Our Love is Here to Stay

             I’m not a natural musician, but I managed to learn how to play pretty well. Popular singers, folk and jazz musicians, people who hear songs, remember them, and play them by ear – they’re what I’d call natural musicians. The best classical musicians, although they play the notes written by composers, also have to be natural musicians to play expressively, an adverb that stands for a whole range of intangible qualities.

           Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, used to say that you shouldn’t play a musical instrument. You should be a musical instrument, the way a singer is a musical instrument. I think of it as unification of ear, mind, and the physical instrument you’re playing. As you play, you should sing what you play in your mind.

            I don’t do that enough. To learn a song, you’re supposed to listen to it, sing along with it, and then play it by ear. I don’t even try to do that. When I’m learning to play a standard like “Our Love is Here to Stay,” one of my favorite Gershwin tunes, I don’t pick a version of it, say the one by Tony Bennett that I’m listening to now, and sing with it. Rather, I look at the notes, play them, and memorize them, which I have found hard, because it’s kind of a tricky song.

            I’m trying to figure out just why I have had trouble memorizing this song. It should be easy. After all, it follows the standard thirty-two measure structure of hundreds of standards. It’s made up of two sixteen bar sections. The first eight bars, the A part, are pretty straightforward, but they’re clever. Without getting too technical, Gershwin leads us to the key of F major in the third bar, but then he wanders off, so that by the end of the A part, the melody is pointing to the key of G. The next eight bars, the B part, hover around between G major and G minor, ending in a tag that leads back to the beginning of the song, the A part, which is repeated note for note. The first three measures of the final eight bars, the second B part, pretty much echo the first three measures of the first iteration of the B part, but they veer off in a new direction the fourth bar, with a melody the leads to a resolution of the song in its native key of F major.

            The chords that Gershwin put in the last two measures are the standard II-V-I progression that are the backbone of jazz harmony: G minor 7, C 7, to F major. However, the melody note that’s harmonized with the C7 chord is a fairly dissonant D (the ninth of the C7 chord), not exactly what one would expect to lead back to the home key of the piece.

            Not only that, the song’s structure is slightly unbalanced in an interesting way. It begins with three notes under the words “It’s very” the first time around and “But oh my” when the melody repeats. These notes are a pickup to the A part, whose melody is seven rather than the expected eight bars long. When you look at it closely, you see that the simple sounding, catchy melody of this well-known song is actually clever, as one expects of Gershwin, a natural musician if there ever was one. As a result, if you try to memorize it my way, by reading the notes and analyzing them, it’s easy to get confused. Only after I’ve played the song again and again can I begin to play it like a natural musician, without having to think about what comes next.