But why is a song memorable -- and what does it mean to be a song of songs? Many songs have nature imagery and gardens in them
Knee deep in flowers we'll stray
We'll keep the showers away.
And if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight,
Will you pardon me
Come tip-toe through the tulips with me.
But its not the gardens that make the songs memorable; it's the love that happens in them. And certain patterns recur in love songs everywhere. To tie the Egyptian, Hebrew and pop America imagery together, Tip Toe Through the Tulips begins:
Tip-toe to the window, by the window,
That is where I'll be,
Come tip-toe through the tulips with me.
The similarity to the Song of Songs is striking:
He looketh in through the windows,
(2:9-10)
He peereth through the lattice.
My beloved spoke and said unto me:
'Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.
The parallels underlying all love songs express a rhythm I call approach and separation. Without these rhythms love would be "frozen" at a fixed distance and its most important contents would be inaccessible. Love depends on movement. The college boy's old favorite poem, already almost forgotten during my college days in the fifties, Andrew Marvell's /To His Coy Mistress:/, is an appeal to movement against languishment:
Now therefore, with the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power
My understanding of songs comes from long experience as a piano player, jazz musician, accompanist and director of musical theater. My professional experience extends back fifty years -- if you consider playing with a trio for an American Legion dance at age fourteen (probably with some World War I veterans attending) professional. When I was sixteen I played for the summer at a Jewish resort in Colchester Connecticut, the Lebanon Ranch and Country Club. In college I wrote music for shows. Afterward I directed musical theater. Since then I have performed regularly in bars and lounges and restaurants, mostly in the presence of indifferent couples bound into their own rhythms of love. I have been there as the piano player, the jazz man. I sing the lyrics to myself as I play and I improvise on the melodies. My full repertory must be in the thousands. My working repertory of the songs I know "by heart" at any one time certainly comes close to 500.
Many of the songs I play were written by Jewish composers and lyricists, children of Eastern European immigrants who came to New York City around the turn of the 20th century. It is possible that some actual resonances from the Song of Songs came by cultural transmission into American love songs then, just as did references to the Promised Land in "Shout Hallelujah" and more subtly in "I've Got the World on a String", both by Harold Arlen, but that would hardly explain the shared content in love songs from Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, ancient Egypt, Greece and Persia.
Because I started performing in early adolescence, every infatuation, love and loss in my own life -- through multiple courtships, marriages and divorce -- has been bounced off these silly but poignant lyrics, hundreds, thousands of times. I have tested and been tested by them repeatedly. One of the powers of the American standard song, I have learned, is its veracity to the crucial moments in love.
We lived our little drama
My heart beat like a hammer,
We kissed in a field of white,
And stars fell on Alabama last night...
My arms wound around you tight
And stars fell on Alabama last night.
I remember playing "I'm in the mood for love" from my fake book at age eleven. What sense could I possibly have made of it then?
I'm in the mood for love
Simply because you're near me.
Funny but when you're near me
I'm in the mood for love.
Ultimately it must be the soul's striving to return to some idealized Mother I was feeling then. My own mother considered me odd by then, unrealistic, intractable, stubborn, an adventurer.
There's love enough for everybody in the American pop repertory. Other kinds of love, spiritual love, camaraderie, love for nature, shines in these songs too.
Everything I have is yours
Every day, every way, I need less of myself
Just travelin' along singing a song,
you're part of me...
I need more you, more you...
Side by side.
And here are the basics: 90% of the songs in the American repertory of standards and show tunes are love songs. Every love song is sung by someone to someone else (sometimes to oneself). When you coach singers you have to help them understand who is singing to whom before they can grasp the poignancy of the moment and get to the story behind the situation. Every phase and stage of love is covered in the lyrics of these songs and they're all ranged along the armature of approach and separation, a polar dynamic.
Is you is or is you ain't my baby...
It's June in January because I'm in love...
Will I recognize a light in her eyes
That no other eyes reveal.
Or will I pass her by and never even know that she is
My ideal.
From its first verses the Song of Songs catches the essential turnings in love. The lovers search for union through sensory approach. The close-up senses of smell and taste and touch are emphasized.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth --
For thy love is better than wine.
Thine ointments have a goodly fragrance...
The markers of the steps from separation to approach are sensory distances beginning with the distant senses and proceeding to the close-up. Edward Hall defines four sensory ranges, the public, social, personal and intimate. In the Song of Songs the lovers approach through the distance senses, first sight then hearing:
Hark! my beloved! behold, he cometh, Leaping upon the mountains,
skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young
hart; My beloved spoke, and said
unto me: Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away...
And then they get to touch and smell and taste:
My beloved is to me as a bag of myrrh,
(1:13-14)
That lieth betwixt my breasts.
My beloved is unto me as a cluster of henna
In the vineyards of En-Gedi.
This movement through sensory distances affirms the truth that a series of approaches and separations is the human condition for love -- not only of man for woman and woman for man, fully fleshed with erotic desire, but, I would maintain, and will soon show, for all kinds of love. After separation new approach comes:
Come. my beloved, let us go forth into the field;
Let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards;
Let us see whether the vine hath budded,
Whether the vine blossom be opened,
And the pomegranates be in flower;
There will I give thee my love.
And each relationship has decisive moments in it along those roads of approach and separation that mark and mold the larger shape. These are their crucial turning points where transformational change occurs.
You turned the tables on me
And now I'm falling for you.
You turned the tables on me
I can't believe that it's true.
These turnings mark shifts from closest approach and furthest separation. In themselves they may only take a matter of moments. But what happens in them will set up far distant outcomes.
I took one look at you,
That's all I had to do,
And then my heart stood still.
The moments may begin with first sight, and go through every change, ending with a final parting at death and then a retreat to memory.
Different cultures, very likely, would have different inflections in their love songs, especially in who is singing to whom and in the predominant interests in the subject matter: "old love, new love, every love but true love", and where the focus falls on the legs and stages of approach-and-separation and the turning points that are behind it all.
In sexual love every episode of sexual arousal, orgasm and relaxation may be considered one oscillation in which there is both separation and approach and reversals between them, and even a single lovemaking incident would contain in it many caresses, many approaches and separations, and within these caresses are many heartbeats, and in each of these is an oscillation. And many arousals and relaxations may be comprised in yet larger oscillatory processes as the lovers come to know each other. So the larger shapes of love are compounded out of smaller units. And the smaller units trace out an overriding tendency in the first passionate encounters: they get the lovers closer and closer. The mini cycles are favoring approach over separation; they combine to form a big approach process.
Cuddle up a little closer,
Lovey mine,
Cuddle up and be my little clinging vine.
Like to feel your cheek so rosy
Like to make you comfy, cozy
'Cause I love from head to toesy
Lovey mine.
Somewhere in the very midst of the approach, often while things are getting hot, the balance between the approach leg and the separation legs in the minor cycles begins to shift and one lover turns away, backs off at a moment determined by intensification, exhaustion, competition or other factors.
It was just one of those things...
If we thought a bit of the end of it
When we started painting the town,
We'd have been aware
That our love affair
Was too hot not to cool down.
So good-bye dear, and Amen,
Here's hoping we meet now and then.
It was great fun,
But it was just one of those things.
The balance goes back and forth between separation and approach. And sometimes the separation lasts longer, and sometimes the new approach is weak or never comes.
I cried for you
Now it's your turn to cry over me.
Every road has a turning
That's one thing you're learning.
I cried for you
What a fool I used to be...
Or in the Song of Songs:
I adjure you, O you daughters of Jerusalem,
(5:8)
If ye find my beloved,
What will ye tell him?
That I am sick of love.
What seems to be a turning in a minor cycle can turn out to be the major determinant of the fate of the relationship.
So love me tonight,
Tomorrow was made for some,
Tomorrow may never come,
For all we know.
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