There is a part in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite where the cello plays the exact same two-measure pattern sixty times in a row. This is followed by twenty-five measures of open strings and then sixteen measures of the original figure. For nearly four minutes, the poor performer of the cello part is given one of the most boring parts ever written in the orchestral repertoire. The Nutcracker Suite is quite a popular part of the orchestral repertoire, so there’s a good chance that any particular professional symphony cellist will have had to play this mind-numbingly bland part at some point in their career. Imagine, if you will, devoting years to studying your craft and perfecting your technical skill only to be given this part to play. You might be forgiven for thinking your talent was being wasted. Perhaps it makes for a good easy break from the hard stuff, but still, the thought persists: you were meant for better things than this!
But there are other, even more boring, instrumental parts in twentieth-century music. Consider the snare drum part in Ravel’s Bolero: seventeen minutes long and playing a single rhythmic pattern with metronomic regularity. At least the performer is allowed the pleasure of slowly increasing the volume of their playing, from a soft pianissimo at the start to a strident fortissimo at the end. The American minimalist composers have perfected the art of writing repetitive parts: the maraca part in Steve Reich’s Four Organs requires the performer to simply shake a set of maracas, keeping a regular tempo for the organists to play over. This isn’t too physically demanding, though, compared to the notorious “pulse” from Terry Riley’s In C, in which the performer is directed to hit the top two C notes of the piano, usually at a fairly rapid tempo, with exact rhythmic precision, for an indefinite length of time (performances of this semi-improvisational work last anywhere from thirty to seventy minutes, with ninety-minute-long versions not unheard of). One can only imagine the poor pianist, arms reduced to jelly, stumbling offstage after what surely counts as a herculean labor of endurance or an exquisitely refined form of torture.
Why do composers do things like this to the hapless performers? Why compose such relentlessly boring parts in otherwise fascinating and enjoyable musical works? The answer lies in the need for a source of stability — there needs to be a foundation, a bedrock upon which the rest of the music can be built. Without the regular pulse in In C, the performers would float aimlessly away from each other, their obligation to respond to each other’s playing becoming more and more difficult without a firm ground of rhythmic regularity underpinning their efforts. Without the steady shake of the maracas, Reich’s Four Organs would be a vague smear of sound.
It could be very easy, and is probably tempting, to set up a metronome or click track for parts like this, but there’s something that feels wrong about that approach; it violates the ethos of the composer’s intentions for these parts to be performed by a machine. Boring parts like these hint at a significant aspect of music-making, the collaborative aspect. Every part of a live musical performance is a meeting of musical minds, and the fact that some parts are boring allows the egos of the performers to be subsumed in the service of realizing the musical work. The performers of the more interesting parts ought to feel a deep obligation that one of their fellowship is taking on the role of service and support, setting their own ambition aside to further the aims of the collective endeavor.
The metaphor can be very obviously applied to the rest of life; there’s not much difference between the bland musical parts we’ve been discussing and the person who changes the linen at a hotel or the dishwashing staff at a restaurant. Janitors and sanitation workers are rarely, if ever, considered glamorous in our society, but they are vital. We notice when these services break down; life seems to grind to a confused halt if there’s trash piled up on the street corner.
Still, these support roles, both the societal ones and the musical ones, don’t often become the focus of attention. It’s true that they melt into the background; most likely the performers of In C develop a subconscious sense of the pulse rhythm after a few minutes of playing — it becomes internalized and therefore not fully within consciousness. But there is another example of a boring part in music for which this is not the case.
The tanpura is an instrument in Hindustani classical music; its four strings are tuned to the tonic and dominant notes of the scale, and further microtuned using thin threads of cotton placed right where the string touches the bridge. The bridge of a tanpura does not contact the strings perpendicularly, like a violin or guitar bridge; it is sloped, and as the strings are plucked, they bounce off this bridge, creating an ascending series of harmonics that gives to the music the characteristic “buzzy / twangy” sound most western listeners immediately recognize.
The tanpura player performs by plucking the four strings of the instrument in sequence, keeping a precise tempo, for the duration of a performance. The singers and the other instruments — the sarod and sitar and tabla and whatever else is being used to make the music — will use the specific overtones and harmonics emphasized by the tanpura as the basis of the scale which will structure their improvisation. Performances of Hindustani music begin with an extended tuning session for the tanpura, in which the player or players (there are sometimes two or more tanpuras in a concert) will precisely tune their instrument to match the specific harmonics of the room in which they will be playing. The tanpura player has to set up their instrument with care and skill, knowing that the choices they make during tuning will affect the entire musical performance — and then they have to support that performance throughout its duration, plucking away slowly at the exact tempo needed to blend the developing series of harmonics into each other in the appropriate fashion.
Theirs is an absolutely vital aspect of the music, but in recent decades, there has been a push to mechanize the role of the tanpura with the deployment of electronic tanpuras (also called “shruti boxes”), which are, in effect, glorified metronomes. Controversy has developed around their use. Surprisingly, some of the most vocal defenders of the traditional human-performed tanpura are tanpura players themselves — the people who, at first thought, would most benefit from not having to perform a tediously boring part in a musical performance. Their argument is that the careful tuning of a tanpura in live performance is a vital part of Hindustani musical culture and the introduction of an electronic substitute would be a loss for that culture. For tanpura players, there really isn’t a divide between lead and accompaniment; the tanpura is of equal importance to the tabla or the sitar, instruments which western ears often mistake for the lead or solo role encountered in music of the European tradition. Hindustani music emphasizes the interconnectedness of the musical performance and the essential unity of the creative act; all of the parts share equally in the making of a fully developed work of art.
“Content to fill a little space if Thou be glorified,” Anna Waring wrote in her hymn “Father I know.” This line encapsulates the sentiment of the boring parts in music, and the humble, ego-emptying pursuit of a subsidiary role in life and art. But what if the “little space” Waring writes about in her hymn is also a space of great importance to the whole? Giving up on the pursuit of human excellence in those little spaces can be detrimental to our shared humanity, as the performers of tanpura would insist. What would it mean, then, if we held a similar attitude in our minds about the societal roles often deemed “support”? Little children might be on to something when they dream rapturously of driving a garbage truck when they grow up.
All of society is interconnected; each of us contributes to a vibrant and fulfilling culture, and no role ought to be considered less important than any other. Or as the Apostle Paul phrases it in 1 Corinthians 12: “The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” In this justly famous passage Paul reminds us that no member of the body of Christ is less valuable or honorable than any other. As in life, so in art: the cellos sawing away in Tchaikovsky, the pianist pounding out those high Cs in Riley’s music, the tanpuras and their repetitive drones — all of these parts are worthy of respect. It’s no shame to fill the little spaces. So if you’re ever called to perform one of the boring instrumental parts we’ve discussed, remember that — and shake your maracas, pound your snare drum, clang your cowbell with humble joy, knowing you are a vital part of a whole.
