On Mashups and Medleys

I’ve had a fair bit of song-combining to do in my recent arranging tasks, so have been thinking about the terms ‘mashup’ and ‘medley’ quite a lot. The two words are sometimes used interchangeably, making less a distinction between how you combine the songs than signally how hip you are (mashups are newer and more happening than medleys).

But the labels also can carry musical meaning, which is rather akin to how they’re used in catering. If you were offered a vegetable medley, you would expect a selection of vegetables served together, possibly prepared and presented in a way so as to create a visual/spatial relationship between them as well relationships of flavour and texture. But you’d still be clear which vegetable was which and be able to enjoy them individually as well as in combination.

Mashing vegetables produces a very different culinary experience: think of colcannon, neeps & tatties, or the way my parents used to serve swede, mashed up with carrots. Not only are they rendered much more homogenous in texture, they are so thoroughly intermingled that whilst they can still be perceived individually, they can’t be consumed separately.

So, in my head, a medley involves combining songs such that each is presented individually, with its own tempo, tonality and expressive world, and it is in the sequential juxtaposition that one builds a sense of story or narrative that grows out of the connections and contrasts between the different musical characters of the individual songs.

I love it when you hear the first song of a medley coming back as a reprise in a brand new light after the experience of the subsequent song or songs that followed it. My ideal medley is thus like my ideal conversation: the different songs (conversationalists) produce meanings when they come together that they couldn’t have produced by themselves.

Musical mashing-up, meanwhile, involves a lot more chopping-up and combining, bringing the songs into a state of near or actual simultaneity. Where they share enough structural similarity in terms of phrase structure and harmonic shape, you can treat them analogously to partner songs. Where you haven’t got that scaffolding to build on, you’re more likely to have one song acting as structure and the other(s) as ornament. That is, you use the phrase structure of one song more or less intact, and use distinctive elements from the other to create echoes, counter-melodies, interjections or accompanimental riffs to create the sense of multiple songs happening at once.

Here’s a useful tip, though, to keep the collage comprehensible: avoid presenting different lyrics at exactly the same time. A little overlap can work, as in dovetailing so that you start a new phrase at the cadence point of the previous one. So can adding interpolations over a long held syllable, so long as you finish the aside before carrying on with the main phrase. But don’t ask your listeners to try and make sense of two utterances at once.

I learned the reason for this from a TED talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who stated that the human brain can process information at a rate of 100 bits per second, and that human speech works at a rate of 60 bits per second. (I may have misremembered the actual numbers, but I am confident about the arithmetical relationship between them because this was what I found so striking.) Hence, whilst there is a good deal of spare capacity in our brains that allows us to continue to understand speech amidst various distractions, it is literally impossible to process two separate strands of speech at once. Useful to know in social situations, and very useful to know when creating mashups.

And I saw this play out beautifully in music when I was arranging the Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’ for the White Rosettes a few years ago. Here you get the narration of the title event of the song in a long, drawn-out descant over the parents’ lament that all the sacrifices they made for her have gone unappreciated. It’s a very poignant passage, and makes superb use of our cognitive capacities.

Most mashups are more frivolous than this, flitting between different songs to create a sense of sparkle and liveliness. But it’s worth remembering that the techniques of mashup do also have the potential to create the sense of dialogue and mutual commentary between songs that one exploits in medleys.