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Martyn Heyne, “The Hall.” Occasionally I revisit the Brett’s Sound Picks playlists to listen to great music that I would have forgotten had I not saved it. In this way, a playlist is a way to externalize one’s memory, a way to remember those sonic details that make a music soar. A fine track from 2020 is Martyn Heyne’s “The Hall.”

On this piece for solo guitar, Heyne, a composer and a stealthily skilled guitarist, plays off of a delay effect. Delay, which creates a repetition of a sound signal after a short time interval, is a rhythmic multiplier that can easily get out of hand if you abuse it by setting the feedback too long. But Heyne uses a quick delay time whose echoes repeat just a few taps for each guitar note. True to the track’s title, the guitar on “The Hall” sounds like a subtly amplified electric in a hall of dimensions that conjure a subtle slapback delay. It’s as if the instrument is bouncing off a far wall, returning from its reverberant journey rhythmically energized.

My favorite section that makes masterful use of this quick delay rhythm is from 4:20 to 6:04. Here Heyne keeps a steady short/short/long rhythm (as if playing an open-closed hi-hat pattern) while moving through a vivid sequence of chords which, inexorably connected, keep building from one to the next before finally resolving back into the track’s main theme. This sequence epitomizes how music feels like a journey that takes you somewhere–how it models a sense of moving in physical and emotional realms. I remember something one of my teachers, David Burrows, once wrote about music as a model:

“Seeing music as a model could seem cold or trivializing. But the urgencies and the passions of living are among the things that music models: music doesn’t belong to the detached world of mathematical modeling. And there is nothing trivial about the musical enterprise: it is far removed from toy model airplanes or fashion models on runways. Certainly we are not consciously engaged in modeling when involved with music. Nobody turns on the stereo, kicks back and says, ‘Now for a little temporal modeling.’ If music is modeling at all, it is preconscious, participative, processual modeling: not the sort of model you stand back from and consider as you might a model to scale of the Colosseum in Rome. You live it” (Time and the Warm Body: A Musical Perspective on the Construction of Time, 2007, p.69).

I could live this minute and a half of music anytime, and I did so while writing this post. Through its use of one melo-harmonic line, one instrument, and one delay effect, “The Hall” is a lesson in how much music one can make with a minimal of means. A few well chosen notes performed live with a sense of urgency is an extraordinary kind of model.