Sinatra's Programmed Uncertainty: The Fermata and Other Deviations

Key Words: information / interruption / style / expectation / pattern / silence / deviation

(Try this - begin with a list of key words and arrange a pattern from them. Then develop an essay from this pattern. Your reader will enjoy imagining a multitude of possible themes and arguments arising from your key words. Sinatra's frequent collaborator, Nelson Riddle, often begins his arrangements, particularly of well-known songs, with a musical method similarly designed to increase desirable uncertainty. He introduces tones the listener will find in the piece, but he doesn't spell out the melody; hence, the systematic uncertainty of all beginnings meets designed uncertainty half way)

"The greater the uncertainty or entropy in a system, the less the probability that any one outcome will be implicated and the greater the information." - Leonard Meyer

1) What made Frank Sinatra the greatest musical stylist of the century? Examining the style of his 1953 ballad record, In the Wee Small Hours of The Morning, we find a careful balance between redundancy, which reduces information, and entropy, which increases information. Redundancy provides a familiar context for audiences to test their expectations; at least eight of the sixteen songs on the album (three by Rogers and Hart, two by Arlen, an Ellington, a Porter, and a Carmichael) had become bona-fide classics before Sinatra made this record. And all the songs address the most familiar of popular music themes - affairs of the heart.