Time and tempo | Culture & Leisure

In music, time is important. It even has a time signature, with each song assigned a specific number of beats per measure. Theres 3/4, which offers the singing sway of the waltz, and 6/8, which can lend some gravity to the House of the Rising Sun. Of course, there’s 4/4, also known as common time, songwriters’ darling in everything from bluegrass to funk.

In life, time is also the key. It’s stable and reliable, but it has an odd way of appearing to stand still or fly depending on the mood. There is the peculiar phenomenon in which time seems to accelerate from year to year, leaving me, for my part, with the curious suspicion that tomorrow I will perhaps wake up in my bed a little old woman with white hair, wondering where my life has gone.

For mandolin virtuoso Sierra Hull, the metronome of life has been set to double the time since she was at knee height at a grasshopper, when she picked up a mandolin as a child and never looked back.

I’ve been going so fast for so many years, she told herself on a sunny Wednesday morning in Telluride. I’ve known I wanted to play music since I was eight years old.

Growing up in a small rural Tennessee town of about 900 people, she was steeped in the country music of bluegrass, folk, and traditional spirituals she heard in church. In one of her earliest memories, Sierra, perhaps four years old, perched on her mother’s lap while her mother taught her how to sing Hes Still Working On Me.

I’ve always thought of singing as a laid back thing, just a way of life, from my grandmother to my great aunt, Hull remembers her early childhood filled with religious hymns and the music her grandmother played. uncle Junior on violin, mandolin and guitar. No one in his family was, nor aspired to be, a professional musician. It was just a part of everyday life, a way of worshiping and having fun.

A few years later, his father decided to learn to choose a few tunes on the guitar and the mandolin, encouraging his older brother to learn an instrument as well. Seeing her brother and father play, the young Sierra was determined not to be outdone.

I was just the annoying little sister who wanted to do whatever he did, she said of her big brother. I loved the ground he was walking on, so I wanted to play something too.

Christmas arrived and Sierra, now eight, was given not a mandolin, but a violin on Christmas morning. However, her grandmother had unwittingly bought the already small child an adult-sized instrument, which the young girl could not handle. Since the violin, commonly referred to as a violin in folk music styles, is tuned to the same notes as the mandolin, her father decided to start her with a few tunes on the mandolin until she could get a violin. smaller. .

He taught her the old folk song Boil Them Cabbage Down, a classic tune and often one of the first learned in the bluegrass repertoire, and young Sierra got hooked. Perhaps it was some devious sleight of hand cleverly wielded by fate that day when her grandmother brought home the wrong-sized violin.

I took the mandolin, and I decided then and there is what I was going to do with my life, she said.

At 10, she was performing on the legendary Grand Ole Opry stage with her hero Alison Krauss, and at 12, she was performing at Carnegie Hall. By the time she graduated, she was already a full-fledged touring musician, performing mostly non-stop.

And that’s what she continued to do until the spring of 2020, when a global pandemic brought the world to its knees. Hull had just released her latest album, 25 Trips, on which she moved away from her bluegrass roots to focus on her singer-songwriter side, and had just embarked on a whirlwind tour to promote the album. Suddenly, in a matter of weeks, 40 or 50 shows were canceled. Hull returned home to Nashville, staring at the barrel of an unknown amount of free time for the first time in her adult life.

She laughed as she remembered the title song from that record, in which she sang, Hello, time, will you slow down? Hello, are you listening? If you hear me, will you slow down?

I guess I got my wish, she said with a chuckle.

Home time, however, was welcome, as she found herself revisiting old musical loves from her childhood, creating just to create without the pressure of busy projects or schedules.

Time, despite endless human attempts to control it, manage it and squeeze every drop of it, has proven once again that it still has the upper hand. As the lockdown weeks spanned months, Hull embraced it, finding joy in his new perspective on what it was like to have a moment of calm.

We’ve been given the time, and we’re all doing our best with it, Hull said. Were all trying to do our best, to be the best version of ourselves. But this last year has also really taught us that there is so much that we have no control over. You have to kind of give your heart to whatever you’re trying to do in your life and then try not to overemphasize how it’s going.

Now 29, times are different for Hull than when she burst onto the bluegrass scene, a respected but still teenage musician. She loved the wild ride offered by following her dreams and passion for music, grateful for her roots in traditional bluegrass and for following musical explorations to new horizons. Now she feels ready to find a symbiosis of the two, all the while remembering to keep some of the stillness of the past year in her heart as she plunges back into a world already furiously running its engines.

I think I’m a bit of a workaholic sometimes, even though it comes from a great place, passion and love for what I do, she says with a smile.

Introducing herself as a little white-haired woman at the end of a long and successful life, however, she wants her 29-year-old self to remember to really savor the journey.

Just so she doesn’t forget to stop and smell the roses, she said. And maybe not to be so hard on yourself. There is a part of me that knows this, but there is also a side of me that can be very motivated and focused. There may be this feeling that you never arrived. It’s always like, what’s next? But that’s also what is beautiful, too, in music, this desire to grow.

After all, the tempos change with every song, and time offers no guarantees. The music goes on, so we better sing along.

We never know how much or how much time we’re going to spend, or how it’s all going to play out, she said. It’s important to remember this big picture, stop and enjoy it along the way.