Anita Mui Makes Time Audible in “似水流年”
In “似水流年,” Anita Mui can make a sustained note sound like somebody waiting for its feeling to become clear.
The strongest thing I hear in “似水流年” is an account of waiting. The singer allows a note to become a place somebody has been for a while. It takes more than a well shaped phrase to do that. Other people in the arrangement have to leave enough of the measuring of time with the singer that a held sound could have a life different from the time announced by the accompaniment. You can hear a person handling the weight of arriving at one note and feeling that it has not quite finished changing. Anita Mui’s “似水流年”.
The arrangement could encourage a listener to hear the song as an enormous general statement about loss. There is plenty in its span to support that impression. The vocal does more exact work. A moment that might have become a statement addressed to everybody can sound as if it is being said to someone whose answer will take time. The power of the public voice has not relieved the singer of the burden of having a particular relationship to the words. I think that is where its apparent dignity becomes complicated and interesting.
The risk of an exemplary performance
It is possible to praise a performance of this kind so fluently that one erases all its movement. The singer becomes a model of restraint and the listener discovers a lot of dignity before pressing play. The actual recording is more difficult to anticipate. There are places where sustaining the sound has a kind of audacity. At others, permitting an ordinary ending gives the next phrase a clearer beginning. Somebody is evaluating how much the room can take at a time, while preserving enough uncertainty to make the evaluation audible.
A listener may love the tune and still hear the familiar emotional arc of a large ballad at work. I would grant that immediately. The song is full of agreeable places to feel things and could have invited a considerably less specific delivery. Its individuality depends on what Mui does with the space she is given when the listener already has permission to feel something. She can devote a fraction of that time to the possibility that the feeling is going to end more quickly than we thought.
To hear the song again is to notice how rarely brilliance in the foreground requires the work to hurry. The voice knows how to make a room quiet without making the feeling that put it there sound settled.