1900 Epicycles

A week ago, I released an-other EP (you can find it here).  So - as I've done for the others - I thought I would type up a post with some more information about all of the songs.

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"1900 Epicycles"

This is one of the oldest songs on the EP.  I wrote this for FAWM 2011 and revised it extensively in November 2011.  I'm pretty sure that the main melody was inspired by Nick Drake's "Know."  I also snuck in a bit inspired by Edvard Grieg's Symphonic Dance, Op. 64.  At the time I wrote this, I'd been listening to Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's, which had some effect.  When I revised this, I added some different chords, and although they're not in the same order, I used the same chords that are in the Searchers' "When I Get Home," even including the key change.

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"Burghley"

This was the first song I wrote for 50/90 in 2011.  I named this after Lord Burghley by flipping through a book of quotes I have and picking one by him (though I don't remember it now).  I'm really bad at titles.  The electric piano part in the middle was written about five months after the 50/90 version.

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"Murque"

This was the last song I wrote for 50/90 2011.  In fact, I posted this on 30 September - the day before 50/90 ended.

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"Island"

This was also a 50/90 song from 2011.  When I first recorded this, it used all of the string instruments I had.  One of the mandolin parts re-arranges the notes from some incidental music from Shaun the Sheep.

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"Emerald Circles"

Yet an-other 50/90 song from 2011.  I started writing the chord progression for this on mandolin and had always intended to record the final version on mandolin, but it just worked better on guitar.

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"Ogle"

An-other song from FAWM 2011.  I had only recently gotten multi-tracking software at the time I completed this, which is why it's simpler than some other songs.  It's named after Ogle County.

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"Snowy"

This was a 50/90 song in 2011, but I have demos from June 2011 that have this pretty much intact.

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"Nail 5"

From 50/90 2011.  I believe this was one of the first times I wrote two simultaneous parts.

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"Chanson de l'ombre"

An-other from 50/90 2011.  The chord progression is much older, at least from the end of 2010.  At the time, I had thought it was inspired by the chords of the Zombies' "It's Alright with Me," but, just recently, I listened to some songs by the Easybeats, and it has more similarities with the chord progressions that they use.  In particular "Sorry," which is one of my favourites.

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On "The Feeling's Inside"

As previously noted, I've been listening to all of the Argent albums I have this month.  I've also been using this as an opportunity to make some progress on the Verulam Cover Project - my attempt to learn and cover all of the songs by the Zombies, Colin Blunstone, and Argent.  Mostly, this has just been lyric transcription.  And while transcribing lyrics, I noticed something, which led me to an idea.

Rod Argent and Chris White started sharing writing credits for the Argent songs, and I had the idea that it might be interesting to try to figure out whether a song is more of a Rod Argent song or a Chris White song.  It seems that people are always trying to decide whether a McCartney/Lennon song is more McCartney or Lennon, so I figured I would try the same with a Argent/White song.

I would wager that "The Feeling's Inside" from Argent's eponymous debut album is mostly a Chris White song for two reasons.

First, there's the line "there is nothing to hide," referring to someone's love.  This is extremely similar to a line in "Friends of Mine," which is undoubtedly a Chris White song.  In "Friends of Mine," there's the chiasmus "that's something to see / that's nothing to hide," again referring to love.

Second, there's a chromatic descending bass part that goes from A to G to F# (and then to lower notes which I haven't figured out yet).  This is also characteristic of White's writing; this same thing occurs in "Brief Candles" (both descending and ascending) and in "Don't Go Away" (though only ascending)

So between the lyrical and musical similarities with his earlier work, I'm almost certain that "The Feeling's Inside" is a Chris White song.

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On "A Rose for Emily"

I've run across this enough times that I feel something needs to be said about it.  The first line of the Zombies' "A Rose for Emily" is "though summer is here at last."  I think that every time I've seen the lyrics written out - even in the sheet music I have of the song - it's rendered as "the summer is here at last."  And while just listening closely enough will reveal that it's actually "though," looking at the rest of the lyrics provides sufficient evidence.

The first stanza sets up the contrast between summer and loveless Emily, which the rest of the song develops.  Summer is usually seen as one of the best times of the year, but despite that fun connotation, Emily's life is sort of dismal.

She watches her flowers grow
While lovers come and go
To give each other roses from her tree
But not a rose for Emily  

Emily, can't you see there's nothing you can do
There's loving everywhere but none for you

And while much of the song talks about this by illustrating the contrast between Emily and the other lovers, it is also illustrated by the contrast in the weather:  "Though summer is here at last / The sky is overcast."  Summer is usually a time of enjoyable weather, but here "the sky is overcast."  The though indicates the opposition between the first two lines.

"The summer is here at last / The sky is overcast" does not have that opposition, and it seems choppy and contradictory.  Though signifies a subordinate clause, which improves upon both of these shortcomings.  It illustrates that the two lines are grammatically connected and intentionally opposite.

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The Various Sorts of Clapping

Over the past week or so, I've decided that there are three main types of clapping and that I like only one of them.

The first type is just regular applause.  The sort you hear at concerts and award ceremonies and the like.  Applause is in a weird position for me because I realise it's necessity but I find it ugly.  When you want to acknowledge appreciation for someone and you are also part of a crowd, applause is - admittedly - a good way to do that.  Everyone does the same thing (though not precisely at the same time), so you avoid the confusion that would arise if, for example, everyone said something specific to communicate appreciation.  And since it's an audible sign of recognition, it has a greater effect than if people just saluted or something.

But it's the not-at-the-same-time feature that annoys me.  Because everyone claps at different rates and volumes, it just ends up being this cacophonous noise.  I hate it when people clap at me because it's just such an ugly sound.

The second type of clapping is the audience participation type of clapping.  At concerts during easily count-able songs (usually 4/4, I should think), audiences feel the need to clap at every fourth beat.  It's one thing if a band asks the audience to do this, but it's eye-rollingly banal and annoying when the audience does it on its own.  In my opinion, clapping to every fourth beat adds no-thing to the music.  It's just noise.  And I'm sure that bands don't have any problem with keeping up with the beat (if they did, there would not be people coming to their shows).  The audience's acting as a giant, collective metronome is not effective.

I think an-other part of this that annoys me is that by starting the fourth-beat clapping, the audience asserts that it knows how the music should be accompanied.  And as a musician, I feel that that should be the musicians' decision.  So when a band asks the audience to do this, I'm not as annoyed because they're sanctioning the clapping, but I still think it's aurally ugly.

The third type of clapping is syncopated clapping, and it is the only type that I like.  Unlike clapping to every fourth beat, syncopated clapping has some complexity.  There's rhythm in it, and because of that, it doesn't getting monotonous like fourth-beat-clapping does.  Sometimes, it can be one of the most exciting parts of a song.

So syncopated clapping is permissible and perhaps even encouraged; applause is decent until some other method of wide-spread recognition is developed; and fourth-beat-clapping is terrible.

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People/Candles

I've finally started doing the idea I had back in February.  Namely, listening to all of my Argent albums every week in August (also, alliteration).  However, since I decided to do that, I bought Circus.  It had worked out perfectly:  seven albums for seven days of the week.  Now I have eight albums that I have to squeeze into seven days.  So I've decided to listen to Greatest: The Singles Collection and Encore on Sunday and then listen to the other albums on the rest of the days of the week, going chronologically:

• Monday:  Argent
• Tuesday:  Ring of Hands
• Wednesday:  All Together Now
• Thursday:  In Deep
• Friday:  Nexus
• Saturday:  Circus

So because to-day is Thursday, I listened to In Deep to-day.  And I realised a few things:

I've heard "God Gave Rock and Roll to You" dozens of times, but until to-day, I had never been able to understand what Rod Argent sings at about 3:45.  It's "To every boy he gave a song to be sung."

I'm pretty sure that Rod Argent musically quotes some classical piano piece in "Be Glad."  I'm fairly certain that it's something he later recorded for Classically Speaking, but I have yet to listen to both albums back to back and figure out which one it is.

I revisited an earlier idea I had about "Candles on the River" and figured out something interesting.  According to Bob Henrit's comments on the LP sleeve, "Candles on the River," while billed to "Argent/White," is mostly a Chris White song.  And the "candles" part reminded me of "Brief Candles" from the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, which Chris White also wrote.  He re-uses the metaphor of people as candles.  But then I remembered that that wasn't his original idea; he took it from Aldous Huxley's collection of short stories titled Brief Candles.  And Huxley took "brief candle" from Shakespeare's Macbeth.  But I realised that Shakespeare didn't really come up with the metaphor of people as candles either.  It's in Isaiah 42:  "Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.  He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench." (Emphasis added.)

Which has a lot of interesting connections.  Even though it doesn't appear that Chris White was familiar with the "brief candles" line in Macbeth, the Zombies did list Shakespeare as an influence.  There's a quote from The Tempest in the original liner notes to Odessey and Oracle.  Similarly, while Argent (the band) may not have recognized the Biblical reference that the people/candles metaphor has, there are religious influences in their work.  There's the musical quotation of the Latin hymn "Dies Irae" in "The Coming of Kohoutek" from Nexus.  In the version of "Hold Your Head Up" on Encore, Rod Argent includes part of "God of Grace and God of Glory" in his solo.  And there are also religious connections (or at least hints to them) in "God Gave Rock and Roll to You," "Gonna Meet My Maker," "Music from the Spheres," and "Rejoice."

So even though it doesn't appear that these bands realized where some of their references came from, the references still fit within the context of the band's past work and acknowledged influences.

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