The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Since 20 January (the 50th anniversary of their first studio session on 20 January 1965), I've been reading Christopher Hjort's So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star: The Byrds Day-by-Day 1965-1973.  A month or two ago, I reached August 1968, when Sweetheart of the Rodeo was released (on 30 August according to Hjort and the liner notes of my CD reissue).  It's probably my favorite Byrds album (although I've heard only the first six so far), so after reading about it, I listened to it a few times and found a few interesting things.

"I Am a Pilgrim"

I'm surprised I didn't realize this earlier, but there are two Biblical stories mentioned in the lyrics.

"I’m going down to the River of Jordan / Just to bathe my wearisome soul" is a reference to Naaman in the Old Testament.  In 2 Kings 5, the prophet Elisha tells Naaman to dip himself in the Jordan River seven times to be cured of his leprosy.

The other reference is in the lines "If I can just touch the hem of His garment, good Lord / Then I’d know He’d take me home."  Recounted in three different books of the New Testament (Matthew 9, Mark 5, and Luke 8), a woman is healed from a discharge of blood after touching only the fringe of Jesus' garment.

(I feel it's also worth mentioning that last September I wrote about some similarities between "I Am a Pilgrim" and "Wayfaring Stranger" as part of my Collection Audit project.)

"The Christian Life"

The CD version I have of Sweetheart of the Rodeo includes bonus tracks, one of which is a rehearsal of "The Christian Life."  After listening to both, I discovered that the two versions flip the first line of the two verses.  In the version on the final album, the first verse starts with "My buddies tell me that I should have waited" and the second with "My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus," but in the other version, the first verse starts with "My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus" and the second with "My buddies tell me that I should have waited."

In both versions, there seems to be a discrepancy between the lead and backing vocals during the line "For what is a friend who'd want you to fall."  The lead vocals seem to have "who'd want" where the backing vocals have "who wants."

"You're Still on My Mind"

Lately, I've been really interested in melismas that add meaning to the lyric.  "You're Still on My Mind" has some of them with the "heart" in the line "An empty bottle, a broken heart, and you’re still on my mind" that ends each verse.  Where "heart" would normally have only one syllable, it has two here, so it sounds "broken."  Oddly, though, that melisma isn't present in every verse.  It's in the first verse and the repeated line in the third verse.  In the rehearsal version (included as a bonus track), it's in the second verse and that repeated line in the third verse.

"You Got a Reputation" [Bonus Track]

Like the melismas on "heart" in "You're Still on My Mind," there are some interesting melismas on "down" in a few of the various "You’re just tearin’ your own reputation down" lines.  They're slight, but some of those "down"s have multiple syllables, and later syllables are at a lower pitch than earlier ones.  So the word "down" is falling, pitch-wise.

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' Cookin' with the Miracles

A few months ago, I listened to a two-CD set of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, and recently I listened to it a second time so I could write about it.  It includes their first two albums, Hi... We're the Miracles and Cookin' with the Miracles, with some bonus tracks.  I noticed some interesting things about a few songs on Cookin' with the Miracles.

"Everybody's Gotta Pay Some Dues"

The opening part of this has a rhythm that's very similar to that in Ravel's Boléro (or, apparently, any boléro).  A month or so before I discovered it in this Miracles song, I also found it in a Jacques Brel song, so I just re-purposed the diagram I made for that:

(click the image to enlarge it)

(notation for Ravel's Boléro found here)

I'll include the same disclaimer from that Brel post:  it's entirely possible that I've done the notation wrong.  Also, I didn't mean to indicate B notes, but I couldn't format my notation like it should be for percussion (with only one line).

"You Never Miss a Good Thing"

I noticed the lines "I know you might miss your water / When the well runs dry," which I think might be a reference to an-other song, but I'm not sure which one.  I have two other songs in my collection that have titles (and lines) similar to those lines: Ray Charles' "(You'll Never Miss the Water) Until the Well Runs Dry" and the Byrds' "You Don't Miss Your Water" from Sweetheart of the Rodeo (with the line "You don’t miss your water til your well runs dry").  Obviously the Byrds' version (from 1968) post-dates this Miracles song, but as a song, "You Don't Miss Your Water" was apparently first released in 1961 - the same year as Cookin' with the Miracles.  If nothing else, all three songs use the same imagery.

"Embraceable You"

The Gershwins' "Embraceable You" is probably the most-performed song in my collection, but after hearing the Miracles' version I understood a different sense of the line "I love all the many charms about you."  I think the Miracles' slow tempo had something to do with perceiving it differently.  I'd always understood that line relatively plainly, where "about" has the sense of "pertaining to."  But it could also have the sense of "surrounding" - the same sense that it has in the next line:  "Above all, I want my arms about you."

With that "surrounding" sense, it becomes similar to a line earlier in the song: "Just one look at you, my heart goes tipsy in me."  In the same way that a look can make the speaker/singer tipsy, there's almost an intoxicating cloud of charm around the titular "you" that also affects the speaker/singer.

Mendelssohn: Concerto in A minor for piano and strings

For the last three days, I've listened to Mendelssohn's Concerto in A minor for my CMQ project (I was reading a Mendelssohn biography last February, which is why that piece was in the queue so much).  The first time I listened to it for the CMQ (which was only the second time I'd ever listened to it), I noticed a phrase in the strings near the beginning of the first movement (it's also near the end of the movement).  It took a few minutes to place, but I eventually remembered that Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" (Serenade No. 13 in G major K. 525) starts with a similar phrase.

I looked up the scores for both so I could compare them.  I had a bit of trouble with the Mendelssohn concerto in that the only notation I could find is apparently the original manuscript.  Mendelssohn wrote it when he was pretty young, and I don't think it was actually printed.  Because it was hand-written, there's a greater likelihood that I miscounted my measures.

In any case, when I looked up the notation and found the part I'd heard, I was surprised by how similar it is to Mozart's phrase.  While they're an octave lower, the first six pitches are the same, and the first five note values are the same.

(click the image to enlarge it)
(notation found here [Mozart's Serenade] and here [Mendelssohn's Concerto])

The middle line is my standardized rendering of the two violin parts in Mendelssohn's Concerto; at the beginning of that line, there are two treble clefs, and I'm assuming that it means that the two violin parts there are the same.  I was going to do the same for the viola and bass parts, but I had some difficulties with my program.  I found the original manuscript a bit difficult to read, but I think those other string parts match Mozart's too.

I went back and referenced the Mendelssohn biography I'd read (R. Larry Todd's Mendelssohn: A Life in Music) to see if I could find anything about this Mozart quotation.  Todd mentions Mendelssohn's being "thoroughly captivated" by Johann Hummel's A minor piano concerto and that Hummel was a student of Mozart, and he also says that Mendelssohn's concerto "marks an impressive achievement of an apprentice, who anticipated elements of his own mature style while he assimilated the legacy of Mozart's concerti and tested Hummel's innovations in piano technique."  There isn't anything there about that quotation of Mozart's serenade, but clearly Mozart was an influence.

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Op. 21

For the last two days, the classical piece I've listened to as part of my Classical Music Queue project has been Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream music.  I became curious about a particular phrase in the overture, so I looked up the notation and followed along when I listened to it yester-day.  What I heard wasn't what I thought, but in looking through the notation, I found something else that I found interesting.

The overture starts and ends with a four-note phrase in the flutes.  The second flute part in the opening is different, but the two flute parts at the end form progressively larger intervals.

(notation found here)

First, there's a third (E, G#), then a fourth (F#, B), a fifth (A, E), and finally a sixth (B, G#).

I don't have anything extra-musical to say about this; I just thought it was a really interesting feature.

Delicious Pastries' Pretty Please

I got Delicious Pastries' album Pretty Please shortly after it came out, and even though they're not that famous of a band, that album became my favorite new album at the time.  I hadn't listened to it for a while, but I recently got back into it and noticed lots of things I'd been oblivious to.

"safe & sound"

The couplet "and I will do all those things / that I would have done unto me" seems to be a reference to the Golden Rule.  "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets" - Matthew 7:12.

"dad"

This is where most my re-sparked interest lay, specifically in the line "you never gave us stones, we only ate bread."  I'd always thought that, following the Matthew 7 reference in "safe & sound," this was based on Matthew 7:9-10:  "Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?"  But then while reading Lord Byron's Don Juan, I came across a reference to Saturn:

One system eats another up, and this
Much as old Saturn ate his progeny;
For when his pious consort gave him stones
In lieu of sons, of these he made no bones (Canto 14, stanza 1, lines 5-8)

I also looked up Saturn in Edith Hamilton's Mythology.  She explains that

Cronos [the Greek name for Saturn] had learned that one of his children was destined some day to dethrone him and he thought to go against fate by swallowing them as soon as they were born.  But when Rhea [his wife] bore Zeus, her sixth child, she succeeded in having him secretly carried off to Crete, while she gave her husband a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes which he supposed was the baby and swallowed down accordingly.

Later in "dad," there's the line "you'd have to eat the veins and arteries too," which seems more relevant to the story of Saturn than the Matthew text.  I still can't seem to make much sense of it, but running across that reference to Saturn in Don Juan has at least showed me that there's more to "dad" than I originally thought.

At the very end of the song, there's the sound of a train, which I'm fairly certain is a reference to "Caroline, No," the last track on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which also ends with the sound of a train.

"marian"

The book-related metaphors ("you're no open book" and "I'd dog-ear a couple of your pages") made me realize that this might be a reference to Marian Paroo, the librarian in The Music Man.  The names are spelt the same, and there are those book references.

"Careless Love"

Since July, I've been working my way through the piano book I used in my beginner's piano class in college.  Last week I re-learned and practiced "Careless Love," which - according to the book - is a Tennessee folk song.  I'm sure I didn't notice this when I first learned the song, but there's a chromatic phrase in the chords at the end of the third phrase and into the fourth:

F7 (F, A, Eb), inverted Bb (F, Bb, D), inverted Bbm (F, Bb, Db), F (F, A, C)

I remember liking that part, but I didn't know it was because of that chromatic phrase (I didn't even know what a chromatic phrase was back then).  In the four years or so since I took that piano class, I've learnt a lot more about music, so when I discovered that chromatic phrase now, I realized that it reflects the feeling of the lyrics.  There seems to be an inherent melancholy associated with descending chromatic phrases, and the lyrics include a despairing "See what careless love has done to me."

Shortly after I played this song in piano class, I discovered a version by Fats Domino already in my music collection.  (For what it's worth, his version is in Ab major where my piano book has it in F major, so the chromatic phrase in his is within the chord sequence Ab7 C# C#m Ab.)  I recently listened to it again and transcribed the lyrics.  They're different from the ones in my piano book (not unusual for folk songs), but they too have a downhearted feeling, with phrases like "Can’t you see what careless love done to me" and "You said that you love me, and it didn’t mean a thing."

Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals

A year or two ago, I thought I found a phrase in Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, KV 550 that sounded similar to a phrase in Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals.  Recently, because it was in the CMQ, I listened to that Mozart symphony and remembered this possible connection that I'd never followed up on.  So I looked up the notation for both pieces and found the specific phrases.

The viola phrase at the very beginning of the second movement of Mozart's symphony:

(click on the image to enlarge it)

(notation found here)

The first contrabass phrase in Saint-Saëns' "The Elephant":

(notation found here)

Both start with an ascending fourth from Bb to Eb, and then that Eb is repeated.  Near the end of both phrases, there's a three-note section where the middle note is lower than the outer two (a whole step in Mozart's symphony, but a half step in "The Elephant").

Apparently Saint-Saëns was familiar with Mozart's work, so I'm assuming that he would have known Symphony No. 40, but I'm not sure if it inspired that phrase in "The Elephant."  There's certainly a similarity between them, but I'm still hesitant to assert anything about classical music because I don't know very much about it.