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.

The Tremeloes' "Hello World"

Last month, I wrote about a riff that's in both the Moody Blues' "So Deep within You" from On the Threshold of a Dream and Rod Argent and Chris White's "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," which was recorded after the Zombies broke up.  At the time, I'd thought I knew an-other song that had a similar-sounding part, but I couldn't identify it.  Recently though, I listened to an anthology of the Tremeloes, and I discovered that I'd been thinking of the beginning of "Hello World."

The phrase in "Hello World" is longer than those in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," and it repeats more frequently.  The song starts with it played four and a half times.

In "Hello World," it starts on a different pitch relative to the key than in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," but the intervals are the same in all three (and the pitches of the first five notes are the same between "Hello World" and "So Deep within You").

(click the image to enlarge it)

(standard disclaimer that the notation may be wrong because I did it myself)

Unlike the other two, the notes in that phrase in "Hello World" are picked individually where the second of each pair of eighth notes are hammer-ons in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."

According to the liner notes in my Tremeloes collection (Silence Is Golden: The Very Best of the Tremeloes), "Hello World" was issued as a single in 1969.  On the Threshold of a Dream - the album on which "So Deep within You" appears - was also released in 1969 (specifically, April).  Apparently "So Deep within You" was the B-side to the "Never Comes the Day" single, released the same month.  According to the liner notes for Into the Afterlife, "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" was recorded in March 1968, although it wasn't released until Into the Afterlife in 2007.

So I have even fewer answers than I did when I wrote my original post.  Now I have three songs that were all recorded and/or released within about a year and that all share the same phrase.

The Shangri-Las' "Remember (Walking in the Sand)"

Last month, I listened to a compilation album of the Shangri-Las, and I became really interested in "Remember (Walking in the Sand)."  It has some great features, and the more I looked into it, the more I found.

The first thing I noticed was the bass parts during the "(Remember) Walking in the sand..." section:

(click the image to enlarge it)
(standard disclaimer that the notation may be wrong because I did it myself)

I should note that I combined the electric bass part and the bass register of the piano part in the notation.  After two eighth notes spanning a fourth (A to D) in the bass register of the piano, the electric bass echoes that fourth in quarter notes.  Musically, there's a portrayal of memory.  There's the initial event (the fourth on piano), and then that event is revisited but - because of the unreliable nature of memory - it's slightly different.  It's still the interval of a fourth, but it's played on a different instrument and the note values are longer, almost as if that memory is being dwelt upon rather than hurriedly passed over.

In figuring out how to play the bass part (so that I could write about what was happening in that section), I discovered that during the verses, it's has a downward trend:

This repeats throughout the verse, but I don't know how to add repeat signs (the program I use is actually meant to create MIDI files, not notation, but it works well enough for that purpose).

Between that descent and the key (D minor), the sadness in the lyrics ("Seems like the other day / My baby went away," "He said that we were through / He found somebody new") is emphasized.

About a month after I realized those two things about the bass part, I realized that those two sections are in different time signatures.  The verses are in 3/4, and the choruses are in 4/4.  There's a musical distinction between the events that the singer/speaker is currently relating and the events that she's remembering.

The Shirelles - Greatest Hits

Over the last month or so, I've been listening to a Greatest Hits album by the Shirelles fairly regularly, and I found some interesting things in a number of the songs, mostly just interesting melismas.  Coincidentally, it was a year ago to-day that I first listened to the album.

"Tonight's the Night"

There are some nice features with melismas in the bridge here.  The "so"s in both "I might love you so much" and "I may want you so much" have melismas, as if to emphasize how much, and the "heart" in "You may break my heart" has three syllables instead of the usual one, portraying the fragmented nature that the heart would have if it were broken.

"Baby It's You"

Similar to the "heart" in "Tonight's the Night," there's a melisma on "apart" in the second line -  "It’s not the way you kiss that tears me apart."

"Everybody Loves a Lover"

The last two "fell"s in the lead vocals have melismas and the later syllables have lower pitches than the first ones, so as the word is sung, it becomes lower.  The word itself is falling as the speaker/singer explains how she fell in love.

"Foolish Little Girl"

I think ever since the first time I listened to this, the opening sounded vaguely familiar.  It wasn't until about a month ago that I placed it; the first line ("You broke his heart and made him cry") is quite similar to the first line in "Do You Love Me" ("You broke my heart / 'Cause I couldn't dance").  Both songs also have the same contrast in instrumentation.  That first section is quieter with fewer instruments, but then more instruments join in and the song becomes louder.

I should note that I actually don't own the Contour's version of "Do You Love Me."  I'm writing based on the Tremeloes' version, which I think is a pretty faithful cover.

Grieg: From Holberg's Time, Op. 40

Last month, I listened to Grieg's Op. 40 a few times, both the orchestrated version and the solo piano version.  As the title page notes, From Holberg's Time was purposely written in an older style ("im alten Style"):

The Holberg in the title is Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754), a Norwegian man of letters.

While listening to the piano version, I noticed a phrase in the first movement:

(click the image to enlarge it)
(notation found here)

When I heard this it sounded familiar to me, although I had to look up the notation to figure out what was going on and why it sounded familiar.  Starting in the forty-ninth measure, the bass part starts descending, but after every two notes, it alternates octaves and repeats the last note from the previous pair.  Or, at least, it alternates octaves to some degree, since the notes are also doubled in octaves.  (This is in the orchestrated version too, although the notes aren't doubled by octaves.)

This sounded familiar because this same type of figure is in the continuo parts of two Bach works that I looked into recently, Christ lag in Todes Banden (BWV 4) and the Third Orchestral Suite in D major (BWV 1068).

(notation found here [BWV 4] and here [BWV 1068])

For the past year and a half (I finished it yester-day), I'd been reading a book of Edvard Grieg's letters (Edvard Grieg: Letters to Colleagues and Friends, Benestad and Halverson, eds.), and I recently read a letter he wrote to August Winding on 4 February 1875 saying that

recently in St. Thomas Church [in Leipzig] I heard the first concert by a Bach Association under the leadership of Volkland, von Holstein and Spitta (the author of an excellent book on Bach).  The concert included three cantatas by Bach that had not been performed publicly before.  I have never heard anything so beautiful by Bach; they are marvelous, great, profound, childlike and fervent.

I'm not sure if Christ lag in Todes Banden is one of the cantatas that Grieg heard, but that letter at least illustrates that Grieg was fairly familiar with Bach's works.

From Holberg's Time is from 1884, almost ten years after Grieg heard those Bach cantatas in Leipzig.  So between Grieg's documented familiarity with Bach's works and the close historical time period between Holberg (1684-1754) and Bach (1685-1750), it seems like Grieg might have taken that particular phrase from Bach's suite and/or cantata and used it to evoke that particular time period in his own work.

The Decemberists' "Eli, the Barrow Boy"

Recently, I've been listening (for the first time) to a box set of Pete Seeger.  Since a lot of the songs are folk songs, I've heard other versions of some of them.  So while "Molly Malone" wasn't a new song to me, because I recently listened to Seeger's version, I got to thinking about it and realized that it shares some similarities with the Decemberists' "Eli, the Barrow Boy" from Picaresque.

The first lines of both mention a city.  "Molly Malone" names Dublin specifically ("In Dublin's fair city") where "Eli, the Barrow Boy" has just a general "town."  I'd always heard it as "Eli, the barrow boy of the old town," but according to the Decemberists' website, it's "Eli, the barrow boy, you’re the old town."  It's a minor point, but both start with a location.

Both characters "cry" out the wares that they have to sell.  The second verse of "Molly Malone" explains that "She was a fishmonger," and the "Cryin' 'Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh'" line is at the end of every verse and acts as a transition to the chorus (which is comprised of all the same words).  While Eli has a wider variety of merchandise (he "Sells coal and marigolds" and "Corn cobs and candlewax"), he too "cries out all down the day."

It's not as obvious in "Eli, the Barrow Boy" as it is in "Molly Malone," but both have a fair amount of repetition to describe how much time the characters spend trying to make sales.  "All the day," "All down the day," or "Down the day" appear (usually twice) in every section of "Eli, the Barrow Boy," and "Through streets long and narrow" (or, as some versions have it, "Through streets broad and narrow") is the second-to-last line in every verse in "Molly Malone."

While Molly Malone dies of a fever and Eli drowns, both return as ghosts to continue pushing their wheelbarrows through the streets and sell their goods.  The last verse of "Molly Malone" explains that "Now her ghost wheels the barrow / Through streets long and narrow," and - likewise - the last section of "Eli, the Barrow Boy" has Eli saying, "But I am dead and gone and lying in a church ground / But still I push my barrow all the day."

I know Colin Meloy has some interest in folk songs (evidenced by the Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins EP and The Hazards of Love album), so I'm assuming that "Molly Malone" did have at least some influence on "Eli, the Barrow Boy."  I think the similarities would be too much of a coincidence otherwise.

The Moody Blues' "So Deep within You"

When I listened to the Moody Blues' On the Threshold of a Dream last month, the recurring guitar riff in "So Deep within You" caught my ear.  I figured out how to play it and confirmed that - save for the key - it's identical to a part in "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," which was recorded by Chris White and Rod Argent shortly after the Zombies broke up.  (There are two versions of "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" on Into the Afterlife, but this riff is present only in the second version [track #18], the one with fuzz guitar.)

(click the image to enlarge it)
(standard disclaimer that since I did the notation myself, it might be wrong)

I didn't know how to indicate it in the notation, but the second note in each pair of eighth notes is a hammer-on.

In the Zombie Heaven liner notes, Paul Atkinson (the Zombies' guitarist) says that the Zombies were friends with the Moody Blues and used to go to their parties (p. 31).  While that provides evidence that the Zombies and the Moody Blues knew each other, it's slightly misleading as far as guitar players, since Atkinson didn't play on "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."  The Into the Afterlife liner notes explain that it was Mac McLeod.

The chronology is also troublesome.  The Into the Afterlife liner notes say that the session at which "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" was recorded was in March 1968.  On the Threshold of a Dream came out in April 1969.  But "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" wasn't released until the Into the Afterlife album in 2007.  So while it would appear that there was some mixing of influences since the songs originated only about a year apart, since the riffs are so similar (with the same accidental even), and since the bands knew each other, it doesn't seem possible that the Moody Blues could have known "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."  Apparently, the similarity is just a coincidence.