Mendelssohn: String Quartet in D major, Op. 44, No. 1

I listened to Mendelssohn's String Quartet in D major (Op. 44, No. 1) a few times last month, and some melodies in the second movement sounded familiar to me.  Here's the first line:

(notation found here)

The first and second violin parts here bear strong resemblances to the hymn tune "Chesterfield" (used for "Hark the Glad Sound").  Last December, I recorded this tune for my blog about hymns:

The arrangements I used for my recording (I combined arrangements from Lutheran Worship [#29] and The Lutheran Service Book [#349]) are in F major, but here's the first phrase of "Chesterfield" transposed up an octave and into D major in order to compare it to the first few bars of the first violin in Mendelssohn's string quartet:

A few note values are different, but - with "Chesterfield" adjusted for key - the pitches are all the same.

Here's the second phrase of "Chesterfield" (again transposed to D major, but not transposed up an octave) and the second violin part from Mendelssohn's string quartet, starting from the sixth full measure:

These phrases are quite similar too.  The last five notes here have the same intervals; while they start from different pitches, the melody goes down a half-step, up a half-step, down a minor third, and then down a whole-step.

I couldn't find much information about Mendelssohn's string quartet, just that it was composed in 1838.  Likewise, I couldn't find a great degree of definite information about "Chesterfield."  Either it was written by or is attributed to Thomas Haweis, who was born in 1732 or 1734 (sources vary) and died in 1820.  According to Hymnary, the tune itself was published in 1792.  While all of that is a bit shaky, it's clear that "Chesterfield" is older than Mendelssohn's string quartet.

I don't know if Mendelssohn was familiar with "Chesterfield," but the resemblance between it and this movement of his string quartet seems to suggest so.  For what it's worth: this wouldn't be the only instance of Mendelssohn's using a hymn tune in his music.  His Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 107, written in 1830, quotes Martin Luther's "Ein feste Burg."

Les Paul and Mary Ford's "Whither Thou Goest"

Last month, I listened to a three-CD set of Les Paul (with Mary Ford, although she's not credited), and I realized that the lyrics in "Whither Thou Goest" come from the Bible, specifically Ruth 1:16.  The first verse of the song is:

Whither thou goest, I will go
Wherever thou lodgest, I will lodge
Thy people shall be my people, my love
Whither thou goest, I will go

It's taken almost directly from the King James Version:

And Ruth said, "Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."

For what it's worth, here's a video that walks through the original Hebrew of the second half of the verse:

Del Shannon's "Two Silhouettes"

Last month, I learned the chords for Del Shannon's "Two Silhouettes" and noticed a feature with an accidental.

First of all, here are the chords (with the disclaimer that, as always, I might have something wrong):

Intro
|: C major | Bb major :|

First verse
C major | A minor
F major | C major | G major
C major
F major | D major
|: C major | A minor :|
C major | G major | C major

Link
|: C major | Bb major :|

Second verse
C major | A minor
F major | C major | G major
C major
F major | D major
|: C major | A minor :|
C major | G major | C major
F major | C major

Bridge
F major | C major
F major | G major | C major
F major
G major

Third verse
C major | A minor
F major | C major | G major
C major
F major | D major
|: C major | A minor :|
C major | G major | C major

Tag
|: C major | Bb major :|

The song is in C major, and - aside from the Bb major in the instrumental sections - the only chord with an accidental note is D major (with an F#).  In two of the verses, the lyrics above this chord describe a change.  In the first verse, the line there is "And all the rain seemed to turn to tears" and in the third verse, "I know things will never be the same."  That F# accidental helps to musically portray the "turn" and not being "the same."  One of the voices in the backing vocals even goes from an F natural to an F# during that line, emphasizing the accidental.

Del Shannon's "I Won't Be There"

Last month I figured out the chords for Del Shannon's "I Won't Be There," and earlier this month I wrote about some connections between the chords and the lyrics.  I had the opportunity to record some songs a few weeks ago, so I thought I'd do a version of it.

I had to put some notes in a lower octave, and my double-tracking isn't exactly spot-on, but I still think it turned out pretty well.

Cliff Richard's "The Snake and the Bookworm"

Last month I figured out the bass part for Cliff Richard's "The Snake and the Bookworm," and I noticed a couple things about it.  First of all, I discovered that the two copies of "The Snake and the Bookworm" in my music collection are different recordings.  I have two compilation albums of Cliff Richard, and while there's a lot of overlap as far as songs, I've been discovering that some are different recordings.  I referenced the version of "The Snake on the Bookworm" on a compilation titled The Early Years, which looks like this:

The bass part isn't very unusual for its era, but there are two features that I found interesting.

For most of the song, the bass arpeggiates the chords it's played beneath.  There's the root, third, and fifth, and then it adds a sixth and a flatted seventh before descending, playing the same notes in reverse order.  This is a standard feature in early rock and roll bass parts.  However, underneath the Bb major, the bass forgoes the flatted seventh and instead plays the root an octave higher.  Instead of

which would match the figures played underneath the F major and C major chords, it's

Musically, it makes the song more interesting, but it also demonstrates the character of the snake.  This musical figure doesn't match the others in the same way that the snake seems to challenge authority and do whatever he likes.  For three of its four occurrences, the lines above this figure describe the snake:  "He tracks her down on the way to school," "And he wants to go and have some fun," and "And he's thinkin' 'bout his recreation."  The only line above this figure that doesn't mention the snake still has a sort of rebellious element in that it features grammatical errors and mentions the possibility of failing a test:  "Well, she got a test, and she don't wanna fail."

At the end of the instrumental section, the song changes keys from F major to F# major.  This is a musical illustration of what happens in the third verse:

The snake got the bookworm one fine day
And he wouldn't let her get away
Mm, and then he kissed her just one time
And then something happened to his mind
Well, now he sings a different song
He's a-been studyin' all night long
The snake is a bookworm

After he kisses the bookworm, the snake becomes a bookworm himself, and in order to match this change in his character, the song changes keys.  I think there might even be a bit of a musical joke here.  The key changes from one flat to six sharps.  It becomes "very sharp" in terms of note accidentals, but "very sharp" could also describe an intelligent person, like a bookworm.

Similarly, the bass figure underneath the B major chords (formerly Bb major chords) now matches those underneath the F# major and C# major chords.  They're all root, third, fifth, sixth, and flatted seventh.  Because of the snake's change, the earlier "rebellion" of replacing that flatted seventh with the root played an octave higher has disappeared.

Here's the bass part in full, with the disclaimer that - as always - I might have something wrong:

 

The other recording of "The Snake and the Bookworm" in my collection (from a compilation titled Essential Early Recordings in The Primo Collection) has the same structure, but it doesn't replace flatted sevenths with roots played an octave higher in the first two verses and, instead of the string of F# notes near the end, continues the arpeggios.

The chords are the same for both versions.  It's almost a three-chord song, but in some spots, there are rapid changes to the chord a fourth higher.  Each line here represents two measures.  The middle chord in each group of three is played for only one beat: the second beat of the second measure.

Introduction:

|: F major | Bb major | F major :|

Verses and Instrumental:

|: F major | Bb major | F major :|

|: Bb major | Eb major | Bb major :|
|: F major | Bb major | F major :|
C major
Bb major
|: F major | Bb major | F major :|

Verse after key change:
|: F# major | B major | F# major :|
|: B major | E major | B major :|
|: F# major | B major | F# major :|
C# major
B major
|: F# major | B major | F# major :|

Badfinger's Magic Christian Music

I've been listening to Badfinger's Magic Christian Music with some regularity this year.  After listening to it twice last month, I found a number of things to write about.  Most are just probable Beatle connections.  The liner notes to the edition I have even say that "this is the most Beatles-sounding of the Badfinger releases."

Aside from the artistic resemblances (detailed below), the album has a number of Beatle connections:  Badfinger were signed to Apple Corp; Paul McCartney wrote and produced "Come and Get It" and - according to the liner notes - arranged for three Badfinger songs ("Come and Get It," "Carry on Till Tomorrow," and "Rock of All Ages") to be used in the film The Magic Christian, starring Ringo Starr; and about half of the album's tracks were produced by the Beatles' roadie Mal Evans.

"Come and Get It"

I learned most of the bass part for "Come and Get It" in February, and I discovered that it has some similarity with the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There," although more in tonality than melody (if that makes sense).  For the first half of the verses, the bass plays just tonic (Eb), subdominant (Ab), and dominant (Bb) notes, but at the beginning of the line "Did I hear you say that there must be a catch," it goes up a half-step to B natural, an accidental in Eb major.  "I Saw Her Standing There" does the same thing with the same accidental (a half-step above the dominant).  The bass part there consists of phrases that more or less arpeggiate the tonic (E major), subdominant (A major), and dominant (B major) chords (more on that here), but there's a C natural (an accidental in E major) to accompany the "woo"s.  Paul McCartney wrote "Come and Get It" and co-wrote "I Saw Her Standing There," so this tonal similarity seems more than coincidental.  McCartney's demo version of "Come and Get It" on the Beatles' Anthology 3 is even in E major, the same key as "I Saw Her Standing There."

"Dear Angie"

I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but "Dear Angie" seems cast in the same mold as the Beatles' "P.S. I Love You."  They're both epistolary songs (both refer to themselves as "this letter"), and both end with "I love you."  The phrase "P.S. I love you" shows up more than once in that song, but the "I love you" in "Dear Angie" shows up only at the end.  The last section is

Dear Angie
The writing's on the wall
Dear Angie
I love you; you're my all
Guess that's all

Incidentally, the phrase "the writing's on the wall" originally referred to Daniel 5 in the Bible, although it's since acquired a more widespread use.

"I'm in Love"

Again with the probable Beatle connections, I think "I'm in Love" took some inspiration from "When I'm Sixty-Four."  The second verse has the lines "Say you will / Love me still / When I'm gray and ninety-three," which bear some resemblance to "Will you still need me / Will you still feed me / When I'm sixty-four."  There's a rhyming couplet followed by a line that mentions a specific age.

"Angelique"

The verses of "Angelique" have a steadily strummed guitar and (in later verses) harpsichord arpeggios with notes of equal value.  Musically, this is contrasted with an-other section (which I suppose is a bridge) in which the guitar is pluckt, the harpsichord breaks out of its supporting rôle a bit, and there are a number of accidentals.  This musical contrast mirrors the contrast in the lyrics.  Each verse praises the titular Angelique, ending with "And you're mine / Angelique," but this odd section reveals that the speaker/singer actually isn't in a relationship with Angelique at all:

I'll never be with you
Never, ever touch your hand
So I'll just dream of you
Lonely in my wonderland

Each of the verses represents part of the "wonderland."  Because the speaker/singer is imagining a relationship with the incomparable Angelique, those sections have a musical stability, almost a perfection.  When the daydream is revealed for what it really is, the music breaks down into accidentals and more erratic rhythms.

I wrote out the notation for the harpsichord part, which might illustrate this better than text alone.  I also wrote in the guitar chords.  As I mentioned above, the chords aren't strummed during the bridge, so what I have there is extrapolated from the pluckt parts.  And - as always - there's the disclaimer I might have something wrong (I'm suspicious that some of the harpsichord part is doubled an octave higher or lower).

"Knocking Down Our Home"

The first line after the introductory section is "I heard the news today," which is the same line (with an "oh boy" at the end) that starts the Beatles' "A Day in the Life."  This by itself doesn't seem that strong of a connection, but I think it's likely considering the album's other Beatle connections.

Del Shannon's "I Won't Be There"

Last month, I learned the chords for Del Shannon's "I Won't Be There," and I found some connections between the chords and the lyrics.

First off, here are the chords (although, as always, there's the disclaimer that I might have something wrong):

Introduction:
|: Eb major | C minor | Ab major | Bb major :|

Following this, there's a chromatic descent with just the root (doubled at the octave) and fifth, so:

D|-8-8-7-7-6-6-
A|-8-8-7-7-6-6-
E|-6-6-5-5-4-4-

First verse

G major | E minor | A minor | D major

G major | E minor | C major | D major

G major | G7 | C major | C minor

G major | E minor | A minor | D major

Second verse

G major | E minor | A minor | D major

G major | E minor | C major | D major

G major | G7 | C major | C minor

G major | D major | G major

Bridge

C minor | G major

E minor | F# major

B minor | C# major

Third verse

F# major | D# minor | G# minor | C# major

F# major | D# minor | B major | C# major

F# major | F#7 | B major | B minor

|: F# major | C# major :|

In the second verse, the C major to C minor modulation occurs immediately after the line "He's only gonna break your heart in two."  Since major chords are often perceived as happy and minor chords as sad, this modulation musically represents the emotional result of the impending heartbreak.

The song is in three different keys: it starts in Eb major, moves to G major for the first two verses and half of the bridge, and then goes to F# major.  To some degree, this peripatetic tonality represents the confusion described in the line "What is my destiny if he's your guy?"

Bobby Darin's "That Lucky Old Sun"

When I listened to a two-CD Bobby Darin compilation about a month ago, I also noticed something about his version of "That Lucky Old Sun."  Each verse ends with some variation on "That lucky old sun has nothin' to do / But roll around heaven all day," and in the second and third verses, Darin sings the "around" with melismas.  For the second verse, it's Bb G F Eb, and for the third, Bb G Eb.

This articulation has two features.  First, there's a musical sense of the "roll[ing] around" because of these extra syllables at various pitches.  Second, those extra syllables provide a sense of freedom.  Earlier lines in the song that mention work ("Up in the morning, out on the job / Work like the devil for my pay" and "Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids / Sweat till I'm wrinkled and gray") are sung with the same number of syllables they're pronounced with (save for "pay" and "gray," which each have an extra syllable).  "That lucky old sun" doesn't have these concerns, so it can "roll around heaven all day" with "nothin' to do," and that freedom is represented by this flexibility with regard to standard syllabic counts.

Listening to the Isley Brothers' version of "Lucky Old Sun" a few years ago, it occurred to me that the lines "Up in the morning, out on the job" and "Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids" exhibit structural parallelism.  "Up in the morning" and "out on the job" are parallel, as are "Fuss with my woman" and "toil for my kids."  (Even the plea to God to "Show me that river, take me across" has some parallelism.)  This parallelism also illustrates the schedule that the speaker/singer operates under.  In the same way that these lines are broken into phrases with the same structure, his time is organized according to his labor.

Bobby Darin's "Down with Love"

I recently listened to a compilation album of Bobby Darin titled Mighty, Mighty Man, and I noticed something about "Down with Love" (from the album This Is Darin, which happens to be the only original Bobby Darin album I have).

Darin articulates a number of phrases in ways that draw attention to "down."  The "Down" that starts the second verse is sung with a descending glissando (I think it's from C to Eb, but I found it a bit difficult to pinpoint).  "Down with Cupid" in the bridge is sung to a descending phrase both times.  It's even chromatic, which seems to emphasize the descent:  Eb, D, Db, C.  The "Down with love" that starts the third verse (a repetition of the second verse) is sung to the descending phrase Eb C Bb.  Finally, the "Down" in the last "Down with love" is sung with a melisma, starting with a Bb and moving through various notes down to Eb.

For what it's worth, a few years ago, I noticed that the line "Down with songs that moan about night and day" refers to the song "Night and Day" and wrote a short post about it.

Unit 4+2's Singles As & Bs

For Christmas a few years ago, I got Unit 4+2's Singles As & Bs.  At the time, I knew only "Concrete and Clay" (I knew "You Ain't Going Nowhere" via the Byrds' version, but I hadn't heard Unit 4+2's), but the album quickly became one of my favorites over the course of the following year.  I started drafting a post about a year after I got it, but then I sort of forgot about it (the post).  I figured I'd finally finish it.

"When I Fall in Love"

The "fall in love" in the titular line is sung to a descending phrase (E D# B, I think), so there's a musical representation of the falling, even if it is only metaphorical.

When I originally transcribed the song, I rendered a pair of lines as "And too many moonlight kisses / Seem to cool in the warmth of the sun," but when I looked over my transcription a few weeks later, I realized that it could also be "And too many moonlight kisses / Seem too cool in the warmth of the sun."  In the first rendering, "to cool" is an infinitive; in the second, "too cool" is an adverb/adjective combination modifying the "kisses" from the previous line.  That second rendering is probably what's intended because then there's a parallelism between "too many" and "too cool."  Still, it's one of those great features that's ambiguous when heard but has to fall one way or the other when it's written out.

I also noticed something about the first two lines of the last verse:  "And the moment I can feel that / You feel that way too."  There's a caesura after the "that" in the second line, so even though the two "that"s function differently (the first is an indicator of an indirect statement and the second is a demonstrative adjective modifying "way"), because of that pause there, it briefly sounds like there's a parallelism between "I can feel that" and "You feel that."  There's a pairing there, which is appropriate for a song about falling in love.

"You've Got to Be Cruel to Be Kind"

The titular phrase - slightly altered - comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  In Act 3, Scene 4, Hamlet says, "I must be cruel, only to be kind" (III.iv.199).  The song doesn't really have anything to do with Hamlet, but that's the origin of that phrase.

"I Won't Let You Down"

The line "Hurtin' in my body and the sweat on my brow now" in the first and third verse (it's the same verse repeated) references Genesis 3, if only indirectly.  Because of the fall into sin, Adam has to work in the fields in order to eat, and in verse nineteen, God tells him, "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food."  It's basically the same as the phrase in the song, but since it's become a common phrase, I don't think it's really intended as a Biblical reference.

"3.30"

One of the verses has the lines "And again I try / Not to reason why."  Like the allusions I found in the other songs, I don't think this is intended as anything more than just the borrowing of a phrase, this time from Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade."  In the third stanza, one of the lines is "Theirs not to reason why."

---&---

For my Collection Audit project, I've also written about "I Will" (which quotes a Bach violin partita) and "A Place to Go" (which has a lyrically significant key change).

The Isley Brothers' "Respectable" [single version]

I recently listened to a two-CD set of the Isley Brothers, and the bass part for the single version of "Respectable" sounded really easy, so I figured it out and notated it:

I considered writing in the chords, but since they last for only one measure each, I thought it would make the notation look too cluttered.  The bass part just arpeggiates the chords played above it:  F major, D minor, Bb major, and C major.

The F major/D minor arpeggiations continue until the fade out, so I put four measures of them within repeat signs, but the fade out actually doesn't last much longer than that.

The Moody Blues' "Lovely to See You"

A few weeks ago, the Moody Blues' "Lovely to See You" was in my head when I woke up (although, at the time, I hadn't listened to On the Threshold of the Dream [the album it's on] for about three months).  The bridge is what was in my head:

Tell us what you've seen in faraway forgotten lands
Where empires have turned back to sand

That's how it's rendered in the liner notes, although - appropriate to their having been forgotten - the word "lands" is cut off:

In any case, this image of "empires... turn[ing] back to sand" reminded me of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias."  It has the same image of a once-vast domain that has since "decay[ed]" so that only "lone and level sands" and fragments of a statue remain.

There really isn't anything else in "Lovely to See You" that seems connected to "Ozymandias," but between the same image of "empires... turn[ing] back to sand" and the land(s)/sand rhyme (which is also in "Ozymandias"), I think Shelley's poem might have influenced "Lovely to See You," if only slightly.