The Isley Motif

Back in November, I listened to a two-disc compilation album of the Isley Brothers.  I'd recently been reminded that a musical phrase in "Shout" is present in one of the other songs on the album (I'd discovered this during an earlier listening), but as I couldn't remember which, I had to listen to the whole album to find out which song it was.  In listening to the album, I actually found three other songs that contain that phrase.  Along with "Shout," it's present in "Twistin' with Linda" and two different versions of "Respectable" (one is specified as the single version, and I'm assuming that the other is an album version).

I compared the phrase as it appears in all of the songs, and I discovered that it's not just the same intervals, it's the same pitches:

I started calling this musical phrase "the Isley motif."

Because the phrase is made up of the same pitches in each instance, I postulated that the songs were all in the same key, so I figured out the chord progressions for "Shout," "Twistin' with Linda," and both versions of "Respectable."  Unsurprisingly, all four songs are in F major.  More interestingly, much of each song just goes between F major and D minor.  Except for the middle part ("Now, wait a minute..."), "Shout" is entirely F major and D minor; "Twistin' with Linda" occasionally adds a C major; and "Respectable" uses the "50s progression" in F major - F major, D minor, Bb major, and C major.

I thought it interesting that - along with that phrase - the songs are linked by the key and the chord progression.  Until I'd looked into them, I had no idea that they were so musically similar.  Except for "Twistin' with Linda," which is from 1962, they're all from 1959.  So they're related chronologically too.

At the same time I was investigating this, I listened to a Christmas album by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and found the Isley motif at the end of "Christmas Everyday," written by Smokey Robinson.  It's in a different key (D major), but the chord progression is similar.  It alternates between D major and B minor with an occasional A major (comparable to alternating between F major and D minor with an occasional C major).  It was originally released in October 1963, which isn't too long after the Isley Brothers' "Twistin' with Linda."  While the chord progression, that specific phrase, and the chronology would seem to suggest some connection to these songs, I'm not sure if there really is one.

Bach's Gavottes

In listening to pieces from my Classical Music Queue (explained here), I recently listened to Bach's partitas for solo violin.  Or at least I listened to what excerpts I have; I have complete recordings of the first and third, but only one movement from the second.  In listening to the gavotte en rondeau of the third partita, I found a similarity to the gavotte in Bach's third orchestral suite:

(notation found here and here)

There are three groups of trills (with the first two notes as eighth notes and the third as a quarter note), and while the note groups of the two works aren't in the same intervals, the general position pitch-wise is the same.  That is: in both works, the first group of notes is the highest; the second is the lowest; and the third is in between the first two.  Both are capped with a (relatively) lower half-note.

There are a lot of threes here - the number of notes in each group, the number of groups, the movement number, and the classification number (No. 3).  Apparently, Bach didn't put the suites in a set though, so the "No. 3" part of "Suite No. 3" is just a coincidence.

In researching the pieces, I haven't found any dates of composition that agree with each other (the partita seems to be 1720, but I've found both 1717 and 1730 for the third orchestral suite), so I can't tell whether the partita or the orchestral suite was written first.

When I add a piece to the Classical Music Queue, I also write down where I found a reference to it.  Interestingly, the partitas were mentioned in some interviews given during a performance of all four of the orchestral suites that I listened to on NPR in November.  However, neither of the times it was mentioned was really a comparison between the partitas and the orchestral suites.

Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman"

Last week, I happened to hear Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman" while at the store, and it occurred to me how parallel two of the lines are:  "Oh--and she never gives out / And she never gives in."  Except for the "out" and "in" (prepositions acting in verb-adverb combinations with "give"), which are opposites, the lines are virtually the same.  It's interesting that those two words can provide such an opposition while - individually - the lines are saying distinct things.  So you can understand that "she never gives out," "she never gives in," and - like the language used to describe her - she's seemingly contradictory and embodies opposition.  The next line ("She just changes her mind") confirms this.

I looked in the liner notes of The Stranger (the album on which "She's Always a Woman" appears) to find the lyrics (it's faster than transcribing them myself, although I did notice some small discrepancies between the printed lyrics and the sung lyrics), and I found two other similar instances.  The first is the first two lines:  "She can kill with a smile / She can wound with her eyes."  Both lines are structured the same way and indicate the woman's hostility.  Later, there're the lines "She is frequently kind / And she's suddenly cruel," which - along with their structural parallelism -  demonstrate her erratic nature.  However, I don't think either of these pairs of lines has the same sort of implication as "Oh--and she never gives out / And she never gives in."

2015 Musical Projects

I've given myself musical projects for the last two years, but usually I'm sick of them by the fall.  So I'm going to try to give myself simpler projects this year.

The first project is to listen to a concerto from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, one of Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, and one of Bach's orchestral suites everyday.  I've mentioned doing this in a few places.  I've amended it a bit so that I'm listening to the whole piece and not just individual movements.  Here's a chart of how I'm cycling through them:

In the fall of 2014, I started thinking about doing an-other project where I try to learn every part to every song by a particular band.  I've been doing this with the Zombies' music since 2012, and - while I'm still a long way from finishing (and probably never will) - it's been a really interesting experience and often enlightening.  Even though I haven't learned all of the parts yet, I've discovered a lot about the music that's made me appreciate it a great deal more.

So I started doing this same thing for the Alan Parsons Project and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and SMiLE (at some future point, I might include other Beach Boys' albums too).  Like my corresponding project with the Zombies, I'll probably never finish these, but if they turn out to be even sort of similar, they'll definitely be worth doing.

I'm also going to try to get better at piano by learning a piano piece every month (or some other keyboard part).  Lately, I've been practicing a piano transcription that Grieg did of a Norwegian folk song, but I'll probably also learn some more recent things.  (I've had my eye [ear?] on the piano part in Buddy Holly's "Think It Over" for awhile now.)  I might try to use more keyboard instruments in my own music too, although probably just in a doubling capacity.  I think this same sort of thing (using keyboard instruments, particularly piano, to strengthen some parts) is done on some Kinks songs, a few Beach Boys albums (like Today! and Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)), and the Beatles' Help!.

The only other projects I'm going to do are continuations of projects I'm already doing - annual participation in FAWM and 50/90, Hymnal Habitation, and the Classical Music Queue.  Starting on 10 May, I'll listen to all of the LPs in Funk & Wagnalls' Family Library of Great Music, like I've done for the last two years.  And I'll probably end up writing a lot about music too.

Gene Vincent's "Wear My Ring"

Over the past two days, I listened to two discs of a compilation album of Gene Vincent.  It's his first two albums with some bonus tracks.  In any case, some of the backing vocals during "Wear My Ring" sounded pretty familiar, so I checked some things and discovered that the backing vocals in the Beatles' "In Spite of All the Danger" are comprised of the same four notes.

In "Wear My Ring," after the line "To remember when December comes in May," the backing vocals go from B to E to D# to D.  The backing vocals in "In Spite of All the Danger" use those same four notes.  There's a slight difference in that the note values in "Wear My Ring" are all the same, where "In Spite of All the Danger" stays on the E a bit longer.

The chronology and influence match up too.  According to the liner notes of Anthology 1, the pre-Beatle Quarry Men recorded "In Spite of All the Danger" in the spring or summer of 1958.  Gene Vincent's "Wear My Ring" was recorded in 1957.  Anthology 1 also contains the Beatles' version of "Ain't She Sweet," and the liner notes mention that "the Beatles usually performed this in the more mellow style of Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps' influential 1956 version."  So the Beatles held Gene Vincent in some regard, and it's chronologically possible that they based the backing vocals in "In Spite of All the Danger" on those in Vincent's "Wear My Ring."  (As a sidenote: the song was written by Bobby Darin and Don Kirshner, but that phrase doesn't appear in the backing vocals in Darin's version, which was actually released after Vincent's version, in 1958.)

I've read that "In Spite of All the Danger" bears some resemblance to Elvis' "Trying to Get to You," so this resemblance to a Gene Vincent song has some precedent.  It's like "In Spite of All the Danger" is an amalgam of the Beatles' early influences.

Simon & Garfunkel's "A Simple Desultory Philippic"

I'm listening to Simon & Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, and I'm pretty sure that there are two bass parts in "A Simple Desultory Philippic."  There's one panned left, and other panned right with fuzz-tone.  I'm not completely sure that the right-panned one is bass, but in any case it matches the bass part pretty closely.

I haven't listened to it for awhile, but apparently "Think for Yourself" from the Beatles' Rubber Soul has two bass parts too - one regular and one with fuzz tone.  And since "A Simple Desultory Philippic" contains a reference to the Beatles ("I’ve been Rolling Stone-d and Beatle-d ‘til I’m blind"), I think the similarity is intentional.  The Bob Dylan pastiche is clearly intentional, so why not the Beatle one?

"Sue Me" from Guys & Dolls

For inexplicable reasons, I was thinking about "Sue Me" from Guys & Dolls last night.  (A book I was reading mentioned Sinatra's "My Way," which may have had something to do with it.)  This afternoon, I transcribed the lyrics, and what I'd suspected turns out to be true - the pacing of the song is connected to the lyrics (or the lyrics are connected to the pacing).

In the first three lines of the first two of Adelaide's verses, the words are both repetitive and fast-paced:

You promised me this
You promised me that
You promised me everything under the sun

And

But you gamble at here
You gamble at there
You gamble on everything, all except me

Both of which emphasize Nathan's flaky behavior.  Like Adelaide's repetitive diction suggests, there have been many times where Nathan has stood her up.  And the fast tempo at which the words are sung seems to indicate that there are so many of these instances that Adelaide has to sing quickly in order to fit them all into the song.

In the line after those parts ("When I think of the time gone by") "time" is long and drawn-out, as is "way" in the line after that ("And I think of the way I try").  The elongation of both of those words helps to illustrate that Adelaide has lengthily waited and earnestly tried for Nathan.

There's also the contrast between these two parts:  there's the fast-paced part when she's listing off Nathan's flaws, and then there's the drawn-out part where she explains her own suffering.  Together, they demonstrate at least her agitation and possibly even her conflict between staying with Nathan or leaving him.

Nathan's parts in the song are very even in tempo and syllable distribution, as if he's trying to placate and mollify her not only with his words but also with the manner in which he says (or sings) them.  His part also includes some repetition, but it's immediate ("sue me, sue me" and "hate me, hate me"), which - together with the steady pace - lends a sense of predictability and maybe even security.  In Adelaide's part, the repetition is in each successive line and is coupled with the fast-paced lyrics, which makes each repetition like an attack.

I liked the song well enough before, but now that I can see how the pacing fits in with the lyrics, I like it even more.

Classical Music Queue

A few days ago, I had an idea, which I'd forgotten about, but I really like it, so I'm going to write it down here in the hopes that I remember it when I can actually do it.

I've been watching some music lectures form Gresham College recently, and some of the works mentioned in those lectures (like Bach's Goldberg Variations or Purcell's Dido & Aeneas) are works that I have recordings of but am not too familiar with.  I think I've listened to both of those works only once each (I've heard Bach's Goldberg Variations twice, but they were two different recordings, so...).

In any case, I'd like to be more familiar with those works, so I'm going to start doing something similar to how I decide which book I'm going to read next, except simplified because it doesn't take as long to listen to a piece of music as it does to read a book.

The way my books thing works is that every time I run across a reference to or a mention of a particular book that I have and haven't read yet, it gets a point, so the more talked-about books get higher on the list, and when a book hits 50 points (sometimes more because I'm already reading some from the list and raise the requirement), I start reading it.  (More about that, including how I don't follow this very strictly, here.)

I'm going to start doing that for these classical pieces of music.  Except it'll be more like a queue rather than a list with points.  So, if I run across a mention of Schumann's Symphony No. 3, I'm going to listen to Symphony No. 3, either that day or the next day (depending on what time of day I run across the reference).  If I run into references for more than one piece during a day, the second piece will wait until the next day, and so on.  I'll listen to only one piece from the queue per day.

I would start this right now, but I'm still in the midst of my Collection Audit project, and - as part of that - I'm trying to get through all of my music before going back to listen to something a second time.  To some degree, Collection Audit helps with my familiarity of these pieces too, but it ensures only that I listen to a particular piece at least once every two years, and I don't think that's often enough for a piece to really stick in my memory.  So, once I finish with Collection Audit, I'm going to start this Classical Music Queue.  Of course, when it's time to do Collection Audit again in 2016, I'll postpone the Classical Music Queue.

Geographical Music

About a week ago, I started reading a book about George Gershwin (Howard Pollack's George Gershwin: His Life and Work).  In Chapter Four (The Popular Pianist), Pollack briefly talks about the geographical distance between different musical types: "The emergence of Harlem stride piano during World War I ran parallel - geographically as well as temporally - to the rise of jazz.  Whereas jazz emerged largely along the Mississippi from New Orleans to Chicago, Harlem stride traveled a similar course along the eastern seaboard, from the coastal Southeast to New York."  This got me thinking about the geographical nature of music, and I realized that music isn't tied to geography for me, either as a musician or as a listener.

As Pollack later illustrates in that chapter, there were more musical differences among various locations in Gershwin's time.  In a word, things were more insular.  As far as my own experience, I don't think that insularity is really the case anymore (at least not in some senses).  Partially because the internet has made communication among distant locations virtually instantaneous and therefore has made obscure styles easier to find (by circumventing geographical borders), but mostly because I'm not a part of a local music culture.  I have a long-standing disdain for where I live, so I wouldn't want to be a part of whatever local culture there is anyway.  In any case, the musical styles that I'm interested in as far as being a musician aren't limited by what I hear around me.  Because of recorded music, I can listen to music that's varied by time period in addition to music that's varied by geography.

Pollack's mentioning the geography of music also made me realize that I'm not part of a geographical musical sphere even as a listener.  For a year and a half, I've been keeping track of what I listen to, and in all of that time, I've gone to only one live performance.  I think that in my whole life I've gone to only two concerts that weren't high school band concerts.  For me, music doesn't really exist as a live medium; recordings take precedence for me, which - interestingly - is exactly the opposite of how things were about a hundred years ago.  Back then, recordings were a rarity; music was a live medium only (radio broadcasts may have started to creep in, but they were still live performances).

To be clear, my avoidance of live music isn't for the sake of avoiding live music; it's all of the things that have become associated with that live music that I dislike: I don't like having to stand for two hours while at a concert; I don't like having to be among people who talk through the concert and smoke cigarettes and drink beer; I don't like being distracted by people's coughing and whatever other noises they produce (I hate the sound of clapping).  For me, those things get in the way of the music too much to make live events worth attending.  I'd much rather just put on headphones and listen to a recording.  Then almost nothing can get between my ears and the actual music.

The Association's "Requiem for the Masses"

I was thinking about the Association's "Requiem for the Masses" this morning, specifically the lines:

Red was the color of his blood flowing thin
Pallid white was the color of his lifeless skin
Blue was the color of the morning sky
He saw looking up from the ground where he died
It was the last thing ever seen by him

And I realized how appropriate the passive voice in the last line is - "it was seen by him" rather than "he saw it."  It's an interesting use of passive voice because it illustrates that the "he" referenced is no longer capable of action.  Because he's dead, he can no longer be active and the verb has to change voices accordingly.

Musical Crosses

From February through April, I was reading John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.  In Chapter 5: The Mechanics of Faith, Gardiner briefly mentions how Bach inserted crosses via the shape of the notes in his music.

From Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

In church to-day, I realized that these musical crosses are also in some of the music in the Divine Service, Setting Three (from the Lutheran Service Book).  They may be in some of the other settings and liturgies too, but these are the two I noticed:

In the Sanctus

In the Nunc Dimittis

This might just be a coincidence, but I still think it's really interesting.  Especially considering that I've probably sung these pieces dozens if not hundreds of times, and it was only now, after reading Gardiner's book, that I found the sign of the cross in them.

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Cycles

A few months ago, I wrote a post about how I felt about guitar, which at the time was not very good.  But reading what I wrote, now I feel kind of embarrassed by it.  Especially the part when I said, "I'm starting to feel that while I may not know how to employ every technique perfectly, I at least know about them all."  I tried to avoid sounding arrogant by saying that I'm not a perfect player, but even with that admission, it still seems arrogant to me.

So I guess part of the reason for this post is to apologize for how pompous I sound in that other one.  Some of what I said I do still stand by though.  Like how I'm still bothered by what I perceive the public perception of guitarists to be.  But what I've realized is that it's my own problem that I'm bothered by that.  I suppose I just over-think my role as a guitarist and ponder the larger issue of image when I should just be focusing on what I play and how well I play it.

But mostly I'm writing this post to say that I've actually been having fun playing guitar again lately.  For my FAWM album, I started to get into chord voicings.  I had first gotten into chord inversions during 50/90 last year, but back then, I was just finger-picking everything.  For FAWM, I was strumming inverted chords, which made a huge difference, not only in overall sound but also in what types of chords I can play.  During FAWM, I learned how to play minor elevenths, and just yester-day, I figured out how to play minor ninths.  Also significant is that I started using a pick and my other fingers simultaneously.  A few years ago, I saw Greg Lake doing this in a video of "The Sage" from ELP's Pictures at an Exhibition.  I think I tried it, but it was really difficult at the time, and I thought I would never be able to do it.  And now I'm doing it, and it's loads of fun.

That other post is just one that I wrote when I was sort of stagnating in pushing my musical horizons (that sounds like a cliché).  I even acknowledged this cycle in that post, but I was too arrogant or pompous or something to realize that, by combining things I already knew, there was still more that I could learn.  I am still sort of frustrated that I'm so much better at guitar than I am at keyboard instruments, but I suppose I just have to practise.  I've been playing guitar over five years now, and keyboard instruments only two or three and I've not been practising them as much as I've been practising guitar.  I just have to put the time in.

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