Album: The Milk-Eyed Mender
Song: The Sprout And The Bean
The music's pretty darn good too. The song lilts along, carving out a space between a-flat minor and B major, using the D#/E flat as an harmonic pivot point and playing liberally with the B flat/B natural tension, when suddenly Newsom springs on us an extended section that alternates between E major and C# major. It's a lovely little effect. Notice in particular the symmetry between the harmonic contours of the two major sections: A flat (G#)-B and E-C#, both minor thirds, one rising, one falling. Really quite beautiful.
Hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to comment on any aspect of the post, especially the analysis which was done relatively quickly and mostly by ear. That is, mistakes are inevitable. Let's see if we can suss out the truth together.
The video made me nauseous, but the harp is a badass instrument.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine and I have had a running argument. It kind of comes out of how we met (both Physics majors with music minors; both dropped out of the music minors because we found the more advanced theory less useful for our amateur purposes--that is, we found it, academic). He feels that we've already done everything music can be, and everything else we do is just variations on the same themes; that music, and thus human creativity, is not infinite. I took his argument further and pointed out that even if music were ever possibly infinite, that it could be reduced from infinitely variable to countably infinite (by doing things like recognizing isomorphic patterns, from things like subdividing or inverting or whatever, ignoring differences between one song that's identical from another except for repeating the chorus at the end one more time). We then argued about whether the resulting possible set of all music was countably infinite or just finite...
ReplyDeleteBut this. Joanna Newsom's music is the stuff that's somehow... different. Yeah, it still fits into traditional patterns--it's no Lightning Bolt--but it's still so unique. According to Wikipedia she's been fairly well covered already. Without hearing them, I bet that those covers still sound distinct. It gives me hope for human creativity, that even with an infinite amount of time ahead of us, we will somehow never be bounded.
Yes, Lightning Bolt gets recognition from Scott. Mission accomplished.
ReplyDeleteThis song uses the same chords as the verses for "House of the Rising Sun," only here they're transposed down a half-step. The principal harmonic divergence of the two songs seems to be that Newsom reverses the order of the IV-VI progression to VI-IV, which creates a much dreamier and unstable feel. When I approach these songs as a lead guitarist, which is often the only way I can figure out what's going on, I get the impression that the prevailing harmony derives from the minor scale (a minor in HotRS, a flat minor here), but switches to dorian for the IV chord (which would then be borrowed from G major/Gb major). I don't know much about folk rock, but the substitution of IV for iv seems to occur frequently, as in HotRS or the chorus in "Working Class Hero." I wonder, though, whether this is an instance of a more general pattern of the same substitution throughout rock music.
ReplyDeleteThe choice of IV instead of iv actually reminds me of mixolydian. I say reminds because I do mean that I didn't learn much of modes in school, but was taught a folk chord pattern that used C-F-G, only that it was clearly in G, and was told it was mixolydian, and that it was common in folk. I found the F to be very bluesy at the time, and I've since thought of the flat-7th in a blues scale as extending from there (since I tend think of the blues scale in terms of G, out of habit from when I learned it long, long ago).
ReplyDelete... Point is, even if I haven't analyzed either HotRS nor the Newsom, I'd believe it if I was told it was part of a more general pattern.
... Further point is, I don't think anyone would say that any (popular) arrangement of HotRS would be considered at all like Newsom. So, even if music is finite and most of it completely overlaps, there's still a lot more we can do without getting completely boring and normal, regardless of what major labels would have us think.