"After You Came"

I listened to Every Good Boy Deserves Favour yester-day and noticed a small feature in "After You Came."  In the lines "So you just have to laugh / When it hurts so much," "hurts" is sung with a melisma (B A), giving a sense of degree (for "so much").

"Dawn Is a Feeling"

Last night, I learned the bass part for the verses of "Dawn Is a Feeling."  To this, I could add some of the piano part, which I learned in March 2018.  I made a short recording of just one verse:

I used the "Grand Lady D" piano sound on my Nord Electro 5D, recorded in mono.

I also discovered that I'd misunderstood the meter of the song.  Before, I knew only the piano arpeggiations, so I thought the song was in 3/4, but learning the bass part made me realize that those piano arpeggiations are actually triplets and that the song is really in a slow 4/4 (although I think there's an odd measure in the verses that has only two beats), so some of my previous comments may not be valid.

"Nights in White Satin"

Yester-day, I was thinking about the poem that's spoken at the end of "Nights in White Satin," specifically these lines:

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,

Lonely man cries for love and has none.

New mother picks up and suckles her son,

Senior citizens wish they were young.

(That's how they're formatted in the CD liner notes.)

I realized that there's a contrast here that highlights the solitude of the lonely man.  The lovers are a pair; the mother and son are a pair; and the senior citizens - while they may be separate from each other - are united in their common wish; but the lonely man is by himself.

"In the Beginning"

I'm pretty sure I noticed before that in "In the Beginning," the phrase "our great computer" is spoken more loudly than the preceding and following words, but I realized yester-day that this change in dynamics highlights that exalted status.

"Question"

Since I finished transcribing the lyrics in the CD booklet from On the Threshold of a Dream, I've moved on to A Question of Balance (I'd already done To Our Children's Children's Children).  Last night, I transcribed "Question" and noticed polysyndeton (the repeated "and") in the lines "With a thousand million questions / About hate and death and war."  It's only a slight use of this rhetorical device, but to some degree, it provides a sense of amount (the "thousand million" from the previous line).

"Have You Heard - Part 2"

Yester-day, I finally finished transcribing the lyrics from the CD booklet from On the Threshold of a Dream.  While copying the lyrics for "Have You Heard - Part 2," I realized something about the line "Scatter good seed in the fields."  Each syllable in the line is sung to a different pitch, and as a whole, the pitches span more than an octave (A B C D E G B).  Musically, then, there's a sense of the breadth and extending of that "scatter[ing]."

"In the Beginning"

This morning, I started transcribing the lyrics from the booklet of On the Threshold of a Dream into Google Documents so that they're easier to reference.  So far, all I've done is "In the Beginning," but in transcribing it, I noticed something:  the insistently repeated rhymes in "I've miles / And miles / Of files / Pretty files..." and "Face piles / And piles / Of trials / With smiles" help provide a sense of abundance in both of these instances.

"Ride My See-Saw"

This morning, I watched this live performance of "Ride My See-Saw" in France in 1969:

I realized two things about the instrumental section (which starts at ~1:50 in this performance but at ~1:40 in the studio recording).  Years ago, I figured out two of the vocal parts.  They're something like:

The higher part generally descends, and the lower part ascends.  This simultaneous up-and-down illustrates the confusion that's mentioned in the lyrics that come before and after this section.  The preceding line is "But by now that answer just ain't true," and the next lyrics are "My world is spinnin' around / Ev'rything is lost that I've found."  The vocal parts' going two different directions provides a sense of this disorientation.

Alternatively, this simultaneous up-and-down gives a musical picture of that see-saw.  It's like each vocal part is an end; as one goes up, the other comes down.

"Eternity Road"

Years ago, I wrote about some significant vocal articulations in "Eternity Road," and recently I found an-other one:  "alone" in the line "And so very much alone" is sung with a melisma (D A G), giving a sense of degree (for the description "so very much").

"Out and In"

A few years ago, I wrote a short post about how in "Out and In," "view" in the line "Looking for total view" is sung with a melisma and that this provides a sense of the entirety of "total."  After I listened to To Our Children's Children's Children recently, I realized that there's an-other musical feature that gives a sense of this breadth.  Underneath this line, the chords are F major and D major.  Usually, those two chords would not go together, but their juxtaposition here provides a sense of tonal breadth, especially since Mike Pinder uses the pitch shift knob on the Mellotron to slide from the F major down to the D major.