"Nights in White Satin"

I think I've now collected everything I've previously written about the Moody Blues' music, so now I'm moving on to recording some examples of what parts I've already learned (although recordings might be few and far between).  I don't think it's worth it to make a recording unless I know two simultaneous parts and a decent amount of them (time-wise).

For my first recording, I pickt one of the most well-known sections: the flute solo in "Nights of White Satin."  While I own a flute and can play it, most of this solo is well beyond my current range, so I used the mellotron flute sound.  The guitar part is vastly simplified; I just played chords.

"And My Baby's Gone"

When I listened to The Magnificent Moodies yester-day, I noticed something new about "And My Baby's Gone" (a bonus track on the edition I have).  In the second iteration of the chorus, there's the repeated line "When I'm walkin', I fall."  The first time, that "fall" is sung to a descending melody (Ab to F), and after each time, there's a descending phrase played on guitar (Ab G F).  Both of these musically illustrate that "fall[ing]."

"It's Easy Child"

I listened to The Magnificent Moodies this morning and discovered that I'd forgotten to mention something about "It's Easy Child" (included as a bonus track).  Some of the "Falling in love with you"s in the backing vocals are sung to descending phrases (F# F# F# F# E D and G G G G E D), giving a sense of that metaphorical "falling."

There's also this phrase in the backing vocals (at ~1:03 and ~2:51), where there's a sustained pitch with pitches added beneath it:

This too gives a sense of that "falling."

In verifying these things, I also noticed that the "Falling in love with you" in the lead vocals at the end of the chorus is sung to the descending phrase C C C B A G.

"Veteran Cosmic Rocker"

Last week I listened to Long Distance Voyager and noticed a small thing about "Veteran Cosmic Rocker."  Near the end of the song, there's the line "He's the apple of their eye," which borrows a phrase from the Bible.  Apparently the first instance is Deuteronomy 32:10, where Moses says, "He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye," but Psalm 17:8 is probably more well-known:  "Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings."

"The Voice"

I'd previously noted the parallelism of "Make a promise, take a vow" in "The Voice," but just recently (in fact, the day my other post about it was published, which is the reason I decided to delay this post), I realized that this parallelism illustrates the seriousness of that pledge.  It's as if the gravity of the situation requires this to be said twice.

"Question"

When I was writing a post about "The Story in Your Eyes" a couple days ago, I discovered that "Question" also slipped through the cracks.  (I don't yet have A Question of Balance, so I have "Question" only on compilation albums.)

When I listened to Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 last month, I noticed that "through" in the phrase "would safely lead me through" is sung with a melisma.  In the live version, it's C A G F E, but in the studio version, it's just C A G.  Either way, this musically represents the movement of "lead[ing]... through."

I also noticed that one of the lines is a bit ambiguous when heard.  It could be either "It's more the way you really mean it when you tell me what will be" or "It's more the way you really mean it when you tell me what we'll be."

"The Story in Your Eyes"

I'd thought I'd finished my initial notes, but then I realized I forgot about "The Story in Your Eyes."

In the final verse, there's some internal rhyme in the line "And it's certain that the curtain's gonna fall."  To some degree, that internal rhyme emphasizes the certainty, as if the words' starting to resemble each other represents the inevitability of the end.

The "more" of "Forevermore" has nine syllables instead of the usual one (the whole word is sung to the phrase D E G G B A G A B A G A), so it provides a musical sense of eternity.

I'm familiar with "The Story in Your Eyes" mostly because it's on both of the compilation albums I have (20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of the Moody Blues and The Best of the Moody Blues).  Originally, it's on Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which I've listened to only twice.  I listened to it somewhat recently (20 March) and noticed that the end of the line "It's been shining down upon me now" descends to represent that "shining down" musically (A B C B A G F# E D).

Yester-day, after I realized I'd forgotten about it, I also realized that "away" in the line "Wash all our heartaches away" is sung with a melisma (G G F#) and that "fall" in the line "And it's certain that the curtain's gonna fall" is sung with a glissando (A to F#), both of which musically represent movement (downward movement specifically for "fall").  While referencing the song in order to find specific notes and write this post, I also realized that the line "For the love that's deep inside us now" descends (it's sung to the same melody as "It's been shining down upon me now"), musically illustrating that depth.

"Once Is Enough"

Days of Future Passed is referenced in the second verse of "Once Is Enough."  As printed in the liner notes, the lyrics are:

Sometimes you're first
Sometimes you're last
Then again you're somewhere
In your "days of future passed"

There's also a musical representation of number at the beginning of the song.  The first line is "Just ask me once," and it's sung by a single voice.  The second line is "Don't ask me twice," and it's sung by two voices.

"Bless the Wings (That Bring You Back)"

The last three lines of the bridge of "Bless the Wings (That Bring You Back)" are "The dust of many centuries / Has blown across this land / But love will not be scattered like the sand," which are fairly similar to the bridge of "Lovely to See You" from On the Threshold of a Dream: "Tell us what you've seen in faraway forgotten lands / Where empires have turned back to sand."  There are a number of similarities here: both songs were written by Justin Hayward; both of these sections are bridges; and both rhyme "land(s)" with "sand."

Like I mentioned already with "Lovely to See You," this image of the eroding sands of time might have come from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias."

Keys of the Kingdom

I haven't found anything that connects the title Keys of the Kingdom with the songs on the album (maybe I'll find something now that I've started this project), but the title itself seems to come from the Bible.  In Matthew 16:19, Jesus tells His disciples, "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

"The Voice"

In "The Voice" after the lines "'Cause out on the ocean of life, my love / There's so many storms we must rise above" (at about 1:52), there's an ascending synth phrase (panned left, playing the notes A B C, I think), which musically represents this "ris[ing] above."

The next two lines are "Can you hear the spirit calling / As it's carried across the waves," which seems to take an image from Genesis 1:2:  "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."

"Long Summer Days"

In "Long Summer Days" (from the "+ 5" on Caught Live + 5), the last word of the first and third lines of the verses is sung with a melisma (D to C# [although the "ways" in the last verse seems like it has a third note]), which musically indicates the length of "days" in "Long summer days," the number of "ways" in "So many ways," and movement in "Time hurries by" and "Don't let it by."

"Lovely to See You"

The bridge of "Lovely to See You" has some resemblance to Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias."  In the liner notes, the bridge of "Lovely to See You" is rendered as:

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

Although, appropriate to their being "forgotten," the "lands" is cut off:

The "empires... turn[ing] back to sand" is the same image as Shelley's 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.

"In the Beginning"

In "In the Beginning," the line "I think, I think I am, therefore I am, I think" is a slight rephrasing of René Descartes' famous statement "I think, therefore I am."

On the Threshold of a Dream

Shortly after I started this project, I dug through my CD collection to pull out some of the Moody Blues albums so I could easily reference the liner notes if I need to.  Looking at the cover of On the Threshold of a Dream, I discovered that there are some elements from the songs in the art work:

There might be others that I'm missing, but off-hand I noticed three.  In the top center, there's "the white eagle of the North flying overhead" from "The Dream."  From "Are You Sitting Comfortably," there's "a fleet of golden galleons" in the lower left hand corner and "Merlin cast[ing] his spell" on the right.  Because there are these two references to "Are You Sitting Comfortably," it would seem that the castle-like building in the upper left hand corner is meant to be Camelot, which is also mentioned in the song.

"A Simple Game"

This is just a minor point, but in "A Simple Game," the line "We'll touch the sky" ascends (B C# D E), which gives a musical sense of reaching up in order to "touch the sky."

"Legend of a Mind"

I'm fairly certain that the second (and also the fourth) section of "Legend of a Mind" contains the lines "Takes you trips around the bay / Brings you back the same day" (I might be wrong in my transcription).  There's parallelism between "Takes you trips" and "Brings you back."  Both are alliterative, and the word order is similar ("Takes you trips" / "Brings you back" - [verb][direct object][word that alliterates with the verb]).

More interesting, though, is the section half-way through (~1:52), where the length of the lines increases:

Along the coast, you'll hear the most about a light they say that shines so clear
So raise your glass, we'll drink a toast to the little man who sells you thrills along the pier
He'll take you up, he'll bring you down, he'll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low, he knows exactly which way he's gonna go

The rhyme scheme here is the interesting thing.  The first two couplets rhyme with each other ("clear"/"pier"), but the last two couplets seem like they're each two couplets re-arranged into a single line.  So they could be re-rendered as

He'll take you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
He knows exactly which way he's gonna go

Later in the song (~5:01), they do appear almost in that form:

He'll take you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back on the ground
He'll fly so high, he'll swoop so low
Timothy Leary

But in that lengthened verse, the internal rhyme is key.  "Coast," "most," and "toast" are irrelevant to the rhyming of the first two couplets, but they act as an indication of what the rhyme scheme will become.  The words that are in the same position in the line as "most" and "toast" (the words that the eighth syllable falls on: "down" and "low") will become important in that new rhyme scheme:

Along the coast, you'll hear the most about a light they say that shines so clear
So raise your glass, we'll drink a toast to the little man who sells you thrills along the pier
He'll take you up, he'll bring you down, he'll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low, he knows exactly which way he's gonna go 

That internal rhyme acts as a sort of structural foreshadowing.

There are also a couple phrases for which the melody provides a musical representation.  "So raise your glass," "He'll take you up," and "He flies so high" ascend (E A B C#); "He'll bring you down" and "He swoops so low" descend (E' C# B A).  When that "He'll take you up..." section is revisited (~5:01), the "down" and "low" are sung with descending melismas (E to D).  Similarly, the end of "back on the ground" descends (a string of F# notes to an E).

At about 2:22, there's a brief change in meter (a duple meter becomes a triple meter).  I think this is intended to represent the mind-altering effects of Leary's drugs.

In all three of the live versions I have in my collection, Mike Pinder plays the "Charge" fanfare (or something close to it) on mellotron after the line "Along the coast, you'll hear the most about a light they say that shines so clear" (although in some of the versions, it sounds more like "life" than "light").  In chronological order:

• 12 December 1969 (Caught Live + 5), ~2:17
• 17 December 1969 (bonus track on To Our Children's Children's Children), ~1:04
• August 1970 (Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970), ~1:49

"House of Four Doors (Part 1)"

I wrote a post about both "House of Four Doors" songs, but I also have some comments specific to "House of Four Doors (Part 1)."

The line "Shadows fell from trees" descends (one of the vocal parts is D D C Bb A), so there's a musically representation of that falling.

More interesting, though, is the last section of lyrics.  I'm not completely sure of my transcription, but I think it's:

"Enter in, all ye who seek to find within"
As the plaque said on the last door

I think this is meant to be the inverse of the inscription above the Gate of Hell in Dante's Inferno:  "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" (canto III, line 9).  If nothing else, it's a similar image.

"House of Four Doors"

The melody to which "House of four doors / I could live there forever..." in "House of Four Doors (Part One)" and "House of four doors / You'll be lost now forever..." in "House of Four Doors (Part Two)" are sung has some similarity to a phrase in George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

I still haven't been able to find a complete score for the Rhapsody in Blue, but there are some piano arrangements on IMSLP.  Digging through those, I found the phrase (beginning at con moto):

Specifically, it's:

Apparently, this is called the "love theme" of the Rhapsody in Blue.

The phrase in "House of Four Doors" doesn't have much resemblance as far as rhythm, but the intervals of the pitches are exactly the same (save for the end).  "House of Four Doors" is just a fifth lower, something like:

Both phrases ascend diatonically, have an octave drop after the first three notes, and then continue upwards again.

Because the Moody Blues recorded the Gershwins' "It Ain't Necessarily So," I'm assuming that they were at least somewhat familiar with George Gershwin's other work and that this might be an intentional reference to the Rhapsody in Blue.  I should point out, though, that "House of Four Doors" was written by John Lodge, who wasn't part of the line-up that recorded "It Ain't Necessarily So."

Aside from the possible Gershwin reference, I also noticed that every "forever" sung to this phrase is sung with a melisma (the last four notes: C# C# B B).  This provides something of a musical sense of "forever" since the word itself is stretched out.

"Dr. Livingstone, I Presume"

Each verse addresses a famous explorer.  The first (and title) line is what Henry Stanley said to Dr. David Livingstone after he went looking for the explorer in Africa; "Captain Scott... out there in the snow" refers to Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who endeavored the reach the South Pole; and, of course, Columbus in the third verse is Christopher Columbus, who "discovered" America.

This might be a bit far-fetched, but each verse - along with describing a famous explorer - also has water in one of its three states.  There's water vapor in the African jungles in the first verse, frozen water in the arctic snow and ice in the second, and liquid water in the form of the ocean in the third.

"Ride My See-Saw"

Compared to the first verse of "Ride My See-Saw" ("I worked like a slave for years..."), the chord progression for the second verse ("Left school with a first class pass...") is different.  The first verse is

|: C major | Bb major | F major | G major :| Bb major | C major

but the second verse is

|: C major | Bb major | F major | G major :| Bb major | D minor

Part of this difference seems to be because the first verse transitions into a different iteration of the chorus ("Run, run my life's race...") while the second verse transitions into an instrumental section, but putting a D minor where a C major is expected is also something of a musical representation of the lyric there: "School talk one and one is two / But by now that answer just ain't true."  It's as if the song goes to a different chord (and a minor chord, at that, where everything up to this point has been a major chord) because "by now that answer just ain't true."

"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

Shortly after I first listened to the edition of Days of Future Passed with bonus tracks (including "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" performed live on the BBC), I learned the guitar phrase and chords for the Animals' version of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood."  After I learned those parts, I tried playing the guitar phrase from the Animals' version on flute (which is how it's played in the Moodies' version).  In doing so, I discovered that the Moodies' version (in A minor) is a whole step lower than the Animals' version (in B minor).

At first, I thought the key was changed just to make the guitar phrase from the Animals' version easier to play on flute*.  In the Animals' version, it's:

On guitar, that C# to D transition isn't anything special, but it's a bit difficult on flute.  The fingerings for C# and D don't have any keys in common.  Here's part of the fingering chart from the back of my flute book:

Lowering the phrase a whole step makes it a lot easier to play on flute.  Here's the notation:

(I should note that in a few instances of this phrase, Ray Thomas adds some trills, but I didn't include those in my notation.)

Here are the relevant fingerings:

All of the fingerings here have at least two keys in common.

Initially, I thought that facilitating that part on flute was the reason the Moody Blues lowered the key from the Animals' version, but as I continued to think about the song, I realized that there might have been an-other reason.  B minor has two sharps, but A minor doesn't have any accidentals.  It might be a bit arcane, but that lack of accidentals is a musical representation of the purity mentioned in the line "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good."  (There are some accidentals in the song [for example, there's a D# in the bass part during the verses and - although I think it might be more implied than outright strummed - there's an E major chord, which contains a G#], but there aren't any accidentals "built-in" as it were in A minor.)  That extra-musical meaning might just be a coincidence and moving the song to A minor was just for a practical purpose, but it's still a valid explanation.

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*Because the liner notes specifically mention the Animals' version and because the two versions of the song have roughly the same structure, I'm assuming that the Moodies based their version off the Animals' version.  There are some significant differences in the lyrics though.

"Nights in White Satin"

This post is more about the narration that follows "Nights in White Satin" than the song itself.  Accompanying the line "Impassioned lovers wrestle as one," there are tremolos in the strings, apparently to represent that "wrestl[ing]" musically.

"Dawn Is a Feeling"

I'm skipping back a bit in order to write about something I realized this morning.  A couple weeks ago I figured out the piano part for the first two verses of "Dawn Is a Feeling."  I don't think the piano in the third verse is played in the same manner as it is in the first two, but it does have the same structure.  Each chord lasts for four measures except for one (Ab major 7th, I think) under the line "It's true life flies faster than eyes could ever see" (beneath "eyes could ever" specifically).  That one chord change is faster than the others (it lasts only two measures), which musically reflects the notion of "fl[ying] faster than eyes could ever see."