"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.

"Dawn Is a Feeling"

I listened to Days of Future Passed this morning and noticed a couple small things.

In "Dawn Is a Feeling," the phrase "far and near" in the line "In minds far and near, things are becoming clear with a meaning" is an example of a merism, a rhetorical device in which two distant points of a range are mentioned in order to refer to the entirety.  While the specific words here are "minds far and near," the sense is really "minds all over the place."

"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."

"Dawn Is a Feeling"

Just recently I noticed that in "Dawn Is a Feeling" the "thousand" in the line "This day will last a thousand years if you want it to" is sung with a melisma (F Eb D), which musically gives a sense of that duration of time since the word itself is drawn out.

Days of Future Passed

I realized years ago that there's a sort of parallelism in the album's beginning and ending with the sound of a gong (I think it's even the same recording, just played backwards at the beginning).  Half of the poem at the beginning is repeated at the end too ("Cold hearted orb that rules the night...").  Recently, though, I realized that there's also a parallelism in the time signatures.

"Dawn Is a Feeling" is the first track played by the Moody Blues (rather than the orchestra), and it's in 3/4.  "Nights in White Satin" is the last track, and it's also in 3/4.  All of the other tracks are in duple meter (most are 4/4, but I think "Another Morning" is 2/4).  Those two songs in 3/4 are an-other parallel feature on the album, but when contrasted with the other songs in 4/4, I think they also represent the lingering effects or beginning stages of sleep.  3/4 has one fewer beat per measure than 4/4, and since the two 3/4 songs are positioned at the beginning and end of the day, this "missing" beat can be attributed to sleepiness.  There's not as much energy at dawn or night in the same way that there aren't as many beats per measure in the songs describing those periods of time.