"Tortoise and the Hare"

Yester-day, I was thinking about "Tortoise and the Hare."  Initially, I had just a small realization about the first half of the bridge, but the more I lookt into the song, the more I found to write about.

The bridge starts with the lines:

Your friend is heavy

But he was ready

And never stopped for a while

sung to a melody something like this:

The lines "Your friend is heavy / But he was ready" establish a rhythmic pattern, but this is broken by "stopped," which is sung with a value that's shorter than what's expected (a quarter note instead of a half note).  In a way, this truncation matches the meaning (even though the line describes how the tortoise "never stopped").

In an opposite manner, "while" is sung with a long note value (two full measures, I think), lending a sense of this duration.

The second half of the bridge is:

While you were sleeping

He went on keeping

The final line in his mind

The line "The final line in his mind" exhibits assonance (the long i).  This sound is sustained in the same way that the tortoise maintains his focus on his goal.  That the sense is spread across the line break ("He went on keeping / The final line in his mind") also demonstrates this endurance.

"Tortoise and the Hare"

I figured out the chords for "Tortoise and the Hare" last night, and I was reminded of a post I wrote about the song a little over two years ago.  I noted that the "heavy"s in the lines "And your load is so heavy" and "While your load was so heavy" are sung with a descending melisma (F F Eb C), giving a sense of being pushed down by that weight.  Alternatively, because these "heavy"s are preceded by "so"s, those melismas could indicate a sense of degree.

"Tortoise and the Hare"

In the lines "And your load is so heavy" and "While your load was so heavy" in "Tortoise and the Hare," the "heavy"s are sung with a descending melisma (F F Eb C).  Musically, this gives a sense of weight, as if the word itself is being pushed down.

There's a similar feature in the first line of the bridge: "heavy" in the line "Your friend is heavy" is sung to a descending pair of notes (C A).