On Sunday, June 15, 2003, at 10:37 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:
best guess is that John and Paul just intuitively gravitated towards this stuff. They found these structural relationships interesting for the same reason that a lay listener might find them interesting, without being consciously aware of what's going on, or able to describe it in technical terms. They just had really, really, really, really good musical instincts. (And, as he says, a brilliant, sensitive producer.)
- Darcy
I did an analysis of "You Won't See Me" some years ago which I presented at the Western New York chapter meeting of the AMS. I was able to account for every note of the piece without referring to chord progressions at all, and I will never believe that the structure I unearthed was unconscious. In the same paper I demonstrated that the underlying techniques were prominent in many, many other Beatles songs, regardless of composer, and were derived from incidental features of some of their earliest songs. Pollack correctly notes the importance of descending chromatic tetrachords in the song, but fails to note their generative power in the actual creation of the piece, because like everybody else he assumes that the chords were born fully-formed and that their inner workings must therefore be > secondary.
I must admit I don't know exactly what you mean by that last sentence. Did you look at his analysis of "Blackbird"? There Pollack (correctly, I think) eschews all but the most basic chord symbols, and concentrates almost exclusively on the voice-leading (i.e., all those tenths). Is that something like what you are getting at here?
Maybe I'll put my analysis up on the web. Pollack has certainly got me thinking...
Please let me know if you do. Or if you don't, perhaps you would be so kind as to email it to me? I'd love to see it.
Regards,
- Darcy
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No one likes us I don't know why We may not be perfect But heaven knows we try But all around, even our old friends put us down Let's drop the Big One and see what happens
- Randy Newman, "Political Science"
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