Ethan Hein on "Iron Man" and "Wish You Were Here"--formal complexity in a riff-basher and hypermetrical ambiguity in a ballad--and I half-jokingly suggest that "Iron Man" is a masterpiece of thematic (riff) differentiation within a nine-part rondo pattern

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/i-dont-hear-the-song-as-being-about-syd-barrett-i-hear-it-as-describing-the-failed-bromance-between-david-gilmour-and-roger-waters-a-music-professor-breaks-down-pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here

 

If these lyrics were presented to you as a poem in a book, you probably wouldn’t be impressed, but the music elevates them. This is true of a lot of Pink Floyd songs, and songs generally. If your melodies, harmonies, arrangement and production are this excellent, it can make whatever words you’re singing seem vastly more profound.

 

That was kind of a thing in 1970s rock and pop, though, wasn’t it?  If I took lyrics from songs by Stevie Wonder, Pinkfloyd and David Bowie and tried to analyze them the way I would with songs by Bob Dylan or poems by Donne or Eliot or Wallace Stevens then Wonder, Waters, and Bowie would come off far the worse for wear.  But … the musical settings of pedestrian texts elevates them whether we’re talking about a Stevie Wonder song or, ahem, a John Dowland song (some of those texts he set to music were just not that inspiring).

Ethan Hein's discussion of hypermetrical ambiguity and phrase elision is fun and does a lot to explain how the Waters/Gilmour song is not nearly as simple as it sounds if you start breaking it down by phrase-lengths and harmonic rhythm. Pinkfloyd may have had to leave Syd behind but they got more ambitious with their musical forms and interest in long-form songwriting.  They peaked (and overdid it) with Animals.  I think "Dogs" holds up because the band didn't do what Yes so often did, which is bludgeon you with riff after riff without giving you a cognitive through-line; instead Pinkfloyd's "Dogs" can be heard as a massive double binary form like "Great Gig in the Sky" (ABAB).  

If you have a parade of mercurial riff-switches in six minutes this isn't an obstacle to the song being indelibly seared into the memory.  This gives me my transition into Ethan Hein's other classic rock song analysis, Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".  Earlier this year I blogged about how I thought Ethan Iverson's reservation about the piano sonatas of Nikolai Kapustin was based on a sound intuition and proposed that the concepts he may have been looking for are thematic presentation and thematic differentiation. Kapustin's piano sonatas have thematic presentation to spare but he wasn't so good at differentiating them.  Conversely, you can cram in riff after riff in a harmonically static soundscape but if every riff is unmistakable ... you get "Iron Man".

 

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/they-were-unfairly-dismissed-by-critics-and-listeners-with-good-taste-as-mindlessly-primitive-a-music-professor-breaks-down-the-theory-behind-black-sabbaths-iron-man

Ethan Hein breaks down “Iron Man” riff by riff and I can’t but make a half-joking and half-serious reply.  If we substitute the riff names with letters then we get a structure that looks something like this.

      iAB AC AC AD—DC AB Ai--E

In classical music there’s an axiom that repetitions can be collapsed to simply the analysis of a form.  If the main riff functions as a “chorus” then let it be the “refrain” in a rondo form.  For a rock song we can dispense with the idea of tonal discursiveness and key regions as superfluous to form; what we don’t get rid of is the idea that melodic and rhythmic profiles and tempo changes count for variables in thematic presentation and differentiation. 

 

      AB AC A  D    AB A (Coda)

 

If you squint your ears, so to speak, you can hear “Iron Man” as an elaborate nine-part rondo. It’s at the outer limits of formal complexity but it still works.  Most theory courses don't even mention that rondos can have up to nine parts but nine-part rondos do exist (I read a case that one of the giant movements of a Sor guitar sonata should be interpreted as a nine-part rondo so making giant riff-bashing musical forms at the outer limits of what non-guitarists want to listen to happens in classical music at least as often as it has in metal a century afterward. ;) 

One of the canards in art song vs pop song is pretending that the materials are somehow foundationally different in terms of music and in terms of text.  

Analysis of Matiegka’s 24 Pieces progressives, Op. 20: XXI. Allegro – in the form of a symphony

In his edition of the composer’s works, Stanley Yates pointed out that Matiegka’s Grand Sonata I and II had sample image on the title page showing that there were also Grand Sonata III and IV. 

Neither of these sonatas have been found but Stanley Yates noted that Sonata III had the same opening material as Matiegka’s Op. 20 No. 21. Whether Matiegka’s other grand sonatas were lost; whether they were promised but left incomplete (even Haydn had those kinds of moments where he over-promised and under-delivered); or whether Matiegka withdrew the works I am not in a position to say.  What I am in a position to do is analyze Op. 20, No. 21.

excerpts from John Neville Figgis' Churches in the Modern State

https://archive.org/details/cu31924020347351

John Neville Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (1911 lectures given in Gloucester)

 

...  We cannot eat our cake and have it. We cannot claim liberty for ourselves, while at the same time proposing to deny it to others. If we are to cry "hands off" to the civil power in regard to such matters as marriage, doctrine, ritual, or the conditions of communion inside the Church—and it is the necessary condition of a free religious society that it should regulate these matters—then we must give up attempting to dictate the policy of the State in regard to the whole mass of its citizens. ...

pages 112-113

...

What is clear to me is this fact. Even if some are unconvinced by the arguments for freedom, and look either backward or forward to a day when men shall be organised in society on a basis of religious unity, it must be plain that we do not live in such an age; that there is nothing to be gained by pretending that we do; that whatever unity of opinion may underlie or come to underlie any probable polity, it will not be that body of doctrine which we know as the Catholic Creeds. What we have to face is a hurly-burly of competing opinions and strange moralities—" new thought " from the West, theosophies from the East, Pantheism all round us. Paganism revived, and unbelief in all its arrogance. All we can claim, all we can hope for, is freedom for ourselves as one society among many. It seems to me in a high degree dishonest, and even more imprudent, to go about and proclaim the rights of freedom and variety in the matter of education, if in other matters we seek to deny it. Liberty does not mean the right to punch the heads of those who disagree with you.

pages 119-120

 

Tt is the essence of the Church to be different from the world, and her mission to proclaim that difference. Whenever men try to sanctify the world by raising it to the level of the Church, they commonly succeed only in lowering the life of the Church to accommodate it to the practice of the world. The two centuries which began with Pope Boniface VIII ended with Alexander VI.

pages 133-134 

 

... We must seek to make our theories grow out of and co-ordinate with the life of men in society as it is lived. We must distrust abstract doctrines of sovereignty, with which the facts can be made to square only by elaborate sophistry. Above all, we must be willing to put liberty above other ends as a political goal, and to learn that true liberty will be found by allowing full play to the uncounted forms of the associative instinct. We are fighting not only our own battle but that of the liberty bf all smaller societies against the tendency to mere concentration, which in one way is a marked feature of our time. Much has to be learnt both by ourselves and others from the mediaeval guild system. Further, we must learn to allow to others that liberty we claim for ourselves as a corporate society, and fairly face the fact which I have called "the religious heterogeneity of the modern State." ...

pages 170-171

A lot of what I have seen in Christian Nationalist discourse fits firmly into what Figgis would have called abstract doctrines of sovereignty with which the facts can be made to square with them only by way of elaborate sophistry. The internet has given us an era in which people can bloviate at blogs about theories of sovereignty for regimes which only exist in their own individual and collective imaginations, which is, of course, not the same thing as having to deal with flesh and blood people here in the world.

When Figgis gave these lectures he was considering legal issues related to the fact that Parliament had decided to issue a command that Anglican clergy had to officiate the weddings of divorcees who wanted Anglican wedding ceremonies regardless of what individual clergy thought, believed and felt was most congruent with the teachings of Jesus.  Figgis' appraisal was while Christian clergy had every right to say what rites they would and would not officiate they did not have the right to impose that will on the masses of society at large or to insist that the state compel everyone to go along.  This was back in 1911.  

In other words, Neville Figgis made these observations a bit more than 80 years before the end of the era that Aaron Renn called "positive world". 

Leonora Spangenberger performs 12 Etudes by Heitor Villa-Lobos and YT BC has the score

So this one's for Ethan, in case he remembers that Villa-Lobos Etude 1 I shared here at the blog a few years back.  Somebody found audio for a performance and took the time to post a read-along score of that Etude 1 with the killer fret-by-fret descending fully-diminished seventh chord vamp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP8R7JBu_UM

I kinda prefer the Fabio Zanon recording as the Villa-Lobos 12 Etudes go but you can hear and read along with the scores to see how Spangenberger does for yourself. 

I hesitate to tag this as "contemporary classical guitar" since the Villa-Lobos catalog has been standard repertoire since before the composer died in 1959. Still, whether you love or hate his music (and I've met a few guitarists in my life who loathe it) Villa-Lobos is inescapable for classical guitar literature.  You can no more escape dealing with him in classical guitar music than you can escape dealing with Segovia and Sor (I prefer Bream and Matiegka and Takemitsu as a matter of personal taste, but I still respect Segovia and Sor).