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The Persistence of Sentiment. Mitchell Morris
Читать онлайн.Название The Persistence of Sentiment
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520955059
Автор произведения Mitchell Morris
Жанр Музыка, балет
Издательство Ingram
LOVE FOR SALE
“Love’s Theme” opens with a swirling run up the D major scale in the violins, along a dominant seventh chord, from a1 to a3. There are no rhythm tracks present yet, so although we already know that we are in a metrical frame, what stands out more strongly than the background ordering of strong and weak beats is the headlong forward motion, made more pronounced by hints of rhythmic disarray, of the strings’ glittering ascent. Brief but extravagant introductions such as this one are useful formal devices for disco songs in general, and the string run in “Love’s Theme” is no exception: utterly recognizable, it signals listeners that a song they love is about to play and gives them a moment to grab a partner and head out to the dance floor. An additional frisson comes from its recollection of an endless series of similar gestures in cinematic music—upon first hearing, we might be excused for thinking that we had happened upon the overture to a film by RKO Pictures or 20th Century Fox. But there’s more to this intro than its aspect of fanfare, and its larger purposes begin to become clear when the strings reach their high a3 and hold it as an arrested gesture, allowing the rhythm tracks and accompanimental figures to take the stage.
The moment the strings reach a3 is the moment that the groove begins to materialize. Its first clarification takes place in the lower strings, accentuated and echoed by electric guitar, which establishes a primary unit of organization (2 + 2 bars as the norm) and sets out rhythmic and metrical tensions to be resolved by the body of the song. The underlying harmonic progression of this opening is four bars long, from a D major triad enriched by appoggiaturas from A major, through a brief and plain version of A major onto a minor seventh chord on B, with the same pattern of appoggiaturas. In the conventions of tonal harmony, this might seem to be nothing more than a simple move from the tonic through the dominant to a slightly enriched submediant, but the both the weak metrical placement of the whole A major chord and the progression’s clear goal of the b7 chord attenuate our sense of D major as the key of the song. Furthermore, the melodic and rhythmic details of the piece will shape the harmonic progression in such a way that A major seems not to pull toward D major; the reduced connection between dominant and tonic, taken with the metrical power of the song’s subdominant harmonies, tends to override the importance of D major. We are not so much in a key as in a key signature.
EXAMPLE 1. Introduction to “Love’s Theme.”
In any case, at the opening of the piece any functional understandings of harmony matter less than the rhythmic effect created by the lower strings’ ornamental tones. The “dissonant” notes in the accompaniment at m.3 of “Love’s Theme” fall ever so slightly at variance with the primary structure of beats; in a transcription of the rhythm, we would probably write it as syncopated sixteenth notes, as in example 1, but the rhythm as heard does not quite feel like that, but rather something a little looser, a little bit closer to triplets urging themselves forward. The hint of raggedness in this rhythm gains additional heaviness from the voluptuous dissonance between the appoggiaturas and the bass, such that the beats that prepare the resolution begin to feel as important as their ostensible goal. Imagine an anapest in which the weak beats also feel something like spondees (thus, short/short/long), and you have another auditory image that matches this effect. The halting effect of the rhythm in this case threatens to disrupt the flurrying continuity of the violin opening and poses the problem of how these are to be reconciled to allow the song proper to begin.
If the opening swirl of violins has captured the foreground of our attention, the ponderous motions of the lower strings with their guitar highlighting sound like an attentional middle ground—not the Schenkerian kind familiar to music scholars—mapping out a musical space at once below and, thanks to the modulations of the mix, moving forward and backward around what we might have imagined as the nucleus of a forthcoming melody.8 At m.5, a hi-hat cymbal, marking out every beat, begins to emerge from the back of the mix in a steady crescendo over the next three two-bar units. (It may be that part of the excitement conveyed in this regular cymbal marking comes from our retrospective hearing; after our initial hearing of the song, we may be aware upon subsequent listenings that the hi-hat will be marking sixteenth notes for the rest of the song, some unconscious memory of its normative tempo probably remains with us and adds an anticipatory excitement to what we hear.) In any case, the hi-hat’s strict timekeeping signals the basic pulse to listeners and dancers at the same time that it adds the rhythmic drive that will propel the song into an actual tune. The last materials that kick the introduction into the body of the song, a glissando on the piano and a quick drum riff, appear on the second half of beat three in m.10, at the very end of the fourth two-bar phrase. The contrast between the abrupt end-stopping of the drum riff and the liquidity of the glissando duplicates at a more immediate perceptual level the tension between the forwardness of the violins and high-hat and the thick anapests of the lower strings and guitar figure.
Perhaps the most memorable feature of “Love’s Theme,” however, is the melody that begins in m.11 and falls into regular units of 2 + 2 bars grouped so that the whole contains an expository phrase, its heightened variation, an intensificatory segment, and a closing. (The absolutely conventional nature of this structure is important because it frees up the attention of listeners and dancers to focus on other musical domains.) The distinctive aspects of the tune come from the way its luxuriant long tones, each one framed by derivations of the opening groove, sail over the rhythmic impulses of the accompaniment until they arc downward, fold into the full anapests of the groove at their primary rhythmic level, recharge, and vault upward again to pick up the primary pitches (C# and D) of the middle register’s figuration and carry them to a closing set of downward appoggiaturas (see example 2). This action occurs over the seductive churnings of the groove, which scatters the opening figure of the groove into multiple rhythmic planes; the anapest and its variations appear at the quarter-, eighth-, and sixteenth-note levels, at some moments almost moving toward the shagginess of funk. By gradually incorporating the groove’s anapests, the melody thus effects a reconciliation of the tensions in the introduction, which allows it to rise to its exultant climax; and because the melody is, beyond this synthesis, non-developmental, listeners and dancers will have the pleasure of hearing this climax repeatedly.
EXAMPLE 2. Main melody of “Love’s Theme.”
Sixteen-bar blocks comprise most of the song’s body and all of its melody, but an important passage, formally close to a genuine B section and followed by a variation on the intro, moves away from the melody to allow its refreshed return. This B section begins with a French horn fanfare bursting out of the orchestral texture, playing on the important pitches of C#/D/A, immediately followed by an intense pulsation in the orchestra that repeatedly ratchets the melody from D to E through the intervening half-step, moving the harmony from D major to the e minor seventh chord that strongly marks the melody’s third phrase. Each repetition of this thrust up to E calls forth a flute lick that swaggers a little bit more on each occurrence, and dialogically summons the strings to dance in place between B and