Burning and Yearning for Ivor

Speaking as I was of Ivor Novello, I've been listening to a few of his songs. To be honest his kind of romantic sentiment is a bit too flowery for my bread basket.

I think the problem is in the lyrics. They are mostly rearrangements what seems to be fairly standard operetta imagery:

Fire
Desire
Heart
Part
Moon
Dreams
Light
Night
Clouds

This kind of thing hasn't aged too well and is, I suspect, the reason why we don't hear much from Ivor's catalogue these days. No doubt this was once popularly accepted as part and parcel of the operetta genre and audiences accepted the generic lyrics in return for the draw of the music and spectacle.

But one song does stick out:

"Keep the Home Fires Burning
While your hearts are yearning
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home" 

Nowadays the lads are even further away and most of us have central heating. But as a war song it still packs an emotional punch. Why? Well, the generic imagery has been given a more specific context - a soldier's family - which makes it more potent. We are not just dealing with the general emotions of loss/worry/heartache. Now these emotions are embedded in people and a situation.

Another reason is that the music and words in this song are working well together. (Old song sheet available Duke University library. It's amazing what you can find.) In particular, the "burning" and the "yearning".

On the two syllables of "bur-ning" the melody is two notes, A to G. This is played over a C7 chord. Now the second note G belongs to the C7 chord (i.e. it's one of the notes that makes up that chord). But the note A doesn't belong to a C7 chord. So what we have when the melody moves from A to G is a suspension. The melody wants to resolve onto a G but by placing the A before it, the composer effectively suspends the resolution of the melody. That's why we feel the extra tension on the first syllable of "bur-ning".

For "year-ning" the composer ups the ante. The melodic phrase is repeated but this time "year-ning" is an F to an E over an A7 chord. This is another suspension but whereas the first one (A to G) was a whole tone, this one is a semitone (F to E). This makes that first syllable of "year-ning" even more tense. You can literally hear the yearning in the singer's voice.

As well as the suspensions in the melody, the music also mirrors the "home" bit as well. The song starts in the home key of F major, modulates into D minor and only really comes back to the home key with the final bar when we get to the word "home". The effect is to make us feel that we've gone on a journey and have now made it home. For the soldiers and their families it is not only a literal return to home but also a return to hope:

"There's a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining
Turn the dark cloud inside out
'Til the boys come home"

With the right music, even these cloudy old operetta images can still shine through.