Yes! We Have a Big Monkey

Monkey musical King Kong arrives in Melbourne.

Tucked away at the end of this report by Alison Croggon in the Guardian is something about the score, which apparently is an eclectic mix of old and new songs:

“We want to create a show for a new generation of theatregoers,” says director Daniel Kramer. “And we want to create a piece of music theatre that pushes the art form forward.”

If by "art form" he means musical theatre, that might be difficult with a bunch of old songs. If, on the other hand, he means simian spectaculars I think he's onto something. I only hope the eclecticism of the score stretches to "Yes! We Have No Bananas":

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.

Is Calvin Harris the New Ivor Novello?

Apparently so. Mr. Harris has picked up the Ivor Novello award for Songwriter of the Year. The award was presented by Radio 1 DJ Pete Tong who said:

"Dance music and DJs never believed they belonged in this room before. Now we have a role model."

Now when someone mentions "dance music" I generally think of the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, so I'm probably not the best person to comment. Fortunately music critic Neil McCormack is a bit more up to date:

"But is Harris actually a songwriter at all? He has been one of the most successful hit-makers of recent times, building techno-electro club pop tracks that smash it in the charts and the on the dancefloor. But if you strip his hits back to melody and lyrics, you’re not left with very much."

And strip back he does:

"If you take We Found Love back to its basic musical structure what you are left with is the same four-chord sequence repeated ad infinitum (D sharp minor / B / F sharp and C sharp), over which floats a sweet verse melody which shifts to the single repeated chorus phrase, with some vague impressionistic verses about “yellow diamonds in the light” and feeling “the heartbeat in my mind”. There is no bridge, no middle eight, nothing but rhythm, verse, chorus, sound and that incessant two-note keyboard hook. It doesn’t take anything away from its effectiveness as a sonic experience. But as songs go, it’s about as basic as they come."

The charge here is that there is a distinction to be made between the song and the production. Producers are essentially knob-twiddlers with an ear for hooks, backing tracks, instrumentations, textures, balance and so on. But the song material itself is the basic building blocks: melody and lyrics. By law:

"The legal definition of a song (as tested in many plagiarism suits) is melody and lyric. Everything else is track, or production."

I hadn't appreciated the legal issue before although if I were ever hauled before the courts I'd be tempted to argue that the harmony (or chord structure) was an integral part of the song as well.

So how do we tell a good song from a merely well-produced one? Composer/songwriter David Arnold has the answer:

"A lot of the time the litmus test of a song’s worth is how it plays when being performed just at a piano. It's not the only test but it's a very good one.”

This is interesting and certainly true for musical theatre songs. The only downside is that you can end up with very "pianistic" songs, i.e. songs which sound good on a piano. That's fine as far as it goes but it's also limiting and can be a big problem if you're trying to make new musical songs that sound different from the old musical songs.

Mr McCormack continues:

"Is there a higher plane of songwriting? A place where melodic complexity and lyrical depth combine to create an emotional or philosophically transcendent experience? I would like to think so. It’s the corner of a record collection where you will find Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush and many, many more, the kind of musicians who approach songwriting as an art, not a craft."

Alas, here I suspect that we must part company. If the art of songwriting is reaching up for some transcendent beauty or truth, then the craft is the step ladder that helps you get there. In other words, it's not either/or. From a craft point of view, Calvin Harris may be no Bob Dylan; but then Bob Dylan is no Cole Porter.

Or even an Ivor Novello.

Carry On Sweden

Ah, Eurovision.

As ever the best entertainment was saved for the interval act which was a veritable "Swedish Smorgasbord" of delightfully daft musical comedy. It's as if Mel Brooks had been employed to pep up their national anthem.

And who knew we Brits had so many national stereotypes in common with the Swedes? Queuing, ignoring other people on the train, not being able to assemble Ikea products and singing daft songs in English.

Cultural exchange at its finest, I'd say.

Why Musical Writers Should Watch Nashville

Mainly because it's better than 99% of the stuff that makes it onto the telly.

If that's not a good enough reason for musical writers, then they should at least watch it for the songs which are not only very well written but also dramatically interesting.

This is, of course, the American TV show Nashville currently airing on More4. It is unsurprisingly set in Nashville and centred around the country music industry. Now my knowledge of country music is about as extensive as The Man in Black's wardrobe. So I can't tell you if the show's depiction of either the music or the industry is particularly authentic but it certainly makes for a good drama. 'Tis all I know.

The series was created by Callie Khouri who said some interesting things in an interview for Salon. Here's the interesting bit for musical writers:

I’ve been really impressed with how much Juliette’s songs sound like Taylor Swift songs. Well, more than going, “Okay, we need a song that does this,” we find these great songs and go, “Oh my God this could be so perfect for so and so, and this would have to happen for her to write that song.” Because it’s just not that easy to get somebody to write a perfect song, that says everything you need it to say. Sometimes everyone will do their pass on the script and it will be, “It would be great if we could get a song that said something like this.” And I’m just like, “Yeah it would, but we’re not going to get that.”
So you have music way ahead of having scripts?We start looking for the music way ahead, yeah. Because we have to record it all. And we want to be the first one to get our crack at the great song, so we’re listening all the time.
Does that mean you hear the songs, and you start to imagine how they would work in the script before the script exists? Even though you haven’t written it yet, the songs must give you some sense of where the story is going to go.Yes, exactly. You hear the song and it just evokes something, and you just start kind of writing toward that.

The age-old question for songwriters is which comes first, music or lyrics. The conventional answer for musical theatre writers is the story. In other words the songs are written in response to the drama. What Ms. Khouri is saying is that, at least in part, they were writing drama in response to songs.

This isn't entirely new. This is essentially what all those jukebox musicals - Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You - have been doing for a while. But these shows write a story around an already established back catalogue of songs. The big difference with Nashville is that the songs are generally not well-known and, in some cases, first heard on the TV show itself.

This doesn't make Nashville a musical. I'm sure that many of the characters and plot lines were in pace long before the songs. But clearly, at times, the songs inspired the story. And it's undoubtedly a good story rather some hodge-podge of nonsense simply there to string a few tunes together.

So this offers a different approach for musical theatre writers. There's no reason why the songs shouldn't come first. Especially when they sound as good as this:

Blame it on the Backbeat

Way back in MusicalTalk episode 328 Comedy Thos was mulling rhythmically (around the 43 minute mark).

The Thos Thesis is that the 1950s saw the beginning of the dominance of the backbeat in popular music. This inevitably had an adverse affect on the lyrics. The insistent rhythm left no room for singers to fully get across the meaning and inflection of the words. Lyrics became mere ornaments to decorate a song rather than an essential part of it.

But in musical theatre, lyrics are essential. Lyrics explain and reveal the what and the why of stories and characters. They cannot be subordinated. So over the following decades a gradual but inevitable split developed between theatre music and chart music, a tragedy from which the civilized world has yet to recover.

I exaggerate a little.

Exhibit A in this thesis is two versions of the song "Tonight You Belong to Me". The first is from 1920s crooner, Gene Austin; the second is from the 1950s sister hit-sters, Patience and Prudence (Spotify 'em for a listen). The Austin recording has the full verse and chorus and enough rhythmic flexibility to allow the singer to bring out all the nuances of the lyric. The sisters, on the other hand, drop the verse which confuses the meaning of the chorus and the singers are straight-jacketed by a fixed and dominating rhythm. The different approaches demonstrate how the lyric has lost its significance in chart music. And frankly m'lud, it's the backbeat wot done it.

If you have a listen, it's certainly a well-judged example.

And Thos is in good company. Richard Rodgers was none too keen on the newly-enhanced backbeat in pop music. I can't now find the reference but I'm sure I remember reading about a letter to a newspaper that Rodgers once wrote complaining about the latest hit parade and how he was taught that music was about melody, harmony and rhythm and why reduce it to just the latter.

And yet, and yet. There is a case to be made for the defence:

1. Most chart music doesn't subordinate the lyric with a backbeat. Even where the backbeat is absolutely fixed, the singer will still sing the melody in a very flexible manner, anticipating the beat fractionally (as is done in Latin music) or delaying it (as in swing music). The inflexible interpretation of Prudence and Patience is really an exception, not the rule.

2. Even if the rhythm is inflexible and dominating that doesn't necessarily make it unsuitable for musical theatre. Let's say that we re-wrote the King and I so that, in an expected plot twist, Yul Bryner and the entire court of Siam are mercilessly wiped out by a Terminator robot sent back from the future to kill Anna. And if Richard Rodgers were writing the Terminator's big number towards the end of Act II, I suspect he'd want a song with an inflexible and dominating rhythm to express the robotic and unrelenting aspect of its character (and to compliment Arnie's general acting range). It's not the musical style that makes a song a theatre song, it's the context.

Despite these objections I'd say that the Thos Thesis is basically sound. The predominance of rhythm will inevitably diminish the importance of the lyric which is problematic for musical writers (although I'd say it's not the only reason why lyrics are less important in chart music).

Then again I can't help but wonder if this is less to do with rhythm and more to do with the difference between a romantic and a modern sensibility. There's an interesting parallel in classical music which (very, very broadly speaking) moved from the nineteenth century romantic focus on melody (e.g. Tchaikovsky) and harmony (e.g. Wagner) to a twentieth-century focus on rhythm. Just as musical theatre has always been a bit uneasy about the heavy backbeats of rock music, it has also never really tried to adopt the cross-rhythms of Stravinsky or the minimalism of Steve Reich.

Perhaps that's because musical theatre is essentially a romantic form. Or perhaps there's just never been a truly modern musical.

Yet.

As the song says, eventually the rhythm's gonna get ya.

A Right Old Ding Dong

It's really no surprise that a certain nest of lefties should celebrate in song the death of a working-class woman and by choosing "Ding dong, the Witch is Dead", it does make them a bunch of munchkins. Analogically speaking.

It's also a reminder of just how striking the Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg song is. The tune is nursery rhyme simple, based around the three notes of the simple triad. In the key of C major these notes are C, E and G. Each phrase begins and ends on one of these notes, like so:

"Ding (G) dong, the Witch is Dead (E)
Which (E) old witch? (C)
The wick(E)ed witch (C)
Ding (G) dong, the wicked witch is dead (G)"

This (and the repeated phrasing) is what gives it a childlike feel.

At the same time it's an exultant death chant. That's pretty striking for a family musical. Frankly it makes the sophisticated re-interpretation of Wicked look like a sentimental chocolate box for girlies (which it mostly is).

Whenever I hear someone talk about how "grown-up" the current culture is in comparison to the "innocent" entertainments of the past, I'll think if this song. Say what you like, those munchkins were hard-nosed little mothers.