New Post Tomorrow!!

“…when you gaze long…”

Last week we looked at Iris Dement’s great song “Let The Mystery Be”, and tomorrow we’ll analyze the lyrics in the chorus for phrasing, meter, and rhyme structure. Before we get to that tomorrow I’ll introduce “signatures” - the meaning of the symbols and and other information at the beginning of a musical score (sheet music, sometimes referred to as notation). We’re most definitely not going to learn to read sheet music, but there is some helpful shorthand information in the “signature” area of a score that we can use - key, tempo, and especially the “time” signature - it’s a critical component of analyzing (and eventually writing) lyrical phrasing and meter. Here’s a preview of the signature of “Let The Mystery Be” as written in the original key (FMaj):

What we’re also not going to do is spend any time on the notes on the staff - that’s way past the purpose of this newsletter - but the symbols and letter/number in the first measure (the part to the left of the first vertical line of the score) will give us a lot of insight into the song. We’ll look at how the capo changes the information and what that means (hint: it means almost nothing).

Best of all (and perhaps worst of all) I’ll give you a sort of musical decoder ring that, if used sparingly and wisely, can help a lot, but beware - if you gaze to long into that abyss, it will gaze back!

Bonus Round: The subtitle to this post alludes to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous (and overly quoted) advice about fighting monsters. Find a beautiful, but darkly ominous, acoustic and vocals song that relates to the abyss Nietzsche warned us about.

See you tomorrow!!

Cheers, and keep playing!!

Michael Acoustic