Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres
The timing of my life and this song has been awkward. I had a vacation, then all my nieces and nephews around, then Mass Effect 2 and a cold, and I just generally lose the flow. Trying to come back, I kept thinking I needed to wait for a day when I could go in at length, but that day never comes. I have to just push ahead with what effort I can
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... and it's my favorite Rush album because i quite simply and sincerely love everything on it. There's no hemming or hawing over how much i do or don't entirely fall for "The Twighlight Zone", or how much i appreciate but don't quite get totally stoked over "Different Strings". There's no empathic journey into musical adolescence or blues roots as needed for the full appreciation of "Rivendell" or "Best I Can", or the meditative state required to fully experience "The Camera Eye". It's four tracks of purely-wrought symphonic rock genius, no strings attached, and there is nothing but love.
Sorry ... just had to say that.
Can anyone explain, in terms of musical theory, what exactly he does in that little rocking bit that gets panned around just as it circles around the scales?
This album being what it is (see above), it happens to be one of the only dozen-or-so albums i've had a chance to rip back into my iTunes since my HD crash, so i spun up the spot.
Rhythmically, there's a time-signature change going on here. The band plays a bar of 4 and another of 3 in a pair to make a 7/4 substrate for Alex, who plays his "upper" line in eighth-note quarters over the 7 beats. Because the melodic line implies a heavy repetition of a 4/4 phrase, it sets up the expectation for an eighth triplet to come. Instead, however, the eighth beat strikes as a downbeat of a new pair of bars dedicated to his lower line, also in triplets, this time both in common time for a total of 8 beats. The whole thing repeats twice, alternating between the "psych-out" 7-beat upper line and the 8-beat "restoration" in the lower line.
Melodically, the triplets are an ornamentation of a 15-beat (presented in the same 4-3-4-4 pattern) main theme from the overture, which first occurs in the track at about 0:30 (albeit only once through). The triplets appear to be rooted on the main notes of the theme, and are nearly all descending, and this substructure forms patterned "bricks" that strengthen the expectation for that eighth triplet to come (far more than the mere repetition of three of four notes, even with the same time-signature change, as in the 0:30 introduction).
I think there are some additional interesting things going on here at the note-for-note level -- like specific relationships between the ornamentation notes of one triplet and the root of the next, but i'd have to sit down and plunk it out to really see what's up here. It may well be that Alex totally got his Phillip Glass on for 30 beats here.
I do wince a little bit at "let the truth of love be lighted."
This may well be a "silence shrouds the forest as the birds announce the dawn" moment, but i see what they were going for, and they did AOK with it. "The truth of love" is definitely something you can at least have a serious conversation about. :)
... and have i mentioned that i love this album?
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