ARTICLES

What Is Rock Music?

Is it poetry set to a beat (a performance by David Bowie at London's Royal Festival Hall in 1972 was described by the London "Times" as "TS Eliot with a beat", and John Lennon once said that "it's easy to write a song: you just think of something you want to say, make it rhyme, and put a beat to it")? Much of mainstream popular music since the advent of the Beatles, and that means rock, (and even since the Fifties eg: "Summer Time Blues") is conveying a particular message eg: "Give Peace A Chance", "Glad To Be Gay", or even I "Wanna Hold Your Hand". The latter is, like the former two messages, a direct request or statement, saying the same thing (ultimately) as a more carnal command such as Nine Inch Nails' lyric "I wanna screw you like an animal ....". These "message" tunes contrast with a song such as Rogers' and Hart's "Manhattan", which is primarily a description of a scene (Manhattan, the "isle of joy" with "sweet push carts gliding by"). Other songs from the Thirties are descriptions of a state such as being love in (also the ultimate point of Manhatten). The closest that songs of this era get to projecting a message is where the tune expresses longing, but that is still a state of being. These songs are therefore static in lyrical content.

A rock song, however, will generally deal with a dynamic situation, a moving situation, one where movement is expected shortly. The song says "give peace a chance", or, "in a minute I am going to screw you like an animal". So is that all rock music is, a piece of rhythmic music stating a direct message, that will usually be over in three minutes or less, leaving a reverberating feeling in the head with a shaken memory of the subject matter of the lyrics?

No, rock is also direct in the music itself. The sleeve notes to a Sixties album by band leader Buddy Morrow, entitled"Big Band Beatlemania: The Hits Of 1964" (most of "the Hits" being Beatles song recordings), comments repeatedly about the directness of the new music, and it is talking about the music, not the lyrics. The lyrics are often of course direct, but so too, very much, is the music. 1964, of course, was the year that the Beatles hit America and the wider world, introducing a new more colourful take on what Paul McCartney referred to at the time as "beat" music. The sleeve notes say:

"Beatlemania .... the emotion - triggering beat, which gave a group, a kind of music and a craze its name.

....

Beatlemania .... a gaudy outcropping of the Life Force, vital and free, vibrant with a wildness of pure song.

.... the frenetically felt urgency for having a good time and living life fast in an uncertain world (definition courtesy of the New York Times). Urgent, unpredictable, uncannily direct .... ".

A "gaudy outcropping of the Life Force"? "Wildness"? The sleevenote writer is describing, as best he can, this initial burst of new music, and above all, it's directness. And finally he says the most apt word, "direct", itself. So rock has a beat that triggers emotions (which are the basis of sex), it is (currently) "pure song" (no big arrangements, "verses" in the jazz era sense, or extended choruses for solos, again as in jazz), and it is in this, above all, direct. The New York Times reflected this in its use of the word "urgency".

In 2003, I was speaking to a jazz saxophonist in his early twenties who had recently taken part in a contest for young saxophononists at a famous European jazz festival and who had apparently not heard much rock music. He was speaking of Pink Floyd's famous song "Us And Them" (from the album "The Dark Side Of The Moon"), and about how "direct" it was. This was compared to the jazz classics what he was used to playing and hearing: the song is effectively four chords (including an augmented chord), placed deliberately and directly one after the other, underpinning a direct melody (with direct words, too, of course, although that is irrelevent for the purposes of my point).

So the sleeve notes writer is commenting quite simply on a musical revolution, a new kind of music, one that followed jazz and even rock and roll (most rock and roll is early rock music anyway). Many fringe jazz singers didn't like it: it put them out of work as they couldn't write their own tunes, let alone perform in the new manner. Frank Sinatra said that he didn't really gel with it. But it is a progression from earlier music, both classical and jazz (and of course country, folk, blues, etc). The music itself exhibits the clarity and force of Twentieth Century music like Shostokovich's symphonies and his Second Cello Concerto (the screaming cello opens the door to Hendrix), Miles Davis' colourful and impressionistic work from 1955 on, and even Sinatra's recording of "In The Wee Small Hours" (listening to a rough cassette copy it reminded me of John Lennon). The music exhibits the colour, vibrancy and directness of Twentieth Century painters such as Picasso and Chagall (Chagall said, "if it isn't vibrant, give up!"). Some rock composers, principally John Lennon, also repeated, in music, the surreallism of Dali, and this is on top of the influence of earlier late Nineteenth Century painters like Gaugin and van Gough, Monet and Cezanne. It's not just what you hear that leads to new compositions: it's also what you see.

Rock has a strong link, unlike most "jazz", to classical music of all eras and to painting of all eras, mainly in the area of its directness, its exposition.

I should also quote my grandmother, born in 1900 and who had for some reason virtually no contact with music except for piano arrangements of pre-twentieth century Scottish songs (she once reacted to a Glenn Miller record on my radio by saying "that [awful] modern music"!). One day she was confronted by a replay of a filmclip of, I think, late seventies chart music playing on a television rock show. "Oh the beat!" she said, and swiftly left the room. The thing she noticed was the beat (witness Paul McCartney's sentence from an early sixties interview: "When I first got into beat music"). The emphasis on the beat is the prime distinguishing factor of this music from other musics, and any music with an emphasised beat is going to be direct.

Some may say that the use of the guitar as the principle instrument, and by "non-trained" musicians, led of necessity to straightforward, direct music: no key changes and no improvisation. But a three minute tune, past or present, does not need a "second theme", let alone a development section sweeping through many coloured and twisting key changes. And no tune, past or present, needs improvisation (unless in an instrumental solo). And yet, unlike jazz, it has the capacity to be extended: you need only listen to the thumping orchestral introduction accompanying Jimi Hendrix onto the set of the Dick Cavett Show in the late sixties to realise that this man was a composer with a distinctive style and sound. The studio orchestra was approximating Hendrix's music. Hendrix was a composer in the general area of rock music. He was a rock composer, although ultimately all music is music whatever style it appears in. Music is either good music or it isn't.

The ultimate point is that, like any classical music, a piece of rock music is an expression of a feeling (just as Beethoven said that in his music he tried to "express a feeling"), howsoever that expression may be. A few classical composers, principally Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, wrote very clear and direct, and sometimes (in the case of Beethoven and Bach) hard music, that stated in a few minutes strong messages exactly in the way that the best rock music does - without, of course, the words; but not always without the words: witness Beethoven's Ode To Joy, curiously, or not curiously, played in the Beatles' second film "Help", and all Bach's religious settings of Chorales and also Cantatas (the latter dealing with issues from the most serious to those of lifestyle eg: coffee). So there is a direct link between these "two musics".

Can only simple music comes from a guitar? Well, Beethoven was once described by a critic as "just cadences" (a two chord wonder). "Yes," said another commentator, "but what cadences!". It is what you put on top of the chords that counts. In addition, Beethoven also described the guitar as a miniature orchestra. That is what it is: the tune sung on top of the chords is the equivalent of the classical "theme", and the guitar's six strings cover most of the range of the violin and the cello, and all the range of the viola (the three main instruments from which any standard orchestra is made up).

The famous broadcaster, musician and classical music educator Karl Haas (who regretfully moved on from here in February 2005, aged 91 - he sounded on radio thirty years younger), reflected the serious musician's viewpoint when he said once on his show " .... and in the area of rock music, I myself always thought that The Beatles were very good musicians!" On another show he briefly sketched the chronology of dance music (the show was describing the history of the waltz) by closing his comments with "(and ) as we move into our time we have jazz dances, and now we have rock ...."

All life is a progression (we hope) and music is no exception. First came the voice. Then came lutes and pipes (and percussive instruments). Then came more sophisticated stringed instruments. Then came orchestras. Then came stand alone solos (the soloist in the concerto). Then came improvised solos, as the sole point or centrepiece of the work (from jazz, the primary and first progenitor being Louis Armstrong). Then came jazz orchestras, made up of instruments that had previously been in marching bands or in one section or another of a classical orchestra (the brass and wind sections). And at the end of all this, the portable stringed instrument, (once a lute or similar instrument but now a guitar or banjo), returned to centre stage, having played in the more recent centuries country, gypsy, folk and Spanish (sometimes Spanish classical) music or blues, but now (along with the piano) voicing a new type of music that was a combination of and outgrowth from all these earlier forms of music: rock.

Conclusion

Did the lyrics pick up the music, and make it direct, command it to be direct (anyone setting a vigorous idea to music will need to match the lyrics with vigorous music)? Or did the changing times simply lead to everything, music, lyrics, thinking in general, even car design (! - compare a 1960s Mustang to a '50s Studebaker, never mind a Model T Ford), being more direct and explicit? Or did earlier direct music by composers such a Shostokovich and electronic music by composers such as Stockhausen combine with electric Chicago blues (where a single guitar lick says ":get your gear off, baby") to influence popular music in general, and meet up with the new lyrics that simply stated what the writer wanted?

Whatever the answer, rock music is direct in its form, whether you are listening to Jimi Hendrix or the Carpenters. It is all four on the floor, going somewhere with purpose.

 

The upstairs room at Jimi Hendrix's Mayfair flat, the music room

 

What was the first rock record?

That is a very good question. The earliest record I have heard that exhibits the signs of rock music is probably the 1942 recording by Louis Jordan of "Moving To The Outskirts Of Town". (I am talking here of the first rock record, not tune. It would be possible to record a song by Monteverdi (1567-1643) and make it a rock record: in fact, I heard a song of his performed on the lute and sung that sounded melodically like The Smiths!).

Robert Johnson's 1937 recording "Travelling Riverside Blues" has parts of the vocals that sound like Elvis Presley's actual voice! Listen to where he says, as a type of aside, "you know what I'm talking about baby", and also "make the juice run down my leg".

 

What was the first rock music?

Here I am talking about composed music, rather than a specific record. Beethoven's Violin Concerto is a candidate for some of the first rock music. It is full of powerful riffs, a thumping beat, and towards the end a ferocious riff, the first five notes of which constitute the exact first five notes of the climbing sequential riff that Jimi Hendrix used to push higher the second half of his first monumental first hit record "Hey Joe". Beethoven certainly wrote in part rock music.

How about the crushing hammering of the Waldstein Sonata? Also at the piano, in the second movement of the Les Adieux sonata he experiments with the successive intervals of a fifth, sixth and flattened seventh that characterise rock and roll (strong examples being Chuck Berry and Fats Domino), that is Status Quo's one and only cliche musical figure and trademark, and that powers many blues jams: the "A shaped" barre chord where the little finger taps down and up on the guitar's neck again and again, playing either one or two notes to kick the music along. Beethoven's music sees the piano tentatively playing the equivalent of the guitarist's little finger going up the neck, back again and up again, stopping at the flattened third, twice. I heard this sonata for the first time played (on record) by Wilhem Backhaus (1885-1968), who had a straight forward style that people said was similar to Beethoven himself. Hearing that record was therefore probably a good indication of what Beethoven was hearing when he wrote it.

The clincher for me is the playing instructions that Beethoven stipulated for his piano sonata Op31 No 3: the movement begins "con fuoco" that is, "with power" or "with fire ", and then continues "con strepito": "with noise"!! Rock and roll, Ludwig. He had the instinct and drive of rock music.

 

An early rehearsal of Yes, already in full prog rock gear

 

"SYMPHONIC FORM" IN ROCK

Picture of writer Mikael Akerfeldt
from the band's Myspace site

 

Opeth: "The Drapery Falls"

Swedish band Opeth (they describe themselves as "metal/progressive" rock) play the traditional dark form of metal, but that is only for appearances really. They are composers like any composer, changing a section when the tension becomes unbearable and the music requires that it go somewhere else.

One of Opeth's best pieces is "The Drapery Falls" (great title!). Opeth has always been known for long "songs", so they are useful to compare to classical music.

The piece opens as it closes, with a sweeping vision of mostly minor chords: C minor, Bb minor, Ab minor and Bb. It is faintly similar to a James Bond piece (by John Barry), but I won't go into that.

The next section is harder: it is in A minor, the key of the song, and is played with an Opeth trademark, octaves in one of the guitars. The signature Devil's interval (a must in dark metal genres) crops up, but Opeth handle it well, and musically, by not dwelling on it! In fact, Jimi Hendrix used octaves a lot in his later records, and played on a sole guitar you can hear the very musical Hendrix rather than growling metal monsters (which Opeth are not).

A note on the typical metal interval: Sibelius, another Nordic composer, used it prominently in his Fourth Symphony, where he apparently felt surrounded by the forces of evil. His basic figure is easily duplicated by playing a C chord on a guitar, and thumbing F# and releasing it to play the open chord again. Horror!

Finally there is the third section of the Opeth number, where the A minor key is affirmed and the vocals start: it is the main verse. The verses are signed off by a collection of rocky fast chords. The second time around, an interesting event happens: Opeth throw in what writer/singer Mikail Akerfeld calls "an off the wall chord" (in the context of the tune), Db minor. Writers look for this effect: Neil Sedaka said he looked for a "drop-dead" chord, the idea being to take the listener's breath away. Opeth use this surprise chord to go into the fifth section, a repeated Db minor, G and B minor chord progression. Sung "aahs" and a solo are put over the chords.

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So in the above five sections there are some very pleasant effects. The only place to go now is somewhere much harder: where Beethoven or Shostokovich would have thrown in dark cello sounds, for example, Opeth use something else, from the "extreme" metal band's armoury, growls! Mymusicdiscovery does not necessarily see growling as musical, but in theory any sound can be placed in a musical composition. In any event, a sixth section erupts, growl vocals over a(n obviously) chromatic Ab/G bass. A seventh section follows, a hammering "coda" of F# and F notes.

There is now nowhere else to go except back to something softer. The key of the song, A minor, is returned to, though still the descending figure idea remains: a fiery yet more melodic solo over repeated A minor and Ab minor chords.

To begin the road back to music with more chords (more than two!), further growls are placed over three chords, repeated Ab minor, G and F# minor chords. This is the ninth section.

The eleventh section is normal singing (Mikael has a good melodic voice) over completely melodic D minor and C chords. This leads us to the first, opening sweep of the four chords at the beginning. You can't call this song "sonata form" (though you could possibly see the first two parts as what classical people call "first" and "second subject", and the verse as the melodic "second movement"), but the main theme is brought back, as is usually the case in any classical symphony.

So there it is: Mikael Akerfeld describes the song as pieces "put together", but that is how longer form music is written. And the audience love it.

The Drapery Falls

 

 

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan: Was Dylan's music just poetry put to a beat, the rhythm coming from the poetry? Eg: Rainy Day Women Nos 12 And 35?

I would not say so. His music displays a tremendous knowledge of music, or at least a brilliant facility with it. Eg: the notes played by the trombones in "Rainy Day Women Nos 12 And 35" or the chords (and melody) of "Knocking On Heaven's Door" or "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall". He zeroes in on musical devices eg: in "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" the notes accompanying the words "blue eyed son" (at the end of the first phrase of the verse) were parlayed by Joni Mitchell into "Both Sides Now", one of the greatest songs of the twentieth century.

Then there is his melodic gift, applied to a whole song: for example, "Blowing In The Wind"; this is such a good tune that the young Stevie Wonder covered it, and it was a hit (again). Whether the tune is traceable to an earlier song I don't know, but the simple fact of the existence of Stevie Wonder's cover indicates the quality of it.

His ability to musically "paint", also, is extraodinary: "Lay Lady Lay" is a fantastic picture. It copies the opening notes of the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" as it begins ("Lay lady lay"), and finishes, at the end of the middle section, with a Lennon-like triplet on the one word ("you": John Lennon may have copied the same thing from Fats Wallers' "Breaking The Ice"), but it is a brilliant piece of music and you can see the big brass bed, the fluffy pillows, imagine the four poster bed in the huge Southern house, etc (or whatever you may imagine when you listen to the tune). The recording itself of course assists this process, with additional colour.

 

"Melody Transference"

Here I am referring to a melody or tune appearing in a "classical" work and then cropping up in a rock song or piece, as, shall I say, an outcrop of rock .... I am not therefore referring to simply a rearrangement of a classical work, such as sometimes occurred in the swing era eg: "Song of India", a 1940s recreation of Rimsky-Korsakov's portrait of an Indian from his work "Sadko", or even to the writing of words by a later writer to a classical melody eg: Eric Carmen taking the second movement of Rachmaninoff's second Piano Concerto and turning it's main theme into the 1976 hit "All by Myself".

There is a tune called "Davy's On The Road Again" performed by Manfred Mann in the seventies. The tune is essentially identical to a main theme in Delius' (orchestral) Florida Suite (1888). The chances are that the author of the song had heard the Delius. Another example is from Sibelius' first symphony: in the first movement there is a clear tune that later cropped up as the beginning phrases of the 1964 hit "Have I The Right?" (recorded by a band called the Honeycombs). Have I the right to copy? Well, if the second composition adds something to the first, purloined piece, then maybe it is OK. Perhaps the writer of the latter song heard the Sibelius, and the notes there stuck in his or her head and simply rearranged themselves as the start of a new tune, in that person's head. Then it would be a reasonably organic, and so justifiable, process. In addition, because of the likely different audiences for the two pieces, the second use of the tune enables the excellent first tune essentially to be heard by new ears, which may in turn trigger new effective compositions.

A further example of this is The Beatles' "Hey Jude". Yes, the first six notes (the first two bars, over the first two chords of the tune) closely trace the opening of the Largo movement from JS Bach's fourth Keyboard Concerto (BWV 1056 in F minor). Paul McCartney then of course took this beginning to new places. But the opening is very similar (McCartney adds a note before the first bar: the note of the word "Hey". He would certainly have heard the Bach first). What this means of course is that if you have only heard "Hey Jude", you have a starting point to investigate the Bach work (and this particular movement is a stunner), and Senor Bach generally. So, rock fans, check it out!

Cat Steven's "Morning Has Broken"?: listen to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony (his Symphony No 8). The same magical opening notes arise at the beginning of the second (and final) movement of that symphony: morning is breaking out all over there. I once heard it performed by the German conductor Gunther Wand at London's Albert Hall: what an effect. Whether Schubert took the notes from an earlier source I do not know. But practically everything he wrote is suffused with bits and twists of melody.

 

The Beatles And Key Changes

"That Gm in 'From Me To You' is a whole new world", said Paul McCartney. It sure is: it's a move to a new tonal area, what in classical circles is called a "ii V I" chord progression. A "ii V I" progression is one of the two main ways to change key in music. In the Beatles' "From Me To You", the Gm chord is followed by a C7 and then you arrive at the new key of F major, for their middle section (the home key, the overall key, of the song is C major). This is one of the factors about the Beatles that had the jazz and classical people in America so excited in 1964.

The classic example is "I Wanna Hold Your Hand": the middle section is in C major whereas the versd is in G major. The change to C is again by the "classic" ii V I: from the G at the end of the chorus they go Dm, G to C! They are now in C, and return to G by the ""I can't hide I can't hide" C and D chords, ie: hitting on the D7 at the end, which is an example of the other major way of changing key in classical music, by planting a big dominant seventh chord before you shift back to the original key.

"Yesterday" sees an immediate key change, to the relative minor of the song's key of F major, Dm, again by way of the ii V I: the chords flow (from F) Em, A7 to Dm (note that although McCartney wrote the song in G, the tune is recorded in concert F). The chords then wend their way back quite quickly to the key of F major again, to finish off the verse.

In a classical piece, the key changes are far more lengthy, being "set up" or "prepared" as they say, but in a popular song there are only three minutes; so the changes must be more deft, generally what classical teachers would call "passing modulations". However, they nevertheless briefly pull the song to a totally new area, catching the listener's ear, and providing that all important variety, or "contrast".

Even the blues has an inbuilt key change: that is how a twelve bar blues is able to sustain itself over several minutes, if not forever (eg: a twenty minute blues jam)! If the blues is in E, for example, then after four bars the chord changes to A. That change is also a key change, a change in tonal area. You reach the A after effectively playing a flattened seventh dominant in the E ie: you are sonically implying an E7 (even if you don't play it) before you move to the A chord. There is then what the classical people call an "abrupt" key change back to E, and then you travel on through the dominant B and back to E at the end of the fabled twelve bar progression.

Some popular music writers play the chorus completely in a different key eg: Brian Wilson. In "The Warmth Of The Sun", the verse is in C, but the chorus is in A! The song is a famous slow number, written within hours of Kennedy's assassination in November, 1963. The verse also moves into different tonal areas (the"passing" modulations or more temporary key changes): the words begin over C and its relative minor Am, then there is an abrupt key change to Eb and its relative minor Dbm; the song finds its way back to the home key of C by, as with the Beatles' examples above, the ii V I progression of, here, Dm, G and then finally the "target" chord and key of C. The verse repeats this, then there is a smooth key change to the completely new key of A major for the chorus, by way of a Gershwin-like (or Thirties-like eg: the famous Eubie Blake song "Memories Of You") Bb diminished chord. It is not usual that a chorus of a rock era song is in a different key to the verse.

The chorus then flows back into the original key of C major, ready for the next verse. Finally, Brian Wilson throws the whole song into a new "overall" key, or world, by starting the verse off in C# major. This last shift was commonly used in pre Beatles radio hits, and can often sound a little corny, but in the case of a Brian Wilson composition such "The Warmth Of The Sun" it is just a further beautiful shift.

The Beatles' "Penny Lane" is another example of a completely new, different key for the chorus: part of the magic of that piece is the abrupt-sounding key shift (it is actually by the planting of the dominant seventh chord, E7, of the coming key of A) from the end of the verse (in B major) to the key of the chorus (A major). The song then, by an F#7, changes out of its new clothes (that it is wearing for the chorus), back to the verse's key of B major again.

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