Note: this recording is uploaded in the spirit of educational advancement, as found in Title 17, Section 107, United States Code.
Music can be bought on the Asthmatic Kitty site, here.
Some terms to look at if you're unfamiliar:
- Mode: A mode is a collection of pitches, with a single pitch assigned a root function, and all the other pitches based around that pitch. Major and minor are both examples of modes, though we'll be working mostly with church modes. If you need a refresher on your church modes, you can find them here.
- Mode Mixture: Combining and synthesizing various parts of modes together.
- Musical Quotation: The acknowledged use of a previous work to augment the meaning or value of the current work.
- Text Painting: An effort to make the music reflect (on a metaphorical level) what is happening in the text.
- Agogic Accent: An accent based on the duration of time, rather than the volume or dynamic of the note accented.
Text
I rest my head on water
I slip under
I descend into the deep
Past the rushes, past the shipwrecks
Into my tears I float
And like a sieve I’m catching leaves and sticks
I’m catching planks and fishes
So it washes through me clean
I’m run clean through
Ah!
Again, we are caressed and buoyed by Worden's poetic, and at the same time thick lyrics. In the first two stanzas, we are set up with a magical and yet terse setting. As though falling through a world with blinders to our peripherials, we are given a conscise yet confusing description of the landscape. The line "Into my tears I float" provides quite a few rather surreal images.
The third stanza switches setting almost automatically, like a strange, food coloring induced dream. The writer is transformed into a sieve, collecting all sorts of debris. The relief of the writer at "I'm run clean through / Ah!" seems almost as palpable as anything else in this poem.
On a metaphorical level, one can see the journey of a character, falling deep into depression or sorrow, passing beyond (into the subconscious, perhaps?) and entering into a period of self reflection and cleansing, and returning feeling refreshed and ready to make a new start. This is my take on it; I'm open to any other suggestions (post a comment!)
Text Painting
Although it may seem a bit elementary, it's important to document the amount of text painting that Worden uses in this piece; it certainly marks a shift in attitudes from the usual pop/rock singer, and from postmodern composition.
From the first line, she's started expressing her ideas through musical phrases. "I rest my head" descends to the octave below, with the perfect fourth neighbor movement of "on water" to smooth out the jump. (A version of this melodic fragment can also be heard in her song "If I Were Queen). "I descend into the deep" is also a descending line, taking its sweet time to sink in her range.
Through range and agogic accent, she also uses word stress to accentuate the most important words. Among them are tears, sieve, and clean.
Mode: 1# Pitch Collection
If you'll remember the last post, where we talked about My Brightest Diamond's "Goodbye Forever," a large portion of the song's intricacy was in her deft use of modal mixture. Well, you guessed it, she's at it again. Only this time, one would be hard pressed to find a root at all. For the most part, a bass drone is absent (or ambiguous), and the melody line never seems to resolve to any recognizable tonic. At a certain point, D Mixolydian sticks out, but soon it blends back into the mix of tones, leaving you to wonder whether that hint of grounding was real, or a ghostly figment of your scrambling mind.
This song purposefully throws away any notion of "do" (solfege). The wandering melodic fragments act as text painting for the lyrics: a sieve carries with it a certain amount of uncertainty and shiftiness, like trying to stand on a pile of sand as it is sifted through. The lyrics reflect this confusion. Worden is noodling around in the one-sharp diatonic pitch collection (think the pitches of a G Major Scale), never settling on a mode or key.
"I Be the Prophet" and Polymeter
As a college student, Shara was heavily influenced by R&B and rap artists, which we can sometimes hear peeking through her compositions. "Like a Sieve" works from a loop by the English artist Tricky, from his second album Nearly God. Tricky may be most well know from his early collaboration with Massive Attack. His lyrics from "I Be the Prophet" has little to do thematically with "Like a Sieve"; however, his unsettling lyrics reflect the tonal ambiguity of Worden's piece.
Tricky's loop is essentially a cello duet, making the two cellos work against each other. After careful listening, one can hear that the loop is actually sixteen beats, which can be represented in a four bar phrase. However, the stresses don't reflect common or normal groupings. I've notated twice to demonstrate this duality; first in 4/4 to demonstrate its ability to conform to a four bar phrase, then with its barlines arranged to more accurately reflect what is happening in the music. There may be other ways to notate the meters in the bottom cello line; this is simply what I heard.
This is a beautiful example of polymeter-- where two meters, many times conflicting, are layered on top of each other.
Now the interesting part is that Worden never actually uses an exact quotation of the loop. She dances around it, and uses many of the gestures from it, but never comes out and states it. The general effect, however, produces something that sounds quite similar to Tricky's loop. A good portion of this can be atrributed to the fact that she uses similar rhythmic figures and intervals.
These are the things that stand out to me most about this song. Hopefully in the future I'll have full score examples for you to look at while you can listen!
