18 lines of just one note – which really is quite a lot. Struck shadows in the sound Seeming to be the chimesĮach of those lines is fundamentally sung on one note, and since the song is strophic – which is to say it is verse, verse, verse without any break for a chorus or middle 8, we get that repeated one note pattern in each of the six verses, which of course means 18 times. If we go back to the original we can hear that there is of course a melody that is part of the song, although there is also quite an emphasis on the same note sung over and over, as with such lines as An' midnights broken toll We ducked inside the doorway, And so in this article I want to present three other versions of the song which I have brought forth before, to show just how much musical potential the composition has. And if we take this version below, with the Grateful Dead, we can hear that at this point Dylan seems actually to be reducing the musical content of the song rather than exploring it and developing it.Īnd yet when others have taken up the song they’ve had no difficulty in understanding its musical possibilities far more than Dylan. True he did perform Chimes 47 times (according to SetList– for some reason I can’t get onto the official Dylan site today to check that number but I guess it is right) but others have performed it more. So to be clear this is not to put forward the argument that sometimes Dylan’s music making is no good – rather than on at least this one occasion (Chimes of Freedom) – he simply didn’t see the potential within the music of the song, and instead focussed mostly on the lyrics. What I hadn’t really thought about was the fact that sometimes Bob has created a song with the most astounding lyrics but with music that doesn’t explore the full potential of the lyrics. When I started this little series dedicated to considering Dylan’s songs from the point of view of the music and the lyrics together (rather than, as many people do, just focussing on the lyrics) it was to put forward the idea that the music of Dylan is of as much importance in many cases as the lyrics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |