The music was right on target for the story—unapologetic pop but with signs of real craftsmanship, especially in “Way Back Into Love,” the song that’s at the center of the plot. What stood out for me was the way the two-bar intro riff is turned into the four-bar hook—the note that the riff lands on is displaced, forcing the phrase to continue and sucking the listener into that continuation. Maybe that’s a case of craftsmanship that’s a little too obvious, but it seemed like just the right thing in a movie that’s about songwriting.

If you’d like to get a peek into the mind and life of a songwriter without a trace of Hollywood fluff, rush out and get Jimmy Webb’s book Tunesmith. He’s the real deal.

You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard for me
You make it hard for me

It was a doo-wop number, with backup vocals played from a recording, so the double entendre had a playful, guileless feel that’s infinitely more innocent than the stuff you’ll find on top-40 radio these days. Since my 9-year-old daughter was with me, I was glad for that—she thought Charley was great, and so did I. (The thing that really got the little wheels in her head turning was the graffiti in the women’s room.)

It’s an odd thing that I ended up teaching this class. When I was in high school and should have been basting myself in rock I listened almost exclusively to jazz—my father’s Miles Davis records felt like a life raft in those days. I was completely alienated from my peers and so there wasn’t much to draw me to their music. It’s amazing how much of it seeped in anyways—thinking back, it feels like Rod Stewart’s voice permeates the whole depressing era, but at the time I’m not sure if I could even have told you who it was singing those songs. I grew more receptive to mainstream popular music as I went through my 20s and 30s, but it never developed into more than an incidental, haphazard interest. But what really mattered to Duke was that they wanted to hire my wife and knew they could seal the deal if they came up with something for me to do as well. Luckily the couple of people in the music department who could have taught songwriting had other things to do, and I guess they figured I couldn’t do much harm with it.

Whoever originated the class (I think it was a graduate student, but I’m not sure, and I’ve never seen the original syllabus) had the inspired idea of calling it “Songwriter’s Vocabulary,” making it clear that it’s about musical materials and techniques, not about the ineffabilities of self-expression. I followed the lead of my immediate predecessor, John Ferri, in structuring the class as a non-traditional introduction to music theory. We make our way through rhythm (approached as prosody), melody (scales, phrases), harmony (chords, progressions, voice leading) and form, but the assignments are mostly exploratory and composition-based. There’s a weekly lecture-assignment-workshop cycle in which I say, in essence, here is some stuff (e.g., scales or chords), here is the terminology, here are some examples of how it’s usually used, now go out and do something with it, and next week we’ll see what you come up with. The looseness of the assignments makes the students feel like they’re at sea sometimes. I try to present the theory not as rules but as guidelines, tendencies, and expectations, and for me the effort has been enlightening, though I still don’t get it across to the class as well as I should. Music theory is only as good as it sounds, and when we go over the assignments in class the theory is almost always borne out—when a student “breaks the rules” it sounds awkward. Sometimes it sounds inspired, though, and I can’t think of a better way to learn about both the usefulness and the limitations of theory.

My ideal has been to make the class accessible to anyone who has some musical facility and wants to write songs. There are a lot of fine musicians on campus who fall through the cracks in the music curriculum because they aren’t very comfortable reading music. Many students have told me that one of their goals in taking my class is to improve their reading and writing, and half or more of the typical class reads quite well, so I use staff notation on the board and in handouts all semester. But I suggest more informal and intuitive ways for them to write down their own ideas—imprecise notations that are precise enough to get the job done, especially if they’re supplemented by a recording or in-class performance. And even when they’re writing abstract musical fragments for an assignment, I urge the students to work with a lyric, no matter how ridiculous or incoherent. Words can’t convey rhythm unambiguously, but they can go a long ways towards pinning it down, both for the student who writes them and for me or my TA when we read them.

It’s been pretty easy to reach the students who sing and play the guitar, who have a rock band, or are in one of Duke’s many a cappella groups. There are plenty of students with a traditional background, from piano lessons or playing in school bands or whatever, who want to try their hand at songwriting, too. I settled into a comfortably loose amalgamation of traditional theory, graphic notation, and composition projects some years ago. In the past few semesters I’ve had several students whose orientation was more towards hip-hop than rock, and they’ve shaken my complacency. In line with most music theory classes, I put a lot of emphasis on chords, and for a vast swath of popular music that makes perfect sense—chord progressions, whether simple, complicated, explicit or implied, are the structural backbone of most every song. But the hip-hop model leans much more on rhythmic and melodic patterning, and if I was to teach the class again it would be high time to work that into the mix. As much as anything else, I’d be doing myself a favor. I’ve spent a whole lot of time talking about harmony—it’s endlessly fascinating but also well-worn ground, and another trip around it isn’t likely to do me that much good. To get myself to the point of being able to say something useful about how a hip-hop song is put together, I’d have to get out of my comfort zone and learn something.

In terms of the musical models I use, I haven’t had to venture into unfamiliar territory nearly as much as I expected when I started. I have about a dozen Beatles songs that serve as textbook examples, and I draw on some other rock classics (not quite the same thing as Classic Rock, but there’s plenty of overlap)—the students don’t seem to find them terribly old fashioned (except, maybe, for Annie Lennox). When I ask the class to bring in music they admire, they often show up with old stuff, too—from the past few years I can recall some Beatles, Springsteen, Neil Young, Led Zepellin, and Velvet Underground—and in technical terms most of the newer songs they like are in the same ball park. What I have had to do is listen more closely and objectively, even to music that’s familiar—something I’ve had to do for other classes I’ve taught, as well, and it’s always led me to a richer experience of the music. My appreciation of music that is simple and direct is definitely more genuine than it was 10 years ago. There was even some evidence at the coffeehouse that I’m conveying that to the class. Introducing his song, called “Simple,” James said that it was inspired by a comment I made, while talking about a song in class, that “simple is good.” Out of that, James came up with a classic guy-with-acoustic-guitar kind of love song that sits right on the line between simple and simplistic up to a beautifully conceived bridge that transforms it and gives it real depth. Ironically, the polish on the song and James’s self-assured performance made it obvious that he was one of the most experienced and sophisticated musicians in the class.

It’s been fascinating and heartening to hear the 100 or so students who’ve come through the class get up on stage and sing their piece (and I don’t think there’s been a single student who hasn’t been able to take part, which is pretty amazing—there may, of course, be a case or two that’s slipped my memory). The big revelation for me has been the ones who feel their way tentatively from assignment to assignment and then show up at the coffeehouse with a couple of verses and a chorus that are not only a real song, but their song—an unpolished little gem that’s both conventional and personal. There’s no denying that if I wanted to claim some credit as a teacher, it’s these kids I should point to, not the well-developed talents like James. But the only thing I really feel I can take credit for when the session is over is that I insisted that they all write a song and show up to sing it. The rest is theirs, and it feels like a window onto a musical creativity that’s disentangled from technique, where originality arises naturally from personality. It’s a great thing to remember when I get lost in the intricacy and abstraction of my own music, when I need to be reminded what the means are and what the ends are.

He has a commission from the Met to write a two-act opera. I wonder what will come of it. Will he string a bunch of songs together, or will he take to heart the example of the composers he admires and write every little transition and interlude and background figure, so the music animates the story and vice versa, and while he’s at it write some real oboe music, real cello music, real trombone music, etc. I’m pretty sure he’s capable of it. He says (in the same interview in Harp magazine where he talks about Janacek) that he’s prepared to fail. I hope that’s modesty and not a way of keeping his foot in the exit door in case it all turns out to be too much trouble.

Henry Mollicone’s Face on the Barroom Floor, which I heard in Greensboro a few weeks ago, is a case study in operatic composition stripped down to its essentials, and a lesson in how to write an piece that has legs, and a small footprint as well. It’s an odd little whirlwind of a mining-town opera that uses three singers and three instrumentalists, plus a fourth cast member who doesn’t sing. Twenty-five minutes long and the soprano is shot dead twice—that’s got to be some kind of record. To get everything across in such a short time, Mollicone has to be able to turn on a dime, musically-speaking. I particularly enjoyed the quote from La traviata that he spliced into the barroom boogie early in the piece—a bit of characterization, since the soprano is playing a soprano (an opera singer, that is, which is a funny coincidence—Wainwright’s opera will also be about an opera singer). I admired the way he cut from broad-stroke tonality to swirling chromaticism the first time the girl was shot, too. This is not, by any means, the only way to approach an opera but it does bring into focus how different writing an opera is from writing a song, even an “operatic” song. As I’m posting this, a few audio samples are still available on the Greensboro Opera web site.

The piano was onstage, since no self-respecting mining country saloon can be without one, and the not-to-be-shot piano player was the composer. He was also music director for the production, so he’d been in Greensboro for several weeks. I don’t know if he planned the opera around the idea that he could travel around to direct and play in it, but it’s a great idea, and I have to say I’m jealous—not only is he deeply involved in preparing and performing his own music but he doesn’t have to cram the rehearsals into the usual couple of days.

I was glad to see the Greensboro Opera Company in action again. The three young singers (Elena DeAngeles, who I heard in February as Gretel, baritone Jeffrey Carlson and tenor Jeffery Maggs) sang their parts with confidence and style, and since it was a small venue, seating a couple hundred I guess, it was good that they were convincing actors as well. I enjoyed talking to them all afterwards, and also to some of the folks behind the scenes. David Barnwell, the managing director, filled me in about some of the problems and promise of opera in Greensboro. Mollicone and I traded notes about our stints at New England Conservatory, which were about two decades apart—if ever there was a place where things change and yet stay the same, that’s it. And then there was Elena’s mother, visiting from New York and a little unnerved after watching her daughter get shot twice (and adding insult to injury, the baritone is her son in law). Mostly, though, she was proud, and rightly so.

Bourland had only one thing to say about the “Going to a Town,” in reference to its refrain, “I’m so tired of America”:

I guess Rufus is tired of America. Hmm, well I say people act like people no matter where you go.

I completely agree with Bourland about people acting like people wherever. From that point of view, it’s reasonable to wonder why the refrain isn’t “I’m so tired of humanity.” If Wainwright wants to make a statement about religious hypocrisy and homophobia, why not take on the Iranian practice of hanging men thought to have engaged in homosexual acts (the example comes to mind because I recently read about a young opera composer who has done just that)? In comparison it’s hard to see how even the worst hypocrisy of America’s homophobic fundamentalists is much cause for complaint, especially from someone like Wainwright who enjoys a tremendous luxury of choice and of self-expression, including the luxury of being out of the closet. The refrain is nothing if not a complaint, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for finding it to be a pretty egocentric one.

In the context of the song it doesn’t strike me that way, though (and I’m not claiming it strikes Bourland that way, either—the line I quoted leans in that direction, but it’s just an offhand comment). The only problem I have with the lyrics is that the first two verses, especially, are too obscure. I’d like for such a forthright refrain to be backed up by more than vague allusions. But “Going to a Town,” as I hear it, is a falling-out-of-love, gotta-pick-up-the-broken-pieces-and-move-on song about Wainwright’s relationship with a country. I’d call it his motherland if his mother wasn’t Canadian and I’d call it his fatherland if the word didn’t have creepy fascist connotations—the parental metaphor is complicated in his case, but it still applies. He’s writing about being let down in a relationship that is deep and irrational, so of course the song is one-sided and unfair. The trick in this genre is to complain, criticize and caricature without sounding too whiny or self-indulgent.

[I was browsing a few hours after I first posted this entry and came across a post on vilaines filles—the guy attracts high-end fans!—that referred to Wainwright’s MySpace page. Not only is this song up on his player (so listening is free at the moment), there’s a commentary track where he says “it’s like a breakup song from a lover who you once were entralled with and then were somewhat cheated on…” I guess I was stating the obvious.]

It’s obvious, I hope, that the meaning of a song doesn’t necessarily come from the words alone. With different music this particular lyric could be turned into something more cynical, more satirical, more strident, or more equivocal (and the list could go on). If Wainwright is saying something, he’s saying it with both the words and the music, and neither stands on its own. What the music adds in this case is the impression of an experience. Based on how the words are placed in the music, it’s a story of alienation and resignation yielding to insight and resolve—a classic breakup-song trajectory. I’m sure Wainwright is editorializing with the lyric, but he absorbs the complaints and criticisms into the texture of an experience that he conveys quite beautifully. That’s my personal reaction, of course, and there’s nothing definitive about it. I’ve had reactions to America similar to his, so his criticisms don’t get under my skin in the first place. But I think the song makes a good case for itself that’s independent of the politics.

A really odd thing about the song is that after 3 minutes of fine stylish songwriting, Wainwright seems to fall under the spell of an ambitious idea that never quite works out. For all the good things I’ve found in the song, it was the strangeness of the ending that got me to pull out my keyboard and work out what’s going on in the music. At the level of musical technique the song makes a fascinating study from start to finish—in the first part it’s wonderfully communicative in ways that can be analyzed pretty clearly, and in the last part it’s strange and awkward, again in ways that aren’t too hard to articulate. It’s a remarkable package—I haven’t come across anything quite like it before. For anyone inclined to read on, I’ll try point out the musical features, both the effective ones and the strange ones.

I’ll admit right off that dissecting music in order to get at its meaning is highly subjective and probably little more than a parlor game. It’s a game I like to play, though—it’s a great way to get up close and personal with a piece of music, and it helps me clarify and refine what I’m trying to do as a composer. If, by putting it up, I can provoke anyone to respond with their own impressions, or a critique of my analysis, or any other kind of constructive comment, that would be icing on the cake.

After playing the video a few times, I went over to iTunes to get the single—I believe it’s an iTunes “exclusive.” That’s the version I’m writing about—the only significant differences with what’s on that video are the lack of a rhythm section and other instruments and the poorer fidelity. Here are the lyrics.

I’ll try to make my musical points without getting into a lot of specialized lingo, hoping it will make sense even if you don’t have musical training. If you know some music theory, though, you should probably read the more technical, nuts and bolts version of my analysis.

~ ~ ~

The verse of “Going to a Town” uses the same chord progression as the durable old standard Autumn Leaves, a French song written in the 40s (you could think of the style as Tin Pan Alley with an accordion and a beret). It’s a pretty generic progression, so the connection could be fortuitous, but I’m inclined to think that it’s not, since the similarities go beyond the chords (just to be clear—there’s nothing wrong with using someone else’s chord progression). In both songs the melody is based on a simple melodic figure that is repeated, but starts one note lower each time (in music theory this is called a sequence). In “Going to a Town,” the sequence is the first 3 lines of the verse, so the repetitive phraseology of the lyric (in most verses to some extent, but especially the first one) goes hand in hand with the melodic repetition. The chords, grouped into pairs, track the melodic sequence as well. The sequence makes the lyrics of each verse seem to march with a kind of clockwork inevitability down to the refrain and the minor chord that supports it—both musically and lyrically, a downhearted conclusion. The way the progression shifts away from major towards minor on the third line gives it some extra poignance. The sense of resignation is especially strong in the first verse, with its passive, gloomy listing of “already beens.”

The chords in the verse are not only strung together in a progression that is typical of jazz standards (i.e., the harmonic world of Tin Pan Alley, more or less), they have a thickness or complexity that is more typical of jazz than of contemporary pop, which in this context gives them a world-weary sheen (it’s especially notable in the second line of each verse). At some level, conscious or unconscious, Wainwright was clearly drawing on this older repertoire—no big surprise coming from a man who’s done a whole show of Judy Garland songs. My sense is that he’s specifically invoking “Autumn Leaves,” which has two layers of wistfulness—one that’s integral to the song and another it gets as a stylistic representative of days gone by.

On the scale of pop-song choruses, this one is pretty subtle, but in comparison to the verse it’s focussed and to the point in the way choruses usually are. It’s faster-moving than the verse and at the same time more static—for the first 2 1/2 lines, the harmony rocks back and forth between two chords, but the chords and lyrics go by twice as fast. The big event, where Wainwright cashes in on the simplicity and predictability of what’s come before, happens on “to lead” in the third line of the chorus. There is a fresh chord, and the harmonic pace slows so he can dwell on a few key words. He diverts the chord progression at the last minute, so the chorus comes to rest in a different harmonic “place” than the verse. On the single there is swell of glacial strings in the background that permeates and transforms the sound. The emotional core of the song is this line, repeated at the end of the chorus—“I’ve got a life to lead”—which comes across as a realization and a moment of clarity.

Aspects of that clarity and resolve carry over into the verses that follow. Where the first pair of verses is vague and passive, the second pair is more engaged and impassioned. Wainwright reaches out with questions, highlighted by repeated rhetorical “tell mes” that introduce an element of call-and-response dialog. It is utterly conventional for the later repetitions of a verse to be more developed or elaborate than the early ones, but in this case it’s not just a matter of musical logic, it conveys something integral to the song. It’s a technique that opera composers use to great effect—nice to see, since Wainwright has apparently been commissioned to write an opera.

The second verse seems to unfold like the first, but in the third line Wainwright tries to pull another rabbit from his hat. He seems in this case not to be a double-rabbit-capable composer. On the word “lead” there is an unexpectedly bright chord and the music suddenly takes on a new character. What happens from this point to the end is, in musical terms, a coda. It starts out well enough. The drawn-out, emphatic feeling of it seems a little excessive to me, but it’s not a bad way to consolidate at the end of a song. The first few chords are fresh and effective, too, but they lead to a cul-de-sac, and it takes some odd chords and awkward phrasing to get back out. It looks just like corners I’ve seen students write themselves into when they’re being too clever, and Lord knows I’ve done it to myself often enough, too, stubbornly developing an idea that’s too brilliant and impressive to let go of, even when it turns into an endless time-sucking labyrinth. One of the odder signs that Wainwright may have been casting about for fancy harmony is the idiosyncratic appearance of a special chord called a Neapolitan sixth that, as far as contemporary forms of music are concerned, crops up in intermediate college-level music theory and nowhere else—I haven’t come across it outside of classical music.

The treatment of the lyric is awkward, too. The words that are most emphasized and drawn-out are “life,” “soul,” “dream” (excellent so far), then “own” (not so great but ok), then “be” (weak, but at least is scans) and finally “to” (really weak). The last line…

I’m  going  TOOOOOOOO  a  town   thaaat  haaaas  AAAAL-REAAA-DYYYY,
BEEN   BURNED   DOWN

is especially strange—oddly parsed and, especially at the very end, oddly grandiose. It’s strange at the level of meaning, too. Suggestive an image as it is, the town that has already been burned down never comes into focus for me—it’s an effective start but a mystifying end. This may just show how dense I am, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other points I’ve made do the same thing. I do realize that Wainwright has far better pop song instincts that I could ever hope for, and probable better musical instincts across the board.

Still, that’s what I make of it. I’d love to hear about some alternatives.

At the top of the list was a poll that came up with “Ob-La-Di” as “the worst song ever.” Say what? I’ve always thought it was a cute little thing, and the mariachi horns on the bridge are a tasty little jolt of joy. Plus, it was one of my daughter’s favorites when she was 4 or 5, so I have a sentimental attachment. It’s beyond me how it could strike anyone as worse than innocuous. Not the first or last time I’ll be out of step with the mass consensus. It has to be a blip, though. The poll responses were probably all over the map—lots and lots of songs, no big standouts. Repeat it with different groups of 1000 people and I bet you’d get different “winners” each time, as in this CNN survey. A paradoxical aspect of both is that it’s only quite popular (and so widely circulated) songs that stand a chance. They should have hired Komar and Melamid.

There was something very much like this on one of the billions of “best of” lists at the turn of the millennium (remember that big bubble of hot air?) that was strange enough to stick in my memory. Critics were polled about the best composition of the 20th century (or something like that, I don’t remember the exact setup or, for that matter, the publication—Time or Newsweek, I think) and they came up with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Obviously there was no consensus, but could it get more random? For that matter, what piece could they have come up with that wouldn’t be random?

Beyond that, as far as bad Beatles songs are concerned, all I can find are more or less mindless forum debates where everyone chimes in with the song they dislike most. There’s a crucial little difference there—“worst” implies at least an attempt at objectivity. I know it’s meant as trivia, and if folks don’t get to touchy I suppose it can be—it’s amusing, at least, to see the wacky reasons people come up with. But when it’s “I’ve always hated this song (and you should to)” it’s just stupid, like this pissing contest (and it looks like they’re Brits, so most likely they really are pissed).

Recently I happened to hear one song that’s mentioned in the first part of the CNN piece, though it’s not one of the winners—C.W. McCall’s “Convoy”—and had to marvel, not just because of the inane persecuted folksiness of it but also the ineptitude. I can’t quite call it up on my mental jukebox (luckily), but it was something about the way the chorus comes in, with backup vocals, like a clumsy splice. Now that’s what I call a bad. ‘Course it’s not exactly a song (more like a recitation), and it was probably meant to be irritating to people like me. So is it really bad if it does just what the creators wanted?

After hearing both versions we had the inevitable debate about which was better. Most of the class felt that the original was best. I like Lennox’s quite a bit better. It’s pretty typical that my songwriting students will have the opposite opinion of mine in cases like this, so I wasn’t exactly surprised. Still, it was surprising how strongly some of them dislike Annie Lennox. She’s iconoclastic in that she insists that she will be herself, but not (as far as I know) in a preachy way. Whatever you think about her style and her material, she’s a superb singer who’s serious and sincere about what she does. What’s to hate about that, even if the music isn’t your thing?

The opinion of most of the class was that Simon’s idea of what was the chorus and what was the bridge made more sense, which I kind of agree with, though it doesn’t make a big difference for me. And then there was the heavily synthesized sound of Lennox’s version, which bugged a lot of the class. I said that Simon’s version sounded very dated to me, more so than other tracks of his from the same period. A student countered that Medusa dated itself more strongly because of the cheesy synths. I guess the other 90s albums with cheezy synths didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But in retrospect, what bother’s me about Simon’s track isn’t datedness, it’s clutter, especially after about the midpoint of the song, when the orchestra come in. There’s flute and pedal steel and echoey string glisses, and a weird two-beat feel that starts on the bridge but hangs around for the rest of the song. Also, the flexibility of the phrasing often verges on awkward, or forced. Lennox (and her producer) streamline all of that, so the phrasing unobtrusively serves the lyric and the orchestration brings out the richness of the harmony but stays out of the way of the gorgeous singing.

I have to laugh at myself when I get analytical with songs like that in class. Parsing a pop song in terms of the distinctive phrase length and harmonic rhythm to each section? How geeky can you get?