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An article on how Paul Simon stole Martin Carthy's arrangement of the English folk song "Scarborough Fair"
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Notes on "The Inner Light" |
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| Notes on "Lady Madonna" | Notes on "Hey Jude" |
This article is from Alan W. Pollack's groundbreaking series "Notes on the Beatles". Links in the orginal article is written in this colour: index to the series, while links I have added appears as standard links. Go here for more information on my site about the song
Notes on "The Inner Light"
KEY E-flat Major (Mixolydian) METER 4/4 FORM Intro -> Verse -> Break -> Verse -> Break' (w/complete ending)
General Points of Interest
Style and Form
Along with "Love You To" and "Within You Without You," this song is one of George's three most unabashedly Indian-influenced efforts. While all three songs present an ingenious-cum-tenuous merger of cultures, this one is particularly distinguished by virtue of its indigenous purity of instrumentation, "inwardly focused" lyrics, and almost strict formal alternation between instrumental and sung interludes.
By the way ... if you contrast this song with our previous subject, "Lady Madonna," you learn an interesting psychological lesson about the the extent to which formal complexity in music affects your perception of musical "length," somewhat independent of empirically measured absolute real-time duration.
"The Inner Light" is the longer of the two songs, yet one experiences "Lady Madonna," as longer than "The Inner Light" because the latter's form is longer than that of the former song. Think it over.
Melody and Harmony
In spite of the clearly Mixolydian mode and the florid ornamentation of the lead instrumental part, the melodic material on the backing track remains curiously regimented mostly into four-note scale patterns that move downward; always balanced out at the very end by an upward scale figure of three notes. George's sung tune contrasts by virtue of its large number of leaps by 3rds, 4ths, and even one 5th.
Harmony here is minimalistic with the I chord alternating with either ii or IV. There's no "dominant" progression to be found; no V, not even flat-VII. This is about as close as you can get to drone-like stasis and still use more than one chord. The manner in which the instrumental lead finishes all his sections with that upward riff toward the 5th scale degree endows the sense of home key with a precipitously high center of gravity.
Arrangement
I'm calling it "E flat," but this is one of those rare Beatles tracks mastered somewhere in the cracks with respect to so-called standard pitch. To the extent that this song is no "Rain" with its intentionally manipulated tape speed, I suspect the result here is an unintentional side-effect of poorly calibrated tape recorders in Bombay or something to do with differences in AC/DC frequencies between continents :-).
Yes, the instruments on the backing track are all authentically Indian, though for all their subtlty of timbre, beyond a point you might as well be listening to flutes, an oboe doubled by a violin, a harpsichord, and an organ pedal. What's frustrating is that the best Lewisohn has done for us with this song is to list a roster of players which clearly is a superset of what is heard in the arrangement. Oh well, please bear with me if I stick with Euro-centric instrument names infra.
Amazingly, you find that even on this track, which was clearly organized and executed with outside forces at a shall-we-say remote location from Abbey Road, that the Beatles demonstrate their favored gambit of using deft changes in texture to help articulate form without allowing the arrangement to lose its overall unity.
The instrumental interludes include a particularly deep bass note for the drone, tambourine-like percussion effects, and lead parts for what I call oboe and harpsichord.
The verses drop the low-pitched drone and tambourine, but add flutes, and reserve a return of the oboe for the last phrase of the section.
The addition of the backing vocals in the final break is a masterful unifying touch.
Section-by-Section Walkthrough
Intro
The intro starts off ad-libitum with just the drone and a couple beats of the anacrustic riffing from the harpsichord which leads into a 10-measure section in tempo. The harmony is all static, but our diagram below spells out the melodic and instrumentation patterns used:
Oboe lead/Hpsrchrd backing - Hpschrd solo lead --------
|C Bb Ab G |Ab G F Eb |Bb Ab G F |Ab G F Eb |
Duet in unison -------------------------------------------
|Bb Ab G F |Ab G F Eb |Eb Db C Bb |Ab G F Eb GAb|
----------------------
|Bb |- |
Verse
The verse is an unusual 13 measures in length with short phrases that create a pattern of "AA'A'A'BCC':"
A A'
|Eb |f |Eb |Ab |
Eb: I ii I IV
A' A'
|Eb |f |Eb |Ab |
I ii I IV
B C
|Ab |Eb |- |- |
IV I
C'
|Eb |Ab |Eb |
I IV I
The harpsichord provides a mockingbird obligatto to the lead vocal for the four A phrases. The oboe doubles the final C' phrase with it in unison. George ends the latter phrase ends on the suspenseful 4th scale degree and leaves it to the oboe alone to assert the eventual resolution of 4 -> 3.
Break
The two break sections are virtually identical and built on more or less the same foundation as the intro, with some real changes in the details of melodic and instrumental patterning. The backing track of the two breaks, themselves, might as well be a copy of the same piece of tape:
Hrpschrd solo -------------- Oboe solo/Hrpschrd backing -
|Eb Db C Bb |Eb Db C Bb |G /\/\/\/\/\|//\/\/\/\/\/\/\|
Hrpschrd solo -------------- Duet in unison --------------
|Bb Ab G F |Ab G F Eb |Eb Db C Bb |Ab G F Eb GAb|
----------------------
|Bb |- |
The oboe riff in measures 3-4 (labelled above as "/\/\/\ ..." is the freest melodic moment in the whole track and you've got to savor it. I dare say the overall song would suffer without this instant of relief from the predominance of scale fragements.
The specific deployment of the vocals in the second break is classic avoidance of foolish consistency. First off, the three vocal interjections are asymmetrically placed in measures 2, 5, and 6. Secondly, the scoring features George double tracked in the first phrase, then single tracked in the second, followed by a choral treatment for the third phrase.
Outro
The outro simply extends the second break with a (what a surprise!) rhetorical triple repeat of the 3-note upward figure from the oboe. Hey, this may be Indian music, alright, but apparently the same old "three-strikes-you're-out" kind of logic applies here as well as it ever did back in the days of "I Saw Her Standing There."
Some Final Thoughts
Next stop for us is the "Revolution" single and all that follows!
Regards, Alan (awp@world.std.com)---
"Yeah, but we want to hear it and there's more of us than you." 030297#128
---
Copyright (c) 1997 by Alan W. Pollack
All Rights Reserved
This article may be reproduced, retransmitted, redistributed and otherwise propagated at will, provided that this notice remains intact and in place.
These articles were originally posted in the News Group rec.music.beatles. The content from this newsgroup is archived at http://www.recmusicbeatles.com/, and Alan W. Pollacks "Notes On" series can be found at http://www.recmusicbeatles.com/public/files/awp/awp.html
. I used to link to the versions published in Soundscapes before I decided to include them on my own site.If you want to learn more about the musical side of song writing, chord progressions, harmony and theory through The Beatles songs (and/or The Beatles in particular), I recommend the following book:
Artist: Dominic Pedler
Arranged by The Beatles
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| Notes on "Lady Madonna" | Notes on "Hey Jude" |