Chapter 10 Flashcards
Middle Eights and Mega Modulations
Modulation - the ultimate songwriting secret? Singalong hooks are often touted as the secret to instant chart success - and The Beatles had plenty of those. But when trying to account for the group’s musical longevity, it is the harmonic twists and turns engineered through formal modulation that emerge as
a recurring feature - and so they do in most acknowledged pop classics, from Cole Porter to Oasis. The principle of modulation goes a long way towards explaining the ability of a song to withstand repeated listening.
By the time of the Anthology tome Paul was still singling out this moment , describing it now as ‘a very big step’. !!
So just what is happening (first at 0.35), in this pivotal third Parlophone single? In a nutshell, McCartney is describing a crucial stage in The Beatles’ development , when one of their seemingly innocent songs modulated to a new key, taking the listener to a new tona l destination. In order to appreciate the mechanics of this device, and to see why McCartney describes it as ‘a surprising place’ in the context of 1963 pop , let’s set the scene with a whirlwind tour of some typical middle eight traditions of the time.
Early rock ‘n’ roll ‘Middle Eight’ cliches Back in the pop and rock scene of the fifties and early sixties, key -switching of all types was surprisingly rare , while middle eights (,’with a few spectacular exceptions) were mundane affairs in comparison to what The Beatles had up their sleeve. Listening to some of the early Beatles covers is the easiest way to confirm the formulaic, single- key traditions of the period. The convention was invariably to start the bridge with a direct move to the IV chord, and after some innocuous filler, end ,’with an Imperfect cadence on V before resuming the verse on I. ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry (Over You )” from Live At The BBC, shows the most primitive of such bridges in action, with the eight bars divided into the following format:
Nothin Shakin
~ develops this a stage further by adding a II to prime the Imperfect cadence on the final V: further anticipating the return to the verse but hardly raising the roof in terms of novelty.
It’s no surprise that some of The Beatles’ own early bridges, such as Paul’s ‘You’ll Be Mine’, would follow this Nothin Shakin structure. Here, beneath Tony Sheridan’s ramblings about ‘toast in the morning’, the only other addition is a tonic I7 to ‘smooth the change’ to IV in bar 5, just as the blues would do :
While typically used within an 8- bar structure, the move to the IV chord can be seen to derive from the conventional 12- bar blues format where the switch to the subdominant in bars 5 and 6 is a defining feature of the whole genre. Meanwhile, the middle eight of what became known as the ‘commercial bridge’ would delay the IV chord by a bar in order to stress this same move. We know that The Beatles would have tackled this variation of the ‘subdominant bridge’ on occasions, most
notably on their live renditions of Elvis’s ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’
This variation, heard on Tin Pan Alley classics as far back as ‘Satin Doll’ and ‘Pennies From Heaven’, was so called because it was the preferred structure to fall back on for professional songwriters churning out Broadway hits in the twenties, thirties and forties. It fitted in to a standard 3 2-bar song structure , consisting of an AABA structure (where ‘A’ is a verse and ‘B’ an eight- bar variation). It
is from this format that the term ‘middle eight’ is derived.
Let’s look closely at Paul’s wheeze. Shunning that customary direct move to the IV, The Beatles decided to venture to the 5th degree
of the scale. But here they built not a dominant chord (or major V triad as they’d done in the bridge of ‘Love Me Do’) but a minor one - complete with its minor 3rd degree, alien to the C major key of the verse. The result was an instant coming of age for The Beatles as songwriters, as the Anthology footage reminds us by ignoring the verse preamble and cutting straight to The Moment.
So radical was this bridge that both John and Paul feared the song might be too novel for pop fans in 1963. They shouldn’t have had too many sleepless nights as ‘From Me To You’ shot to the NO . 1 slot.
so emphatic was the reaction to From Me to You, that John and Paul obviously decided to repeat the very same middle eight harmony a few months later on ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. Paul’s
corresponding swooning moment is now first heard ,’with the rogue, non -diatonic, Dm
This last point is important as it confirms that, once in the new key, all the standard harmonic ideas are back up for grabs. As well
as several more ‘ii- V-I-vi’ moves, we’ll be seeing old chestnuts like I-V alternations, I-vi developments, Cycles Of Fifths, Four -Chord
turnarounds, etc.
To make the point using the very simplest possible modulation, let’s fast forward to Abbey Road to find ‘Octopus’s Garden’ blending a pair of I-vi- IV -V cycles in two different keys: one for the verse/ chorus sections and another for George’s guitar
solo.
While each of these modulations to IV represents an important development from the standard bridges of the fifties, they are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the variety of other ‘surprising places’ that The Beatles had in store for us. For wherever you decide to go in the harmonic universe , as one writer sums up : ‘what better way to create freshness than by choosing a totally new tonal center
The following cycle shows at a glance how the ‘From Me To You’ switch was just the tip of the iceberg as The Beatles visited almost every corner of this particular musical globe. With one example from nearly every port -of-call, it provides a sneak preview of our own journey as we attempt to follow in their footsteps.
‘Very strange’ - the pivot entry to the ‘Penny Lane’ chorus
McCartney had in fact already used a similar B-A key scheme for ‘Good Day Sunshine’ on Revolver, while later conjuring a subtle variation when crafting the tonal contrast between the two main sections of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Although the latter uses more rocky ‘borrowed’ chords (in contrast to the pop cycles of the earlier pair), its structure still hinges on a dual -tonic premise of I and ~
bVII which underlies the basic themes of the songs.
bIII
It should be no surprise that the key-switching devices that unlock the magic of new tonalities are rapidly emerging as the very same select group of cadences that we have been using throughout when closing a sequence or making transitions between diatonic sections.
Meanwhile, the fact that we do so via an Imperfect cadence on the line ‘the road that stretches out ahead’, is just the icing on the cake. For we aren’t going home just yet. As with the ‘love you when we’re apart’ of ‘I Will’, the corresponding moment in ‘Two Of Us’ reinforces the temporary detachment from the stabilizing tonic that is inherent in all such ‘middle feelings’.
The Beatles first mastered the modulation to a bIII bridge in 1965, on a pair of songs on Help!: ‘Another Girl’ and ‘You’re Going To
Lose That Girl’. Despite the fact that they appear ‘back-lo-back’ on the album , The Beatles cleverly disguise their use of the device
by varying their opening melody note in each case. While the latter goes for the major 3rd (as in ‘Two Of Us’), the former nails the
root of the chord thereby making the change even more sudden.
Here too, a modulation proves the perfect time -distorting ploy for the lyrics as McCartney takes us through Lady Madonna’s
mundane weekly schedule. Even the choice of bridge progression (another outing for ‘ii- V -I-vi’) conveys appropriately the idea of
going through the motions.
Meanwhile, the same type of mature , disguised modulation to bIII resurfaced expertly in Lennon’s ‘Free As A Bird’. A close listen to the song reveals it as much more than a posthumous marketing exercise. Here again John Lennon deftly blends the key-switch within a progression rather than unveiling it more predictably at the start of a new section. More profoundly, he camouflages the move still further by means of an elaborate substitution effect that bears the mark of genius.
Unlike ‘Lady Madonna’ where the opening iv chord automatically flagged the key change with its non -diatonic note , we don’t feel the modulation in ‘Free As A Bird’ until the V -I arrival on the new tonic that formally consummates the key switch. This is because the Dm7 chord has already appeared in the verse as a ‘borrowed iv’ in the key of A, in what is a subtle variation on the I- vi. -IV-V Four -Chord Turnaround . By virtue of its role in both keys, the iv chord acts as a highly subtle pivot. So natural is the move from Dm7 down a 5th to G that the whole maneuver goes by almost undetected until subliminally we feel the bird spread its wings at those select moments. Here is a summary of what was one of Lennon’s most delicate songwriting gambits.
