Friday, October 31, 2025

"Blue Jay Way"

Last week, I was thinking about the lines "Ask a p'liceman on the street / There's so many there to meet" in "Blue Jay Way" and had a small realization about the melody to which they're sung, something like this:


(I'm not sure what key the song is in, so I just left the notation in C major.)

The first syllable of "many" is sung with a shorter note value (a sixteenth note) than the surrounding notes, so temporally (if not spatially in the notation), there's a denser concentration of notes here, lending a sense of this abundance.

Friday, October 24, 2025

"Savoy Truffle"

I was thinking about "Savoy Truffle" yester-day and realized that in a small way, the alliteration in the line "But what is sweet now turns so sour" lends a sense of degree.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"

I recently found a note from last year about "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that I finally got around to looking into.  This is just a small point, but in the line "Ev'ryone smiles as you drift past the flowers," "ev'ryone" is sung to notes of all different pitches (C# D E), giving a sense of number.