A Project Gutenberg pen-pal from Spain solved the mystery: the song was released on a 45 in 1973 or 1974 entitled "Tubular Bells," but the tune I remembered was Side B, also (confusingly) entitled "Tubular Bells."
I remembered the tune very accurately, as it turns out--even the ornaments showed up towards the end--but I'd completely forgotten the background arpeggio except as a dim memory of a kind of rhythm.
I just can't say what a relief this is! Now I want to go play with the noteflight score to put in the correct left-hand part.
11 comments:
Nice. I'm glad you found it.
Yeah for you!! I hate when you have a ear bug and can't get rid of it.
0>;~}
This is cool. Especially the memory part, and your "easier" solution to the problem of clearing the partially remembered tune from your head.
I frequently annoy my wife because the only way I can clear a half-remembered tune--or even a clearly remembered one--is to go find it on YouTube and play it. Often, it's rock n roll, too, which adds to annoyance.
Eric Hines
I had that Mike Oldfield album, and others, his "5 Miles Out" meant something more to me when I was a young student pilot.
It's a funny thing--often I find a song I like very much and am excited to find out the composer, hoping I'll like his other work. But I didn't hear a single other Oldfield piece that I cared for while I was listening for this one.
Crowd sourcing is like the benefits socialism and communism promised, without the centralized control scheme of megalomaniacs.
I'm fascinated by the memory part. Melody is often the most important part of a piece, but in this case it is more the arrangement. The tune could have been at least slightly notherwise without damage. Yet it was the tune that you remembered, while the arrangement vanished. You remembered the name and couldn't shake it, even when you had evidence that it was impossible. You remembered when you had heard it.
Not just the tune but the chord structure: I knew it was C7, C7, Gm7, C7, F7 (at least, in relative pitch). And the Brit voice: "Mandolin." And that fairly common 1xx4xx7x beat for a rock song.
The noteflight program is so much fun. I'm trying now to reproduce the bluesy piano accompaniment to "Dixie Chicken":
http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/f1ff6f2c25dbeb6f3f4929d74fcae5c200583226
Syncopation is hard!
I'm fascinated by the memory part. Melody is often the most important part of a piece, but in this case it is more the arrangement.
With instrumentals I think it's far less often true that melody is the most important part. I've heard it said that Asian music is built around melody, African around rhythm, and Western around harmony...I think there's some truth in that. If you listen to a piece like the overtures to The Invisible City of Kitezh or Tristan and Isolde, I think it's the chords you'll remember more than the melody lines. If you're like me you can whistle the top lines but not reproduce the chords...yet the melodies alone wouldn't do much for you.
The group I sing and play with often gets tripped up on well-remembered songs with strong vocal harmonics, like the Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel or the Everley Brothers. When we try to sort out the parts, we find we've each constructed a composite tune from memory. We generally remember what the chords are that inform the two (or three) parts for any point in the melody, but we have to practice our individual parts for a while to prevent switching parts in midstream.
It's not always easy to say what the "tune" of a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song is, unless you follow all the parts to the end and see which one ends on the key note.
I spent years once trying to figure out a tune I often heard as background music in movies, which turned out to be Saint-Saëns' "Aquarium." It's mostly a chord progression with a lot of tinkliness that was way beyond my ability to hum for anyone or even remember in any detail. Playing the chords for people didn't make it recognizable, while hearing even half a measure of the real piece was instantly recognizable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6RBf_j5Y7A
But even rooting randomly around in iTunes for a composer that seemed to be of the right era and style yielded results faster than my search for this truly puzzling Tubular Bells thing. It doesn't usually take me this long to find a ear-worm tune.
Post a Comment