Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Music Analysis 2


This is a very famous song from Jacky Chang's Musical "Snow, Wolf, Lake" 雪狼湖. It was composed by our local pop composer Dick Lee. This excerpt of the music score is the cantonese version.I will like to share with you my favourite part of this song, which is the very well known chorus. The chorus is very simple and straight forward with a few Passing Tone (PT), however, it seems that Dick Lee uses a lot of Neighbouring Notes (NN). I think that it is very interesting that he make use of multiple Neighbouring Notes to form a Melody. The whole chorus I think ends with Preparation (P), Suspension (S) and Resolution (R).


The progression which I worked out is

: I - vi - IV - V - iii - vi - ii - V - I (continued to P2)(Phrase 1)

: I - vi - IV - vii - III - vi - IV - V - I (Phrase 2)



The Harmonic Function which I worked out is

: T - PD - PD - D - PD - PD - D (Phrase 1)

: T - PD - PD - PD - PD - PD - D - T (Phrase 2)

6 comments:

Unknown said...

hey.. interesting choice of song.. =) haha.. maybe cos i dunno how to appreciate chinese songs..
but i thought that there were a few phrases.. maybe cos u did this before we had the sentence phrasing lesson. i thought there were a few imperfect cadences..
the first one being IV to V and the 2nd ii to V.
moreover, there are missing 7s. and i think there is tonicization in bar 14 to C minor. heh.. =)correct me if i'm wrong. ;)

ec said...

Very unique kind of phrase structure here! Notice the 4+2+2 organization here? Sentence structure reversed?! Any idea what is going on? Try figuring out also the ensuing second half.

Tabby is right about the tonicization of vi, but can either of you figure out the voice leading for b. 14 as a whole?

ec said...

Ops, one more thing: please re-examine your interpretation of the suspension situation in b. 18 (bear in mind the underlying harmony of that entire bar).

Unknown said...

hmm.. dr chong for bar 14 is it the 7-8 voice leading.. the F seems to be from the previous chord then it finally resolves to a G which is then from the G chord..

Lai JinXing said...

Dr Chong, I think the notes play by the left hand are moving upwards, so the underlying harmonic are changing. Therefore, it does not fulfil the criteria of suspension.

Lai JinXing said...

The Sentence structure is indeed very unique. It started wih 4+2+2 and followed by 2+2+3+3. I think the sentence structure is so unique due to the lyrics. The first half talk about the strength of love and nothing can hinder it, so the lyric is broken up to list the various barriers which the love may encounter and the love will still be strong. The second half talk about no matter how long a time, the love will not die off, the lyric is not trying to list things but is a sentence to make a promise, therefore the sentence structure is longer, this apply for the last 3 bars too. There can possibility that the lyric was wrote before the composition of the music. All these are just my assumptions. =)