Nearly 11 years ago I wrote a blog entry about the used of varying time signatures appearing in the album 'Godbluff' by Van der Graaf Generator, noting that "I haven't figured out yet in which time signature the opening verse" of 'The Sleepwalkers'. Yesterday I heard the song once again and this time I made some progress in deciphering.
I wrote then that the final verse has the structure 4-2-4-4 (as also appears in "My room"), and this section has always given me the feeling of 'arriving home'. I now understand why I feel like this: the opening verse appears to have the following number of beats 6-3-6-6 (although this final 6 seems to be truncated); it's so fast that it's hard to count. The 'cha cha' section is definitely in 3/4. Looking at the first verse, if one takes the beats to be crotchet triplets, then the structure is 4-2-4-4! Very familiar. In other words, the opening verse is the same as the closing verse but metrically is played as triplets as opposed to 'straight' crotchets. I wonder who is the clever dick who thought this up.
No comments:
Post a Comment