It’s been interesting to compare Webber’s music to Sondheim’s in Into the Woods. Webber’s songs are basically pop music adapted to the theatre: simple, catchy hooks and melodies, pop-style chord progressions and relatively tame rhythms with pop-style syncopations, with pop-Broadway orchestrations. Sondheim’s music, though, is closer to opera (or at least to classical) than to pop music. The melodies often contain difficult jumps that aren’t typical for vocal music and are more fragmented and motivic than long and flowing. The chord structures are often very complex. And the rhythms are constantly changing and shifting, difficult to pin down to a pattern or single time signature, and more closely follow the pattern of speech than typical musical patterns. I was surprised and impressed when my lovely wife and I watched Into the Woods a few months ago; the performances were good in themselves, but they were terrific considering how difficult the music was.

There’s nothing wrong with Webber’s music, of course; it’s pop-music candy for the ears. But for a substantial meat-and-potatoes meal, Sondheim delivers something unique and masterful that’s quite inspiring to an aspiring composer such as myself.

“Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope”

And with it this series of blog posts! I hope you enjoyed the last two weeks, and aren’t too offended that it was published a year late. Hmmm… what to write about next?

And there’s only one song remaining….

But the reason the song is one of the coolest on the album, as with “Glass of Water,” is the chorus. The chorus of “Rainy Day” is accompanied entirely by strings. No guitar, no drums, no bass. All strings. And to my surprise when I first heard it, it sounds terrific and it works. The basses provide a driving rhythm which ensures that the song doesn’t lose energy or momentum from losing the other instruments and the drums. And the arrangement of the strings is very well done: the basses have the rhythm, there’s an independently moving cello line in the low mid range, and the violins and violas have held notes in the mid and high ranges. The other thing that makes the strings so cool is the sick high cello riff in the middle of the chorus (listen for it, starting with a flattened third, right after the words “slow down”). The range of the line (high for a cello) gives it a great deal of tension on the instrument, which, along with the flattened third, makes it jump out of the texture and bring attention to how rocking it is.

The chord progression in the chorus is VII – IV – I; the song is in E-flat, which means the chord progression is D-flat – A-flat – E-flat. This is a relatively common progression in pop music, and I’ve heard it zillions of times. But I think that “Rainy Day” is the most musically satisfying use of the VII – IV – I progression I’ve ever heard. And the accompaniment is all strings. Brilliant.

The piano interlude after the second chorus confused me for the longest time, because I couldn’t figure out whether the piano arpeggios were triplets (three notes to one beat) or sixteenth notes (four notes to one beat), no matter how hard I listened. But finally, I figured it out, and the reason it’s so difficult to hear is that it alternates between triplets (three notes going up then three notes going down) and sixteenth notes (four notes going up then four notes going down). You have to listen closely, but I’m almost positive that’s what’s happening. In a song called “Glass of Water,” it creates a cool blurred rippling effect that’s very clever and leads into the final chorus, which is instrumental without vocals. My only disappointment in this song is that there isn’t a cooler guitar solo over the instrumental chorus; the song as it is features an electric guitar simply repeating a high F-sharp and A (the third and fifth of the tonic chord D major).

The end of the song consists of a solo piano, voice and quiet electronics, bringing to a close the coolest song on the album and bringing the energy level back down before launching into the second coolest song on the album….