Sweetpea
Group: Members
Posts: 1476
Joined: April 2007 |
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Posted: May 16 2008, 03:13 |
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This recent post, by nightspore, regarding Tubular Bells II...
| Quote | | Personally, it's my favourite. In classical terms it's the most sophisticated, too, in the attention given to leitmotifs, transformation of themes, etc. Mike's no doubt intense familiarity with every note of the original TB, and the great musical experience had had acquired in the meantime, clearly enabled him to see vast possibilities in the material, and to take advantage of it with some very skillful writing - without losing and, indeed, surpassing the emotional intensity of the original. It's a wonderfully joyous composition, too,whereas the first TB was impressive more because of its sinister feeling, its speaking of shadows. |
...got me thinking about how Mike sometimes revisits melodies. Of course this occurs within individual albums, but I'm mainly referring to inter-album instances. In the case of Tubular Bells, I think the reconstruction exercises have been worth the effort and criticism of repetition. To me, "Introduction", "Sentinel", "Tubular World", "Secrets", "Harbinger", etc. (I'm probably missing one or two?) are beautiful pieces of music. I wish I were capable of disecting each and expounding their merits, but I can only say that I love them.
But Tubular Bells isn't the only example of the reuse of musical ideas. "Roses" might have been merely an obscure little gem within the monstrosity (and I mean that in the most flattering way) that is Amarok. Thankfully, we are given the rosebush, so to speak, in The Songs of Distant Earth. While it appears in several parts ("Let There Be Light", "Oceania", and "Ascension"), this tune is not treated as exploratorily as the variations of "Introduction", but rather as reinforcement of its pure melodic character. Its use on The Songs of Distant Earth gives "Roses" a stature and power that is surprising considering its original humility in Amarok.
I do find this revisiting/reworking/reconstructing of musical ideas fascinating. Perhaps that's partly due to my slowness in catching on to it. Really, I had to have someone point out the "Roses"/"Let There Be Light" connection, as well as some others.
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"I'm no physicist, but technically couldn't Mike both be with the horse and be flying through space at the same time? (On account of the earth's orbit around the Sun and all that). So it seems he never had to make the choice after all. I bet he's kicking himself now." - clotty
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