Chapter 9: Some…Data….??

Hello everyone! After the last 3 weeks of reading, reading, and reading, we are finally back to analyze some songs. 

But first, as you may or may not remember from blog 7, I have to reanalyze my songs from the background (macro-level) because otherwise, I would be picking up tiny details from the foreground. 

How did I exactly do that? Well, I tried real hard to listen for the bassbrechung that Schenker deemed important, and here is my data: Long Live (I-IV-vi-V in C Major); Castle on the Hill (I-IV-vi-V in D Major). Honestly, nothing much has changed about my conclusions—and that’s probably because I was semi-altering between background and foreground analysis before. 

Now, after finding and grasping this consistent method of analysis, I started to analyze for my actual data collection (this was actually supposed to happen a few weeks ago…but I got delayed by the 3 weeks of lit review that I did NOT expect…). 

I will just list some of my data here: Die with a Smile (125 in f#m); That’s So True (546 in Db); Birds of a Feather (1625 in D); Die for You (6514 in c#m); photograph (1564 in E); Love Story (1564 in D); Someone Like You (1564 in A); Party in the USA (1365 in F#); and Last Friday Night (1365 in F#).

* I got lazy writing Roman numerals, so I switched to numbers (e.g. 1 = tonic, 2 = supertonic, etc.)

So…about my method, I started out thinking that I would just take a diverse assortment of songs from all American pop composers. But…(unfortunately, there’s always a “but”) after analyzing these 9 songs, I felt this was getting nowhere—if I wanted to use this method, I would have to analyze at least 70 songs or more. 

I wanted a random sample of songs, so I thought of a couple of options: 1) keep the current method and suffer the consequences; 2) do a deep dive on one singer; 3) do a medium-deep dive on a few singers. Anddd….I chose the 3rd option after some debating. 

Regarding what a “medium-deep dive” specifically entails, I will choose 3-4 singers, choose two songs (one with positive/happy lyrics, one with negative/sad lyrics) out of every album they produced, and analyze! The total number of songs I must analyze should be around 50. 

Phew…that’s quite a lot. I’ve already started on it, but I will put all my data in the next blog! See you then!!