Saturday, May 20, 2017

"Gemini"

A couple weeks ago, I figured out some of the vocal parts for "Gemini," by which I mean I not only figured out the notes but also notated them (although I'm not too confident in some of my note values).  Thinking about them later, I realized that there are many instances of twos in the music, ostensibly to portray the "two-ness" of Gemini, which is the sign of the twins in astrology.

For the first two verses, the lyrics are comprised solely of two-syllable words (save for "believing").  Usually, each word is sung to two quarter notes, and the rest of the measure has a two-beat rest (again, save for "believing," which is sung to three quarter notes, the first of which encroaches on the measure ahead of it).

The two verses are:
Watching waiting rising falling
Listening calling drifting
And
Touching feeling seeing believing
Hoping sending leaving
The melody for the lead vocal is something like this:


In the second verse, there's a two-voice backing vocal ("I see your shadow coming closer everyday") that consists mostly of half notes (which receive two beats each):


Like I mentioned above, I'm not too confident on some of my note values (and - as always - I might not have even figured out these parts correctly), but it's clear that there are a lot of musical elements in these two verses that emphasize twos.

In the liner notes to the deluxe edition of The Turn of a Friendly Card, Eric Woolfson's daughter Sally writes that "he didn't read or write annotated music" (which why he recorded musical ideas on numerous cassette tapes).  Because he didn't use notation, I'm not sure whether these various instances of musical twos were intended or not.  Notation makes them more obvious (I never noticed them when just listening to the song), but notation certainly isn't necessary for these elements to exist in the song.