Monday, February 10, 2020

The Turn of a Friendly Card

Last night, I figured out about half of the bass part in "Time" (up until ~2:18, just before the bridge).  I was particularly interested in the bit underneath the lines "Who knows when we shall meet again / If ever":


(This is from the second verse; the last measure is a bit different in the first verse.)

There's a chromatic descent, but the notes appear in different octaves.  This is somewhat similar to the bass part in "Nothing Left to Lose" (up until ~2:35, at least), in which a majority of the measures contain the same note just an octave apart.  I wrote about this (and its similarity to the bass part in a movement of one of Bach's orchestral suites) about three years ago, but here's some notation with better formatting than what's in that post:


Both this bit of the bass part in "Time" and most of the bass part in "Nothing Left to Lose" use the octave interval, and that gives a bit of cohesion to The Turn of a Friendly Card.