Tales of Mystery and Imagination

I listened to Tales of Mystery and Imagination yester-day and for the first time noticed that the recorder part from "A Dream within a Dream" is reprised near the end of "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."  When I lookt into the parts more closely, I discovered that they are slightly different.

The recorder in "A Dream within a Dream" (starting at ~1:03) is something like this:

In "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," the recorder starts at ~3:29 and repeats throughout the rest of the song:

The keys are different, and some note values have been shortened in "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," but all of the intervals are the same.

"A Dream within a Dream" and "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" are the first and last songs, respectively, on the first side of the original vinyl album.  Since this recorder part appears near the beginning of "A Dream within a Dream" and in the coda of "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," it creates a sort of book-ending effect.

"(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"

I was thinking about "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" yester-day and had a small realization about the line "Just what you need to make you feel better" in the lead vocals at ~1:45.  "Better" is sung with a melisma (I think it's something like Eb F G G F Eb G G F Eb F Eb C, but it gets more difficult to follow at the end), and this articulation gives some sense of the comparative nature of this adverb (more notes for a higher degree).

"(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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This morning I listened to the first disc of The Essential Alan Parsons Project for my Collection Audit project.  I still have to write a post about something I noticed in "Snake Eyes" (which I'll reblog here), but first, I figured out the recurring guitar phrase in "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."  As I was listening to it, it sounded pretty easy; the only difficulty (which wasn't even that difficult) was determining that one of the notes is bent.

I doubled-tracked this, mostly because my tone doesn't match that well and I thought double-tracking it would help, but I think it might be that way in the original too.

"(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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This post contains some spoilers for the Poe story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."

The other thing I noticed when I listened to Tales of Mystery and Imagination a few days ago is in "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."  I'd previously noted that the melody from "The Raven" appears near the end, but it wasn't until now that I realized the implications of its reappearance.

It's not really revealed in the APP song (although looking at the lyrics just now, I noticed that the line "At the far end of your tether" Spoonerizes "Tarr" and "Fether" to "far" and "tether" [albeit missing an R]), but in the Poe story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," the narrator comes across a party in a house, and he later discovers that the house is an asylum and that the party-goers are the inmates who have escaped their cells (I read it about two years ago, so I might have a few things wrong, but that's the basic story).

The significance here is that "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" involves an asylum.  Since the melody from "The Raven" reappears at the end of the APP song, it indicates either that the singer/speaker of "The Raven" was so overcome by the bird that he's now in the asylum or - based only on the APP lyrics and disregarding Poe's story - the titular system is something that the singer/speaker of "The Raven" is trying to benefit by.  Of course, it could be both too (or neither).