I listened to The Sicilican Defence this morning and noticed a particular synthesizer phrase in "P-Q3." It starts at ~2:36 and is something like:
There's a ritardando beginning around the seventh measure, and I'm not sure of the note value of that last F.
Some of the phrases in this melody (measures one, three, and five) alternate between progressively lower notes and notes of a fixed pitch. I think this is a feature from baroque music, although the only specific piece that I know has this is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565. Here it is (alternating with both descending and ascending notes) in the pedal part:
In the line "You can grow a hedge that is vertically straight over ten feet high" in "Pyramania," the phrase "ten feet high" is sung to a group of ascending notes (B C D), musically giving a sense of this height.
While searching for an easy part to figure out yester-day, I noticed two small features in "The Cask of Amontillado," specifically in the line "When you're chained in the dark all alone." "All alone" alliterates, and because there's only one initial sound, there's an illustration of that singularity. "Alone" is sung with a melisma (Eb C D C Bb), musically giving a sense of degree (for "all").
I'm not sure if "the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth" really applies to the album's concept though. The liner notes of the CD re-issue describe the concept as "man's inhumanity to man."
I was going through some old notes last night, and I found one about "Stereotomy" from 7 March that I'd forgotten about. Almost all of the "Turn me to stone" lines are sung to a single pitch: the first two (at ~1:35) are sung to F notes, and the later two (at ~5:10) are sung to A notes. (The last two [at ~5:37] are both sung to more than one pitch). This constancy of pitch musically represents the immobility of being a stone.
Aside from the introduction, my first post for this project was a recording of the palm-muted guitar chords and electric piano phrase in "Eye in the Sky," and I commented that one of the chords "sounds a bit weird, but I don't know if that's because it's wrong or just because the rest of the parts aren't there." It turns out it was wrong.
After I listened to Eye in the Sky last month, I discovered that I'd never written down the electric piano phrase, so I re-learned it (and wrote it down). I had written down the chords, but in revisiting the song, I discovered that what I'd thought was a Bb major is actually a G minor. It doesn't particularly come across in my new recording because it's mostly the bottom three strings of the guitar that are played (G D G').
When I made my recording five years ago, I was limited in my keyboard sounds, but since I got a Nord Electro 5 about two years ago, I can now more accurately reproduce the Wurlitzer that Eric Woolfson played on the track. I added some chorusing and panning too, but I'm not sure if the original has that or not.
Unlike last time where I played the chords for the whole song, this is just the introduction and the first verse. Were it not for my previous mistake in the chord progression, I wouldn't have even recorded that much because all I know of the verses are the chords, and they're a bit boring to listen to on their own.
Here are the chords, which I still might have wrong, but which are at least a bit more accurate than what I used in my last recording:
Introduction/Coda
|: B minor | G major :|
Verses
|: D major | B minor :|
G major | G minor | D major | E major
D major | G major | D major
Choruses
|: D major | F# minor :|
G major | G minor
|: B minor | G major :|
EDIT (29 April): YouTube deleted my video, citing it as "inappropriate content" (!?), so I posted it on Twitter:
In the lines "A dreamer must be / Someone who has more determination than me" in "Inside Looking Out," "determination" is sung with a melisma (F# F# F# F# B B: the "na" is sung with two syllables/notes - F# B), musically giving a sense of that "more."
In "Standing on Higher Ground," in the second of each pair of "Way above it all"s, the "all" is sung with a melisma (G F), musically giving a sense of breadth.
I noted before that in "La Sagrada Familia," "tears" in the line "And for all those years our eyes and ears were filled with tears," is sung with a melisma (D C# B F#) for a sense of amount, but a couple months ago, I discovered that "filled" is also sung with a melisma (Bb A) for a similar effect.
"Tears" is also sung with a melisma in the stand-alone "Filled with tears," although it's the same pitch (F# F#).
In the lines "Risin' on the crest of a natural wave / That never seems to break my way" in "Step by Step," the "way" is sung with a melisma (D D C C, I think), so while "break" is negated, there is a musical sense of fragmentation.
