Song of the week #7
Watercress Line
I enjoy playing with words in my songs, whether it is an unlikely near-rhyme (such as “team they can follow” and “plough a lone furrow” in my song Some People) or a classical device known as anadiplosis (repeating the last words of a line at the beginning of the next line as in Childish Dream). So I found it very frustrating when I came up with a catchy tune that I couldn't fit words to.
The tune of Watercress Line began, like many of my songs, as an academic exercise - a “what would happen if…” experiment.
I've always been fascinated by the rhythm of Irving Berlin's Puttin' on the Ritz. The verse contains a rising phrase of four notes but the rhythmic trick here is that each of these phrases lasts for seven quavers - one quaver short of the eight which make up a bar of 4/4 common time. The four-note phrases gradually get “out-of-sync” with the 4/4 bars but order is restored by the two crotchets at the end of the four-bar pattern. A quick check of the seven-times table reveals how this done. Four seven-quaver phrases take up 7x4 = 28 quavers. The two crotchets at the end bring the total to 32 quavers which is what you would expect from four bars of 4/4. The following graphic should hopefully make this long-winded explanation clearer:
You can listen to Bertie Wooster (!) playing Puttin' on the Ritz here. The joke here is that, of course, Hugh Laurie is a highly accomplished jazz pianist and would have known how to play it without Jeeves' (Stephen Fry's) incorrect guidance - spoiler alert: it's NOT a syncopated 5/4!
Anyway, I digress… My “what would happen if...” experiment was to play Irving Berlin's tune upside-down. I did so and out popped a rather catchy foot-tapping melody. For a while I called it Just Because although I never got any further than that with the lyrics.
The tune languished on my “Songs to be completed” pile until I decided to cut the Gordian Knot and turn it into an instrumental tune. I'd progressed a little way into the arrangement when it started to make me think of steam trains so I contacted my brother Alan who is a steam-train enthusiast and a rather good photographer. I asked him if he had any photos of trains on the Mid-Hants Railway (commonly known as the "Watercress Line") and he sent me some amazing photos. The result of this Parks-brothers collaboration can be seen below.
I'm rather pleased with my brass arrangement on this track - especially the bit near the end where the tuba is grunting very low down!
(Obviously no lyrics for this Song of the Week!)
