Reworking OK Computer Pt. II
Continued from:
The Score so Far
This project remains an effort to produce a catalog of meaningful paper documents. These articles are merely meant to encourage me to carry out the work. The score is not, at present, in a developed enough state for it to be of meaning to the content of this article.
Harmony
In future, I will be recording brief segments of music that I wish to use for the purposes of demonstration directly from the record. This should make individual portions of the music I want to highlight far more digestible. The copy I bought, unfortunately, came warped at the edge, and this prevents me from accessing the early portions of Airbag. The rhythm guitar comes in around the 27 second mark in this clip, which is cued up to start at the 25 second mark. The bass line comes in around the 33 second mark.
Fundamentally, I hear the chords as
F-Aminor-Gminor-C-F
or, in Roman numeral notation
I-iii-ii-V-I
This is how a I-iii-ii-V-I chord progression sounds on guitar:
Adapting guitar-based popular music to the piano requires considerable divergence from the original, in part because the strum pattern of a guitar extends the interest of harmonies, whereas on the piano they can seem bland. This allows for popular guitar-based music to make use of a single harmony for one or more measures without killing all interest. Reproducing the recording with as much fidelity as I can muster is not the goal of this project, nor do I find it particularly interesting. For the sake of investigating the original, however, I have annotated a figured bass for this progression, and this same chord progression, along with the melody, sounds like this on the piano:
An ability to parse the bass line, to understand it, and reproduce it, is the readiest means of understanding a piece of music’s harmonic structure. When learning a piece of classical music, it helps considerable to hear out the bass line, much like they were the melody, and the bring this out in the performance of the piece. The bass line of classical pieces can be just as florid as the melody, which is largely a reflection of the contiguous and varied harmonic progressions. Harmonic progressions in popular music tend to be far simpler, and the bass lines are typically rather concise in commercially accessible songs. There are often only two distinct bass lines, one for the tonic section of the song, and one for the modulation to the dominant harmony.
In Airbag, it seems that there is more or less one harmonic function for the baseline, although there are frequent variations on the specific notes and its frequency. The bass part here is not integrated floridly with the harmonic structure and does not make for an ideal bass line to demonstrate the principles described above. An ability to hear out the notes and notate these, therefore, does not offer a wealth of information about harmonic progression. Accordingly, I have attempted to hear out the harmonic changes from the rhythm guitar and reason them out based on the melody, whereas the bass part I have merely reproduced directly in the notation and positioned in an appropriate place. What is important for now is that the bass notes describe F-major on the downbeats, which is the tonic harmony. Here is how I hear the first bass notes, along with the notation.
Up Next
There are three options, as I see it, for producing a score for piano based on the original. The first, which is the method of the material presented so far in this article, is to more or less orchestrate the music for piano by notating the various parts and then adapting them for playability. The second option is to explicitly impose a new harmonic structure, like the figured bass example from the previous article. The third option is to derive music implicitly through a fugue-like structure. As I work through the songs on OK Computer, I expect to employ the three methods variously. I have begun work on each of these methods on stave paper for Airbag. I hope to have them in a developed enough state for next month in order to discuss these different approaches.
I have notated the piece, nominally, in F-minor. In the harmonies described above, I have used F-major as my tonic harmony. I will attempt to describe the major-minor nature of the music, that is how the music switches from major to minor throughout the piece.