From: awp@world.std.com (Alan W Pollack)
Subject: Notes on "I've Just Seen A Face" (IJSAF)
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 02:43:57 GMT

		 ============================================
		|| Notes on "I've Just Seen A Face" (IJSAF) ||
		 ============================================


KEY	A Major

METER	4/4 (2/2, a.k.a. "cut time", may be more accurate)

FORM	Intro -> Verse -> Verse -> Refrain -> 
		Verse -> Refrain -> Verse (solo) -> Refrain -> 
			Verse -> Refrain -> Refrain -> Refrain -> Outro
		


GENERAL POINTS OF INTEREST


Style and Form
--------------
- Aside from the delightfully unplugged arrangement, and a greater 
  than ever amount of attention paid to compositional detail, this song 
  manifests a button-busting sense of energy that is timeless and most 
  compelling.

- The form is reasonably clear in some sense, but it's also unusually
  complicated and would appear to have absorbed the influence of several
  styles.  The two verses in a row near the beginning are pure pop/rock.
  The strict alternation of verse/refrain in the second half is rather
  folksy.  The triple refrain as an outro is reminiscent of the R&B
  rave up.  And the whole thing is lead off by an extraordinary intro 
  that is not so easily pigeonholed.
  

Melody and Harmony
------------------
- Only four chords are used but this very limited number of them
  are cleverly deployed so as to alternately suggest two different 
  styles: the pop/rock cliche of I-vi-IV-V in the verses, and the
  bluesy V-IV-I in the refrains.

- Melodically we find several trademarks yet again: the noodling around
  within a tight pitch range during the verses, with the headroom freed
  up somewhat during the refrain.  The tune is also shot through with
  Paul's much favored appoggiaturas; I'll spot you "face" and "place"
  in the opening phrase, but you've got to find the rest of them on
  by yourself -- have you no natural resources of yer own ? :-)


Arrangement
-----------
- The instrumental texture is most strongly characterized by the folksy 
  sound of several crisply recorded acoustic guitars.  And yet, the use 
  of (what sound like to me as) jazzy wire brushes in place of the usual 
  wood sticks for the drum kit, not to mention overdubbed maracas (in the 
  refrains and guitar solo) create subliminal free associations with other 
  styles.

- Paul is closely *single* tracked for a change on the lead vocal, the
  more intimately for us to feel the slight quiver in his voice.  During 
  the refrains, he provides his own contrapuntal backing part in the same
  nasally affected C&W voice used to back Ringo in "Act Naturally."



SECTION-BY-SECTION WALKTHROUGH


Intro
-----
- This fully instrumental introduction is unusually long and musically
  involved.  On the one hand, it features an oscillating motif in slow
  triplets that never shows up again for the remainder of the piece. And
  yet, the long scalar bassline whose full octave span stretches out over 
  the complete length of the intro has embedded within its ending the 
  ubiquitous "La-da-da da'n'da" hook phrase (i.e. D->C#->B AG#->A).

- The slow triplet pulse creates a deceptive sense of tempo.  When the
  verse finally kicks in with its four-square beat that is sustained
  for the remainder of the song you have a gear-shifting feeling of
  acceleration as though the tempo had changed.  But this is entirely
  an illusion, anticipating what would show up later, even more forecefully,
  in "We Can Work It Out."  If you count the measures in "two half" time
  instead of the twice-as-fast 4/4 you'll more easily grasp the extent
  to which the underlying tempo is constant.
  
- The illusion of acceleration is abbeted by the phrasing.  The intro
  has an unusual ten-measure length and is built out of three phrases, 
  the last one of which is foreshortened and thus "hastens" the arrival 
  of the first verse.  In any event, this feeling of speed is one that is
  particularly effective in the song's album-opening context of the 
  'American' _Rubber Soul_ line-up where you feel drawn straight into
  the entire LP by it, not just the first song.
	
- Harmonically, the song opens subtly away from the home key but
  quickly converges upon it.  Even though the bassline line starts
  off, unaccompanied, with the pitch of the home key, the first chord
  is f# and until you reach the end of this section the sense of
  harmonic grounding is quite suspended; similar to, though not
  quite as intense as, the opening of "Help!".

- In order to better elucidate the truly fine detail of this intro,
  I've included in the schematic below a precis of both the bassline
  and top voice along with the usual harmonic information.  In the
  latter department note the unusual sonority created in measures
  6 and 7 by the "non-harmonic" passing tones, and the handling of 
  the E chord in measures 9 and 10 with an appoggiatura instead of 
  the the root note in the bass:
  


top-most line:	|F#	|A	|C#	|F#	|
chords:		|f#	|-	|-	|-	|
bassline:  A G#	|F#	|-	|-	|-   E  |
A Major:	 vi



top-most line:	|D	|E	|F#	|-	|
chords:		|D	|- 9/6/4|- 7	|-	|
bassline:	|D	|-	|-	|-   C# |
		 IV


				|verse --->
top-most line:	|E	|D	|C#
chords:		|E 6/4	|- susp	|A
bassline:	|B	|A   G#	|A
		 V		 I


Verse
-----
- The verse is blues-influenced to the extent that its form is twelve
  measures long, consists of three phrases, and its harmonic rhythm is 
  mostly slow throughout.  Note, though, that the chord progression used
  is distinctly *pop*:


	|A	|-	|-	|-	||f#	|-	|-	|-	||
	 I				  vi



	|D	|-	|E	|A	||
	 IV		 V	 I



- The first two phrases are virtually identically, tune-wise, though
  they sound different simply because of the chord change, not to mention
  the unfolding lyrics.  

- The bassline motif of the intro is continued here albeit abbreviated in 
  length.  In measures 3-5 the tune marches down the scale in parallel 
  10ths with the bass, but note how the same basic idea idea in  measures
  7-9 makes for parallel 5ths!
  

Refrain
-------
- The refrain is eight measures long and parses into a couplet of two
  short phrases that are balanced out by one longer one ('AAB'):


	|E	|-	|D	|-	|A	|D	|A	|-	|
	 V		 IV		 I	 IV	 I


- The chord progression and the unique appearance within the song of a
  melodic minor 3rd (on the first syllable of the word 'calling') give
  this section a slightly more bluesy feel than the rest of what
  surrounds it.


Solo
----
- The solo is an almost slavish replicate of the tune, but one that is
  cleverly transformed in character by the Countrified, rhythmically
  flat rendering of it.

- The slight departure from the tune in the final three measures 
  (the guitar melodically harmonizing a 3rd below where the tune
  itself should be) is a most welcome variations, especially as it
  is followed by that 'bon mot' flourish one octave up right at the 
  end.


Outro
-----
- The use of a triple repeat to signal the approaching end of a song is
  quite a well-worn Beatles trademark.  We're used to seeing this trick
  used on the scale of a 'petit reprise' of a phrase no longer than
  two to four measures in length.  The repeat here of an entire eight
  bar chorus is rather unprecedented.

- There's an unusual and shameless bit of "stumbling" word painting 
  in the final repeat where Paul throws in that extra "oh!" and sounds
  literally as though falling; but it works quite nicely.

- The last refrain runs out into a little instrumental reprise that
  is redolent with associations to what we had heard earlier on in
  the song.  Primarily, we have a snippet of the last part of the
  intro which adds a bookend formal symmetry and allows the song
  to be ultimately summarized by its "La-da-da da'n'da" hook phrase.
  But even that final strummed guitar chord seems to resonate with 
  what I had described as the 'bon mot' ending of the solo section.



SOME FINAL THOUGHTS


- By this point they had been freely borrowing and blending various
  stylistic elements of pop, rock, folk, blues, and still other styles 
  for quite a while.  Still, this otherwise sweetly simple "folk rock" 
  song really pushes the envelope in terms of the sheer number of diverse 
  styles juggled simultaneously as well as the effortlessly seamless 
  manner in which they are fused.

- In the final result though, if resonance has any thing to do with 
  why you find this song enduring, I'll bet it's not so much in scholarly
  terms of style, but rather in those not so easily verbalized ones of 
  your own experience.  If you are, let's say, of the type who, when 
  romantically enthused (you should only be so lucky!), tends to start 
  talking rapidly, getting all inarticulate and muckle mouthed about it 
  in the bargain, then you're likely to find Paul's patter-song-like 
  syllabic delivery of the words of this song, up to and including his
  momentary retreats into scat phonemes, rather apropos, maybe even 
  truly inspired.



Regards,
Alan (awp@bitstream.com *OR* uunet!huxley!awp)


---
"I want all the world to see we've met."			010593#73 
---								H   B   s

                Copyright (c) 1993 by Alan W. Pollack
                          All Rights Reserved

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