I did an analysis of "You Won't See Me" some years ago which I presented at the Western New York chapter meeting of the AMS. I was able to account for every note of the piece without referring to chord progressions at all, and I will never believe that the structure I unearthed was unconscious. In the same paper I demonstrated that the underlying techniques were prominent in many, many other Beatles songs, regardless of composer, and were derived from incidental features of some of their earliest songs. Pollack correctly notes the importance of descending chromatic tetrachords in the song, but fails to note their generative power in the actual creation of the piece, because like everybody else he assumes that the chords were born fully-formed and that their inner workings must therefore be > secondary.
To wh. Darcy:
I must admit I don't know exactly what you mean by that last sentence. Did you look at his analysis of "Blackbird"? There Pollack (correctly, I think) eschews all but the most basic chord symbols, and concentrates almost exclusively on the voice-leading (i.e., all those tenths). Is that something like what you are getting at here?
Well sorta, but all he does is put the voices up there w.o doing any real analysis. What I meant was that Pollack always seems to assume that the harmony in a given song was created by generating a chord progression, the internal voice-leading properties of which were then picked out and brought forward, whereas I believe that very often the Beatles composed by genuinely contrapuntal means.
Maybe I'll put my analysis up on the web. Pollack has certainly got me thinking...
Please let me know if you do. Or if you don't, perhaps you would be so kind as to email it to me? I'd love to see it.
It's more work than I think I want to do right now (especially because the original is written in a pompous academic style to fit its original audience, and I'd want to do a lot of rewriting for web purposes). Here's the skeleton of it:
Create 3 staves, key of A. On the bottom staff, enter 18 mm. of unbroken tonic drone. On the middle staff, enter 4 descending chromatic tetrachords, one note per bar, starting on E, E, G and E respectively; in the remaining two bars of that staff, repeat the preceding two bars. Now in each bar, look at the pair of notes you've written, and pick the most dead obvious third note that you would add to make a chord (do *not* pay any attention to the progression you're creating, and try to forget everything you learned about chord voicings in Music Theory class), and put that note in the top staff. In other words, if you have a third or a fifth, complete it as a root-position triad; complete 4ths and 6ths as second inversion triads, and complete all dissonances as "dominant" seventh chords. Finally, change the top-staff note in mm. 15 and 17 from F# to B.
If you now play the sequence of notes you entered in the top line,you'll find that you have generated all the main melody notes for the verse of "You Won't See Me," and my suggestion is that the method you just used to duplicate the song was the one the Beatles used to create it in the first place. The bridge is a little more complicated, but uses essentially the same technique.
While no other Beatles song uses this method quite so rigorously, it is clearly employed as a songwriting resource throughout their middle and late period (in the chorus of "Eleanor Rigby," for example). The basic principle--throwing a chromatic line against a drone and filling in the blanks--derives, I think, from the incipient chromaticism inherent in some of the harmonic special effects in their early songs ("How could I dance with another, OOH!"), and the concern for voice-leading perceptible in the harmony vocals of even their earliest work.
-- Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press
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