Structure

When analysing the piece of music, it is usually best to get an overall view first. Listen to the song. What you think the structure of this song might be?

You might have noticed that this song consists of verses but there are no choruses. We cannot call this type of song Verse Chorus song structure. This type of structure, where each verse is sung to the same music but there is no chorus, is called strophic form. The opposite of strophic form, with new music written for every stanza, is called through-composed.

How many verses does The Sound of Silence have?

Tempo, Metre and Rhythm

The tempo marking is Moderately and the tempo of the recording is 108 BPM.

Metre is 4/4 quadruple simple time.

The song begins with a 6 quaver anacrusis. Some phrases have a 7 quaver anacrusis.

Anacrusis: When a phrase does not start on the first beat of a bar, the unstressed note(s) before the down beat are called the anacrusis.

The melody mostly moves in quavers with each phrase coming to rest on a long note (ie the semibreve in bar 3). There are occasional syncopations in the form of iambs (ie bar 11 and similar places) and quavers tied to a strong beat (ie bars 23 and 25)

Texture

The texture is homophonic. This means there is a melody and an accompaniment. In this song the accompaniment is an oscillating arpeggio figure known in Classical music as an Alberti Bass.

Tonality

Let us look at the key signature next. We find the key signature at the start of the music between the clef and the time signature. It consists of a number of flat symbols or sharp symbols (never both!). Or there may be no sharps or flats.

If there are no sharps or flats then we are probably in the key of C major.

If you go up in fifths from C (G, D, A etc) then you keep adding a sharp to the key signature each time.

If you go down in fifths from C (F, Bb, Eb etc) then you keep adding a flat to the key signature each time.

The Sound of Silence has the key signature of one flat. So it could be in the key of F major. However every major key has a relative minor key that shares the same key signature. The relative minor of F major is…. D minor. Notice that the first and last chord in this song is D minor (this is always a useful clue when deciding the key of a piece). It makes more sense to describe this piece as being in D minor.

However, there is a problem!

These are the notes used in Sound of Silence. Notice that there is  a Bb and a C natural. The tone between the last two notes, C and D should be the biggest clue that this is not a major or minor scale from our tonal system but a Mode. You may recognize this as the natural minor scale or the descending version of the melodic minor scale. Its proper name is Aeolian Mode and it has the same intervals as the scale of A to A on the white notes. Try playing it on the keyboard for yourself.

Harmony

The song begins with a D sus2 chord. Not having a third means that we cannot tell if this is major or minor. It is ambiguous. The verse makes use of four chords which operate in two pairs. The first pair is C major and D minor. This creates a modal cadence in D minor. We will look at cadences later in the year but basically they are chord progressions that lead to the home chord (usually) or a related chord (V or vi). The usual chord to do this is chord V (dominant) but with a flat 7^th degree we cannot use this. In pop and jazz the modal cadence is known as the Back Door resolution (implying that V – I is the front door).

From bar 6, the harmony changes to an F Bb F progression. This is a plagal cadence (IV-I) in F. F is the relative major of D minor.

So, although there are only 4 chords in this song, they can be seen to belong to two tonal centres and this is part of the character of the song.

Word setting and use of voices

Art Garfunkel sings in a high tenor voice. Word setting is syllabic throughout. The lead part (Garfunkel) is frequently arpeggiated and therefore disjunct. The second part (Simon) largely follows the roots of the chords.