Final Assessment Qn1

Final Assessment



Question 1: Consolidation and self-reflection of blog posts


My selected area of focus was Rock music, an area which I was completely alien to, and finally decided to narrow my scope and look only at music written by the Beatles as they were the ones who have impact Rock culture in the 1960s the most.

My most significant learning point was the identifying of mixture harmonies, and this came only at the very end of this assignment which was from the individualized assessment questions. Before that while doing the analysis of these three Lennon and McCartney songs, it did not occur to me that primary and modal mixtures were used and were not aware of them. Being able to identify them later on helped me have a better understanding of mixture harmonies especially in ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ where the primary mixture was used and also the modal mixture of Lydian mode as described further in Question 2.

Another insight was seeing how very simple melodies in those songs were treated that they can be used many times but yet does not get boring at all. An example is ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ which has very simple and repeated melodic ideas but remain interest by having unconventional underlying harmonies. It also does not stick to one idea for a long period of time as we see that this song has three short sections with different ideas for each.



There is a question yet to be answered from the comments of the very last post on 31 March 2007 regarding the key of the introduction of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. I too also struggled to decide if the key should be in E minor or G major as both were possible options, but in the end I still decided that there was a stronger sense of E minor. A possible reason why Jeanette felt a stronger sense of E minor only in the verse as said in her comments could be because the verse uses an E minor pedal like a drone and briefly switching to C major and back again to E minor.