Performance by Marion Burns:
.
Lyrics:
http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/t/theressomethingintheair.shtml.
Writers:
Bernie Grossman and Cyrus Harold Lewis.
This song, "There's Something In the Air", is from the movie "Sensation Hunters" (1933). It is old, but in my opinion it has not aged much. I love it.
Here, I will take a close look at this song to see how a song made by professionals looks like. Note that I am not an expert in such an analysis.
The performance.
Marion Burns does not move with the music, but I think that was never the intention.
The melody.
The type of music might be described as popular music of the day. I would say that the melody has a hook even according to today's standards. It seems obvious to me that the song runs in 4/4. I have not been able to determine who wrote the music and who wrote the lyrics, Grossman or Lewis; maybe they wrote both together.
The theme of the song.
The theme is kept in the dark throughout the song, but we get vague indications from lines like "My senses are all on fire", "Something that makes an old man get busy with his feet", "Making my feelings bubble", and so on.
The song's structure: AABBCBBBCB.
- To understand this structure designation you have to read the lyrics. To remind you: AA works as an intro, most of the B parts start with "There's something in the air", and the C parts start with: "Something that makes". The melody of the second A part is a bit different from the melody of the first A, but the two melodies are merely variants of each other.
- The song seems to be a Tin Pan Alley song. The AA part is called a "sectional verse", and it precedes the main part of the song. The B parts are verses, and the C parts are middle 8 sections or bridges. We see that the main part of the song has a compound form in that it is a sequence of two BBCB parts, each of which has the classic thirty-two-bar form.
Song part structures.
- Every B part has the same first line except for the second and fifth Bs. By the way, the first lines of these two parts both rhyme with the first lines of the other B parts (through the words "care" and "air").
- Every B part has the same last line.
Rhyming.
- The A parts have internal rhymes. In these parts all the rhyming syllables start at different beats of their respective bars so that the rhymes would not qualify as conventional rhymes, I guess. For instance, "vexing" starts at the third beat of the bar, whereas "plexing" starts at the second beat of the next bar.
- The rhyming structure of a B part is: 0aa0 (0= no rhyme).
- The rhyming structure of a C part is: abab.
- All rhymes are perfect (I've used rhymezone.com to check) except for "Closer" and "No, Sir" because of the different sounds of "e" and "i".
Rhythm.
- The lines of the B parts start with a non-accented syllable with the exceptions:
- The last line of every B starts with "Oh", which is accented. However, if it had been pronounced more naturally, i.e. with a shorter sound and at a more natural time, which is slightly later, it would not have been accented. This way, the last line of every B would have followed the same pattern, as well. Clearly, the "Oh" is made accented on purpose.
- The line "Making my feelings bubble" of the fourth B has the first syllable accented. However, this is obviously done to introduce parallelism between this line and the preceding line.
- One word, "ev'rything", is wrongly accented, because the last syllable, "thing", is accented whereas the first syllable should have been accented.
- The words "something" in the A parts have both syllables accented, whereas only the first syllable should have been accented.
- Two words, "busy" in the first C part and "acting" in the second C part have none of their syllables accented whereas the first ones should have been accented. However, I do not know whether this phenomenon is considered a problem at all, my guess is that it is not.
- The following rhythmic structure starts most bars: an accented syllable followed by two non-accented syllables followed by an accented syllable followed by a non-accented syllable.
- For example, taken from the first B part (/ = accented, - = non-accented):
/ - - / -
bringing a new de...
- This rhythmic structure appears:
- in every bar of every B part except for the bar(s) of the first line of the B parts and
- in every bar of every C part.
- It does not exist in the A parts.
- In the C parts this rhythmic structure starts every line. The same is not true of every line of the B parts except for one line, the line that was mentioned above: "Making my feelings bubble".
