"Music from the Spheres"

For years now, I've had a digital sticky note on my computer desktop reminding me that the phrase "across the universe" in "Music from the Spheres" might be a little nod to the Beatles song "Across the Universe."  I happened to look at this yester-day, and I realized something about that line in the Argent song:  the "universe" is sung with a melisma (B C# D# E), musically giving a sense of the breadth of "across the universe."  At the same time, there's a string glissando*, which gives the same impression of breadth in two different ways: the glissando itself encompasses a large span of notes, and because it's recorded in stereo, it seems to travel from left to right, giving a sense of spatial range.

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*I'd always thought it was a harp glissando, but after listening more closely, I'm not so sure now.  The timbre seems too different.  I think it might actually be piano, played by striking the strings directly, not using the keyboard.  Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer did this on "Take a Pebble," and Rod Argent's mentioned him a few times (for instance, in this interview originally published in March 1975 and - more recently - in this interview from 2017 [in response to a question asked at ~17:33]), so it might even be a bit of his influence.

"Butcher's Tale"

Although my flute skills aren't advanced enough for me to play hardly any of them, I follow the daily music pieces posted on flutetunes.com.  A couple days ago, they posted a piece titled "The Queen's Shilling."  Accompanying the piece, there's a short paragraph that explains that "the queen's shilling" or "the king's shilling" is "a historical slang term referring to the earnest payment of one shilling given to recruits to the Armed forces of the United Kingdom."  Here's Collins' dictionary entry for "king's shilling."

Now that I've learned this term, I finally understand one of the lines in "Butcher's Tale" a bit better: "But the king's shilling is now my fee."