Monday, November 22, 2021

"I Must Move"

I was thinking about "I Must Move" yester-day and realized that there's some significance to the shape of the vocal melody in the chorus.  It's something like:


The lyrics here are:
I must move on, must move on; I can't stand still
I must move on, must move on, must go
(I'm still a bit unsure about my transcription though; some of those "on"s might be "I"s.)

Like I noted before (but had completely forgotten), the phrase "can't stand still" is sung entirely to A notes, so while it's negated, there's a musical sense of "stand[ing] still."  In contrast to this, the rest of the melody here rarely stays on the same pitch (there are two sequential Ds at the beginning and three sequential Cs in the next measure).  The melody itself has a sort of wandering nature that mirrors the narrator's need to "move on."