Reminder: Brian Wilson and Jeff Beck are on Jimmy Fallon's Show Tonight

[KittyKat]

I had to look up vocal harmony on Wikipedia. Shows what I know.

So, what type of music is "Our Prayer" most reminiscent of? It sounds familiar to me, as though I've heard that style of music in movies or perhaps being exposed to the limited amount of classical music I heard in music appreciation classes in college. What period of music history is it derived from? Is it in the classical realm?

[guitarfool2002]

It's Bach-style chorale writing, most of that was designed to be sung as part of a church service, and with those harmonies it would have been around the time of Bach. In fact, another fascinating bit of info, some of the old cathedrals were designed so the choir could be heard by the audience in "stereo" or even surround sound, and you'd have the various groups of vocalists placed around the church and the place itself designed a certain way for sound reflection and whatnot so the vocal blend would envelop the people in the church. Pretty neat, several hundred years before "stereo". 

There is a possibility that Brian as a student taking music theory and harmony classes probably would have studied and been assigned to write his own examples of this Bach type of chorale writing, it's what all the courses use to teach it and still do. If he took a theory class in school, he'd have a basic knowledge of it from there, plus whatever else he developed and learned on his own after those classes.

[HeyJude]

I'm not sure why "Our Prayer" is considered such an impressive piece of music. It's super-short, it's simple, and it's not that original-sounding. It's a faux Gregorian chant. I don't think it shows off vocals that well, especially since part of is closed-mouth humming. I wish they would have chosen different pieces of music than that or "Danny Boy." Oh, well.

You could hate "Our Prayer" and still recognize that it is not simple. It's very far from simple, especially within any context of "pop" or "rock" music.

[keysarsoze001]

Brian's talked about his love of Bach and how his favored shuffle beat comes from "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring". So yes, I think when he did "Our Prayer" he was purposely trying to ape the sound of devotional music and probably imagined a choir of voices singing it in a cathedral. And of course the last line in the bass part of "Our Prayer" is basically one of the main melodic themes in "Rhapsody in Blue".

That said, as someone who's taught the different parts of "Our Prayer" to singers for a Christmas album I did a year ago, the parts in the middle are the trickiest to learn, which is often the case. Any altos or baritones out there know those mid-range parts are absolute arse to learn.

[rogerlancelot]

A few thoughts:

1) I thought the performance was wonderful. Very tasteful and not at all embarrassing.

2) I went to college for music so once I read Kitty Kat's comparison to Gregorian chant I kind of ignored the rest and kept on.

3) Too many cynics here. Would you have rather they performed "Barbara Fucking Ann" instead?

4) I would love it if Jeff Foskett would double all of my vocals. I sure would sound more like a Beach Boy. I know he's a busy guy but I'll ask him next time I see him.

5) Besides Guitarfool2002's posts (always well written), just a lot of hating amongst fans who have to choose which version of the group they prefer. Think I'll listen to more Pink Floyd instead. Oh wait...

6) I really don't give a damn what anybody thinks about my opinion. I'm really just a fictional character from a Monty Python movie anyway. I'll trade you some of my shrubbery for a ticket to next Friday's concert (which I can record).

7) Why are people hating on Katy Perry? I don't find her particularly offensive in any way.

9) What happened to #8?

Here I am.

11) Now I'm all screwed up, thanks a lot, Roger.

10) Your welcome, Roger.

[Cam Mott]

I suppose they didn't mention Al and David or the Beach Boys [did Jimmy mention BBs?] because it is the Wilson/Beck tour not Beach Boys/Beck tour.

[Iron Horse-Apples]

Saying 'Our Prayer' is Gregorian chant is like calling Bing Crosby a hip hop artist, or JS Bach a classical composer.

[filledeplage]

Saying 'Our Prayer' is Gregorian chant is like calling Bing Crosby a hip hop artist, or JS Bach a classical composer.

This Gregorian Chant thing is interesting.  My background is Roman Catholic.  We used Gregorian Chant in church and in 12 years of Catholic School. The nuns taught us the shortened scale and we didn't know anything different. Its' music staff has four lines and three spaces.  And, the range is theoretically shorter.  The notes look square instead of oval.  And it all "sounds" as if written in a minor mode.  

We sang western conventional music, such as Silent Night, Adeste Fideles, and what one would call traditional European Christmas Carols, alongside the Gregorian stuff.  It is mostly used for the Kyrie, and other "responsorial" type sections of the service.  Lots of controversy surrounded the termination of the Latin Rite Mass, in the middle 1960's.

That is a dramatic over simplification.  But, if you want to see a Latin Rite Mass, just go on YouTube.  There are plenty of examples, just skip over the non music parts.  You can get the sonority of the difference as between the two.  And, specifically it was used in the Western (Rome) Church.  There was a lot of church politics surrounding this at the time.

There must be old hymnals floating around eBay, to compare the two styles of composition.  

I've read where Brian used his "own" kind of music notation, so to judge how it was written, is tough, but just found a traditional sample of sheet music by searching, on the 2004 BWPS.  (Our Prayer)  Looks like 1964 Irving Music, but it is blurry on the iPad.  Hope this is helpful.  The highest vocal note goes down from E to E, in the "low do to high do" so it has the modern music intervals, rather than the shorter tonal range of the Gregorian Mode.  It has 6 flats, so it looks to me like Eflat minor? I'm sure someone will rescue me, here.  It has been a while.  

[mtaber]

All I noticed was that there were 80 gazillion people on stage and nary a word was uttered...

[filledeplage]

Saying 'Our Prayer' is Gregorian chant is like calling Bing Crosby a hip hop artist, or JS Bach a classical composer.

This Gregorian Chant thing is interesting.  My background is Roman Catholic.  We used Gregorian Chant in church and in 12 years of Catholic School. The nuns taught us the shortened scale and we didn't know anything different. Its' music staff has four lines and three spaces.  And, the range is theoretically shorter.  The notes look square instead of oval.  And it all "sounds" as if written in a minor mode.  

We sang western conventional music, such as Silent Night, Adeste Fideles, and what one would call traditional European Christmas Carols, alongside the Gregorian stuff.  It is mostly used for the Kyrie, and other "responsorial" type sections of the service.  Lots of controversy surrounded the termination of the Latin Rite Mass, in the middle 1960's.

That is a dramatic over simplification.  But, if you want to see a Latin Rite Mass, just go on YouTube.  There are plenty of examples, just skip over the non music parts.  You can get the sonority of the difference as between the two.  And, specifically it was used in the Western (Rome) Church.  There was a lot of church politics surrounding this at the time.

There must be old hymnals floating around eBay, to compare the two styles of composition.  

I've read where Brian used his "own" kind of music notation, so to judge how it was written, is tough, but just found a traditional sample of sheet music by searching, on the 2004 BWPS.  (Our Prayer)  Looks like 1964 Irving Music, but it is blurry on the iPad.  Hope this is helpful.  The highest vocal note goes down from E to E, in the "low do to high do" so it has the modern music intervals, rather than the shorter tonal range of the Gregorian Mode.  It has 6 flats, so it looks to me like Eflat minor? I'm sure someone will rescue me, here.  It has been a while.  

Not Eb minor. - duh that is three must be some horrible thing I can't read anyway. Like Gb minor (just found it on wiki!) relative minor is Eb minor ( could have done worse! ) Mea culpa! (pun intended!)  

[Iron Horse-Apples]

Harmonically, I think Our Prayer sounds more baroque than anything else.

I seem to remember David Leaf compared it to a gregorian chant in the two' fer booklet, which is where this misconception may have come from.

[Niko]

Our Prayer uses Oblique Motion, something used often in Gregorian chant.
the wiki definition, just for clarity
"a kind of motion or progression in which one part ascends or descends, while the other prolongs or repeats the same tone, as in the accompanying example."

Some of the jumps between notes are a bit large, but it does follow the rules of Gregorian chant.

[Iron Horse-Apples]

Gregorian chant is plainsong. How can there be parts?

Some of the jumps between notes are a bit large, but it does follow the rules of Gregorian chant.

Yes, and if you add some notes, and take some away, and swop some around, it also follows the rules of 12 note serialism. Spooky!

[guitarfool2002]

From page 4:

About Gregorian chant...This may have been covered on Wikipedia, I didn't read it. But I got a pretty fascinating bit of history that I like telling my students who are studying harmony, and one of the few things I retained from what was an early-morning lecture course on early music history...most times I was either half asleep or worse when I stumbled in for the two-hour lectures.  

Gregorian chant does have harmony, but only very limited and specific harmony. You'll only hear in traditional Gregorian chants the intervals of the perfect 4th or the perfect 5th. If you play guitar, that's the "power chord" sound. In melody, that's the "here comes the bride" notes for the 4th, and the Wizard of Oz chant "oh - we - oh" for the 5th. In Beach Boys terms, the Salt Lake City intro is sliding 4ths/5ths.

When the chants were developed, music was designated solely for sacred performance and use. You were literally not allowed under the church's rule to harmonize using intervals outside the 4ths and 5ths, in fact the "tri-tone" interval which forms a diminished chord, as well as the 7th chord (3rd plus flat 7th is the tritone), was called "diablo musica", or some variant. Rough translation: "devil's music". It was literally outlawed, if you were composing music and used that interval you could be punished for it.

This of course all changed as music and art transitioned out of the "Dark Ages".

And the type of harmony and chorale-style writing for voices developed using 3rds and tri-tone intervals, a technique perfected by Bach. That is perhaps the reason why most if not all music theory courses use Bach as the foundation of the course, in both analyzing and writing examples in that style in order to learn the technique. Of course some developments are studied that came before Bach, but I think it was his chorale writing that codified it.

So, the next time you hear a 7th chord or a diminished chord (as in God Only Knows), keep in mind that at one point in history writing or performing that chord was against the "law".  

Any vocal piece with more than a perfect 4th or 5th interval sung in harmony with the melodic line is not Gregorian chant. I thought that would be enough info to resolve this question back on page 4! 

[guitarfool2002]

I also wanted to apologize for maybe giving a misleading example, for anyone who may have searched for an example of a "Bach chorale" and found exactly that. If you find those examples, you probably heard something more complex, sung by a vocal choir with orchestra, and sung with lyrics and a whole lot of counterpoint and ornamentation of the basic melodies. That was part of the Bach sound, I didn't mean those as direct examples of where "Our Prayer" may have its foundation.

What I meant was that the type of harmonies underlying all of Bach's ornamentation and embellishment were the same types of voice-leading and harmony writing that "Our Prayer" uses. It's actually easier if you're looking for a Bach example to hear the harmonies in any number of his organ pieces. But again, sometimes all of the counterpoint and ornaments can mask the type of chord harmonies going on underneath.

I agree with the musicians who mentioned in the thread the kind of church hymns that have a more simplified type of writing, less about the ornamentation and counterpoints and more about how the chords were blocked out for the vocal parts.

If you can find any traditional church hymnal, many of them follow the same catalog of music, and they're usually arranged in four voices, SATB (soprano-alto-tenor-bass). This was the kind of example we'd most often analyze and dissect, as well as given assignments to "block in" the three voices under a melody (usually in the top voice) using this method.

And I remember reading or hearing specifically that Brian as a music theory student was given this same assignment in his class, where you'd receive a melody, and sometimes specific chord names, then you'd "block in" the remaining three voices to support it.

And if that's any guide, if you hear "Our Prayer", Brian is the melodic lead on top, Mike is the bass, and the others are singing the other chord tones in between. Which is why as was mentioned those middle voices can be the toughest to sing. Sometimes the way you'd need to fit in one crucial chord tone and have it shift to the next chord created a less-flowing or more angular phrase with less obvious notes and wider interval jumps than either the lead on top or the bass.

[Niko]

Gregorian chant is plainsong. How can there be parts?

Some of the jumps between notes are a bit large, but it does follow the rules of Gregorian chant.

Yes, and if you add some notes, and take some away, and swop some around, it also follows the rules of 12 note serialism. Spooky!

My point is not that it is Gregorian chant, but that Oblique Motion gives it the kind of sound that the misconception that it is Gregorian Chant could be drawn from

[runnersdialzero]

The point of KittyKat's post, though, was that "Our Prayer" is some kind of simple dipshit non-unique toss-off that anyone of us could write. I think most folks here would agree, even outside being Brian fans, is just not true. I'm no expert, but I'd go as far as to say that, amid a sea of complex music from that era, this one is near the top in terms of just being really, really well-crafted. Doesn't mean it's necessarily the best or anything, but the notion of it being extremely derivative because omg it's a vocal piece with chamber reverb seems really silly, to me.

[Wylson]

I think the problem here is that a lot of people have learned the term Gregorian chant from That Same Song

[filledeplage]

I think the problem here is that a lot of people have learned the term Gregorian chant from That Same Song

Funny.

They might have heard it in Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. 

[guitarfool2002]

Putting "Our Prayer" into context, at the time in 1966 when the song was originally recorded, were there other bands or artists among Brian's peers in the "pop/rock" field that had done or were doing anything like "Our Prayer"? I can't think of any off the top of my head, if anyone knows of any please chime in!

Within a few short years, there was something of a mini-movement where groups would do "rock prayers", like the Electric Prunes' "Kyrie" from the album "Mass In F Minor" which later ended up in Easy Rider, The Association's "Requiem" which hinted at it in '67, etc., grafting traditional church music sounds onto rock backgrounds or in a rock context.

[KittyKat]

The point of KittyKat's post, though, was that "Our Prayer" is some kind of simple dipshit non-unique toss-off that anyone of us could write. I think most folks here would agree, even outside being Brian fans, is just not true. I'm no expert, but I'd go as far as to say that, amid a sea of complex music from that era, this one is near the top in terms of just being really, really well-crafted. Doesn't mean it's necessarily the best or anything, but the notion of it being extremely derivative because omg it's a vocal piece with chamber reverb seems really silly, to me.

I never said it was "dipshit" and that"anyone of us could write (it)."  It's derivative of other forms, yes, and you seem to have clued into that fact. As have others. I was wrong about saying it was based on Gregorian chant, but then, so was David Leaf.  It's also very short. It's impressive compared to most other pop/rock writers, but if you look at what was happening in music at the time, Brian was not the only person to experiment with other types of music. The Yardbirds did Gregorian chant, for instance. The Beatles were doing Indian music. The Stones with Brian Jones were experimenting with adding world music sounds to pop songs. The Moody Blues were adding orchestrations to pop music. I could go on, but you get the point.

[filledeplage]

The point of KittyKat's post, though, was that "Our Prayer" is some kind of simple dipshit non-unique toss-off that anyone of us could write. I think most folks here would agree, even outside being Brian fans, is just not true. I'm no expert, but I'd go as far as to say that, amid a sea of complex music from that era, this one is near the top in terms of just being really, really well-crafted. Doesn't mean it's necessarily the best or anything, but the notion of it being extremely derivative because omg it's a vocal piece with chamber reverb seems really silly, to me.

I never said it was "dipshit" and that"anyone of us could write (it)."  It's derivative of other forms, yes, and you seem to have clued into that fact. As have others. I was wrong about saying it was based on Gregorian chant, but then, so was David Leaf.  It's also very short. It's impressive compared to most other pop/rock writers, but if you look at what was happening in music at the time, Brian was not the only person to experiment with other types of music. The Yardbirds did Gregorian chant, for instance. The Beatles were doing Indian music. The Stones with Brian Jones were experimenting with adding world music sounds to pop songs. The Moody Blues were adding orchestrations to pop music. I could go on, but you get the point.

Don't be so hard on yourself.  It is "reminiscent" or "harkens back to" that Gregorian Chant. Maybe "inspired" is a better term.  And gf2002 was correct about that forbidden 7th chord.  God Knows why.  Probably some church nonsense.  And, it is impressive. 

Leaf, on the other hand, was a BB author and should have verified underlying facts. 

But, lots of work is derivative and style-generalized. Lots of folk music sounds similar. And basic rock-style as well.  As long as it is not plagiarized, note-for-note, no problem.   

[runnersdialzero]

It's not about "experimenting", though, it should be about how the track is crafted. You're dismissing a song solely based on its style, which is, to me, not a valid reason to do so.

And fuck, if we want to get into discrediting the band solely because this song is kind of derivative of this style or kind of derivative of that style, you may as well give up on the Beach Boys. I'm not saying there wasn't innovation happening at times with the Beach Boys, but again, craft and, you know, the song doing something for you and speaking to you should matter far beyond "It's guys singing harmonies in an echo chamber, it's been done before."

[Cyncie]

It's not about "experimenting", though, it should be about how the track is crafted. You're dismissing a song solely based on its style, which is, to me, not a valid reason to do so.

And fuck, if we want to get into discrediting the band solely because this song is kind of derivative of this style or kind of derivative of that style, you may as well give up on the Beach Boys. I'm not saying there wasn't innovation happening at times with the Beach Boys, but again, craft and, you know, the song doing something for you and speaking to you should matter far beyond "It's guys singing harmonies in an echo chamber, it's been done before."

Agreed. To say something is "derivative" implies that it's just an imitation of someone else's work. I don't see imitation. I see influence. And, if we're going to disregard influence, then we have to disregard most artists, because everyone takes something from others that came before. It's what you do with those influences that matters. I think "Our Prayer" expressed something that Brian wanted to say in "Smile," and it not only did it in a way that was unique for pop/rock at the time, but was also moving and beautifully crafted.

That's all that matters to me.

[mtaber]

Now I'm waiting for someone to rip the crap out of Danny Boy...