Listening for America by Rob Kapilow

Author:Rob Kapilow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

The book had said Kansas was an arid place where not even flowers grew. The only colorful thing Dorothy saw, occasionally, would be the rainbow. I thought that the rainbow could be a bridge from one place to another. A rainbow gave us a visual reason for going to a new land and a reason for changing to color. “Over the Rainbow Is Where I Want To Be” was my title, the title I gave Harold. A title has to ring a bell, has to blow a couple of Roman candles off. But he gave me a tune with those first two notes. I tried I’ll go over the rainbow, Someday over the rainbow. I had difficulty coming to the idea of Somewhere. For a while I thought I would just leave those first two notes out. It was a long time before I came to Somewhere over the rainbow.16

Interestingly enough, the “bridge from one place to another” that Harburg refers to is already set up beautifully before the song even begins. After Dorothy tries to tell her aunt and uncle about the unfortunate incident between the town spinster Miss Gulch and Dorothy’s dog Toto, an annoyed Aunt Em tells Dorothy to “find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble.” Though Aunt Em is simply referring to an actual, physical place on the farm where Dorothy won’t get into trouble, as Dorothy reflects on this, she turns the real into the metaphorical, saying to Toto, “Some place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat, or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain.” This little scene elegantly creates a “bridge from one place to another”—from the reality of Dorothy’s Kansas farm to the world of her imagination, a world that comes to life with the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow.”

In a musical language utterly different from the through-composed, non-repetitive style of “Stormy Weather,” “Over the Rainbow” has only two melodic ideas in its famous opening (Ex. 10.1). The first I will call “leap,” and the second “circle-and-yearn.” The full-octave leap on “somewhere” is enormous for the opening of a popular song. It’s a leap between two different parts of the voice—and between two different worlds. The first note is low, almost in chest voice. It’s Dorothy’s troubled reality—Kansas, aridity, no flowers, the black and white of the opening of the film. The second note is higher, lighter, and more ethereal. It’s “over the rainbow,” Oz, the place she wants to escape to. The other melodic idea occurs in the second measure, on “over the rainbow.” It begins on a B, circles back to a B, and then yearns upward to a C. These gestures—leap and circle and yearn—are the two key musical ideas of the song.

There are three leaps in the opening phrase. The first one, on “somewhere,” is the largest—a full octave (C–C).

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