Speakers
John Covach
John Covach is Director of the University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. Professor Covach teaches classes in traditional music theory as well as the history and analysis of popular music. His online courses at Coursera.org have enrolled more than 350,000 students in over 170 countries worldwide. He has published dozens of articles on topics dealing with popular music, twelve-tone music, and the philosophy and aesthetics of music. He is the principal author of the college textbook What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock Music (W.W. Norton) and has co-edited Understanding Rock (Oxford University Press), American Rock and the Classical Tradition and Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music (Routledge), Sounding Out Pop (University of Michigan Press) and The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones (Cambridge University Press). He is editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Prog (Cambridge University Press). As a guitarist, Covach has performed widely on electric and classical guitar in both the US and Europe.
“’Of Warmth When You Die’: Yes, Fragility, and Transformation”
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John Covach
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Released in late 1971, Yes’s fourth studio album Fragile features Roger Dean’s cover depicting a fragmenting planet, suggesting that the album’s title perhaps refers to environmental fragility. The opening track of the album, “Roundabout”—which became the band’s best-charting single of the 1970s—addresses the very different fragility of romantic relationships and separation. The lyrics to “Heart of the Sunrise” engage interpersonal alienation in an urban environment, yet another kind of fragility. “South Side of the Sky” reflects on the subject of death and the fragility of life, in this case cast in terms of a team of mountain climbers who perish in the cold. Like the other two extended pieces on the album, “South Side” divides into multiple contrasting sections, with driving, lead-guitar fueled verses yielding to a central section dominated by classical-tinged grand piano and ethereal ensemble vocals sung without lyrics on neutral syllables. This central section provides a musical portrayal of the moment of death, positively cast as a “warm” transformation from this life into the afterlife: death as a rebirth.
The proposed paper will provide a detailed discussion of “South Side of the Sky,” comparing it with other Yes tracks on Fragile. The paper will also trace the band’s return to the topic of death in subsequent tracks, including “Close to the Edge” (which also features a transformative central section) from the next album (1972), “To Be Over” (from Relayer, 1974), and “Turn of the Century” (from Going for the One, 1977). Finally, Yes’s engagement with death will be placed in the larger context of British rock in the early 1970s, especially Genesis’s “Supper’s Ready” (1972) and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974), and Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play (1973).
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Keywords: progressive rock, form, lyrical interpretation, album cover design, musical analysis, history of rock music