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Understanding Rock
guitar. And I sing anything. I play anything. And I wait till I come across a pleasing accident. Then I start to develop it. Once you take a piece of musical information, there are certain implications that it automatically contains—the implication of that phrase elongated, contracted, inverted or in another time signature. So you start with an impulse and go to what your ear likes."10 The importance for Simon of the play of implications, both those realized and those thwarted, will be explored in much of the analysis below. Simon is chiefly known for compositions of the 1960s and 1980s that are diatonic both on the surface and at structural levels, but much of his work of the 1970s is characterized by a sophisticated handling of innovative chromatic structures, enabling one to hear a career-spanning arch-shaped curve of tonal complexity in his work from 1964 through 1990. His early folk-based Simon and Garfunkel recordings (1964 -1970)H are either strictly diatonic (tonal, as in "I Am a Rock," or modal, as the dorian "The Sounds of Silence") or—beginning with their third album (1966) — make use of one or two embellishing applied chords (as in "Homeward Bound" and the later "Mrs. Robinson" and "The Boxer"). Mode mixture appears on the 1968 album Bookends (in "Old Friends" and "Overs") and in the title track from Bridge over Troubled Water (1970), but it is not generally characteristic of Simon's writing. Neither tonicization nor modulation is in evidence in this body of work. Similarly, sixteen of the twenty-one songs on Simon's last two albums, Graceland (1986) and Rhythm of the Saints (1990) (both promotions of world musics), are completely diatonic within a single major-minor system, and four other songs on these albums shift abruptly between two tonal areas that are themselves prolonged without chromaticism; only one of these twenty-one songs ("Further to Fly") has any degree of chromaticism. Thus, Simon's chromatic music from the mid to late 1970s constitutes a kind of midpoint in an arch that stretches from the diatonic music of the Simon and Garfunkel years to the diatonicism of Simon's more recent music, not unlike the way that "Night Game" inserts a chromatic bridge between two diatonic verses. In 1983, Simon put his interest in the total chromatic (as discussed in relation to "Night Game") into a context that directly relates to the "arch of complexity": "I have gone through different phases in my music writing. There was a time when I used a little exercise—incorporating all of the twelve notes in the chromatic scale—to get me going. I used this technique for a while, but I don't any longer because I am going back to simpler melodies. Originally I moved away from the simple songs because I thought they were too simple."12 An experimental composition, "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright," on his last album before the break with Garfunkel (1970) points to an early interest in chromaticism that subsequently matured through the 1970s, gaining in intensity with the tonally adventurous 1973 recording There Goes Rhymin' Simon and peaking in the 1975 album Still Crazy after All These Years and the soundtrack for the 1980 film OneTrick Pony. All twenty songs of these latter two jazz-influenced collections evidence some interest in chromatic voice leading, and those with the deepest chromatic structures will be discussed in detail. The six-year span between the chromatic One-Trick Pony and the diatonic Graceland is divided by a single new album, Hearts and Bones (1983); significantly, this album is largely diatonic, though it does include two songs based on chromatic