Song: Death and the Maiden

Artist: The Verlaines

Songwriters: Graeme Downes

Release date: 1983. Re-released on the Juvenilia compilation in 1987.

Genre: Alt-Rock, Post-Punk, The Dunedin Sound

Key: A Major

Chords in Key:

Intro and Verse

Death and the Maiden is written for drums, electric guitar, bass guitar, organ, and vocals. Throughout the song, the tonality of the chords changes according to notes sung in the vocal; it is not uncommon in Death and the Maiden to find major, minor, sus2 and sus4 variants of the chords in A Major.

The intro begins on the tonic, then moves to the submediant in the second bar of the first verse. The following chord is an F Major, a mixture chord (from the enharmonic minor), however it then returns to diatonic chords from the original key of A Major. The sequence finishes on the dominant chord, setting up a perfect cadence between the last chord in the sequence and the first chord when it repeats. This pattern forms the harmony behind the verse, with the clean electric guitar with single-coil pickups playing against a bass guitar mostly playing straight semiquavers. The pre-chorus speeds up the chord changes and emphasises this by using sixteenth notes on the bass, guitar, and snare drum, creating an explosive, militaristic stab. This has the effect of building tension, especially by ending on the Dominant 7th chord.

Chorus

The chorus arrives with a perfect cadence on the tonic which was set up in the pre-chorus. As the tonic chord is the tonal centre of most songs, this aurally tells the listener that it has come back "home." To emphasise this, the same diatonic chords are used as in the verse but without the mixture chord. This makes the tonality more stable, giving a stronger sense of a tonal centre. The repeated line of “Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine” with backing vocals emphasises that this section should be sung along to.

Bridge

The bridge section takes the song in a whole new direction. It begins with a modulation to the supertonic, achieved by changing the time signature to 3/4 and destabilising the tempo of the song using a rallentando across four bars, which are used as pivot chords. The pivot chord section begins with the tonic and subdominant, followed by the F# note being naturalised via an F major chord, then a ♭VII chord. The subdominant is sustained across several bars, acting as the dominant in a perfect cadence into the new key of B Major; the bass guitar confirms this as it ascends from the fifth scale degree through the tonic of the B Major scale. The guitar and bass begin to play in this key; however, the organ enters in a carnivalesque manner using chromatic notes to create dissonance and a feeling that each chord is shifting between major and minor tonalities. An accelerando begins to take hold as the tonality becomes more stable with fewer chromatic notes, before modulating back to the key of A Major for the final choruses. The song finishes with a molto rit on the electric guitar, using a mixture of chords from A Major and its enharmonic minor including a return of the F Major chord which has featured throughout the song.

For a glossary of terms visit dictionary.onmusic.org

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit: creativecommons.org/licenses

--