Napthali Wagner on Sgt. Pepper

Naphtali Wagner's chapter on Sgt. Pepper (see citation at the end of this post) includes a reading of "She's Leaving Home" based on an ascending Urlinie. A large portion of the chapter can be found on the Google Books page: link.

The chapter is about the varying combinations of classical and contemporary popular elements in the songs of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper. Of the songs discussed, "She's Leaving Home" is described as "the most classical" and is said (therefore?) to be "to a large extent Schenkerable" (82). But that Schenkerability (!) is conditioned on an ascending Urlinie and on an interruption of that Urlinie: see Wagner's Example 6a & 6b (81; here without the caption and with added letter labels).

I wrote about the possibility of interruption and division in the 1987 JMT article, defining two accessible types (see example below; 293) and suggesting others.

In addition to the two division classes given above, others might be proposed; for example, ^5-^6-^7 || ^5-^6-^7-^8, ^5-^6-^7-^8-^9 (=^2) || ^5-^6-^7-^8, or even ^5-^6-^7 || ^5-^4-^3-^2-^1, and so on. I do not suggest these as practical possibilities, but only because I have found no compositions to which they unequivocally provide the best solution for the first middleground. (296)

In his example (a), Wagner reads "She's Leaving Home" based on the first of the additional figures—^5-^6-^7 || ^5-^6-^7-^8—but notes that the song actually uses a "twisted realization" of that figure (see his example (b) above). The relation of this strategy to the lyrics is explained succinctly as follows:

“She's Leaving Home” is full of ambivalent situations that evoke conflicting feelings: harmonic and contrapuntal retreat, internal motion within a static block of harmony and a distorted superstructure. . . . The ambiguous musical environment is amazingly appropriate for the ambivalence that emerges from the text: the scenario is dawn twilight, no longer night but not yet really day; mixed feelings (the girl's sense of liberation mixed with extreme distress; the parents' discomfiture. . . ). These are threshold states that are easily assimilated to the psychedelic concept of the album. . . . However, the classical framework encompassing all these occurrences is not in doubt. (83)

Here is the detailed analysis (81; here without the caption and the underlain lyrics):

If examples (a) and (b) above were offered as conceptual layers of, say, a movement in a Mahler symphony, I would be very skeptical of the abstractions, but in a strophic song like this and in this repertoire (mid-century popular song), I find the reading entirely convincing.

Reference: Naphtali Wagner. 2008. "The Beatles' psycheclassical synthesis: psychedelic classicism and classical psychedelia in Sgt. Pepper." In Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles It Was Forty Years Ago Today, edited by Olivier Julien, pp. 75-90. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate.