Troyer17 - The Monday Morning Memo

“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. 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.””

- Rob Kapilow, in his book "Listening for America."

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