Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play: Inside Two Long Songs

4. The Music of Thick as a Brick: Form and Thematic Development

57 Before examining the form and thematic development of Thick as a Brick, it would be helpful to read a portion of the first review of the album, which warns the listener that the structure of the work may seem a bit odd: “One doubts at times the validity of what appears to be an expanding theme throughout the two continuous sides of this record but the result is at worst entertaining and at least aesthetically palatable. Poor, or perhaps naïve taste is responsible for some of the ugly changes of time signature and banal instrumental passages linking the main sections but ability in this direction should come with maturity.”1 This review isn’t from Rolling Stone or Melody Maker, the leading music periodicals when the album was released. Beating the critics at their owngame,IanAndersonwrotethistongue-in-cheekreviewhimselfand included it on the album on page 7 of the St. Cleve Chronicle. Although Anderson (under the pseudonym Julian Stone-Mason B.A.) writes that Thick as a Brick shows “naïve taste,” this is a piece of music whose form shows a great deal of “maturity.” The form of Thick as a Brick is one of its most distinctive features, and a close examination lends insight into the originality of the piece. As with most music, an appreciation of the musical content of Thick as a Brick cannot be fully grasped by using only one method of analysis. What John J. Sheinbaum concludes about the Yes song “Roundabout” is also true of Thick as a Brick: “Interpreting ‘Roundabout’ solely as a rock song misses much of the detail that invites consideration alongside the art-musictradition,butatthesametime,todescribethesongasifitwere merelyapieceofthattraditionalsomissesmuchofthedetailessentialfor The Music of Thick as a Brick: Form and Thematic Development four 58 Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play understandingthesongintermsofitsbackgroundasrockmusic.”2 Thick as a Brick is essentially an album of rock music, but it is more accurately described as a convergence between the worlds of rock, folk, and classical music, exhibiting both the common ground and the tension between these three styles. It is a composite of the defining features of these three styles of music. In a nutshell, it has the loud intensity of rock music, the lyrical introspection of folk music, and approaches the compositional depthofclassicalmusic.Myanalysisof Thick as a Brick’sformdrawsparallels to large-scale forms found in classical music simply because, being forty-three minutes of continuous music, it is far more complex than the commonsongformsofmuchrockandfolk(suchasstrophic,AABA,and verse-chorus; see “Common Popular Music Forms” below). Yet Thick as aBrick’slarge-scaleformisconstructedfromthebuildingblocksofthese same small-scale forms, so a consideration of them is just as necessary. In the past twenty years, several scholars have convincingly compared large-scale forms in progressive rock pieces to various large-scale forms in classical music.3 These scholars have shown that bands like Yes and Genesis blended rock with classical music not simply at a surface level (overdubbing a string arrangement), but at a deep structural level. In considering the form of Thick as a Brick, David Nicholls states that it is “at once [a] song cycle, multi-movement suite, and symphonic poem, yet succeeds brilliantly at transcending all of these supposed models in creating a seamless musical, textural, and pictorial Gesamtkunstwerk.”4 I wouldaddthat Thick as a Brick alsoresemblesthemeandvariationsform and the medieval lai, as discussed in chapter 2. But Anderson is quite candid,andcomic,inadmittingthathefollowednoneofthesemodels:“I rememberinanactofextremebluffingonadailybasis,cominginsaying ‘OK right, next piece of music we have today, to add on to the rest of the stuff . . . is such and such,’ and I had only written it that morning. I would come in the next day and pretend it was all part of some master plan, some grand scheme, whereas, in fact, of course, I was only making it up asIwentalong.”5 Althoughtheaforementionedclassicalformsareuseful in showing the expansive scope ofThick as a Brick, they don’t adequately describetheformofthispiece.Myapproach,whichfollowsbelow,shows how the small-scale popular music forms of strophic, AABA, and versechorus were used to construct the large-scale form. Form and Thematic Development of Thick as a Brick 59 The Role of Form in Popular Music Listeners of popular, folk, or rock music are more often drawn to a song’s melody, lyrics, or performance than they are to a song’s form. The major reason for this is that these styles of music usually are made from small-scale forms that are easily...