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5. Diana Ross: ‘Touch Me in the Morning’, Tamla Motown TMG 861

All over American society, in Hollywood, in education, in music, in architecture and in general social manners, aspects of European nobility have been perceived as ‘classy’ for most of American history. The slave-holding ranches down the Mississippi gave themselves Greek or Roman names. The nineteenth century benefactors of education built European gothic style edifices to signify a commonly understood notion of excellence. Mock Palladian architechture occupies civic space in all American cities. Boston accents are perceived as ‘classy’ because their long vowels resemble English. In African-American music, the process of adopting European characteristics to signify ‘class’ is similarly well established, especially in the Christian churches who want to be identified as conservative. The choir of The First Church of Deliverance on South Wabash, Chicago broadcast their services across the nation every Sunday. In addition to their repertoire of African-American gospel music, they sing unsyconpated, homophonic anthems in a style which could be identified as ‘quasi-Handelian’. Andree Crouch, the elder statesman of contemporary gospel music, includes Bach style trumpets in his recording of ‘Jesus is Lord’. This study looks at the ways that European classical music has been taken out of its original context to reappear in the classic Motown song ‘Touch Me in the Morning’ in order to support the implicit ideas of sophistication, nobility, and even innocence.

‘Touch Me in the Morning’ was written by Ron Miller and Michael Masser, two Motown songwriters who specialised in romantic ballads for women singers. It was released in May 1973. Its musical language suggests implicitly that the singer of the song is beyond reproach. This remarkable achievement is brought about by the evolution of a musical vocabulary which is a potpourri of half-remembered bits of baroque style, and by alluding to other crucial mythic landmarks in European culture. The European musical baroque style has associations with nobility and moral superiority. It is a prestige musical language. The song miniaturises aspects of baroque form. Although in its ‘properness’ it is more baroque than anything else, it naively misapprehends a courtly quality, obliquely suggesting that the singer (a lady) is waiting for the visitation of her lover.

It starts with a chord, and the singer relates the factual scenario, rather in the nature of a recitativo ...
 

... before the movement of the song is picked up and the ‘aria’ begins the process of reflection on the agony and ecstasy, the possibilities and projections of this relationship of woman and lover.
 

It’s a story about a woman’s sleepless vigil remembering what it was like to be touched by her lover - the touch that signalled permanent separation.

5.1  Recitative section: introduction with suspensions

In the slow ‘recitativo’ style introduction, a chain of 9-8 suspensions triggers an association with European baroque practice. This reference, and the accompanying 6/3 chords later on, both signify a popular understanding of the baroque, which can be understood as ‘noble’. The objective of this ennoblement is to suggest that the singer of the song, the woman, is expressing feelings that are above the commonality. Her feelings have become gentrified by their expression in an ennobled context. In addition, although this song concerns itself more or less explicitly with sex, the manner in which the sex is referred to is not ‘guilt laden’. By placing sex in the sanitised environment of the European nobility, it escapes moral censure.

The last phrase of the recitativo section is particularly interesting. Two versions are offered. In the first version, a strictly diatonic 6/3 chord in substituted in the bass; that is, it has a C sharp substituted instead of C natural. The second is the version as it is heard in the song, with the root position chord on a flat seventh pointed out.

5.2   last phrase is recitativo section with altered bass notes:

5.3

The point of this comparison is aurally obvious. In the first example, the words ‘.. but we had yesterday’ are rendered innocent, seemly, innocuous because the chordal accompaniment is so utterly unsurprising and in keeping with the baroque harmonic style that has been established. But the second version tells us something much more punchy and earthy about the quality of ‘ ..yesterday’, because the C natural alerts us to possibilities - musical and narrative - that are beyond the polite mannerism of baroque style. And this exciting memory kick-starts the rhythm department into pop song propulsiveness. Whatever happened ‘yesterday’ proves enough to shake off the noble restraint. Let’s forget about decorum, we want to know all the human details! Diana Ross, as the central character in this story, begins to tell us a story ... Apparently, at the outset of this relationship she had all the good ideas.
 

If this is a lady’s song, in another sense it is also a woman’s song. It is sung by a woman amidst women, because the backing vocals are female too. If we were not listening to a pop song, but a radio play, the stage is exclusively populated with women. The central male in the story is only alluded to. He’s off somewhere else when all this happens: the words of the song are addressed to an empty bed. He features passively in the drama, referred to only through her song and through her interpretation.

Although this song appeared in 1973, at a formative moment in the women’s movement world-wide, the portrait of a woman who suffers on account of the wider ambitions of her male partner is properly romantic. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg offers many examples of this principle being actively reinforced by the activities of male reformers in nineteenth century America. Despite the many famous examples of women as literary heroines in the canon of nineteenth century writing (Emma Bovary, Bathsheba Everdine, Therese Raquin), the pervasive climate was one where, as part-and-parcel of the maintenance of Christian values, women were reactive recipients of the world as it was handed to them by men. Men acted out their lives in interesting and enterprising ways. Women were required to reflect on the needs of their male partners virtuously and undemonstrably. Whereas a man could engage in a series of projects and initiatives that took him away from the site of the relationship, the home and the embrace of the woman, a woman’s fantasies and imaginings were properly centred on the relationship itself, and were dominated by a romantic conception of love, virtue, the unavoidability of suffering, constancy and a particular interpretation of Christian ethics that suppressed the manifestation of yearning and ambition. The narrative of ‘Touch me in the Morning’ mirrors this romantic stereotype. He has concerns that take him away from her. She is forgiving that he ‘... has given all [he’d] got to give’ and even goes as far as to say ‘I can understand you feeling that way, everybody’s got their life to live’. Her demands as few. She admits only that she cannot ‘say goodbye in the cold morning light’, and asks that he ‘touch [her] in the morning, then just walk away’. All she will have is a stock of memories. She asks for this small concession to her physical needs before confronting the predicted loss of the beloved.

Like the Madonna Mediatrix, like the Queen of Heaven, Diana sings something that is both a nocturnal vision and a lady’s complaint. In this story of night time vigil (Gethsemane), she is both Magdalen concerning her physical demands, and Madonna in the sense that she selflessly gives all and loses all. To some extent, these dualities are mirrored in the musical construction. The case is not a perfect one, but the following analysis demonstrates that, at least to some extent, the unresolved dilemma between her world and his world, alternatively expressed as the world of the pure and virtuous Madonna versus the passionate and sensual Magdalen is mirrored in the way that the accompaniment gets stuck oscillating between the triads of A7 (C sharp bass) and C maj7. Is this significant? Well, yes. Since we have already established that the diatonic orbit of D major seems to suggest a kind of orthodoxy (social and musical), and that the use of the 6/3 inversion (with the C sharp bass) especially implies a kind of noble sentiment, it is interesting that when his concerns are being articulated, the key centre moves away from the closely related diatonic orbit to a triad based on the flattened seventh, C natural.

5.4

‘It must have been hard to tell me’
(She is the subject of the phrase)
[A7, dominant of D major, 6/3 inversion]

‘That you’d given all you’d got to give’
(He is the subject of the phrase)
[C natural triad, flattened seventh of D major]

‘I can understand you feeling this way’
(She is the subject of the phrase)
[A7, dominant of D major, 6/3 inversion]

‘Everybody’s got their life to live’
(He is the subject of the phrase)
[C natural triad, flattened seventh of D major]

The musical process that leads up to the climactic phrase ‘If I’ve got to be strong’ signifies ‘struggle with self’. This is encoded in two ways: firstly, structurally. ‘Struggle’ is implied in the act of ‘trying to escape from something that has an overwhelming gravity. ‘But I can’t say goodbye...’. Thus, the bass in the musical example remains static ( = gravity) while the upper parts try to move independently of it. But the attempt is unsuccessful. Earth pulls her back, and A natural falls to the dominant F sharp.

5.5

Secondly, by association with other seminal musical texts. This chordal movement is redolent of baroque church music. By reference to this sort of musical and cultural precursor, the composers of ‘Touch me in the Morning’ successfully elevate the song above the mundane and humdrum, describing an ordinary moment in an ordinary love affair in a terminology that is absolute and divine.

And the notion of being strong, is exemplified in the final, third attempt; ‘If I’ve got to be strong...’. Here, the attempt withstand the fatal pull of gravity, and to escape from its clutch is encoded in the voice leading.

5.6  resolution built into voice leading

The final section of ‘Touch me in the Morning’, which plays the song out, employs another familiar baroque device that, again, has precursors in the passion music of Bach. The texture divides into three vocal lines that work polyphonically against each other. There is a chorus of female backing singers and two more lines, both sung by Diana Ross.

5.7  Dramatic dialogue between parts: coda section to fade out.

(click the diagram for a better image)

The two lines sung by Diana Ross function like a chorale tune, and an embellishment around a chorale tune respectively. The backing singers have periodic interjections of ‘Touch Me!’. The particular nature of these interjections is formally reminiscent of the opening chorus of Bach’s ‘Saint Matthew Passion’ where there is similar interplay between the chorale tune (‘O Lamn Gottes Unschuldig’) and the richly woven fabric of parts around it. At times, in the Bach example, the choirs shout out (‘Seh’!’, ‘Wohin? Wohin?’) . As with the passion music, ‘Touch me in the Morning’ broadens the scope of its expression into something that approaches opera. The dialogue between the principle voice and the backing singers places the central woman, for once, not alone on the stage, and precisely because the backing singers re-emphasise the point of the lyric, ‘Touch me!’, in a direct yet abstracted fashion, one feels that these women are now dramatis personae in a play of divine meaning and universal importance.

The song is a classic Motown Romance. Although the orchestration, in this instance, consists chiefly of strings, other romantic ballads in the same tradition have established a vocabulary of instrumentation which is entirely consistent with the strong European heritage alluded to in this analysis. For Bach, in the ‘St Matthew Passion’, the divine presence is signified by sustained strings which surround Christ’s voice rather like a musical halo. Other parts of the baroque orchestra had similar direct associations which linked them semantically to the Lutheran liturgy. For instance, the timbre of the oboe (and especially the Corno da Caccia) signified the love of God, even though for modern audiences, this correlation is almost certainly lost. The famous aria of the Virgin Mary in Bach’s ‘Magnificat’, ‘Quia Respexit’, might have modified this notion to something more closely associated with humility and archetypal femininity. ‘Candle in the Wind’, Elton John’s tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, features classic Gospel harmony as mediated through Elton John, with strings and oboe, whereas Maria Carey’s ‘Hero’, a song which celebrates the appeal of the traditional, mythic male hero, is an instrumental drama between Strings ( = Divinity), Oboe ( = Femininity), and French Horn ( = The Hero).

APPLICATIONS

Each statement is matched by a new key centre which grows out of the previous one, suggesting an organic, developing argument.

‘Like a Prayer’ - Madonna ( Sire W 7539) is a very interesting song to analyse, especially if one considers the heavy layers of imagery laid upon it by the accompanying video. It recycles all the familar themes of eroticism, Roman Catholicism and positions these against a background of racial harrassment, burning crosses and the like. The mixture fails to make coherent sense, except to serve as a rather dreamlike rehearsal of disturbing images. The apparent injection of authentic meaning, close to the end of the song, by the sudden appearance of a sanctified gospel choir doesn’t really save the song from being a crude collision of themes from America’s recent past. Madonna has the Midas touch in reverse: in any other circumstances a church-busting gospel choir is one of the few unadulterated genuine transcendental expressions in contemporary popular music, however in this song the choir becomes merely a signifier of something real, and not that vibrant reality itself. In the context of the ‘Like a Prayer’ video, the gospel choir becomes yet another piece of postmodern simulation of human feeling and vitality.

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