Composition
Roger Waters and David Gilmour stated that the song had been composed primarily in 7/8 time; it was composed in 7/4, according to Gilmour in an interview with Guitar World magazine in 1993.
The song changes to 4/4 time for an extended guitar solo. The first of three choruses which comprise the solo was recorded using real-time double tracking. Gilmour played the chorus nearly identically in two passes recorded to two different tracks of a multi-track tape machine. The second chorus is a single guitar. The doubled effect for the third chorus was created using automatic (or "artificial") double-tracking (ADT).
One of Gilmour's ideas for the solo section was that, for the second chorus of the solo, all reverb and echo effects would be completely off (referred to as "dry"), creating the sense of just four musicians playing in a small room. For this "dry" chorus, all musicians played softly and subtly, with Gilmour's solo, now one single guitar, playing very sparsely. Then, for the third chorus, the dynamics would suddenly rise, with heavy use of reverb and echo (a "wet" sound), additional rhythm-guitar parts in the background, and the drums becoming heavy and almost chaotic.
The form and chord progression are based on the standard twelve-bar blues in the key of B minor, with the vocal melody and nearly all of Gilmour's soloing based on the pentatonic and blues scales. Two twelve-bar verses are followed by a twenty-bar instrumental section that features a blues-style tenor saxophone solo (played by Dick Parry) along with keyboard, bass and drums and a further two-bar intro in 4/4 leading to the guitar solo, which is structured like a twelve-bar blues, but doubled to a twenty-four-bar length.
The lyrics are briefly referenced in the film Pink Floyd The Wall, when the protagonist, Pink, is caught writing poems in class by his teacher. The teacher snatches the poem from him and reads it in a very sarcastic, demeaning manner, practically encouraging Pink's classmates to laugh. The poem is a verse of lyrics to "Money".
Read more about this topic: Money (Pink Floyd Song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Vices enter into the composition of virtues as poisons into the composition of certain medicines. Prudence and common sense mix them together, and make excellent use of them against the misfortunes that attend human life.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)