Hello, everyone! I've been on-and-off lurking here for a while (mainly since the build-up to the release
The Astonishing, but I lurked about a bit when DT12 was coming out to), but haven't really posted until now. I'm a college student studying Music Composition (only a sophomore now, but going for a doctorate eventually!) and I happen to be a BIG fan of Dream Theater (well,
obviously). I also love music theory (pfft nerd) so I decided to combine those two interest into one fun (and sometimes annoying) activity.
I had happened to buy the keyboard book for
A Dramatic Turn of Events a couple of years back, and it was really just gathering digital dust in my iPod, so I decided to finally put it to good use and give the album a good analyzin'. As for why this song in particular, I was listening through the album on the bus one day and as "
Breaking All Illusions" was playing I started noticing that the "instrumental interlude" was sounding quite a bit like a musical development section! I looked over the sheet music for it, and it was really looking like sonata-allegro form to me, so I set out to see if my hypothesis was correct. And I tagged "
Far From Heaven" along for the ride since it was the opener and the only song that I could analyze only using the keyboard anthology thing. What followed was a wonderful journey of transcribing everything, straw grasping, marigold measuring, and overanalysis.
(And, no, I am going for that
Images & Words/
A Dramatic Turn of Events comparison route at all)
Here's a link to the google doc upload of the analysis (in PDF format).And a mirror on mediafire if that one doesn't work.Let me know if there are any technical difficulties or possible errors in my analysis! I hope you guys find it as interesting and helpful as I did!
(Edit: also, fair warning, it's really long!)