Far From Heaven and Breaking All Illusions (Analysis)

[Ninjabait]

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!)

[DarkLord_Lalinc]

Sounds awesome! But the link doesn't work. 

[Ninjabait]

Sounds awesome! But the link doesn't work. 

Oops. It somehow got set to private (and I accidentally added quotes to the url out of habit oops). I fixed it now, and added a second link just in case.

[DarkLord_Lalinc]

I'll definitely give it a good read. Thank you for this!

[Mladen]

Wow, that looks like a great read. It requires time and concentration, though, I'll make sure to take some time one of these days and study it. Thank you for sharing this!

[Enigmachine]

That's some deep analysis you got there. Makes me think about how carefully constructed even a short DT song like FFH can be.

[Peace and Love]

Thanks for posting this!

I sometimes tend to overlook this sort of stuff, but it goes to show that the DT guys always put a lot of thought into composition. I mean, this small example of writing a motif and then reusing it, developing it, etc. is exactly the same as what makes The Astonishing so successful, though of course on a much larger scale.

When they made SFAM or TA, they undoubtedly went as far as possible. But they indeed have already been doing this on smaller songs, as you pointed out.

[ReaPsTA]

I didn't totally understand this, but still thought it was great, and shows how deep the craft in DT's music is.

[Onno]

That was awesome.

[Ninjabait]

Thank you for the kind words, everyone! It's definitely very encouraging.

And sorry if it's hard to understand, haha. I tend to get excited about this sort of stuff and get carried away.

That's some deep analysis you got there. Makes me think about how carefully constructed even a short DT song like FFH can be.

Absolutely! You almost have to carefully plan out short songs like that so they leave an impact on the listener in such a short time frame.

Thanks for posting this!

I sometimes tend to overlook this sort of stuff, but it goes to show that the DT guys always put a lot of thought into composition. I mean, this small example of writing a motif and then reusing it, developing it, etc. is exactly the same as what makes The Astonishing so successful, though of course on a much larger scale.

When they made SFAM or TA, they undoubtedly went as far as possible. But they indeed have already been doing this on smaller songs, as you pointed out.

And "Octavarium", of course! I'm definitely planning on tackling that titan in the future.

I would love to analyze The Astonishing whenever the official orchestral score is released as well. Last I heard it (in a reddit I stumbled upon while googling, so not exactly the most official source) was leaning towards sometimes in October? It'd be a tough and cool project for sure. I'm very interested in how leitmotifs are used in story-driven music, and almost did a paper on it for my Music History class last semester (I ended up switching at the last minute to something a little simpler. I didn't have the time for music anymore to pour over and micro-analyze what would've amounted to around 18 hours of full orchestral music!). Plus it's just fantastic in general. Scenes From a Memory too!