Defying Gravity

• Stephen Schwartz is an American music theatre composer and lyricist born in 1948 in New York.
• Pause marks or fermatas are used to lengthen and give freedom to longer rhythms, for example at the end of bars 174 and 176.
• Stephen Schwartz studied piano and composition at the Julliard School of Music while still at high school and later graduated in drama from Carnegie Mellon University.
• Stephen Schwartz had his first success with the musical Godspell in 1972.
• In the 1990s, Stephen Schwartz collaborated with the composer Alan Menkin on the scores of many Disney animated films such as Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and wrote songs for Dreamwork’s first animated film, The Prince of Egypt.
• Stephen Schwartz returned to this collaboration with Menkin in 2007 to write the lyrics for the Disney hit film Enchanted.
• Stephen Schwartz took on the role of both composer and lyricist for Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, a musical based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, in 2003.
• Stephen Schwartz won a Grammy Award for his work as composer, lyricist and producer of Wicked.
• The finale song for the first act of Wicked, 'Defying Gravity', is a duet for the characters Elphaba and Glinda with some spoken dialogue in addition to the singing.
• The two characters either deliver their text spoken, half sung/spoken with music notated on the stave with crosses instead of note heads or entirely sung.
• The performers of 'Defying Gravity' require extremely versatile voices with a large range of just under two octaves, from G below middle C to F.
• Wicked uses a large orchestra: woodwind section (including additional instruments such as piccolo, bass clarinet and cor anglais), brass and string sections with a harp and three keyboards.
• The orchestra in Wicked is used to good dramatic effect.
• In the verses, there is a melody and accompaniment or melody-dominated homophony texture where the singer is accompanied by chords in the orchestra.
• The time signature of the song changes from 3/2 triple time to 2/2 duple time in the opening section and remains there until bar 88 where it changes to 4/4 quadruple time.
• There is some use of dissonance in the song.
• Rhythms in the song are predominantly crotchet and quaver based, although there are some notes of longer duration particularly at the ends of phrases.
• Each phrase in the song starts with an off-beat entry after a crotchet rest (e.g. bar 15).
• At the end of the song, there is a pedal at bar 168.
• The ending of the song is contrapuntal with three different musical ideas with different lyrics.
• Ostinato accompaniment is present at bar 88 with repeated semiquavers.
• Elphaba and Glinda usually sing separately but sometimes sing together in unison or in harmony such as thirds.
• The opening of the song shows a sparse texture with punctuating instrumental chord stabs and some monophonic unaccompanied bars.
• In the opening of the song, the tonality is ambiguous with chromatic movement and unrelated chord progressions.
• Chords in the song are in root position.
• Chord progressions in the song are often unrelated and include shifts downwards in parallel semitones.
• In bar 103, the song returns to the chromatic melody of the opening.
• For the verse, the song remains in D major until bar 88 when it moves to G major.
• For the final Maestoso section, bar 168, the song is in B minor until we finish on a chord of D major.
• Triplets are used in the song, both quaver triplets (e.g. bar 96) and crotchet triplets (e.g. bar 60).
• Rests are often used to break up phrases in the song.
• Dotted rhythms are used throughout the song, for example, on the word 'gra-vi-ty' in bar 82.
• The song is in D major.
• There are homophonic chordal moments in the song.
• At bar 132, the song returns to the tonic key of D major.
• At bar 20, the song shifts to B major for two bars before arriving in F major at bar 22.
• Syncopation is frequent throughout the song.
• The text setting is syllabic throughout with rhythms moving in a speech-like manner.
• This piece has multiple sections which are defined by tempo, contrasting moods and melodic material.
• The brass section plays homophonic chordal music in an almost fanfare-like manner.