The Mercy Seat
Johnny Cash’s 2000 covers of a 1988 song by Nick Cave, “The Mercy Seat,” whose lyrics record the perseverations of a guilty prisoner preparing to die by electrocution.
The example is presented in Figure 5; this seven-bar phrase is cycled approximately a dozen times in the second half of the song. The representation beneath the transcription models the passage on Cube Dance. To the right, the model is “unclasped,” yielding a version of Cube Dance that serves as the core of three-note voice-leading space introduced in the work of Callender, Quinn, and Tymoczko [3], and explained in greater detail in Tymoczko’s A Geometry of Music [7] (see also Hook, Exploring Musical Spaces[2], chapter 11).
Other detailed Animations
A Simple MatheMusics of Pitch and Time
