Building form through accumulation in Tune-Yards' Nikki Nack

In its more recent music, Tune-Yards has experimented with formal models influenced by its favored compositional process of musical layering. Several songs from the group’s third album, Nikki Nack (2014), employ what Mark Spicer has called cumulative form, in which “a variety of compositional procedures can contribute to our experience of a musical work as somehow always aiming toward a certain moment of culmination." Though Spicer proposes several categories of (ac)cumulative form, all of which serve as important compositional strategies in the music of Tune-Yards, I will focus on the practice of gathering two or more recognizable melodies from earlier sections of a song and superimposing them in the song’s final section, a familiar feature of American musical numbers (Irving Berlin’s “Play a Simple Melody [1914]” and Stephen Schwartz’s “All for the Best” [1971] are two examples). As Spicer observes in his analysis of Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” this compositional device is effective because it provides a satisfying moment of insight, when the listener realizes that melodies previously heard in isolation were in fact “destined to fit together.” 

The basic formal structure of “Find a New Way,” the first song from Nikki Nack, exemplifies Tune-Yards’ use of cumulative form. 

“Find a New Way” begins with a straightforward alternation between verse and chorus, but soon introduces a second, distinctive chorus section. Here are Chorus 1 and 2 heard back-to-back:

The final section of the song presents both chorus melodies in counterpoint:

“Water Fountain,” which immediately follows “Find a New Way” on Nikki Nack and is discussed earlier in Example 4, uses a similar formal procedure but includes some interesting nuances that deserve a more detailed look. The first chorus of “Water Fountain,” is in Db mixolydian: 

As with “Find a New Way,” “Water Fountain” introduces a second chorus melody later in the song, but this time in the chromatic mediant key of F mixolydian, a relatively distant pitch collection:

 

When the two choruses are heard in counterpoint at the end of the song, they remain in their original keys of D♭ mixolydian and F mixolydian, and the resulting bimodality causes several chromatic clashes. Yet in spite of this chromaticism, the concurrent presentation of the two melodies at the conclusion of the song still manages to provide the sort of formal resolution that traditionally characterizes cumulative form:

A few other characteristics of “Water Fountain” are worth noting. First, as in the verse of “Doorstep” (Example 22), the content of each layer is not completely fixed; the bass line migrates from Layer 2 (F mixolydian) to Layer 1 (D♭ mixolydian) in m. 5 of Example 28a. Second, though the vocal melodies remain locked into their respective layers, they are chopped up into fragments, occasionally suggesting antiphony. Finally, it should be noted that the collage-style design of the final chorus is clearly influenced by the current accessibility of digital audio editing technology, just as Spicer argues that rapid advances in recording studio sophistication in the late 1960s and early 1970s impacted the (ac)cumulative compositional methods of bands such as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Queen.