Textuality » 3LSCA InteractingMBolzan - Analysis of 'Somewhere over the rainbow'
by 2021-01-07)
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The objective of the following text is to discuss the song “Somewhere over the rainbow” by Judy Garland. The song was written in 1939 for the film “The Wizard of Oz” and it was sung by Dorothy, the main character of the film. Just considering the title, the intelligent reader expects the song to be about a fantastic place, set in an undefined position over the rainbow, far from where we live, maybe the sky. The song starts with 30 seconds of only instrumental: the careful listener can hear that there are only string instruments: a piano which beats the rhythm. The rhythm is quite slow, but it radiates a kind of happiness because the violins produce quick and acute sounds. Subsequently, after about 30 seconds, Judy Garland begins to sing and the rhythm slows down. The verse is about an unknown place “over the rainbow”, difficult to reach, that Dorothy knows about only because she heard of it once in a lullaby, thus, before to sleep and dream. Then she repeats the line “somewhere over the rainbow”. Moreover, Dorothy sings that in the place over the rainbow all the dream you dare to dream became true. Hence the place she sings about is so difficult to reach that he seems a dream. The repetition of the title “Somewhere over the rainbow” underlines the importance that this place has: it is the protagonist of the song. After the verse, there is the chorus. The rhythm of the song becomes faster than before and so the vocal part does. She sings that someday, in an unknown future (like the place she is singing about), she will be far from the place where she lives now, in a place where there aren’t any clouds. Indeed, she will wake up in a place with no sadness, full of positive things, very far from the conditions she lives in the moment. He makes a question to a “you”, who can be either the listener or a character of “The Wizard of Oz”: why can’t I dream if you do it? And then she asks herself why she can’t be fly over the rainbow as bluebirds do. Bluebirds represent freedom, so the only thing she wants it’s to be free. In conclusion, the song’s message is freedom, represented by the bluebirds, the freedom that she can only imagine. |