Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John Bass Clarinet - Digital Sheet Music

CLARINET & PIANOScore: 6 pages, solo part: 2 pages, piano part: 3 pages., Duration 3' 11" at half note = 60. Length: 51 measures. One of Elton John's greatest songs, this mega-hit is suitable for performance in church, nightclub, or recital hall. This song contains many advanced songwriting techniques and shows a complete mastery of advanced tonal harmony and voice leading. The verses are syllabic and arranged in 8 regular phrases. The last phrase is elided with a contrasting melismatic bridge that suddenly modulates to the lowered mediant, causing a foreign chromatic mediant relation. (F major to Ab major). Further drama is evoked by the voice-leading where an ascending leap of a minor 9th signals the beginning of the bridge. The bridge then modulates back to the original key for the refrain, which, like the verses is arranged in 8 regular phrases and elides once again into a final version of the bridge which functions this time as a coda. "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" is a ballad performed by musician Elton John. Lyrics for the song were written by Bernie Taupin and the music was composed by John for his album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Its musical style and production were heavily influenced by 1970s soft rock. It was widely praised by critics, and some critics have named it John's best song.[1] The song was released in 1973 as the album's second single and entered the Top Ten in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It was one of John's biggest hits and surpassed the previous single, Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, in sales and popularity quickly following its release. In the US, it was certified Gold on 4 January 1974 and Platinum on 13 September 1995 by the RIAA.[citation needed] The Yellow Brick Road is an image taken from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. In the movie, Dorothy and her friends are instructed to follow the yellow brick road in search of the Wizard of Oz, only to find that they had what they were looking for all along. The road leads to the Emerald City in the land of Oz, often referred to as a metaphor for "The road that leads to life's fantasies" or "The road that leads to life's answers." The lyrics describe wanting to go back to a simpler existence after living what the narrator thought was the good life, but realizing they had simply been treated like a pet. The Wizard of Oz was reportedly the first film that Elton John's songwriting partner Bernie Taupin had ever seen, and he used the imagery in the lyrics relating to his own life as his desire to "get back to [his] roots". Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is the seventh studio album by Elton John, released in 1973. The album proved to be extremely popular, selling over 30 million copies worldwide,[2], and is regarded as one of his best. It was recorded at the Château d'Hérouville in France after problems recording at the intended location of Jamaica. Among the 17 tracks, the album contains the hits "Candle in the Wind", "Bennie and the Jets", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" plus "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" and "Harmony". Originally intended as a regular single album, the experience of transferring from Jamaica to the château proved to be conducive to producing such quality material that it was released as a double album.[3] In 2003, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[4] The album was ranked number 91 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time,[5] and number 59 in Channel 4's 2009 list of 100 Greatest Albums.[6] Goodbye Yellow Brick Road has come to be regarded as John's best and most popular album,[7] and is his best-selling studio album. -Wikipedia