Jeff Buckley’s gritty yet dulcet rendition of Hallelujah is an angry prayer,a dissonant hymn, an aggrieved devotional. Written by Leonard Cohen, a songwriter with a cult-like following like Buckley’s own father, Tim Buckley, Hallelujah is rich with biblical allegory while singing about the loss of a seemingly secular, yet at once deeply spiritual, romantic love. It is both confession and accusation, ancient yet modern, and endlessly repetitive while clearly offeringa sense of forward momentum and subtle emotional resolution in its final chords. While the text itself illustrates these profound paradoxes, the disguised complexities of a seemingly simple homophonic texture, predictable rhythm held in a complex 6/8 meter with ananacrusis which subtly throws off the melodyfrom the accompaniment, and the wave-like repetitive melodic contours each indicate themes of our lives as mythologies repeated and the hubris of man’s belief in their infallibility.
From the beginning, Buckley introduces temporal and lyrical elements that define Hallelujahas a devotional, yet it seems unaware of itself as an accusation and confession.Hallelujah begins with a deep exhalation of breath against a silentback drop. The artistic choice to begin with an exhalation instead of inhalation is telling – it indicates that we are entering amid a plot, en media res,for which this song is the release. This is the same way confessions start –with the events of our lives in need of confession currently in progress. This contrasts dramatically with the etymological root of Hallelujah, a Hebrew word used in both Jewish and Christian liturgy meaning a joyous, often interpreted as specifically musical, prayer to God.
The mathematical symmetry held within Hallelujah is reminiscent of when music was a mathematical practice of divinity. The mathematical precision begins with the accompaniment’s overture before the lyrics enter. It is one minute long and divided into three cadences. The first twenty seconds begin with the exhalation of breath, quickly closed with a single beat created by thehit and hold of the guitar strings and a two-second pause filled with poignant electric static (0.00 - 0.03). Then the guitar accompaniment enters, playing the melody of the eventual chorus, with a melodic contour that rises and falls four times in the exact same way the words, “hallelujah” will eventually be repeated in the chorus (0.03 – 0.20). Each note has a strong attack, a loudpitch that climaxes quickly then softens and sustains until its release. This guitar rift, with its smooth grit of the reverb and a warm, thick, and vibratotimbre lasts the same amount of time, 20 seconds including the exhalation, as each of the choruses themselves. The second part of the opening accompaniment is 25 seconds and features a melodic arch like each verse, which will also last25 seconds, varied in pitch but climbing and swelling. This closes with the final 15 seconds, which, after two dramatic strums of the guitar, begins the accompaniment’s melody that will continue for the entirety of the song except for two beautifully mathematically centered guitar solos.
Buckley’s voice, with a rich and sweetly velvety timbre, doesn’t begin at the precise endof the minute-long overture. It enters one beat early, introducing the anacrusis of the 6/8 meter held by the vocal melody of Hallelujah. This single beat-off creates a disjointedness while at the same time creating a cyclicality that rolls the bridge into the verse, an effect that is mirrored bythe way each verse ends with “hallelujah”, sung in the same note that begins the chorus, therein rolling the verse seamlessly into the chorus. The lyrics begin by placing Hallelujah in a lineage of biblical devotion as greatas King David: “I heard there was a secret chord / That David played and it pleased the Lord / But you don’t really care for music, do you?” (0.59 – 1.11).The opening verse lyrically mimics the attempted perfection of music asd evotion but introduces a similar perversity to the offbeat of the anacrusis.For one, Buckley isn’t playing a chord – he’s playing an arpeggio of a chord.He is breaking the chord apart, a climactic confession that he sings with piercing loudness in the final verse, “It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.” However, the opening verse continues, “Well it goes like this thefourth, the fifth / The minor fall and the major lift” and Buckley sings these lyrics with musical accuracy. He sings “the minor fall” in a minor chord with asingle pitch descent for “fall” and “the major lift” he sings in a major with“lift” in an ascending pitch. This creates a musical trustworthiness where webelieve the narrator and assume him to be honest.
The lyrics continue with biblical allegories of great love stories fraught with deceit. King David’s story continues with his affair with Bathsheba. “You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you” (1.53 -2.01). “Overthrew you” has the minor fall and the major lift present in everyverse, word painting the highest happiness and great human failing of David. However,the next lines introduce another biblical love story of deceit – Samson and Delilah.
“She broke your throne and she cut your hair / And from your lips, she drew theHallelujah” (2.05 – 2.15). These verses blame the loss of David and Samson’s otherwise near-divine perfection on Bathsheba and Delilah. The end of the verse, like each of them, raises in climactic loudness, before falling to the arched melodic contours of the softer chorus, four “hallelujahs”. The final minute isa maelstrom of “hallelujahs”, varying in passion. The first two are sung angrily, akin to the end of each verse. The final two are sung softly in a near angelic timbre with a barely there vibrato for twenty seconds each. While we feel asense of music resolution with the guitar static still vibrating in the air, we also sense this myth, like all the others in our lives, is only moments away from repeating itself once more.
