In searching for a song’s essence, a good place to start is with its creator. Leonard Cohen’s oft-mentioned roots in poetry are of primary importance here.

It’s the song’s words that are its generative force, not only lyrically but musically; much of the melodic character of the song is derived from their lilting ebb and flow, and its gospel music harmonic progressions well suit their biblical and ecstatic imagery.

This must be one of the few songs that precisely represents its musical harmony in lyric: “The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift . . .” are descriptions of the song’s melodic movement.

In the song’s key of C major that’s F major (the fourth), G major (the fifth), Am (the “minor fall” to the darker relative minor chord), F major again (the “major lift” back to the fourth or subdominant chord) in preparation for a key change (or “modulation”) to the relative minor key (A minor) proper on the “lu-jah” of “composing Hallelujah”.

That this arrival at the song’s first Hallelujah should be accompanied by a journey to the harmonic dark side (albeit temporary) is indicative of how the song works in macrocosm too.

And yet this song is definitely a celebration too, a love song to the idea of love, regardless of its perils: a hymn to the essential rightness of its pursuit.

In this secular ecstasy we experience the divine and it’s in the way Cohen not only blurs the line between the two throughout, but has them coexisting, tension unresolved on so many levels musically and lyrically, that makes Hallelujah so achingly human and so magnificently transcendent.

James Doheny is a musicologist and author of Radiohead Karma Police: the Stories Behind Every Song (Carlton Books)

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