Radiohead and the Lament Bass

6 min text | 8 min music

One of my favorite Radiohead songs uses a technique with roots going back more than 400 years — the lament bass.

A quick bit of history, then Radiohead.

The lament bass started life as a thumb in the eye of Renaissance composers, especially madrigalists who overused a technique called word painting. Instead of writing a madrigal with one emotional reference point — joyful, sad, what have you — these madrigalists would reflect certain passing words of text with a winking musical illustration of that word. The word “high” gets a high note, “running” gets fast notes, and so on, even if it suddenly jolts you out of the emotion of the overall piece. The audience titters at the drollery, and the composer writes MOAR WORDPAINTING on his hand.

Sometimes it works well:

0:30

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That’s the madrigal As Vesta Was Descending from 1601. The word descending gets a downward run, ascending is an upward run. Later there’s a duet on two by two, a solo on all alone, and a long held bass note on the word long. It’s all harmless and cute for one reason: the word painting never contradicts the overall joyful emotion.

But to be a madrigalist in the 1590s is to never ignore your shoulder-devil, painting every word even if it wildly snaps you out of the emotion of the piece. A lyric like

Grief o’erwhelms my soul, tears flow like rain
Never again shall I be happy
So let me die now, alas

would start dark, then the word “happy” would suddenly repeat six times in up-tempo major, like Up With People crashing a wake, before returning to slow minor for the last line.

Listen to Carlo Gesualdo, The Mad Duke of Verona™, setting this actual text:

I die, alas, in my suffering,
And she who could give me life,
Alas, kills me and will not help me.
O! sorrowful fate

0:35

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Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover, then wrote mournful music for the rest of his life by way of apology. Nobody does stab-me-in-the-heart, throw-me-down-a-well sadness like the Mad Duke. But he’s also a late Renaissance madrigalist, bless his heart, which means he can’t resist showing what a very clever boy he is. Even in the sentence “she who could give me life KILLS me,” the word “life (vita) goes into perky major cartwheels for a few seconds (0:16-0:30) before plunging back into sighs on “O! sorrowful fate.” That kind of crazy-quilt has no relation to actual human emotion.

The Renaissance also loved complex polyphonic textures (several overlapping melodic lines at once, like the “vita” section above), which buggers the text, which guts the emotional impact.

This elevation of cleverness over emotional clarity started to grate on some influential patrons of the arts, who were pretty sure that the music of ancient Greece and Rome was simpler in texture (one melody over a subdued accompaniment) and more emotionally unified. Their only evidence was ancient written accounts of music dramas being interrupted by audience members wailing inconsolably and throwing themselves off parapets. So these 16th century patrons gathered composers and theorists to discuss the problem of “music today” and to plot a new movement, one that assured a more unified emotional expression and much more parapet diving. Sad music would be sad from stem to stern, and peaceful music peaceful, and joyful joyful.

And lo! the Doctrine of Affections was born.

It was an idea meant to improve the expression of emotion in music. Simplify textures so lyrics could be understood. Keep tempo and rhythm consistent. Composers would choose an emotion from a list — Descartes suggested admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sorrow — and stick to it. Keys were assigned specific emotions (C major is “rejoicing,” D major is “warlike,” G minor is “kindness,” etc.). A catalog of bass lines was created, each reflecting a different emotion. These eight notes, for example

signified “peaceful contentment.” Repeat the bass line for a peaceful, contented piece:

0:40

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfxrNblTr4o” parameters=”end=39″ /]

If you’ve been to a wedding, you probably know the rest.

Sadness, on the other hand, called for a bass line descending by scale steps (like white keys on the piano) or half steps (white and black keys) from the first note of the scale to the fifth. Called the lament bass, this descending line is like a silk thread tying the chords together, creating centuries of smooth, gorgeous harmony.

Three Examples of the “Scale Lament”

Here’s a bit of Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa (1620) with the repeating lament bass on scale steps.

0:38

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And a bit of Ray Charles using the same technique 330 years later:

0:22

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Tiz6INF7I” parameters=”start=2 end=24″ /]

Even the Lord God his own damn self likes to wail over the lament bass:

0:36

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QW2Wh1OZBA” parameters=”start=181 end=217″ /]

Four Examples of the “Chromatic Lament”

The chromatic lament uses all of the half steps (white and black keys) for even more emotional juice. Follow the pulsing notes in Vivaldi’s cello:

0:18

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FmS4_fsau0″ parameters=”start=27 end=45″ /]

…or Mary Poppins, of all things:

0:13

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG6O4N3wxf8″ parameters=”start=7 end=21″ /]

Here is that same melting line in the brilliant “Butterflies and Hurricanes” by Muse:

0:21

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hucz0qsXEUQ” parameters=”start=8 end=29″ /]

…and of course “Stairway to Heaven”:

0:12

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ioyEvdggk” parameters=”end=12″ /]

Radiohead’s Lament

Then there’s Radiohead.

A big part of my attraction to Radiohead is their wide spectrum of influences: Romantic harmony, New Orleans jazz, minimalism, punk rock, aleatory, non-Western — they reach into nearly every corner of the musical world. When the score for There Will Be Blood blew my hair back, and I thought I heard the influence of radical avant-gardist Krzysztof Penderecki in it, and then learned that Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood wrote that incredible score, and that he calls Penderecki his favorite composer…I thought, why not. That’s Radiohead.

So I wasn’t surprised when a beautiful lament bass shows up in one of my favorite Radiohead songs, Exit Music (for a Film). Here it is.

4:25

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The lament bass starts right on the voice entrance at 0:23. It’s subtle the first three times, the lowest line of the guitar, but still serves the purpose of a silk thread linking and guiding the harmonies. And the last time (3:21) the lament shouts right on through.

There is so much more to the song: the Picardy third (a major I in a minor key) that ends each verse; the simultaneous Mellotron choir and the modulation to Pluto at 1:27, then the smooth slide back to Earth; that guitar tremolo countermelody at 2:50.

For you four-pepper theorists, check out the Neapolitan moment. Deceptive cadence at 3:02, VI becomes V/♭II…then ♭II slides back to V (3:12-14), helped by that chromatic guitar line. Maybe my favorite Radiohead moment.

But it’s the lament bass that informs so much of the richness of this remarkable song. And at 3:21, it all comes together — Mellotron, tremolo, lament. Add the single melody over accompaniment, and it’s a perfect fit for the doctrine of affections — emotionally unified and effective from beginning to end.

I have seriously heard this a hundred times, and I’m going to listen again right now. That says something right there.

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Feature image by Allesandro Pautasso via Flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; Thumbnail by angela n. via Flickr | CC BY 2.0

The Hidden Grammar of Music

Walter Piston’s ‘Harmony,’ viewed through my eighth-grade eyes

I was 13 when I saw my brother’s college music theory textbook sitting on a table — Walter Piston’s Harmony. I had played clarinet and sax for a while, even did some arranging for jazz band. So I knew a little theory, but I was barely out of the blocks.

When I picked up the book, it fell open to a section called “Table of Usual Root Progressions.” Clickbait! I traced the words with a trembling finger:

An actual scan of the actual line in the actual book.

Whoa.

If I’d known less theory, I’d have glossed right over it without understanding what it meant. If I had known more, I might not have been surprised by it. As it happens, I knew just the right amount to be gobsmacked.

It continued:

Here’s what it’s saying. Every key has 7 triads in it — 7 chords based on the 7 notes of the scale for that key. This is C major:

Now look down the left side of the Piston text: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. These are the 7 triads of any key. (If you know some theory or read this post, you’ll know the Romans are usually upper case for major and lower case for minor. He’s making them generic for this example. Be not confused.) Each line is saying, “When you hear this chord, here are the chords you’ll most likely hear next.”

So for C major, you could rewrite the text like so:

The C triad is followed by F or G, sometimes A minor, less often D minor or E minor.

The D minor triad is followed by G, sometimes F or A minor, less often C or E minor.

And so on.

Here’s the thing: I had no idea there was a “most likely” order of chords. If I’d written a theory book when I was 13, it would have said

Chords are nice because they make the music fuller than just a tune alone. If you’re in the key of C major, the C triad should be followed by something different, because variety is the spice of life. GENESIS RULES! DM + KH 4EVER

I saw the chords as 7 different colors the composer could use, and yes, they are that. But it never occurred to me that there was this kind of hidden sense to it, a kind of grammar, like saying The subject is usually followed by a verb, sometimes by an adverb, less often by a prepositional phrase. 

It was my first real glimpse below the surface of music. And then Piston did something lovely and rare in music theory — he explained why it’s that way.

When you move from any triad to another, there are only three possibilities: the chords have two shared notes, or only one, or none at all:Each of these has a different emotional quality. The first one is called a “weak” progression (though never to its face) because there’s only that small change between the chords, just one note different while two hang on. It’s like a sloth working its way through the forest canopy, moving just one limb at a time while the others stay attached.

When the roots of the chords (the note on which it is built) are a third apart, like C to E, you get that progression.

“Weak” doesn’t mean bad — sometimes a weak progression is just what you want for a tender moment, like so:

Here it is put to perfect use:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/J6xzL0TrsRY” parameters=”start=67 end=78″ /]

If all of the notes change, the feeling is more abrupt. There’s no connection between the chords. There isn’t a sense of smooth harmonic direction because the connection to the previous chord isn’t there. It’s a monkey leaping from one tree to another. You can’t easily tell where he leapt from.

When the roots of a chord are a second apart, like C to D, you get this kind of progression. The chord change at 0:38 is this type:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/eQAm7eZr920″ parameters=”start=17 end=45″ /]

And then there’s the engine that drives music. This is for chords with roots a fifth apart, like G and C, dominant to tonic. It’s Goldilocks, not too weak, not too abrupt: one note shared, two notes changing. It’s the perfect balance of continuity and dynamism, the monkey brachiating effortlessly through the rainforest of your mind, one hand back on the previous branch, a hand and a foot reaching forward to the next. And on he swings.

It’s called a circle progression for a great reason I’ll get to eventually.

When a composer wants you to feel direction on a large or small scale, the circle progression is the go-to. It flows like water. This aria from a Bach cantata is as good an example as any. The circle starts at 0:17 and ends around 0:30.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/3rKIc6QBCig” parameters=”end=31″ /]

Do you feel how the harmony was essentially marking time at the beginning, then starts rolling forward at 0:17? Circle progressions will do that to you.

The big news here is that harmony is spinning out a narrative beneath the melody. Composers use a mix of the three types of progressions to create an ebb and flow — moving forward, circling back, pausing, lurching, and sliding effortlessly in turn.

Now if you look back at the Piston text, it starts to make sense. No matter which of the 7 chords you’re on at a given moment, the most likely next step is a circle. That Bach progression is

I – IV – VII – III – VI – II – V – I

That’s all circle, and you can feel the tumbling momentum. But sometimes you don’t want that, so you’ll move by second or third, depending on the musical need of the moment.

Like all grammars, the real fun comes in busting out of the box — chromatic harmony, secondaries, modal harmony, polytonality, atonality, jazz harmony — but that page of Piston’s Harmony was my first step into the basic grammar of Western music. And it totally changed the way I saw my favorite thing.

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A Minor Detour, To Jethro Tull and Bach

Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull.

Level 2
7 min

I want to write about the House of Cards theme, but first I have to talk about my obsession in middle school band. No, not the Hannah twins. I’m talking about a musical question that haunted me: Why is the melodic minor scale different going up and going down? 

I know: If I had the head space to be haunted by the melodic minor, I clearly hadn’t read enough Camus. But I eventually figured it out, so I could turn at last to the fundamental absurdity of human existence.

Here’s the A melodic minor scale:

Hear it? The 6th and 7th notes (or degrees) in the scale are raised on the way up (F# and G#) and lowered again on the way down (F and G).

To understand why that is, notice that melodic minor has melodic right in the name. It’s the scale that dictates the form pitches take in a minor key when they are in sequence, one after the other, like a melody.

The message of the melodic minor scale is this: if your melody is going upward, raise the 6th and 7th notes. If not, don’t.

That still doesn’t explain why. For that, you need to know one thing: notes are lazy.

Suppose a note is not in the chord of the moment — this is called a nonharmonic tone, more on that later — and it’s between two pitches that are in the chord. Moving either way would resolve the tension of being nonharmonic. But if one of those pitches is a whole step away, and the other a half step, the note in the middle will tend to move to the closer pitch, like an electron jumping to the nearest valence.

Remember Dorothy last time, hanging on that leading tone, windmilling her arms before reaching toward the tonic home a half step away?

That’s the power of the leading tone, just a tantalizing half step away from the tonic. Minor keys want a piece of that magnetic action too. But the 7th note of a minor scale is a big boring whole step from the tonic.

Nothing compelling there, no irresistible attraction to the tonic, no windmilling arms. To add to its humiliation, when the 7th pitch is a whole step below the tonic, it isn’t even called a leading tone — it’s the “subtonic.” Sick burn. It’s bumping elbows with the tonic, but not leading toward it in any particular way.

So instead, when a melody in minor is going from the 7th pitch to the tonic, it borrows the leading tone from major, raising 7 a half step, making it a true leading tone to the tonic:

Instant attraction!

Okay, but why is the 6th note raised? Because when you bump the 7th note up, the distance from 6 to 7 becomes a step and a half, a.k.a. an augmented 2nd, which stands out against the half and whole steps, sounding like Aladdin just magic-carpeted into the room:

Can’t have that. A lot of Western tonal theory is about creating a unified musical texture so you can respond to the emotional language of the whole without individual elements suddenly drawing your attention like passing squirrels. The absence of bagpipes in the orchestra, the rule against parallel fifths, and avoiding augmented 2nds are just a few of the ways traditional Western theory keeps your attention on the big picture.

So to avoid the augmented second from that raised leading tone, let’s raise the 6th note. This also keeps it from wanting to fall back to the 5th note, the powerful dominant, when you’re ascending. If you keep it lowered, it’s only a half step away from that delicious dominant, and that’s allllll it wants (10 sec, turn it up a bit):

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRZAk2rfESU” parameters=”end=10″ /]

You feel that?? We’re in B minor here, so the top note G is the 6th, unraised. And each time you hear that unraised G, you can feel the magnetic pull down to F#, the dominant (5), just a half step below.

That’s great if that’s where your melody is headed, like it is in the Batman theme. But to break the pull and go up, you raise the 6th and 7th. Imagine after a couple of times through that motif above, Elfman wanted a triumphant ending. It might have sounded like this:

That time I raised the 6th to G#, which continued up to A#, then home to B. The line was going up, so 6 and 7 are raised.

These adjustments also just make minor melodies flow better as the 6th and 7th lean in the direction they are headed. Carol of the Bells is a great example:

9 sec

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LiccvcXdeI” parameters=”start=21 end=30″ /]

One note in Carol of the Bells gives me chills every time — a raised 6 as the tenors sing, “Oh how happy are their tones.” The word HOW is raised, then “happy are their tones” turns around and cascades over it:

5 sec

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LiccvcXdeI” parameters=”start=17 end=22″ /]

That spot, that one note, is thrilling, unexpected. Now you know why — it’s the sudden brightness of the raised 6th degree.

I’ll finish with the best example of the melodic minor in its natural habitat, one that takes me back to middle school again — Jethro Tull’s Bourrée:

15 sec

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2RNe2jwHE0″ parameters=”start=5 end=21″ /]

(I hear Bach did a remake of this, but I’m too much a fan of the original.)

Okay — now we can talk about House of Cards.

Home and the Neon Arrow

10 min

Just about every piece of music you’ve heard starts with a question: Where is home? A lot of the emotional power of the music, moment to moment and beginning to end, has to do with leaving home and finding our way back.

We’ve told this story for as long as we’ve told stories. It’s Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and the Garden of Eden, the Hindu Muchukunda and the Welsh Gwion Bach. It’s Gone with the Wind, The Martian, Exodus, Battlestar Galactica, Gilligan’s Island, Gravity, Lost, Cast Away, all three Toy Stories (especially 2), Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes…and the films that elevated home-lust to a fine art: The Wizard of Oz and E.T.

                     The stages of Campbell’s monomyth

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell suggested that every myth and legend we’ve ever told is a variation on a basic story he calls the monomyth. The hero leaves home, crosses into the unknown (usually by besting a guardian), meets a mentor, faces challenges and temptations, is transformed, and returns home, usually bearing a gift, totem, or special knowledge. Shake well and you get Prometheus, Star Wars, the New Testament, Lord of the Rings, and a million more.

I don’t know about “every myth,” but I get it. This narrative is huge.

Music works the same way. Composers establish home in a few ways, including the key, then they take you away. Sometimes it’s just a few seconds at a time — pop in on the neighbors, then home again, then out to the folks on the other side, then home again, all in a single verse. Or the music might take you for a long drive, then come back to the neighborhood, only to pull into the wrong driveway. It can also take you away from home and never bring you back. You start the day in F major, get stranded in D, and by the end of the piece, you’re stuck in the suburbs of B minor, working for an insurance company and living for the weekend.

I hinted at this in the scales post:

This pattern [of pitches in the scale] creates a kind of aural map. The sequence of half and whole steps sticks a pin in one of the notes, calling it home, then creates a series of landmarks to tell you where you are relative to that home at all times. By listening to music all your life, your ear has learned how to follow that map — to go away from home, have adventures, and return (or not). The next three JET posts will get into that.

And here we are, getting into it.

Part of the complex texture of musical communication is that all of this home-and-away drama happens not just on the scale of the whole piece, but measure by measure, phrase by phrase. There’s even the ability to encode different home-and-away messages in melody and harmony at the same time–I’ll show you how that works in a bit. As usual, you don’t have to know how it’s done, or even that it’s happening at all, for it to work.

But knowing is nice, so let’s do that.

First, a little proof of concept:

If you sang the last note like a little cheater, consider yourself Mozart. When he was 4, Mozart’s father is said to have rousted Wolfgang out of bed each day by playing the first 7 notes of the scale on the harpsichord, do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti… The slappable little prodigy would leap out of bed, unable to bear the musical unresolvedness of it all, run into the parlor, and play the last note: do! 

Whatever.

True or not, the story rests on a true thing: the 7th note of the scale is fabulously unstable, known perfectly as the leading tone. It’s the last thing before you get back to the key note, which is “home” in music. You can feel home right next door. Not only that, it’s just a half step away from the tonic home. So the leading tone feels like it’s standing with its toes over the edge of a cliff, windmilling its arms, trying to keep from toppling forward onto the tonic. And not trying all that hard.

Dorothy’s final “can’t” (Why oh why caaaaaaan’t…) is on a leading tone.

But for all its cliff-edge windmilling, the leading tone isn’t where the real home-pointing power is. There’s another relationship that’s more important for deep emotional direction. It’s the tonic’s relationship to the 5th note of the scale, known as the dominant. The chord built on that pitch is a big neon arrow pointing home. If you’re in C, then C is the tonic and G is the dominant:

Listen to those last three notes, 1-5-1. The first note is home. The second note moves away. The third feels like a return home, back to the center of the tonal universe.

But single pitches are just a shadow of the real juice–the harmony. Build triads on those pitches and you can really feel it. Triads are designated with Roman numerals, so the chords built on the pitches 1-5-1 are called I-V-I. Here’s what that sounds like:

Sounds simple to the point of boring, right? But it’s epic, one of the main reasons music works. That second triad isn’t just a generic “away” — you can feel a magnetic pull back to home.

Let’s put it in context, melody plus harmony, with three short phrases you know. I hold the V a bit in each one so you can feel it jonesing to get home:

That’s right — Dorothy’s “can’t” has a leading tone in the melody, and a dominant in the harmony. It’s yearning for home in both ways.

So why the special relationship between V and I? It’s the overtone series. Remember this?

In the overtone series, the fifth note of the key is the strongest pitch you hear. That’s why the fifth is the most basic pitch relationship after the octave. The G is embedded in the sound of C. Sure the leading tone is just a half step away, but emotionally, the dominant pitch is the closest thing to home. So as Western music developed its grammar, that relationship of a fifth, tonic to dominant, became the emotional center — home, and the neon arrow pointing home.

Add the fact that the dominant chord has the leading tone in it, and you’ve got both a harmonic and a melodic magnet to home.

Composers can do wonders by promising home, then fulfilling, delaying, or denying that promise, or fulfilling it in the melody but denying it in the harmony, and on and on.

The Phillip Phillips song “Home” plays with the concept, and no surprise there. In the second verse, “Settle down, it’ll all be clear,” the harmony is on the tonic chord, but the melody floats up away from home, away from the tonic pitch:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRkntoHkIE” parameters=”start=45 end=61″ /]

The next phrase (“trouble it might drag you down”) could have been boringly stuck at home on the tonic in melody and harmony:

Instead, when the melody drops down to the tonic on the word down (“trouble it might drag you DOWN”), the harmony moves away from home. It’s cat and mouse:

Hear the difference? All through that verse, melody and harmony don’t find home at the same time until a strong downbeat on…what word? Yeah:

I’m gonna make this place your HOME.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRkntoHkIE” parameters=”start=61 end=79″ /]

Whether the composer was literally thinking of the lyric “home” and matching it with the tonic, who knows. But no decent songwriter stumbles accidentally on the home-and-away syntax of music. They know just what they want emotionally, and the home-and-away dynamic of Western harmony gives them the tools to achieve it.