Porn for Music Theoryheads
(18 min and worth it)
To a certain kind of musician, the deathbed dictation scene from Amadeus was everything:
It was a courageous scene to even try. “Second measure, fourth beat on D. All right? Fourth measure, second beat – F!” is not generally Academy-bait banter, as Tom Hulce notes in this great behind-the-scenes clip:
And now, after thinking that scene couldn’t get any better, I stumble on this brilliant gem. For an even smaller subset of musicians — the kind that likes to peel back the skin and see the gleaming bones — this is just porn:
(Extra Credit: Find the theory error in the dialogue and put it in the comments.)
The Most Essential Element of Music
Music is a hard thing to study or talk about for one big reason: it can’t stop moving. Aside from film, visual art tends to stand still, allowing the viewer some control over the experience. But music moves forward, relentlessly, thwarting our attempts to get a firm grip.
Suppose you tell a friend that you went to the Van Gogh exhibit at MOMA yesterday, and she asks, “How long was the exhibit?” The question doesn’t really make sense. At best, you’ll take it to mean, “How long does it take to go through?” That depends. Your answer could be six minutes, an hour, or all day. There isn’t a set duration for visual art.
But if you say, “I went to hear a Brahms concert yesterday,” and she asks how long the concert was, it’s a sensible question. Two hours and five minutes.
The difference is a critical one. At the Van Gogh exhibit, you could look at each painting for three minutes or skip entire rooms. Stand and gawk at “The Starry Night” for hours. Get in close for a look at one brushstroke. Step back, cross your arms pretentiously, and you can see the whole thing at once. You can compare one part to another, move your eye left and right and left again, top to bottom, leave the room for a potty break and come right back to looking at the waves crashing on the shore.
Stare at those waves for 20 minutes if you want. Realize they’re not waves. Compare background to foreground. Time is not a constraint.
Now on to the concert. The first piece begins. At any given moment you are experiencing only a fraction of the entire piece, one moment in time, and as soon as it happens it is gone, replaced by another and another in a sequence you cannot change. You can’t move your ears from left to right and back again at will, and you certainly can’t step back and look at the whole piece at once.
You also can’t stand up and yell, “Stop! Hold it right there so I can really listen to that moment!” Even if concert security doesn’t drag you out, holding one moment of the music destroys it. All you would hear is the chord at that moment, no rhythm, no meter, no tempo. All the elements of time, so crucial to making music what it is, are fatally suspended. You might as well try to understand the processes of the human body by saying, “Hold that heartbeat and breathing still for a few minutes.”
“If you take a cat apart to see how it works,” said Douglas Adams, “the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”
Visual art transmits meaning with shape and color distributed through space. Music transmits meaning with pitch and (tone) color distributed through time. This is the heart of the difference between music and visual art, and the heart of the difference in what each can and cannot do. The thing that makes music hard to study also gives it an advantage in capturing lived emotional experience. Like life, music flows.
Life unfolds, one moment after another. Plans are made, expectations built up, then they are fulfilled, or delayed, or dashed on the rocks, over time. The fact that music shares that critical element with life itself—that it unfolds gradually—is key to understanding its power to move us.
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Yabbut…Why THOSE Four Chords?
A few years ago, the comedy-rock band Axis of Awesome pointed out a great truth — that every pop song ever written uses the same four chords in the same order.
The fact that it’s not really true makes it no less impressive. I mean, every single song!
Enjoy a couple minutes of this, then we’ll talk.
So maybe it’s not every song, but it is a helluva lot of songs using the exact same progression somewhere in it. The video puts them all in E major, which makes the progression
E – B – c# – A
Putting all of the songs in the same key is not cheating — it’s still the same progression, just like “Happy Birthday” is the same festering turd of a tune no matter how much helium you inhale. Likewise, this is the same chord progression no matter what chord you start on. If you’re in C, it’s C-G-a-F. If you’re in A, it’s A-E-f#-D. But it all boils down to this:
I – V – vi – IV
So why are songwriters addicted to I-V-vi-IV? Because for a basic progression, it’s actually pretty effective. Not a thing of genius, just a really solid workhorse. It’s been robbed of its sparkle by overuse, but it’s worth taking apart to see why it has become such a go-to.
I
It starts with I, the tonic, because most of the music you’ve heard, like most of the stories you’ve heard, starts at home. The question is where we go next. That’s easy:
V
As I said in The Hidden Grammar of Music, the most common place for any chord to go is up or down a fifth, and the tonic chord is no exception. In this progression, the I chord goes to the chord it is most closely related to, the dominant, the neon arrow: V.
Now the obvious thing for V to do is spring right back to I. Happens all the time:
The aforementioned “Happy Birthday” does exactly that. But a good chord progression (like a good sentence, story, meal, relationship) should include a little of the unexpected. Since we just did an obvious thing (I-V), we should do something less obvious next. So instead of going back to I, we go to
vi
Remember the deceptive cadence I introduced in the post about Cohen’s Hallelujah? That’s the idea. Instead of going home to I as it was born to do, V can go to vi, the relative minor. It’s interesting — a wee bit of shadow falls across the progression. And as the Hidden Grammar post pointed out,
Only one chord to go. But which one? We could repeat I, V, or vi, but that’d be boring. We want something new to round out the phrase. There are four other chords in the key. Which would be the most satisfying?
Here’s a thought: Each of the chords we’ve heard so far is made up of three pitches from the seven-note scale. When you rack up the pitches in those chords, we’ve heard six of the seven pitches:
You don’t know it, but your ear is thirsty for that missing fourth note. In the key of E, that’s an A. The chord built on that pitch is A major, or (ta-da!)…
IV
All together, then:
As a bonus, when you repeat the progression, IV goes back home to I in a very satisfying and common progression called the plagal or “Amen” cadence.
None of this makes the I-V-vi-IV progression inevitable, but it does make it sensible as a recurring thing, like subject-verb-adjective-object in written language.
Nutshell: If you start in the most common starting place, make the most common harmonic move, follow it with something just a little different, then fill in the one remaining gap in the scale, you get the most common pop progression on Earth.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Clap on 1 and 3
In a post called The (Actual) Evolution of Cool, I described the difference between cool and non-cool music using Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and a Sousa march. TL;DR: Putting the emphasis in unexpected places tickles the cerebellum’s timekeeper, which simulates danger, which feels cool.
One way to inject the unexpected into music is by emphasizing the offbeats. If a song has four beats per measure, as most do, beats 1 and 3 are strong beats, the obvious places to put your emphasis. Polka bands, marches, and hymns all emphasize 1 and 3.
But if you want to be even cooler than a hymn, throw the emphasis to the offbeats — one-TWO-three-FOUR.
Harry Connick Jr. is a cool guy, but his audience is mostly white suburban moms, sorry, which means the clapping is gonna be on 1 and 3, which kills the feels. And the particular kind of New Orleans jazz he plays can teeter between cool and square, so a little push from the wrong side of the beat is death.
The concert clip below starts with 40 seconds of painful 1-3 clapping, and sure enough, Connick’s piano sounds rinky dink. But right at 0:40 Connick adds a beat, turning one of the four-beat measures into a five-beat measure. The audience just keeps clapping on every other beat, but now they’re on 2 and 4, and everybody wins. You can see the drummer exulting in the background when he realizes that Connick saved the swing:
Genius move.
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h/t Rob Tarr | Top image by Stephanie Schoyer Creative Commons 2.0
Title inspiration via Drummer’s Resource
The Long Exile in Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah
When Leonard Cohen died at 82, he left us more than 100 songs, most of which I don’t know. But there’s one that’s almost universally known and adored: “Hallelujah.” One reason for that success is an effective use of the tools of harmony.
Start by listening to the first verse and chorus (58 sec):
Let’s take it apart a bit. We’re in C major, so the tonic chord, the emotional home, is a C triad (I). Here’s the first phrase with Romans:
That’s a comfortable, homey phrase of music. The melody winds around G, the reassuringly stable dominant pitch. The harmony is also fully domesticated, touching home (I) three times and the dominant (V) twice. We’re 15 seconds in, and all is well.
The chords at the end of a phrase make up a kind of emotional punctuation called the cadence. This phrase ended on V, which is common. It’s called a half cadence, the musical equivalent of a comma. There’s an unresolved, up-in-the-air feeling because you’re pointing home without actually going home (7 sec):
Feel the dangle? That’s a half cadence.
Now before we get to the magic, let’s geek out on some music theory Easter eggs Cohen has hidden in the next phrase:
“The 4th” is over a IV chord; “the 5th” is over a V; “minor fall” is a minor triad and “major lift” is a major triad. That’s adorable.
For the real magic, we need to zoom out and look at eight measures:
The melody forms a beautiful, yearning arc, starting from middle E (“it goes”), reaching up to high E (“composing”), then falling through more than an octave to middle C on the last Hallelujah. Here it is simplified:
Gorgeous. But as usual, it’s the harmony that conveys the main emotional story.
(Stick with me now. This is cool and comprehensible, and a good window into how music works.)
Remember how the first 4-bar phrase kept coming home to the tonic? I -vi-I -vi-IV-V-I? That made it homey and comfortable. Now look at the chords for these next two phrases — 8 long, slow bars:
I IV V vi IV V V/vi vi | IV vi IV I6/4 V I
We leave home (I) on “It goes like this,” then wander in exile for what is (musically speaking) a very long time. Along the way, we keep encountering LIES. The third chord is a V (on “the 5th”), which promises home…but instead of I , we get pulled sideways to vi, the minor. That’s disconcerting, but okay.
Two chords later there’s another V, another promise of home. But the chord after it — the one that looks like a fraction — isn’t even in the key! A minor chord in our home key has been changed into a major chord, becoming a dominant arrow for another key entirely. It’s called a secondary dominant. In this case it’s the dominant of A minor (vi), which leads strongly to vi. Going from V to vi is called a deceptive cadence , for good reason: it’s a damn lie.
The first vi was disconcerting. The second, stronger one is more so. Twice we were promised our C major home, and twice we ended up on A minor instead. The second one was even tonicized, which is what you call it when a dominant of its very own was created to emphasize it.
As we head into the chorus (“Hallelujah…”), we get a IV. Ooh, I know this one! It could be the first part of a plagal cadence (IV-I), also known as the “amen” because it closes every church hymn. That’ll take us home through another door, like so — and I’ll make it nice and churchy (11 sec):
Amen, see? That would have grounded the phrase and ended our exile. But…it doesn’t do that. We don’t go home. Instead, the IV goes unexpectedly to vi, and we’re pulled sideways to the A minor dark side for a THIRD time (11 sec):
The first one takes us home and tucks us into our bed; the second pivots to our dark minor lake cabin in winter, and the firewood is wet, and the horn just blew three times.
At this point it’s been a full 30 seconds since we’ve been home, an eternity on this scale. Worse still, we’ve been teased with home three times. Cohen has us feeling subconsciously homesick. Then finally, finally, we get a V that isn’t a lie. It promises home and delivers, moving to a I on the last syllable of the last Hallelujah. It’s an authentic cadence, V-I, the musical equivalent of a period, full stop.
Here’s my favorite cover of the song. Feel the security of that first phrase, then leave home, wander in the desert as home is thrice denied, then feel the return on the last Hallelujah of the chorus. Beautiful.
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Top image by Bill Strain | CC 2.0
Lou Rawls and the Christmas Clams
I hate to do this.
Lou Rawls is one of my favorite R&B singers. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is one of the most harmonically delicious Christmas songs. So you’d think the Lou Rawls cover of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” would make me happy. But it doesn’t — all because of one phrase.
I know this is a little stupid. Most of the cover is perfection. The band is tight, and Lou is on his game. I’m having myself a merry, as requested. But just over a minute in, on “faithful friends who are dear to us,” Lou lays down a series of clams so painful that I want to gently place my fingertips on the crowning head of baby Jesus and stuff him back in.
Let’s listen from the beginning, up to the spot that pees on my Yule log (75 sec):
The harmony in this song is rich and gorgeous, especially in the bridge:
It’s taking all of my restraint to not run naked and giggling through the Romans on this one. Those of you who would understand it can do the analysis your own fine selves. For the rest, here’s a slow jam on the harmony (32s):
A lot of the wonder in this passage is in the relationship of the melody to the harmony. There’s a chain of dissonances that still play by the rules of harmony. The bass note and melody note form one dissonant interval after another — sevenths and ninths and tritones. But in the context of the full harmony, every note of that tune is either part of the chord or what’s called a non-harmonic tone — a note that’s not in the chord of the moment, but follows one of a dozen established patterns that your ear can make sense of. This passage was not written overnight. Picture one of those guys who paints landscapes on the head of a pin.
If you’re a jazz singer, futzing around with the melody is part of the job description. But when the harmony is as complex as this, it’s a lot harder to thread that needle. Rawls starts the bridge like so:
I’ve straightened out the rhythm for comparison to the original, but notice the pitches. Instead of singing three Cs for “Here we are,” he sing Bb-C-Bb. Nice touch. He’s now off by one step for the rest of the phrase…
…and it works anyway! Jazz harmony is greatly expanded compared to classical harmony. Instead of three-note triads, you have 7th chords (with 4 notes), 9th chords (with 5 notes), and so on. More pitches are eligible to sound at any given moment. You can go off script and still win, and that’s what he did here. Every melody note nestles into its chord as either a chord tone or a legal non-harmonic. To translate that to jazz, Lou laid no clams in those four bars, only pearls.
Oh, but the next two bars.
Flush with that victory, Lou decides to sing the same basic phrase again. But the harmony under it has changed, a lot. The result is a clambake:
You don’t need to be a music theorist to hear it. Here they are together: listen to how the first phrase works, and the second phrase (“Faithful friends”) doesn’t (15 sec):
<silent scream>
I know what you’re thinking. I’m a petty little man, and he’s Lou Rawls. But imagine that for years you’ve adored the genius that went into one tiny corner of a beautiful painting, a detail that no one else seems to notice or comment on. Then one day you see someone walk by and squirt their clam sandwich onto that exact spot. I don’t care if it was Michelangelo himself who bit the sandwich, you’re still gonna be pissed.
I love you Mr. Rawls, but dude, napkin.