The saddest chord progression ever (revisited)

First, let’s get this out of the way: the title of this post is a joke. No chord progression has any inherent emotional quality. Musical sadness is a matter of cultural convention, and even within a culture or subculture, sadness is the result of harmony interacting with melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre, phrasing, articulation and other intangibles. The listener produces as much of the music’s meaning as the music does, if not more. That said, everything else being equal, there are some chord and voice leading combinations that reliably evoke sadness in Anglo-American listeners. The saddest chord progression that I know of comes from a short passage near the end of Vasily Kalinnikov‘s Symphony No. 1, 2nd movement. Listen at 6:16.

I mean, right? So the question is, what makes this so sad? Some of it is the orchestration and dynamics and so on. But even if you strum these chords on a guitar with minimal expressiveness, they are still sad. Let’s find out why.

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The final day of the Song Factory course

Last week we brought my first New School Song Factory class to its conclusion. I have taught songwriting many times before, but it was always as a means to learning something else: music theory, production, progressive pedagogical methods. This was my first opportunity to teach songwriting for the sake of songwriting. The final session ended with a spontaneous singalong of “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers, initiated not by me, but by the students. I couldn’t have planned it any better if I had tried.

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Songs in film and television

As my Song Factory course at the New School comes to its conclusion, we are moving past the specifics of particular genres and eras and into larger questions about the cultural life of songs. This week we are discussing songs in movies and TV shows. The conversation deliberately will not include scores or musicals, interesting though those are; instead, we will focus only on soundtracks. We will start off by distinguishing between scores and soundtracks: scores are custom-created for the film or show, while soundtracks are compiled from existing music. They are created by different people, too; scores are written by composers, while soundtracks are selected by music supervisors.

Next, we will explore the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Diegetic music is part of the characters’ reality: songs playing on a car radio or home stereo, or a musical performance taking place. Non-diegetic music, on the other hand, is not part of the characters’ reality, it exists “outside” it. Nearly all film scores are non-diegetic, but soundtrack songs can work both ways.

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For No One

The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.”

Paul is playing piano and clavichord, Ringo plays drums and maracas, and the delightfully-named Alan Civil plays the French horn. (He also played in the orchestra on “A Day In The Life.”) John and George were not involved.

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Where do jazz standards come from?

My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz.

There are numerous sources of jazz standards. In this post, I collect some of the ones that appear in movie musicals, and I pair each one with a well-known jazz interpretation. (Note that most of these had appeared in stage musicals many years earlier.) Enjoy! Continue reading

She’s Leaving Home

My kids are totally obsessed with the Beatles right now, much to my ongoing delight, so I’m learning how to play more of their songs. Brad Mehldau motivated me to take a look at “She’s Leaving Home”, which I learned about a thousand years ago on guitar and haven’t thought about in a while. It’s a good one! Apparently, when Paul McCartney was ready to record the song, George Martin was busy. Paul was eager to get moving on it, so he asked a guy named Mike Leander to do the harp and string arrangement. Presumably Leander transcribed Paul’s piano part and embellished from there. Harpist Sheila Bromberg was the first woman to play on a Beatles record.

The production is pretty tame by Sgt Pepper’s standards, but there are still some intriguing choices. There’s a single-tap tape echo on the harp, which is most plainly audible on the intro. Paul and John double-track their voices on the choruses, too. Those touches are just enough to keep the track in the world of psychedelia, rather than the world of fake classical like “Eleanor Rigby.” Hear the harp without the tape echo on this early take:

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Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music tech and songwriting students. 

This song was famously assembled in the studio from multiple takes, and its production is quite complicated. Like many later Beatles psychedelic masterpieces, this ended up being more a piece of electronic music than rock. But before we get into the production of the track, let’s talk about the “notes on the page” aspect of the song. John Lennon is very good at making unconventional songwriting ideas sound intuitive and inevitable.

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