Identifying song forms

Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to do with the balancing of surprise and familiarity, of predictability and unpredictability, but if someone has a systematic theory of why some structures work so much better than others, I am not aware of it. The best approach I can recommend is to examine the most widely used structures across styles and eras and try to internalize them. Transcribing songs at the structural level is a great way to do that. Staff notation is not the right tool for the job, because you can’t easily zoom out and see the big picture. I like to use Ableton Live to annotate and color-code audio and MIDI. Here’s “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads. 

I also like the bubble diagrams you can make with Audio Timeliner, because it lets you group sections together at multiple levels. The downside is that you can’t easily zoom into the bars and beats level, or show meter and hypermeter.

In this post, I’ll talk through examples of three common structures: strophic form, AABA form, and verse-chorus form (the one that “Burning Down The House” uses). Then I’ll get into the difficult question of form in groove-based music.

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Identifying standard pop chord progressions

This week in aural skills, we are practicing identifying pop schemas, that is, chord sequences and loops that occur commonly in various kinds of Anglo-American top 40, rock, R&B and related styles. We previously covered the permutations of I, IV and V and the plagal cadence. Now we’re getting into progressions that bring in the rest of the diatonic family, that is, the chords you can make using the notes in the major and natural minor scales.

Singer-Songwriter/Axis progression

A huge percentage of current mainstream pop and rock songs are built on the four-legged stool of the I, IV, V and vi chords. In C, those are C, F, G, and Am. You can find these chords in any order, but there’s a particularly inescapable sequence that my NYU colleagues call the singer-songwriter progression: I, V, vi, IV, which in C is C, G, Am, F.

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Identifying added-note chords

My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are not from jazz. You could also call them extended chords, or complicated chords, or fancy chords, or cool chords. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the numbers and symbols. My preferred way to organize all this information is to think of chords as vertically stacked scales. It is intimidating to try to learn to distinguish between C7, C9, C13, C7sus4, C9sus4 and C13sus4, but they are really just different combinations of the notes in C Mixolydian mode, and they all convey a similar “Mixolydian-ness”. But before we get to those, let’s start with extended chords you can make from regular old C major.

Major scale chords

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Love Rollercoaster, Genius of Love, and nonsensical chord loops

I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In this post, I demonstrate the idea using two dance floor classics. “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players (1975) is from the peak disco era, and “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club (1981) sits at the crossover point between disco, new wave and early hip-hop. Let’s start with “Love Rollercoaster”.

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Rap before hip-hop

For the hip-hop unit in the Song Factory class at the New School, I want to start things off by clarifying the difference between hip-hop and rap. People use these terms interchangeably, but they really describe two different things: hip-hop is a culture, and rap is a musical expression of that culture. But rapping is also a musical technique, one that long predates hip-hop. Rap appears in every style of popular music descending from the African diaspora. I list examples from several of those styles below. You might debate me on whether some of these examples count as “rap” or not. Is it rap when you sing rhythmically on one pitch, or on a narrow range of pitches? Rap more often uses wider pitch contours. Are we counting any spoken word with musical accompaniment, or does the speaking have to be rhythmically structured in a specific way? Does it have to rhyme? We will be discussing all that in class.

Blues

John Lee Hooker – “Boogie Chillen” (1948)

Hooker raps a couple of short verses amid a mostly sung tune, and they are haunting. He is not exactly following the rhythm of the guitar part, but he’s also not using natural speech rhythm; it’s somewhere in between.

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Little Simz and Ramsey Lewis

In 1973, the Ramsey Lewis Trio performed their arrangement of “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts on German television. This performance has been viewed an astonishing 1.6 million times on YouTube.

I learned that fact from Paul Thompson‘s analysis of the performance, which includes transcriptions of several of Cleveland Eaton’s basslines. Paul’s YouTube channel is one of the most valuable music education resources on the internet.

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Rock Steady

I need a lot of reassurance that things are going to be okay. This Aretha Franklin groove reliably does the job for me. I say “groove” and not “song”, because while “Rock Steady” does have a minimal song structure, it’s all in support of helping you dance.

The musicians on this track represent the gold standard of R&B session players: Donny Hathaway on organ, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard Purdie on drums, and Robert Popwell and Dr John on percussion. The backing vocals are by Pat Smith and Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma. Aretha herself played a scratch piano part for everyone to follow, but it doesn’t sound like it made it into the final mix. According to an interview with Chuck Rainey, the musicians recorded several takes, but they ended up choosing the very first one as the released version. The Memphis Horns (Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love on tenor sax) were overdubbed later.

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