Identifying embellishing tones

We’re getting started on melody in pop aural skills by talking about embellishing tones. The word “embellish” is from the Old French embelliss-, meaning to make something beautiful by ornamenting it. To understand what embellishing tones are, you first need to know about the tones they are embellishing. In Western tonal music and (non-blues-based) Anglo-American pop, the main melody notes are (usually) found within the underlying chords. For example, if the song has a C chord, then the main melody notes over that chord will (probably) be the notes C, E, or G. Any other melody note will be an embellishing tone.

There are many different kinds of melodic embellishments, but we will be dealing with just four: passing tones, neighbor tones, appoggiatura, and escape tones. Continue reading

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 plagal cadences

This week in aural skills, we’re working on various harmonic tropes based on IV-I root movements. This chord progression is technically called the plagal cadence, but is more memorably nicknamed the “Amen” cadence because it’s a traditional European hymn ending. (It has nothing to do with the Amen break, though they do sound good together.) The plagal cadence is the mirror image of the classical V-I authentic cadence.

Where does the word “plagal” come from? The Online Etymology Dictionary says that it’s probably from Greek plagios, meaning “oblique” or “side”, and that word in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *plak-, “to be flat”. This root also gives us flag (a flat stone for paving), flake, and plank. Plagal probably shares an etymology with “flatness” because the important voice-leading element is scale degree four resolving down to three. While we’re talking about word origins, amen comes from a Hebrew word meaning “truth,” in this context meaning “an adverbial expression of agreement.” Continue reading

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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Jack Straw

After spending their first few years writing abstract psychedelic tunes, the Grateful Dead took a hard turn into Americana. They wrote a bunch of songs inspired by blues, country and folk, and in doing so, they massively expanded their listener base. Several of these songs involve outlaws and drifters in the Wild West. I think the best of the Dead’s cowboy songs, both lyrically and musically, is “Jack Straw”.

When I was a kid, my older stepbrother had a bunch of Dead albums stored in our apartment. I avoided listening to them at first because their covers suggested that they would be too heavy and frightening for my tastes. Imagine my surprise when I finally did try them and they turned out to be affable psychedelic country. I first heard “Jack Straw” on What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been, the hugely better of the two Grateful Dead greatest hits compilations. (The other is Skeletons from the Closet, which has some baffling choices – “Mexicali Blues”, why?)

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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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Absolute Beginners

As my older kid’s Bowie obsession continues, he is digging deeper into the corners of the catalog and finding songs that I hadn’t even heard of. This week we’re learning “Absolute Beginners”, which Bowie wrote for the movie of the same name.

The song is as richly weird as all Bowie songs are. The instrumentation is mostly standard eighties rock, except for the horn section, which is one trumpeter and six (!) saxophonists. I learned from the Bowie Bible that Bowie wanted a backing vocalist who sounded “like a shopgirl”. Session guitarist Kevin Armstrong recommended his younger sister Janet, who had never sung professionally in a studio before. Knowing that makes me feel a little warmer toward her fairly awkward performance.

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Moonage Daydream

Over the weekend I went with the family to see the newly remastered 1973 David Bowie concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The picture and sound quality are uneven at best, but Bowie is such a spellbinding performer that it doesn’t matter. One of the high points is his performance of this banger.

Like all the great Bowie songs of the era, this superficially sounds like a regular rock song, but it has a lot of peculiar songwriting and arrangement touches. Bowie plays acoustic guitar, but also saxophone and pennywhistle. Mick Ronson plays electric guitar and piano, and also wrote the string arrangement. Trevor Bolder plays bass and Woody Woodmansey plays drums.

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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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Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

David Bowie was a great admirer of John Lennon, and like Lennon, Bowie had the gift of making weird songwriting choices sound natural. You don’t necessarily pick up on the weirdness from casual listening, but then you try to learn a Bowie tune, and it is full of surprises. “Changes” is a case in point.

From my first hearing of this song as a kid until literally yesterday, I thought the chorus went, “Time to face the strain.” Nope, it’s “Turn to face the strange.” I guess I imagined that Bowie was singing about the strain of things changing? I’m not alone in this! According to this book, some of Bowie’s own backup singers heard it as “strain” too until he corrected them.

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