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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Blues tonality

See a more beginner-friendly blues primer here. Read this treatise in Spanish, translated by Jesús Fernández.

Abstract

The blues is a foundational element of America’s vernacular and art music. It is commonly described as a combination of African rhythms and European harmonies. This description is inaccurate. Blues follows harmonic conventions that are quite different from those of Western European common practice. Blues harmony does not fit into major or minor tonality, and it frequently violates the “rules” of voice leading and chord function. But blues listeners do not experience the music as strange or dissonant. Instead, they hear an alternative form of consonance. In order to make sense of this fact, we need to understand blues as belonging to its own system of tonality, distinct from major, minor and modal systems. Because blues tonality is so widespread and important in Western music, I argue that we should teach it as part of the basic music theory curriculum. Continue reading