We are wrapping up the harmony unit of pop aural skills class with harmonized basslines. These sound more “classical” than the other material we’re covering, and for good reason. Long before Western Europeans thought in terms of chords, they saw harmony as something that emerged from the interaction of multiple simultaneous melodies. Baroque composers frequently …
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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 …
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Swing primer
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington Hear a seamless collage of several varieties of swing: Music Theory Songs by Ethan Hein Aside from the blues, swing is the United States’ most significant musical innovation. People typically associate its rubbery, …
The saddest chord progression ever
See also the happiest chord progression ever. The short-lived Russian composer Vasily Kalinnikov is best known (to the extent he’s known at all) for this piece of music: If you listen to this piece at 6:16, there’s a particularly beautiful and tragic chord progression. It’s in the key of E-flat, but I transposed it into C …