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.

Passing tones

A passing tone is a note that connects two chord tones. It could be part of the overall key/mode, or it could be chromatic. Listen to the beginning of the chorus of “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers. The chord is C, and the two main melody notes are E (“lean”) and C (“me”). The D in between (“on”) is a passing tone.

Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk” (1954) starts on a Bb chord. The first riff in the melody connects two chord tones, D and F. The E-flat and E in between them are the passing tones. The E-flat is part of the Bb major scale; the E is a chromatic note.

The Curb Your Enthusiasm theme uses chromatic passing tones in a more unusual way, because its main notes are chord extensions. The first chord is C, and the main melody notes are B (the seventh) and A (the sixth). They are connected by a chromatic passing tone, B-flat. 

Neighbor tones

A neighbor tone is what it sounds like: a note next to a chord tone. Listen to “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles, starting at 0:43. The line “The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you” centers on the main note D. Each subphrase jumps up to the neighbor tone E for one syllable (“is”, “ti”, “are”).

In “Hey Jude”, the line “better better better better” is an arpeggiated F chord where each note is preceded by its chromatic lower neighbor.

You can also have a double neighbor, a structural tone with neighbors on either side of it. You can hear double neighbors throughout the bridge of “On The Sunny Side of the Street” by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, sung here by Ella Fitzgerald with Count Basie. On the line “I used to walk in the shade”, the underlying chord is G, and “shade” is on B. It’s preceded by the second A on “in” and the fourth C on “the”. The same pattern holds for “with my blues on parade” and “I’m not afraid.”

Appoggiatura

This sounds like a scary classical music term, but it’s easy to understand. It’s from the Italian appoggiare, “to lean”. An appoggiatura is a non-chord tone that appears on a strong beat where you were expecting a chord tone. It’s then immediately followed by the expected note. John Lennon uses lots of appoggiatura. Listen to the first verse of “In My Life”, on the line “There are places I remember”. The first chord is A, and you would expect that the word “places” would start on the note A, but no, Lennon sings “place” on B instead, and only then sings “es” on A. He does the same thing on the line “Some forever, not for better” – the appoggiatura is on “ev” in the word “forever.”

Lennon does the same thing (on the same word) at the end of the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever”. The line “Strawberry fields forever” ends on a C chord, but the syllable “ev-” is on the note D, and you don’t hear the expected note C until “er.”

Paul McCartney has a nice appoggiature in “She’s Leaving Home” in the chorus, when he sings “She is leaving”. It’s over an E chord, and the syllable “leav-” is on F-sharp, an appoggiatura that resolves with “-ing” to the expected G-sharp.

A student asked, “Isn’t an appoggiatura just a suspension?” Yes and no. In classical music, there are a lot of specific rules determining when and how suspensions and appoggiaturas can be used, so they are easy to tell apart. Pop is looser, so it’s harder to draw clear distinctions. I would say that an appoggiatura is a rhythmically accented non-chord tone, which might or might not be a suspension.

Escape tones

An escape tone is a note that you approach by step before leaping away in the opposite direction. (Imagine a video game character, I guess.) You can hear an escape tone in “Dear Prudence” in the first verse, on the line “greet the brand new day-ay-ay-aaaaaay.” The word “day” walks down the D major pentatonic scale: D, B, A. Then it leaps up a sixth to F-sharp. That lowest A is the escape tone.

“Life On Mars?” by David Bowie has lots of escape tones. Listen to the prechorus at 0:42. In the line “but the film is a sadd’ning bore”, the last syllable of “sadd’ning” is the escape tone. Bowie steps down to it from “sad” and then leaps up to “bore.” On the next line, “though she’s lived it ten times or more”, the word “or” is the escape tone. Bowie steps down to it from “times” and then leaps up dramatically to “more”. The same thing happens in the next two lines.

Bowie uses both appoggiatura and escape tones in “Starman”. Listen to the first line, “Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low-ow-ow.” The chord under this line is Gm. The word “lights” is an appoggiatura on A before the expected G on “were.” Then “were” is an escape tone; Bowie steps down to it from “lights” before leaping up to “low”. At the end of the chorus, on the line “let the children boogie”, the syllable “dren” is an escape tone. Bowie steps up to it from “chil” and then leaps down to “boog.” Cool melody.

I had a harder time finding these examples than I expected. I know plenty of melodies, but most of the music I listen to is unhelpful for illustrating these particular melodic concepts. Everything I’ve discussed here presumes that the melody of the song centers on chord tones, with non-chord tones as decoration or connective tissue. But most of the songs that I like are based on the blues, where melodies have very different relationships with their underlying chords than songs deriving from European tonal harmony do. An important melodic note in the blues doesn’t need to be a chord tone, or even from within the key. There are structural and decorative notes in the blues, but there isn’t a convenient formalism to explain them that I’m aware of. Some scholars have begun to lay the foundation for such a thing; check out Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis by Jeff Titon and The New Blue Music: Changes in Rhythm & Blues, 1950–1999 by Richard Ripani.

Current pop is also a problem for traditional melodic analysis because of its widespread melodic-harmonic divorce. For example, in “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, the main melody notes are mostly not chord tones! Both the melody notes and the chords are from within G major, but the melody frequently conflicts with the chords. The first line of the verse, “I threw a wish in a well”, repeats the note B over a C chord. On the line “I looked to you as it fell”,  Jepsen does another string of B’s over a C chord and then “resolves” to a pair of A’s sung over a G chord. The first two bars of the chorus are an arpeggiated G chord over a backing of mainly C and D chords. This song is not an outlier, either. This is a subject for another class, I guess.