Identifying sequences

The final topic in pop aural skills is harmonic sequences, strings of chords whose roots move in a predictable interval pattern. Sequences are common in European classical music. Listen to Bach’s Chaconne from the D Minor Violin Partita or Contrapunctus VIII from The Art of Fugue for a million examples. Sequences are also pretty common in jazz. They are not so common in pop. But when people do use them, it can sound like a fun harmonic adventure. 

Circle of fifths sequences

Many sequences are organized around the circle of fifths, so let’s start there. The basic idea is simple. Say you want to write a sequence in the key of C major. You find your chord roots by starting on C and moving through the key in counterclockwise circle of fifths order, like so: C, F, B, E, A, D, G, C. 

Continue reading “Identifying sequences”

Hypermeter

I didn’t find out about hypermeter until very late in my music theory learning journey. I think it should be part of the basic toolkit, especially for songwriters and improvisers. The explanation that follows might seem abstract, but behind the scenes, hypermeter provides the signposts that orient you in medium-scale musical time.

The term “hypermeter” might be new to you if you aren’t a musicologist, but I guarantee that you already intuitively know what it is. When you feel that a verse or chorus has a front half or a back half, that you can or can’t expect when the next section is going to start, or you sense that things do or don’t align with each other, that is your sense of hypermeter at work. At a club or festival, the crowd can easily feel when a 32-bar section of a repetitive dance groove is coming to an end, not because anyone is counting measures, but because of their orientation in the hypermeter.

Continue reading “Hypermeter”

Identifying augmented chords

Augmented chords don’t come up much, but they are on the aural skills syllabus, and they have that specific quality that no other harmony can create. Their uncanny zero-gravity quality is the result of their symmetry. Any note in an augmented triad could function as its root. When you write the augmented chords on the chromatic circle, you quickly discover that there are only four possible ones, shown in the image below.

The one on the top left is C+, E+ and G#+/Ab+. The one on the top right is C#+/Db+, F+ and A+. The one on the bottom right is D+, F#/Gb+ and A#/Bb+. Finally, the one on the bottom left is D#/Eb+, G+, and B+.

Continue reading “Identifying augmented chords”

MusicRadar column on “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” and “Soul Makossa”

This month in MusicRadar, I explain my favorite Michael Jackson song and my favorite song of the 1980s generally, enjoy.

Identifying tritone substitutions

This is one of those jazz theory ideas that gets explained endlessly online and in texts and is relatively rare in a typical American’s listening experience. But when you do hear it, it does sound cool. I made an interactive explainer, because as with so many jazz theory concepts, tritone substitutions make more sense when you hear them than when you see them represented symbolically.

Tritone substitutions by ethanhein1

Here’s the verbal explanation, for what it’s worth. Say you have a V7-I cadence in C major, that is, G7 resolving to C. The active ingredient in G7 is the tritone between the third, B, and the flat seventh, F. This same tritone is also present in Db7; its third is F and its flat seventh is C-flat (the same pitch as B.) For jazz purposes, this means that you can substitute Db7 for G7 and it will function the same way, but with an edgier and more chromatic sound. This is called tritone substitution because the substitute chord’s root is a tritone away from the original chord. The practical consequence is that you can precede any chord with the dominant seventh chord whose root is a half step higher and it will create a nice resolution.

Continue reading “Identifying tritone substitutions”

Identifying modulations

In class we have been talking about secondary dominants, where you temporarily treat a chord as a new key center before returning to the main key. In a modulation, you move to a new key center and stay there (for a while, anyway). Modulations were a common songwriting technique in pre-rock popular music, and a somewhat less common one in the rock era. They have become increasingly rare in the Anglo-American pop mainstream, though they are still a feature of game and film scores.

Continue reading “Identifying modulations”

Improvising over secondary dominants

This week in aural skills we are improvising sung countermelodies over various chord progressions. The goal is to help the students feel the voice leading, the chromatic alterations and so on. This is especially important for playing over secondary dominants or “applied chords” as classical theory folks call them. I won’t explain these chords in any depth here; I’ll just refer you to this chart I made showing all the chord roots on the circle of fifths in grey and their associated dominant chords in purple.

In any major key, there are seven chords that are diatonic to the key (meaning, built entirely from that major scale). You can precede each of these chords with a dominant seventh chord whose root is a fifth higher, to create a nice tension-release sequence. For the tonic chord, you use the regular old V7 chord. The other chords get secondary dominants. This post lists examples of the most commonly used ones. Continue reading “Improvising over secondary dominants”

Improvising countermelodies

How do you improvise a countermelody? Listen to things in the music and respond: imitate, vary, fill in gaps. Which tracks, though? Start with music that is harmonically uncomplicated enough that you can predict where it’s going, but with enough rhythmic interest to give you something to react to. I do not recommend the blues for this purpose. It’s a popular strategy among well-meaning music educators, and I get why, but blues improvisation is not a beginner-level skill. So what should you use?

I like the first three and a half minutes of “God Make Me Funky” (or the shorter single version.) The tune is in E, and you can use Mixolydian, major pentatonic, minor pentatonic or any combination of the above. Try following and responding to the guitar.

Continue reading “Improvising countermelodies”

Identifying blues melodies

This is an exciting week of class for me, because we are analyzing blues melodies, and that is a music-theoretic subject that is close to my heart. Given its impact on the past hundred years of Anglo-American popular culture, the blues has been the subject of a shockingly small amount of musicological analysis. The best resource I know of is Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis by Jeff Titon. I collect lots of other references of widely varying quality here. It’s wonderful that NYU is centering the blues in its new pop theory sequence, but how do we actually teach it? Western tonal theory is no help here, and jazz theory doesn’t have much to add. If there isn’t a systematic framework we can use, where do we even begin?

The first question we have to answer is, what constitutes a blues melody? Are we only going to count Delta blues, or other kinds of blues, or are we going to open up our inquiry to blues-derived musics like jazz, country, R&B or rock? I think we can draw on any kind of music that uses blues tonality, so my answer is all of the above, but that does not make my job any easier.

Continue reading “Identifying blues melodies”

Identifying melodic motives

Motivic development is more of a classical music thing than a rock/pop thing. If you want to hear a motive carried through a series of elaborations and variations, you should look to Beethoven rather than the Beatles. Pop songs are a few riffs, repeated or strung together. But there are some songs out there whose riffs are organized in ways that you could understand in terms of motivic development.

Continue reading “Identifying melodic motives”