Identifying song forms

Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to do with the balancing of surprise and familiarity, of predictability and unpredictability, but if someone has a systematic theory of why some structures work so much better than others, I am not aware of it. The best approach I can recommend is to examine the most widely used structures across styles and eras and try to internalize them. Transcribing songs at the structural level is a great way to do that. Staff notation is not the right tool for the job, because you can’t easily zoom out and see the big picture. I like to use Ableton Live to annotate and color-code audio and MIDI. Here’s “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads. 

I also like the bubble diagrams you can make with Audio Timeliner, because it lets you group sections together at multiple levels. The downside is that you can’t easily zoom into the bars and beats level, or show meter and hypermeter.

In this post, I’ll talk through examples of three common structures: strophic form, AABA form, and verse-chorus form (the one that “Burning Down The House” uses). Then I’ll get into the difficult question of form in groove-based music.

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Identifying phrase structure

It’s easy to understand what a section of a song is: an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge. It is less easy to understand phrases, the components of a song section. Usually a song section contains between two and four phrases. But what is a phrase? No one seems totally sure. This is important to figure out, because if you aspire to write or improvise music, having control over your phrasing might be the most important thing you need. If you can organize your phrases, you can have limited technique and knowledge of theory and still sound good. If you can’t organize your phrases, all the technique and theory in the world won’t be much help.

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Identifying harmonized basslines

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 wrote pieces using ground bass, formulaic basslines that act as a foundation for counterpoint. (Bach used ground bass for the Passacaglia and Fugue and the Chaconne.) Galant composers used schemas, short figures combining basslines and contrapuntal melodies that you use as points of departure for larger compositions. And many European composers in the 17th and 18th centuries honed their skills with partimento, basslines that you improvised counterpoint on top of according to particular rules.

Some the Baroque ground bass patterns and galant schemas persist in the vocabulary of Anglo-American pop, though with fewer rules about the correct way to harmonize them. Continue reading “Identifying harmonized basslines”

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 plagal cadences”

Identifying I, IV and V chords

The I, IV and V chords are beginner-level music theory concepts. However, in my pop-oriented aural skills class, we are covering them in the context of the blues, where they are more complicated than they are in the standard tonal theory context. Let’s begin with a review of the basic I, IV and V from the major scale. Here they are in C.

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Identifying the diatonic modes

In Aural Skills class we continue our sprint through harmony concepts with the diatonic modes. These are an advanced topic in classical theory, but for popular music, you need to deal with them up front, especially Mixolydian and Dorian.

Here are the tunes I’m giving the class to practice distinguishing the modes from each other. Continue reading “Identifying the diatonic modes”

Identifying pentatonic scales

It’s pentatonic scales week in aural skills class. This would seem to be the easiest thing on the syllabus, but I discovered while doing listening exercises with the students that even these simple scales have their subtleties.

Major Pentatonic

You can understand the C major pentatonic scale to be the C major scale without scale degrees four and seven. These are the ones that create all the tension and dissonance, and without them, the major pentatonic sounds uncomplicatedly sunny and cheerful. (Or does it? More on that in a minute.) Click the image to play the scale in the aQWERTYon.

You can easily explore the G-flat major pentatonic scale: it’s the black keys on the piano. Guitarists will find that G major pentatonic is particularly easy to play. (Too bad they can’t so easily play it with the pianists.)

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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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Identifying seventh chords

In aural skills class, we are practicing identifying seventh chords. This is second nature for guitarists and pianists who play anything jazz-related, but I appreciate that it’s harder for singers and players of monophonic instruments. Here’s my reference guide to the four (non-diminished or -augmented) seventh chords.


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