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 intangibles. The listener produces as much of the music’s meaning as the music does, if not more. That said, everything else being equal, there are some chord and voice leading combinations that reliably evoke sadness in Anglo-American listeners. The saddest chord progression that I know of comes from a short passage near the end of Vasily Kalinnikov‘s Symphony No. 1, 2nd movement. Listen at 6:16.

I mean, right? So the question is, what makes this so sad? Some of it is the orchestration and dynamics and so on. But even if you strum these chords on a guitar with minimal expressiveness, they are still sad. Let’s find out why.

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Rock Steady

I need a lot of reassurance that things are going to be okay. This Aretha Franklin groove reliably does the job for me. I say “groove” and not “song”, because while “Rock Steady” does have a minimal song structure, it’s all in support of helping you dance.

The musicians on this track represent the gold standard of R&B session players: Donny Hathaway on organ, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard Purdie on drums, and Robert Popwell and Dr John on percussion. The backing vocals are by Pat Smith and Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma. Aretha herself played a scratch piano part for everyone to follow, but it doesn’t sound like it made it into the final mix. According to an interview with Chuck Rainey, the musicians recorded several takes, but they ended up choosing the very first one as the released version. The Memphis Horns (Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love on tenor sax) were overdubbed later.

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Over The Modal Rainbow

Music theory prankster Robert Komaniecki tried to ruin “Over The Rainbow” by singing it in C Phrygian mode:

@robertkomaniecki

Where are my Gregorian chant-heads at #musicmajor #musictheory #choir

♬ original sound – Robert Komaniecki

My son’s reaction to this: “Waaaaggghhh.”

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Ahmad Jamal and hip-hop

One of my favorite rap songs is “The World Is Yours” by Nas from his classic Illmatic, produced by the great Pete Rock.

Here’s Tracklib’s sample breakdown:

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I made some music using modes of the harmonic series

It’s a cliche to say that the harmonic series is the basis of all of music. It is true that the first five harmonics are the basis of Western tuning. The first seven harmonics are a possible basis for the blues. You don’t tend to hear much music based on the higher harmonics, but they can be a great way to build exotic scales that still have a feeling of coherence and order.

 

Here are some tracks I made using the pitch ratios derived from the first forty-three natural harmonics.

I made this music using Ableton Live and a tuning plugin called MTS-ESP. I got it so I could try out historical tuning systems, first for my own understanding, and then for teaching music theory. While I was experimenting with the software, I started plugging in weird scales of my own invention. To understand what I was doing, you need to know a little math.

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The final day of the Song Factory course

Last week we brought my first New School Song Factory class to its conclusion. I have taught songwriting many times before, but it was always as a means to learning something else: music theory, production, progressive pedagogical methods. This was my first opportunity to teach songwriting for the sake of songwriting. The final session ended with a spontaneous singalong of “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers, initiated not by me, but by the students. I couldn’t have planned it any better if I had tried.

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As The World Falls Down

As kids, my siblings and I watched Labyrinth about eight billion times. It has been super gratifying that my own children love the movie too. Together with their separate David Bowie fandom, that has put “As The World Falls Down” into heavy rotation lately.

When I was a kid, I didn’t especially love this song, I thought it was boring and weird. I started connecting to it in adulthood. It seems like a straightforwardly cheesy pop ballad, so why is it so magical? There’s more musical substance here than you might think.

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Songs in film and television

As my Song Factory course at the New School comes to its conclusion, we are moving past the specifics of particular genres and eras and into larger questions about the cultural life of songs. This week we are discussing songs in movies and TV shows. The conversation deliberately will not include scores or musicals, interesting though those are; instead, we will focus only on soundtracks. We will start off by distinguishing between scores and soundtracks: scores are custom-created for the film or show, while soundtracks are compiled from existing music. They are created by different people, too; scores are written by composers, while soundtracks are selected by music supervisors.

Next, we will explore the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Diegetic music is part of the characters’ reality: songs playing on a car radio or home stereo, or a musical performance taking place. Non-diegetic music, on the other hand, is not part of the characters’ reality, it exists “outside” it. Nearly all film scores are non-diegetic, but soundtrack songs can work both ways.

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Building the Amen break

I continue to refine my new groove pedagogy method: teach a complicated rhythm by presenting a very simplified version of it, then a less simplified version, then a less simplified version, until you converge on the groove in its full nuance. Imagine a pixelated image gradually gaining resolution. My goal with this is to have each simplified version still stand on its own as a musically satisfying groove. I tried the method on the Funky Drummer break, and now I’m doing something more complicated, the Amen break. 

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God Make Me Funky

Herbie Hancock’s band on his classic mid-70s funk albums went on without Herbie as The Headhunters. Their biggest hit, “God Make Me Funky”, has been sampled in several hundred rap songs, and rightly so, it’s an amazing groove.

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