CONCEPT: INVENTING AN INSTRUMENT TO PLAY MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB IN A.
EAR: CHORD CHART NAMES FOR HARMONY. LISTEN TO EACH OF THESE 1990S SONGS, AND WRITE OUT THE CHORD CHART IN LETTERS AND IN NASHVILLE NUMBERS.
NOTE: TENUTO REVERSE KEYBOARD NOTE IDENTIFICATION. https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/keyboard-reverse/oyyayrybbndebyyy
MELODY: TRANSIENT AND TERMINAL CADENCES IN THE 1990S PRAISE CHORUS*
HARMONY: PRE-DOMINANT FUNCTION, HARMONIZING MELODIES. There are 3 basic options for ending a song with a pre-dominant chord in the antepenult position. You can use a 4, a minor 2 or a major 2. One or more of those combinations will lead to a perfect authentic cadence. Try substituting one of the chords for another in these tunes: “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” uses 27-57-I (D7-G7-C). See how it sounds different using a 4 or a 2-7 in its place. The ending of the refrain for “At Calvary” uses minor 2 (Dm/F - G7 - C). For that one, try using a major 27 (D7) in place of the Dm. How would you describe the difference in the sound of the F# in the chord, rather than the F natural? Then try SCOTT (“Open My Eyes That I May See”) or “500 miles” by the Proclaimers or “Beyond the Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John. All of those use a simple 4 chord, followed by 5 and 1. What if you use a 2, both major and minor? How does that change the sound?
ART: PSALM TONES
CWM: DISCOVER WHAT CHORDS, IN WHAT ORDER, WHAT % FOR EACH IN CCLI TOP 25
why we sing along: the formula for congregational song
PRE-DOMINANT FUNCTION CHORDS
FOR FUN: BEETHOVEN, KING OF POP
What makes a song “sticky?” It’s all measurable and predictable. Just ask Ludwig. He was doing it over a hundred years ago.
FUNCTIONAL HARMONY (PRE-DOMINANT FUNCTION)
All harmony comes down to stable or unstable. That is the story of music: We are home, and we establish our setting and our characters. Then we leave home, we send our characters out on an adventure, we take risks. And in the end, we return home, we resolve the plot, and we come to resolution.
Melody can imply all of these points of a good story, and we have learned about the stable pitches of 135 and the unstable pitches of 2467. But to really tell your story in Western music, you need to underscore it with harmony. All harmony is ultimately made of “stable” pitches (scale degrees) and “unstable” pitches. They can be illustrated with a harmonica or in other ways demonstrated with common folk tunes, but the point is that we use SD1,3,5 to be stable and 2,4,6,7 to be unstable. This is an unbreakable rule.
See chopsticks. It is a diving board: unstable = the jump. Lots of things could happen while you are in the air, but one certainty is that it won’t last long, and it will resolve by hitting the water. Stable = the splash.
See Three Blind Mice. Which pitches are stable (first and last), and which are unstable (the one in between). Play it on a harmonica. You can’t miss. When you blow, you hear the stable pitches. When you draw (breathe in), you get the unstable notes. So 3 Blind Mice is simply playing Blow-Draw-Blow-breathe. Repeat.
Mexican Hat Dance
Chop Sticks
TaRaRaBoomDiay
But those are very simple, very short songs. In order to sustain interest, we need a third chord, and that is the pre-dominant. A different feel than the 5 chord, which definitely wants to resolve directly to home. If you will, the pre-dominant is the diver climbing the ladder to go out on the board and jump in. Not quite as action-oriented, and not the video that you show on the highlights, but the needed thing to set up the dive. You have to break gravity in order to make the natural fall of a dive happen in the first place.
Right now, we’re going to start using Roman numerals from time to time, to help distinguish between scale degrees and the root of a chord. We will use Arabic numerals for scale degrees and Roman numerals for chord names. Later in theory courses, those Roman numerals will help to explain function; for now, it’s just helpful to sometimes use them to know that we are talking about chord numbers and not pitch class numbers.
Use a song that goes 1451. That is the illustration.
Father I Adore You.
Happy Birthday
There seem to be an almost infinite number of chords out there. Indeed, there are many. But in the end, most common songs use only 4 or 5 chords (3 during the verse, add a fourth one in the chorus, add the 5thin the bridge). So how can there be so many chords? In the first place, there are 12 different keys, one for each half step in the octave. Then make each one of those keys minor and you have doubled the options for starting chords. All the rest of the chords are variations of the basic 3 or 4 (or 5) chords that are common to most songs. Let’s get into those now.
Every song begins with a tonic chord: the stable pitches 153. The penultimate chord in traditional music is nearly always the dominant seventh: 572 or 5724. Then comes the pre-dominant chord, which is usually 461 or might be 2468 (which we appreciate, to be sure). If we are talking about pitches, see this story unfold: 1 with 35 then 46 then 57 then 38.
Notice that all of the diatonic scale degrees match one of these three Primary Chords. So theoretically any song can be harmonized by using just 3 chords in that key.
If we put the melodies into the key of C, so that we can easily imagine the scale, let’s see what chords might be implied by the prominent notes of the melody.
Swanee River
Jesus Loves Me
Twinkle Twinkle
Now let’s look at your tune, and try this same technique on it. See what pitches are first in each measure, or if any chords are outlined by the leaps in your melodic line. Hopefully, the chords that work on paper also sound acceptable to you (though perhaps not your first choice, they “work”).
FUNCTIONAL HARMONY (MINOR DIATONIC TRIADS)
We are covering Ten Essentials for Musicians, and we are on Essential Number 4, which is what is known as functional harmony. What we have been exploring is the standard communication of Western music that involves the three primary chords 4 5 and 1. It is “functional” harmony because those three chords have a function.
Remember the diving board illustration? Climb the ladder and go to the edge of the board: that’s Pre-Dominant function, setting up the action that is about to unfold. Then you jump in the air. There is tension and drama, beauty and dissonance, as we are away from home by being “up in the air.” That is the Dominant function, which invariably ends in a return home, or in resolution of the conflict, or in returning home, when you splash into the water. That is the Tonic function, the return to resolution.
You can hear the functions with the simple chord loop 1 5 1, and then 1 4 5 1.
But music is usually more complex than that. Somewhere we long for a bit more of an adventure than these simple folk tunes or children’s songs. Notice that all three primary chords are major chords. Now we introduce the minor diatonic chords: 2, 3 and 6.
Hear the difference between major and minor? It brings a new color to the palette. And in Western music, it is often the next layer “out” from home. If Planet Tonic is home, and its gravitational pull eventually brings us back, and if Dominant 5 is the atmosphere around the planet, so that we know exactly what to expect because the dominant leads us to home. And if pre-dominant is the orbit above the planet, where we can dwell for a while before crashing back into the atmosphere, then these minor chords are the space outside of the gravitational pull of the planet. From these chords, we might go back into orbit and back home, but we can wander farther away and go on a longer adventure, if we wish.
Here are some examples of these chords. Notice that they stay in the same key. In C, no sharps or flats. Yet they are not in a hurry to get back home.