Now that I’ve had my hearty morning guffaw I’d like to be on topic for a moment.
In the Irish Trad forum there was a discussion of the Harmonic Minor scale which Bloomfield eloquently elaborated upon. That got me thinking
about how music works. Particularly, why does the combination of I, IV and V chords work the way it does? Most forms of western “folk” music from Playford to modern blues, and rock have used these three chords and new tunes are being written every day.
I want to understand is how it works?
Why do the specific chord changes engender a sense of movement the way they do? For example if you play a blues rhythm and play the tonic for four measures, that change to the IV is like a musical sigh. Then of course the latter measures with the V-IV-I-I7 puts on the finishing touch.
Any psychological/physical reasons? Any ideas? Can someone explain the musical theory behind it?
Bloomfield might have been elaborating but I wouldna call it eloquent.
Frankly I didn’t understand most of it. He was trying to explain the absence of the Harmonic Minor on the basis of his little dissertation but his rationale would need to be tested in the context of other European traditions that do use that scale with chords. In my band we have a guitarist who plays chords when we do a piece in Raag Kirwani which is in Harmonic Minor Scale and the chords work well. We do it in D
( D E F G A Bb C# D).
I have also heard this scale in Eastern European and Israeli music (I think)so its origins are older then the advent of the dominance of harmony oriented music over modal music in Europe. Still, in contemporary renditions one hears recognizable chordal accompaniment to them. And it works well.
I hope this post doesn’t make you guffaw too, Fly.
It’s mathematical. (Yes, I know..big help, but it is the mathematical relationship of the notes which cause them to resonate with the human psyche in a particular way.)
Really? I can understand the mathematical relationship between notes, but I don’t think that would explain why, for example, I find Eastern music unattractive and unappealing, but Western music is acceptable to my ears whether I ‘like’ it or not.
Unless, Nymph, you wish to amend the phrase “…the human psyche…” to “… a particular human psyche…” But even then I’d likely scratch my head and mumble. A lot.
Although if you’re talking about the Music of the Spheres then I agree wholeheartedly.
But Raag Marwa resonates in the psyche of millions of listeners including Western music lovers.
Its notes are (using D tonic as example):-
D Eb F# G# (no 5th) B C# D+
Can you come up with a sweet series of chords for that without
demeaning its keynote? Now if you get, at some point in time, a harmonic based predominance over a modal tradition such a raag may will go out of fashion. Perhaps this has happened to some songs from the Irish Trad.
Think it´s just convention.
Something developed over centurys making a language somebody know and some dont.
Other cultures have moved in other directions.
The math thing was something Pythagoras tried to prove. In my opinion thats just theory and, like most other teories regarding our perseption of any kind of art, quite helpless…
As an example i guess most of us in the western world would not fully apreciate the sutile nuances, if anything at all, in trad chinese music on first hearing…
I don’t know. Could it be that exposure since infancy to the patterns of Western music has taught your brain to favor receptors for those particular patterns?
Yes of course, I’d agree wholeheartedly with that.
But not with the assertion that mathematics are the root cause of the ‘why it works’ that the Flyster is asking. I can accept that Mathematics is a Universal language, but I don’t think music is. In the case of music, I rather think that the music came first, and then, as Albanian noted earlier, someone tried to use mathematics to explain why certain progressions and intervals sound good and others don’t. But it doesn’t explain why those progressions and intervals will sound wonderful to some people and detestable to others.
On a basic level, it’s all about tension and release.
A lot of the technical reason has do with what’s called “voice leading”. Chord movement is based on the motion of the notes that constitute the chord, and the smoothest-sounding motion is “stepwise”, like adjacent keys on the piano. Smooth for most people = good, i.e., harmonious.
If you can look at a piano keyboard, the concept is a little clearer. The motion between two notes lying right next to each other (a “half-step” for example the white-key notes B and C) is the smoothest (least amount of motion) and that of two notes with one between them (a “whole step” like C and D which are white keys that have C#, a black key, between them) is the next smoothest.
So take the three Major chords in the key of C: C (the “home key”, I chord or tonic, CEG), F (the IV chord or Subdominant, FAC) and G (the V chord or Dominant, GBD, often with an added note, the seventh which would be F). An example of voice leading in this progression would be:
C–>C–>B–>C
E–>F–>F–>E
G–>A–>G–>G
I–>IV–>V7–>I
In any major key, the biggest tension is between the I and V7 chords – there are two notes in the V7 chord which want to resolve back to the I. In C the two notes are B (which wants to resolve to C, a half step) and F (which wants to resolve to E, also a half step).
To add to this, the I chord is also the V chord of the IV chord, which is why the I–>IV progression sounds the way it does.
Pythagoras and his followers expounded on this extensively – I’m not sure about the I-IV-V sequence, although many lyres were tuned to this – but about music and the mind. I don’t remember any of it, but you might want to look him up.
Thanks mate. Now I understand Bloomfield better. Or shall I say, more chance of understanding him.
Interestingly, the 6 plainsong scales all have 6 out of 7 notes that are bases for chords whereas the Marwa scale (not the raag here) has 5 and the Harmonic Minor, Bhairav, Ahava Rabba and Todi scales only have 4 , Pooravi only has 3.
On the basis of simplistic chordal analysis its easy to see where the orientation (no pun intended) of the Harmonic Minor is.
But I hardly think the dearth of Dorian in ITM can be explained on the basis of this type of rationale because it has 6/7 and its seventh note can be the basis of a chord just like the Natural Minor’s 7th.
The music works the same way that corporations work in the USA. Twice as much management as you actually need, times four times as much supervision as you actually need, mutiplied by 5 times as much pay as the executives actually are worth, divided by half as many actual productive workers as you actually need.
I hire illigal migrants to go to sessions and play for me. They sound awful, but no one notices. They send illegals to play for them, too.
Would you like to buy some stock?
Harmonic minor in Western art music is basically an alteration of the natural minor (Aeolian) scale to induce a Dominant chord.
The dominant to tonic movement is called a cadence, that’s what Bloomfield was talking about (that’s not the only type of cadence, but the most common).
In a minor key, the v chord is naturally a minor chord, so the third degree of the chord is raised a half-step to get the “leading tone”, or half-step that resolves back to the “home” note of the key.
For example in A minor the i (minor tonic) chord is A C E and the v chord would be E G B. G won’t resolve to A as smoothly as G# will, so the G is altered to G#.
In most harmonically-based Western art music, the harmonic minor mode is not used melodically, unless the composer wants to invoke an “oriental” (to use the quaint anachronism) feeling to the piece.
The whole step is more “stable” than the half-step, so less tension. The I–>IV progression has just the one half-step, where the V7–>I has two, so it REALLY wants to resolve. Actually, there is another member of the V7 that I left off, which is D… but it is a whole step away from both C and E so doesn’t contribute as much to the tension – so it is frequently dropped from the voice leading in favor of the extra member of the V7 (F, which gives the cadence the two half-steps).
Also I noticed that the notes that make up the chords in C maj are the seven notes of the C scale. After a bit of thinking and writing I see that for any major key, the three major chords in that key consist of and only of the notes in that key’s scale. That may be a useless observation as to why we feel good when we hear these sounds work in a certain pattern.
As others have mentioned, a lot of this has to do with mathematics, specifically the overtone series. Once you introduce alterations (or “accidentals”) to the basic Major scale, you increase the amount of tension. A lot of 19th-early 20th century music exploited this… Wagner or Chopin, for example.
Good to know the theory/comp degree comes in handy once in a while…
It could, sure, but it doesn’t illustrate the voice-leading as clearly. It’s much easier to see the theory at work when you voice it as I did earlier… you get the half-step motion as opposed to the sort of leaping motion in your example.
In learning to write choral arrangements, especially, stepwise or stationary is usually the rule. It is much easier for someone to sing C–>C–>B–>C than C—>F–>G–>C. If you have a piano, try it.
Composers get bored, of course, so all kinds of voice leading is possible, just depends how “smooth” you want to make it…
Ah. Lightbulb. I follow. I’ve been playing around with different keys including minors and your A minor example now makes sense to me.
Thanks for the lessons!
I guess our emotional response to these things will remain a mystery.
I guess our emotional response to these things will remain a mystery.
Well, again, i think a lot of it has to do with tension and release, or conflict and resolution, which is a basic premise of creating drama or almost any other art.
In Western art music composition, a lot of the emotional effect is this feeling of the “home” key or tonality and things taking you away from this “home” key and eventually coming back to it. One way conflict can be created in music by the process similar to the one described above for the harmonic minor scale: introducing notes outside of the key to give a further feeling of tension and take one away from “home”.
This as i said before was a common artifice of late 19th-century art music. I think on a technical level it’s one of the things that makes Wagner’s music difficult to appreciate for a lot of people (apart from the bombast )… he used these long chains of altered dominant chords to give the music a restless, shifting quality which strayed from the “home” tonality for long periods without resolution. Chopin was one of the first to employ this device and it gives his music its characteristic stormy, romantic quality.
If you have some Western art (ie “classical”) music from different periods, especially piano music, try playing say Haydn or Mozart and then Chopin or Liszt and you’ll probably be able to hear the differences in the harmonic structure, just by the way it makes you physically feel.
This also gives bebop (Bird & Dizzy) its edgy quality when compared to earlier Jazz (Louis Armstrong). Much of bop, like early jazz, is blues-based, but these altered chords and shifting tonalities are imposed on it to give it a more harmonically modern sound.
Of course, there are also neurophysiological effects of different tones and combinations (intervals), and this is an important part of the tension/release as well.
Then again, as was mentioned several times in this thread, there are cultural aspects as well – gamelan music sounds weird and uncomfortable to a lot of Westerners, but feels right at home to Balinese people.
