Intervals, Arpeggios And Chords
August 17, 2013 7:04 AM
Two massive weaknesses in my playing are as follows - I don't know my guitar chords or arpeggios properly and, generally, I don't know my intervals well enough.
I just discovered two outstanding videos that I think will help me immensely with fixing this, and thought I'd share them:
12 Essential Chords For Jazz (Jeffrey Matz) - NB - Not just for jazz. Contains *really* useful note on arpeggios at the end.
Interval Song (Django Bates)- I strongly suspect that if you can sing this you can sing anything.
I know there's no shortage of music tutorial videos out there, but I'd love to be pointed at other outstandingly good ones.
posted by motty (10 comments total)
7 users marked this as a favorite
I know there's no shortage of music tutorial videos out there, but I'd love to be pointed at other outstandingly good ones.
Yes, thanks, good video.
These videos aren't really that good, but I find the subject interesting: African soukous guitar tutorials
posted by edlundart at 10:11 PM on August 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
These videos aren't really that good, but I find the subject interesting: African soukous guitar tutorials
posted by edlundart at 10:11 PM on August 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
Just came across this lesson as well: "The 1 lick every jazz guitarist needs to know." Seems very usable for guitar hacks like myself.
posted by edlundart at 9:18 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by edlundart at 9:18 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]
Cool videos, thanks!
Honestly, though, that "Interval Song" seems like it would be very hard to learn from. I learned by relying on snippets of music I was already familiar, like "Here comes the bride" (perfect fourth), the teasing song "na-na-naaa na naa-naa" (minor third), and "N-B-C" (major sixth, major third), etc. Of course for me, being able to *sing* these melodies to myself to actually hear the interval with my ear was crucial to matching it up to the unknown interval in question. If you can't sing the intervals I think you are at a great disadvantage. That's really why the song snippets are so useful, because "Sing a major 4th" is hard to learn, while "Sing 'Here Comes the Bride'" is much more manageable.
But to go off the rails for a minute, this post is especially interesting to me as a guitar player, since I've recently come around to a new (for me) understanding of harmony that focuses on intervals rather than notes, and it has really opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about music. For instance, in the first link the teacher starts with two chords, Cmaj7 and then C7, and shows you how they differ by a single note and how you can think of the relationship between the fingerings of the two chords, to help you understand which note is playing which role.
But what's always struck me as interesting is how two chords that are so similar in notes could be so dissimilar in sound. I mean, if you are hearing things correctly, Cmaj7 should sound *nothing* like C7, and yet they share 3 of the 4 same notes. The trick is when you break those chords up into intervals, you realize that while that two chords share most of the same notes, they only share half of the same intervals! So it's the change in intervals that really drives the change in sound.
There's a famous quote, usually attributed to Claude Debussy, that "music is the space between the notes". In my experience, people interpret this quote in the context of the horizontal or temporal space between the notes, like the rhythm of notes, or the different feel a player brings to the timing of the melody, or sometimes (with even more poetic license) the actual silence that lives between each occurrence of sound! But I think there is another important and infrequent interpretation: Debussy was talking about intervals! Intervals are also "the space between the notes", and they truly make up the sounds we call harmony.
Another demonstration of the central importance of intervals is the relative nature of harmony -- absolute note values don't matter nearly as much as relative note relationships, which is really just a fancy way of saying "interval".
As far as playing intervals on the guitar, I have found the pentatonic scale to be indispensable in understanding the fretboard and working up to the modes of the diatonic scale. A breakthrough exercise came for me when I started learning the pentatonic scale on two adjacent strings, up and down the neck. There are some very simple patterns that start to jump out right away, in how the whole notes and minor thirds are arranged. And by playing across two strings, you see how these two intervals move from string to string. Once of the best things I picked up from that exercise was the two sets of whole steps DO-RE-MI and FA-SO-LA that lie on the same frets of the two strings. It has symmetry across frets, covers nearly a whole octave, stretches your fingers (and really, your whole hand) outside of a single, comfortable position, and teaches you how many steps there are between two adjacent strings.
Of course, the big exception here is when playing through the B string (since it's tuned down a half step). But the truth is that the patterns always change the same way through the B string, and as I've learned how the B string shifts the patterns I've come to appreciate the variety of sounds I get by having to use slightly different fingering across different strings. My hands play differently and there is a wider range of expression due to the shift caused by that beautiful B string!
I don't think it's a coincidence that my recent love of the pentatonic came to me while I took a hiatus from guitar and was playing a lot of piano, and especially learning the black keys (in particular, how many different ways you can turn "just the black keys" into a full blown diatonic scale). Intervals seem more important to a beginner on a piano, because the piano lacks the "symmetry across key" that is found on the guitar. In other words, transposing on a guitar is trivial if you just move up the neck, you don't have to think about the different intervals you're playing because it always looks the same, you just use the same shape. But on a piano, to move from one key to the next, you often need a very different looking scale, and the changing chord shapes can start to feel quite arbitrary. But once you start learning your intervals on the piano, it can really help you zero in on where the notes of your current diatonic scale should be. I took that lesson back to the guitar with me and I think it has really opened up my playing.
Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, but in summary, intervals YES! Of course, YES arpeggios too, but for me the arpeggio is more of an exercise in building dexterity and facility, where as learning intervals is more about ear training and overall musicality.
posted by grog at 2:31 PM on August 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Honestly, though, that "Interval Song" seems like it would be very hard to learn from. I learned by relying on snippets of music I was already familiar, like "Here comes the bride" (perfect fourth), the teasing song "na-na-naaa na naa-naa" (minor third), and "N-B-C" (major sixth, major third), etc. Of course for me, being able to *sing* these melodies to myself to actually hear the interval with my ear was crucial to matching it up to the unknown interval in question. If you can't sing the intervals I think you are at a great disadvantage. That's really why the song snippets are so useful, because "Sing a major 4th" is hard to learn, while "Sing 'Here Comes the Bride'" is much more manageable.
But to go off the rails for a minute, this post is especially interesting to me as a guitar player, since I've recently come around to a new (for me) understanding of harmony that focuses on intervals rather than notes, and it has really opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about music. For instance, in the first link the teacher starts with two chords, Cmaj7 and then C7, and shows you how they differ by a single note and how you can think of the relationship between the fingerings of the two chords, to help you understand which note is playing which role.
But what's always struck me as interesting is how two chords that are so similar in notes could be so dissimilar in sound. I mean, if you are hearing things correctly, Cmaj7 should sound *nothing* like C7, and yet they share 3 of the 4 same notes. The trick is when you break those chords up into intervals, you realize that while that two chords share most of the same notes, they only share half of the same intervals! So it's the change in intervals that really drives the change in sound.
There's a famous quote, usually attributed to Claude Debussy, that "music is the space between the notes". In my experience, people interpret this quote in the context of the horizontal or temporal space between the notes, like the rhythm of notes, or the different feel a player brings to the timing of the melody, or sometimes (with even more poetic license) the actual silence that lives between each occurrence of sound! But I think there is another important and infrequent interpretation: Debussy was talking about intervals! Intervals are also "the space between the notes", and they truly make up the sounds we call harmony.
Another demonstration of the central importance of intervals is the relative nature of harmony -- absolute note values don't matter nearly as much as relative note relationships, which is really just a fancy way of saying "interval".
As far as playing intervals on the guitar, I have found the pentatonic scale to be indispensable in understanding the fretboard and working up to the modes of the diatonic scale. A breakthrough exercise came for me when I started learning the pentatonic scale on two adjacent strings, up and down the neck. There are some very simple patterns that start to jump out right away, in how the whole notes and minor thirds are arranged. And by playing across two strings, you see how these two intervals move from string to string. Once of the best things I picked up from that exercise was the two sets of whole steps DO-RE-MI and FA-SO-LA that lie on the same frets of the two strings. It has symmetry across frets, covers nearly a whole octave, stretches your fingers (and really, your whole hand) outside of a single, comfortable position, and teaches you how many steps there are between two adjacent strings.
Of course, the big exception here is when playing through the B string (since it's tuned down a half step). But the truth is that the patterns always change the same way through the B string, and as I've learned how the B string shifts the patterns I've come to appreciate the variety of sounds I get by having to use slightly different fingering across different strings. My hands play differently and there is a wider range of expression due to the shift caused by that beautiful B string!
I don't think it's a coincidence that my recent love of the pentatonic came to me while I took a hiatus from guitar and was playing a lot of piano, and especially learning the black keys (in particular, how many different ways you can turn "just the black keys" into a full blown diatonic scale). Intervals seem more important to a beginner on a piano, because the piano lacks the "symmetry across key" that is found on the guitar. In other words, transposing on a guitar is trivial if you just move up the neck, you don't have to think about the different intervals you're playing because it always looks the same, you just use the same shape. But on a piano, to move from one key to the next, you often need a very different looking scale, and the changing chord shapes can start to feel quite arbitrary. But once you start learning your intervals on the piano, it can really help you zero in on where the notes of your current diatonic scale should be. I took that lesson back to the guitar with me and I think it has really opened up my playing.
Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, but in summary, intervals YES! Of course, YES arpeggios too, but for me the arpeggio is more of an exercise in building dexterity and facility, where as learning intervals is more about ear training and overall musicality.
posted by grog at 2:31 PM on August 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
That 12 essential chords one is great. And basically it's just four essential chords in three locations. Once you start reducing chords to those shells it all starts to become an awful lot easier, and jazz changes suddenly start to make tons of sense because so often you're just changing one or two tones in a chord.
For me the breakthrough was realizing that about 9/10 of the time your are just playing modes of a major scale, so that the ORDER of half-step, whole-step, whole-step etc never changes -- you just start it on different degrees of the scale. Once you realize that, you start to be able to hear whether the next note you want is a whole step or a half step away (most movement being stepwise). And if you want to make a leap, generally knowing where you are in the scale will help you find it.
posted by unSane at 6:24 PM on August 19, 2013
For me the breakthrough was realizing that about 9/10 of the time your are just playing modes of a major scale, so that the ORDER of half-step, whole-step, whole-step etc never changes -- you just start it on different degrees of the scale. Once you realize that, you start to be able to hear whether the next note you want is a whole step or a half step away (most movement being stepwise). And if you want to make a leap, generally knowing where you are in the scale will help you find it.
posted by unSane at 6:24 PM on August 19, 2013
The trick is when you break those chords up into intervals, you realize that while that two chords share most of the same notes, they only share half of the same intervals! So it's the change in intervals that really drives the change in sound.
With chords with a 7th the flavor notes are the 3rd and the 7th. In fact the two most important intervals in the chord are between the 3rd and 7th and the 7th and the root. That's why part of why a min7 is such a static chord, it's two stacked perfect fifths, so there's no strong pull to resolve like in the tritone of a dominate 7, and there's not really a heck of a lot of tension in a major 2nd like there is in a min second, so there's not the pull to resolve like in the Maj7.
Once you start reducing chords to those shells it all starts to become an awful lot easier, and jazz changes suddenly start to make tons of sense because so often you're just changing one or two tones in a chord.
That's a be-bop thing. A lot of soloing or voicing of ii7-V7-I progression is built around guide tones. In C, the chords are dmin7, G7, and Cmaj7:
D,F,A,C->G,B,D,F->C,E,G,B
So the bottom two notes of the chord become the top notes of the next chord, and the fifth shifts down a whole tone and the seventh down a half step. Alternately, since the V7 has that tritone built into the chord there's a pull from the third to the root of the I.
posted by Gygesringtone at 3:01 PM on August 22, 2013 [1 favorite]
With chords with a 7th the flavor notes are the 3rd and the 7th. In fact the two most important intervals in the chord are between the 3rd and 7th and the 7th and the root. That's why part of why a min7 is such a static chord, it's two stacked perfect fifths, so there's no strong pull to resolve like in the tritone of a dominate 7, and there's not really a heck of a lot of tension in a major 2nd like there is in a min second, so there's not the pull to resolve like in the Maj7.
Once you start reducing chords to those shells it all starts to become an awful lot easier, and jazz changes suddenly start to make tons of sense because so often you're just changing one or two tones in a chord.
That's a be-bop thing. A lot of soloing or voicing of ii7-V7-I progression is built around guide tones. In C, the chords are dmin7, G7, and Cmaj7:
D,F,A,C->G,B,D,F->C,E,G,B
So the bottom two notes of the chord become the top notes of the next chord, and the fifth shifts down a whole tone and the seventh down a half step. Alternately, since the V7 has that tritone built into the chord there's a pull from the third to the root of the I.
posted by Gygesringtone at 3:01 PM on August 22, 2013 [1 favorite]
With chords with a 7th the flavor notes are the 3rd and the 7th. In fact the two most important intervals in the chord are between the 3rd and 7th and the 7th and the root. That's why part of why a min7 is such a static chord, it's two stacked perfect fifths, so there's no strong pull to resolve like in the tritone of a dominate 7, and there's not really a heck of a lot of tension in a major 2nd like there is in a min second, so there's not the pull to resolve like in the Maj7.
You know, I can't say you're wrong, per se, but I've never understood or been able to use those kinds of metaphors for understanding harmony. I mean, I hear consonance and dissonance, and believe in the psychoacoustic phenomenon of key, but I'm not convinced that the harmonic relationships we use act as absolutely as people claim. In particular, I've never been able to attribute psychological imperatives to consonance and dissonance, or understood how to consistently use works like "pull" in a harmonic context. I mean sure, harmonic resolution is a real thing, but it's not a functional part of what makes harmony sound the way it does, it's just a tool you can use to create a certain sound.
The whole "this note WANTS to resolve to here" never struck me as very self consistent, at least to my ear. Or the idea that some notes or intervals in a chord are more "important" than others. If you just played the third and the seventh of a Maj7 chord, it wouldn't sound like a Maj7 chord at all! So how can those notes (or that interval) be the most important? You only get a Maj7 sound with all the notes and intervals included, you know? Otherwise it's a different sound. And the idea of a "static" chord just seems arbitrary to me, without some further "horizontal" harmonic context (not to mention that there are many ways to "stack" fifths, and they all sound different, based on the distance between the lower notes, so to claim that stacked fifths have a certain sound is not quite accurate).
Basically what I'm saying is, a single Maj7 chord (for instance), played by itself without any context, has absolutely no pull to resolve anywhere other than where it already is, just like any other chord played out of context. Even the fabled dominant 7th chord doesn't actually want to go anywhere when played alone. All you're really hearing in a G7 chord is the unambiguous sound of the key of C, which, generally speaking, has nothing to do with a C major chord ;-)
The whole thing hinges, I think, on how harmony is often taught in the context of historical music, and examples of how things can sound are pulled from a corpus of music that has strong stylistic conventions that are *not* actually features of harmony itself, but the distinction between the convention and the harmony is not often make explicit. The realization of this viewpoint (to me) is the realization that so many of these rules we create and apply are conventions of a certain style of harmony, not the essence of harmony itself, which is a different, true and real thing that can be studied on its own.
Does that make any sense?
posted by grog at 2:24 PM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
You know, I can't say you're wrong, per se, but I've never understood or been able to use those kinds of metaphors for understanding harmony. I mean, I hear consonance and dissonance, and believe in the psychoacoustic phenomenon of key, but I'm not convinced that the harmonic relationships we use act as absolutely as people claim. In particular, I've never been able to attribute psychological imperatives to consonance and dissonance, or understood how to consistently use works like "pull" in a harmonic context. I mean sure, harmonic resolution is a real thing, but it's not a functional part of what makes harmony sound the way it does, it's just a tool you can use to create a certain sound.
The whole "this note WANTS to resolve to here" never struck me as very self consistent, at least to my ear. Or the idea that some notes or intervals in a chord are more "important" than others. If you just played the third and the seventh of a Maj7 chord, it wouldn't sound like a Maj7 chord at all! So how can those notes (or that interval) be the most important? You only get a Maj7 sound with all the notes and intervals included, you know? Otherwise it's a different sound. And the idea of a "static" chord just seems arbitrary to me, without some further "horizontal" harmonic context (not to mention that there are many ways to "stack" fifths, and they all sound different, based on the distance between the lower notes, so to claim that stacked fifths have a certain sound is not quite accurate).
Basically what I'm saying is, a single Maj7 chord (for instance), played by itself without any context, has absolutely no pull to resolve anywhere other than where it already is, just like any other chord played out of context. Even the fabled dominant 7th chord doesn't actually want to go anywhere when played alone. All you're really hearing in a G7 chord is the unambiguous sound of the key of C, which, generally speaking, has nothing to do with a C major chord ;-)
The whole thing hinges, I think, on how harmony is often taught in the context of historical music, and examples of how things can sound are pulled from a corpus of music that has strong stylistic conventions that are *not* actually features of harmony itself, but the distinction between the convention and the harmony is not often make explicit. The realization of this viewpoint (to me) is the realization that so many of these rules we create and apply are conventions of a certain style of harmony, not the essence of harmony itself, which is a different, true and real thing that can be studied on its own.
Does that make any sense?
posted by grog at 2:24 PM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I was talking theory with a friend a day ago and never really got out of theory geek mode. I actually was thinking last night about how I should have put a big old disclaimer about all that being true for most forms of Western music, but not all, and even in the ones it's true for, not all the time.
The chord doesn't pull so much as we expect the resolution. With a species as wired for pattern finding as we are, that's a powerful thing (I kind of wonder how different sorts of intelligence might make music, but I think I'm probably too trapped in the physical aspects of my mind to actually work anything out). It's entirely possible to create systems of music that create different expectations and pulls. Even with equal temperament and chords built on thirds. That's what a good chunk of art music since the Romantic period has been trying to do, like the Impressionists or modal composers like Vaughn-Williams. Serialism and some other more extreme departures do away with the third basis entirely, but most keep the equal temperament.
On the other hand, there really is a physical basis to some things. Like, if an orchestra NAILS a major chord (Which involves nudging the intonation of a few notes in the chord), the overtones will just fill up the room. The experience has got more than a hint of the numinous in it. Western theory wasn't built on purely theoretical bases. I like to think of it as explaining all the cool tricks that have worked so far as opposed to placing a limit on all the cool tricks that will work.
posted by Gygesringtone at 3:20 PM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
The chord doesn't pull so much as we expect the resolution. With a species as wired for pattern finding as we are, that's a powerful thing (I kind of wonder how different sorts of intelligence might make music, but I think I'm probably too trapped in the physical aspects of my mind to actually work anything out). It's entirely possible to create systems of music that create different expectations and pulls. Even with equal temperament and chords built on thirds. That's what a good chunk of art music since the Romantic period has been trying to do, like the Impressionists or modal composers like Vaughn-Williams. Serialism and some other more extreme departures do away with the third basis entirely, but most keep the equal temperament.
On the other hand, there really is a physical basis to some things. Like, if an orchestra NAILS a major chord (Which involves nudging the intonation of a few notes in the chord), the overtones will just fill up the room. The experience has got more than a hint of the numinous in it. Western theory wasn't built on purely theoretical bases. I like to think of it as explaining all the cool tricks that have worked so far as opposed to placing a limit on all the cool tricks that will work.
posted by Gygesringtone at 3:20 PM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
You only get a Maj7 sound with all the notes and intervals included, you know? Otherwise it's a different sound.
I don't think that's totally true. So long as you have the root in the bass, if you play the major third and major seventh, you get a major seventh tonality most of the time. The fifth is pretty much implied. If you don't have the root then, yeah, it's just a floating fifth/fourth interval which reads differently depending on which note is on the bottom.
On the whole leading tone thing, it makes a bit more sense if you think of the tritone wanting to resolve to SOMETHING that isn't a tritone. So a dominant seventh has a tritone (the third and flattened seventh) stuck on top of the root but it doesn't have to resolve to the tonic at all. You can take it a bunch of other places.
On the other hand, there is this big western tradition of analysing music in terms of harmony, which only captures about 10% of it. I mean, you think about your average funk groove of E9 and be there, and the harmonic analysis is pretty much redundant.
posted by unSane at 3:48 PM on August 23, 2013
I don't think that's totally true. So long as you have the root in the bass, if you play the major third and major seventh, you get a major seventh tonality most of the time. The fifth is pretty much implied. If you don't have the root then, yeah, it's just a floating fifth/fourth interval which reads differently depending on which note is on the bottom.
On the whole leading tone thing, it makes a bit more sense if you think of the tritone wanting to resolve to SOMETHING that isn't a tritone. So a dominant seventh has a tritone (the third and flattened seventh) stuck on top of the root but it doesn't have to resolve to the tonic at all. You can take it a bunch of other places.
On the other hand, there is this big western tradition of analysing music in terms of harmony, which only captures about 10% of it. I mean, you think about your average funk groove of E9 and be there, and the harmonic analysis is pretty much redundant.
posted by unSane at 3:48 PM on August 23, 2013
The chord doesn't pull so much as we expect the resolution.
Maybe this is the problem I have, I wonder why it is that we "expect" resolution, and I challenge that we actually do expect it. As I tried to say above, I think the reason we automatically hear a resolution coming when we get to G7 is not because we "want" the harmony to go somewhere, but rather because the harmony is already there... G7 is unambiguously in the key of C, where as a C major chord lives inside three different keys. So G7 sounds more like the key of C than C major does, and that's just what we hear in G7, the key of C. So you don't really need the harmonic movement (i.e. resolution) in order to understand and hear the harmony itself.
It's entirely possible to create systems of music that create different expectations and pulls. Even with equal temperament and chords built on thirds. That's what a good chunk of art music since the Romantic period has been trying to do, like the Impressionists or modal composers like Vaughn-Williams. Serialism and some other more extreme departures do away with the third basis entirely, but most keep the equal temperament.
I know this music exists, but I don't know a whole lot about it. Thanks for the references!
On the other hand, there really is a physical basis to some things.
Yeah, that's why I keep coming back to the word "psycho-acoustic", it sums up all the fundamental physical features of sound that have to be included in some kind of "first principals" of human harmony, at least to my mind.
---
I don't think that's totally true. So long as you have the root in the bass, if you play the major third and major seventh, you get a major seventh tonality most of the time. The fifth is pretty much implied.
I want to agree with you in principal, I mean 1-3-7 sounds very similar to 1-3-5-7, but I still don't understand what "implied" really means in this context. Unless you're talking about some specific psycho-acoustic phenomenon like a missing fundamental, it just seems like handwaving to me. Everyone says the fifth doesn't really "add" anything to the chord, but I don't buy it, it adds three more intervals! And those intervals contain a lot of sound.
Perhaps if you are specifically referring to implied in an arrangement context, you can argue that some other instrument will probably be playing the 5th of the chord, and so then your guitar can play a triad voicing without the 5th. But then we're talking about arranging, and not about harmony. I mean, imagine you played a whole song with no fifths in any of the chords. That would sound like a drastically different arrangement, I think, enough so that you wouldn't be able to say the harmony was the same.
But now that I think about it, maybe it's a convention that allows people to arrive at the same harmonic analysis with limited information, by working against the psycho-acoustic principal that the lowest note lends itself to being heard as the root.
it makes a bit more sense if you think of the tritone wanting to resolve to SOMETHING that isn't a tritone. So a dominant seventh has a tritone (the third and flattened seventh) stuck on top of the root but it doesn't have to resolve to the tonic at all. You can take it a bunch of other places.
Yeah, I just can't get there. The tritone is dissonant, sure, but the idea that it wants or has to move somewhere specific just never really made sense to me. Maybe it's the loaded meaning of the word "resolve". Something like tritone substitution implies that there's a whole world of harmony that doesn't depend on tritones resolving at all, but rather uses the tritone as the grounding unit of harmony. But now I'm speaking to the very limits of my own familiarity with harmony beyond the diatonic scale.
On the other hand, there is this big western tradition of analysing music in terms of harmony, which only captures about 10% of it. I mean, you think about your average funk groove of E9 and be there, and the harmonic analysis is pretty much redundant.
That's a great point, and embarrassingly I think it helps me understand my real problem here, which is that I think of music as being made of two separate but equal entities, harmony and rhythm, and all sound is really just a blend of the two, which I call melody. So actually, when other people use the word "harmony" they are referring to horizontal changes (pushes, pulls, resolutions) that I would argue are in some sense rhythmic elements because to me all harmony is static (exists only in space, not time, which is the domain of rhythm).
So basically, I'm using my own special snowflake definition of harmony, so a lot of my objections are really kind of pointless! Sorry about that, I wasn't trying to play devil's advocate, I just really enjoy thinking and talking/writing about these things...
posted by grog at 12:26 PM on August 26, 2013
Maybe this is the problem I have, I wonder why it is that we "expect" resolution, and I challenge that we actually do expect it. As I tried to say above, I think the reason we automatically hear a resolution coming when we get to G7 is not because we "want" the harmony to go somewhere, but rather because the harmony is already there... G7 is unambiguously in the key of C, where as a C major chord lives inside three different keys. So G7 sounds more like the key of C than C major does, and that's just what we hear in G7, the key of C. So you don't really need the harmonic movement (i.e. resolution) in order to understand and hear the harmony itself.
It's entirely possible to create systems of music that create different expectations and pulls. Even with equal temperament and chords built on thirds. That's what a good chunk of art music since the Romantic period has been trying to do, like the Impressionists or modal composers like Vaughn-Williams. Serialism and some other more extreme departures do away with the third basis entirely, but most keep the equal temperament.
I know this music exists, but I don't know a whole lot about it. Thanks for the references!
On the other hand, there really is a physical basis to some things.
Yeah, that's why I keep coming back to the word "psycho-acoustic", it sums up all the fundamental physical features of sound that have to be included in some kind of "first principals" of human harmony, at least to my mind.
---
I don't think that's totally true. So long as you have the root in the bass, if you play the major third and major seventh, you get a major seventh tonality most of the time. The fifth is pretty much implied.
I want to agree with you in principal, I mean 1-3-7 sounds very similar to 1-3-5-7, but I still don't understand what "implied" really means in this context. Unless you're talking about some specific psycho-acoustic phenomenon like a missing fundamental, it just seems like handwaving to me. Everyone says the fifth doesn't really "add" anything to the chord, but I don't buy it, it adds three more intervals! And those intervals contain a lot of sound.
Perhaps if you are specifically referring to implied in an arrangement context, you can argue that some other instrument will probably be playing the 5th of the chord, and so then your guitar can play a triad voicing without the 5th. But then we're talking about arranging, and not about harmony. I mean, imagine you played a whole song with no fifths in any of the chords. That would sound like a drastically different arrangement, I think, enough so that you wouldn't be able to say the harmony was the same.
But now that I think about it, maybe it's a convention that allows people to arrive at the same harmonic analysis with limited information, by working against the psycho-acoustic principal that the lowest note lends itself to being heard as the root.
it makes a bit more sense if you think of the tritone wanting to resolve to SOMETHING that isn't a tritone. So a dominant seventh has a tritone (the third and flattened seventh) stuck on top of the root but it doesn't have to resolve to the tonic at all. You can take it a bunch of other places.
Yeah, I just can't get there. The tritone is dissonant, sure, but the idea that it wants or has to move somewhere specific just never really made sense to me. Maybe it's the loaded meaning of the word "resolve". Something like tritone substitution implies that there's a whole world of harmony that doesn't depend on tritones resolving at all, but rather uses the tritone as the grounding unit of harmony. But now I'm speaking to the very limits of my own familiarity with harmony beyond the diatonic scale.
On the other hand, there is this big western tradition of analysing music in terms of harmony, which only captures about 10% of it. I mean, you think about your average funk groove of E9 and be there, and the harmonic analysis is pretty much redundant.
That's a great point, and embarrassingly I think it helps me understand my real problem here, which is that I think of music as being made of two separate but equal entities, harmony and rhythm, and all sound is really just a blend of the two, which I call melody. So actually, when other people use the word "harmony" they are referring to horizontal changes (pushes, pulls, resolutions) that I would argue are in some sense rhythmic elements because to me all harmony is static (exists only in space, not time, which is the domain of rhythm).
So basically, I'm using my own special snowflake definition of harmony, so a lot of my objections are really kind of pointless! Sorry about that, I wasn't trying to play devil's advocate, I just really enjoy thinking and talking/writing about these things...
posted by grog at 12:26 PM on August 26, 2013
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posted by drezdn at 4:49 PM on August 17, 2013