Identifying modulations

In class we have been talking about secondary dominants, where you temporarily treat a chord as a new key center before returning to the main key. In a modulation, you move to a new key center and stay there (for a while, anyway). Modulations were a common songwriting technique in pre-rock popular music, and a somewhat less common one in the rock era. They have become increasingly rare in the Anglo-American pop mainstream, though they are still a feature of game and film scores.

Let’s start in the jazz era. Many if not most of the midcentury standards modulate to a new key at least once. The typical scenario in a 32-bar AABA tune is to have the A sections in one key and the B section in another. Listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Dream A Little Dream Of Me” by Fabian Andre, Wilbur Schwandt and Gus Kahn. The first two A sections are in C major. The first B section at 1:05 modulates to Ab major. Then the tune modulates back to C major for the final A section at 1:31. So far, so typical, but Ella and Louis’ recording has a few extra twists. For the second B section at 1:57, they go to Db rather than Ab, and then they do the final A section at 2:23 in F.

Sometimes standards will have more than one key change in the B section. “Have You Met Miss Jones” by Richard Rodgers is a case in point. Listen to the Oscar Peterson Trio’s recording, possibly the most swinging music ever put to tape. The A sections are in F. At 0:48, we get to the first B section, and the key changes to Bb. This is typical. But then two bars later it modulates to Gb major. Two bars after that, it modulates to D major. And two bars after that, it modulates to Gb major again. Finally, it returns to F major for the final A section. This is very not typical! The idea of moving key centers by major thirds was probably one of John Coltrane’s inspirations to write “Giant Steps.”

It wouldn’t be a pop aural skills class if we didn’t talk about the Beatles. Their music shows a lot of Tin Pan Alley influence, including their tendency to modulate to new keys in the bridge. “Something” has a couple of interesting key changes.

The song starts in C major. It begins with an F chord, then a Bb that implies C Mixolydian, then a G chord implying diatonic major, all leading into the C chord that begins the first verse. Check out the voice leading from A to B-flat to B to C. On the line, “Don’t want to leave her now”, the key changes to A minor, the relative minor key to C major. This is no surprise; going to the relative minor is probably the most common modulation in all of Western music. The second verse returns to C major. After the second A minor part, surprise! The F to Bb to G chords lead up to A major, not C major. Now the voice leading is A to B-flat to B to C-sharp. It’s elegant. Then George goes back to C major for the guitar solo.

So far, we have been looking at modulations that are integrated into the structure of the song. There is also a simpler kind of modulation where the entire song shifts up by some interval, usually a half step or whole step. These are nicknamed “truck driver” modulations, and they are a time-honored trope in power ballads. Michael Jackson provides examples in two of his gospel-flavored classics. First, listen to “Man in the Mirror”. It starts in G major. At 2:52, it dramatically shifts to G# major on the words “make that… CHANGE”.

My other Michael Jackson gospel truck driver modulation example is “Will You Be There”, otherwise known as the Free Willy song. (Do kids still watch that movie?) The tune starts in D major. At 2:07, Michael modulates up a whole step to E major. At 2:30, he modulates up another whole step to F# major. Then, at 2:53, he modulates up another whole step to G# major. That’s a lot of truck driving!

Beyoncé drives the truck even further in “Love On Top”. She starts in C major. At 1:43, she modulates up a half step to Db major. At 2:05, she modulates up another half step to D major. At 2:25, she modulates up yet another half step to Eb major. Finally, at 2:45, she modulates up still another half step to E major. Notice the costume changes that go with every key change.

Truck driver modulations are almost always upward, but James Brown modulates down a minor third in “Doing It To Death (Parts One and Two)“. He starts in F blues, and then at 3:14 he tells the band to modulate down to D, funky D.

There is a more rare and subtle form of key change that happens without the chords changing. Instead, your sense of the tonal or modal center shifts because of repetition or metrical emphasis. The end of “Man in the Mirror” has a good example. At 3:50, the song lands on the IV chord, C#, and then stays there for so long that I hear the key center eventually shift from G# major to C# Lydian mode. Cool effect! There’s another good example in the transition between “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” by the Grateful Dead. “China Cat Sunflower” is in G major (mostly), but it ends on the V7 chord, D7, which never resolves back to G. Instead, the band plays a long modal jam on D Mixolydian, and then “I Know You Rider” is in D. I hear the shift in tonic taking place at about 3:34.

What does it mean that Anglo-American pop has mostly stopped using key changes? One common critical trope is to say that it’s a sign of civilizational decline, a symptom of music education being defunded, or our imagination decaying for other reasons. Rick Beato is a prominent advocate for this argument. My man Dan Charnas responds that key changes can be cool, but truck driver modulations are maudlin and played out, and on balance, pop music has gained as much as it has lost. He attributes the move away from key changes to the influence of hip-hop. Chris Dalla Riva agrees, but also points to the influence of the DAW as the main medium for songwriting, because its affordances support interesting arrangement and sound design rather than interesting harmony and structure.

What do I think? I enjoy harmonic surprises as much as the next dork. I listen to jazz for a reason! But I don’t equate harmonic complexity with aesthetic value. Listening to guys from music school running a maze gets old fast. Meanwhile, most of my favorite pieces of music are modal drones, one- or two-chord blues tunes, and other harmonically static grooves. Remember how the crazy modulations in “Have You Met Miss Jones” inspired Coltrane to write “Giant Steps”? Coltrane wrote a bunch of very dense, twisty, modulation-packed tunes like that around 1960, but then he quickly abandoned them. (He only ever played “Giant Steps” live a couple of times.) Instead, he pivoted toward simple, static and open-ended groove forms, and continued exploring them for the rest of his life. I think he had the right idea.