Explaining embellishing tones

This week in aural skills, we are covering embellishing tones. This topic is tough, because I can never remember the difference between an appoggiatura and an escape tone without looking it up, but it’s on the syllabus, so I have to try. In previous semesters, I have approached it by having students identify examples from songs. That can be productive, especially when we talk about ambiguities and edge cases, but it’s too easy for people to zone out. I wanted something more active and creative.

My general principle with music theory and aural skills is that the only way to internalize the concepts is to use them for your own music making; otherwise, you won’t retain them past the end of the semester (or the end of the day). To understand melodic embellishments, the students should ideally be improvising their own melodic embellishments. So my plan is to provide them with some nice simple unembellished melodies, give them clear examples of the different embellishing techniques we’re expecting them to learn, and then see what they come up with in the moment.

So I opened up Ableton and MuseScore and made this:

Embellishing Tones 

The broad-stroke version of embellishing tones is easy. You have some melody with main notes, and you decorate those notes with other notes. In Western tonal theory, the main notes are usually chord tones, and you embellish them with non-chord tones. So if your melody is over a C chord, then your chord tones are C, E and G. You can use any of the other notes to embellish those three. Passing tones are easy: non-chord tones that connect the chord tones. Neighbor tones are easy too: non-chord tones above and/or below the chord tones.

My real problem is with appoggiatura and escape tones. The reason I have trouble retaining them is that they are based on some assumptions from Western tonal music that don’t necessarily apply to the music that I like. The big problem is the presumption that the main notes in a melody are chord tones. In an ABBA song, that presumption is usually accurate. In an Aretha Franklin song, however, it usually isn’t. Blues-based music uses completely different melodic and harmonic conventions than Western European art music does. Current pop is full of melodic-harmonic divorce, where non-chord tones can sound more stable than chord tones. And this is before we get into questions about the rhythmic placement of notes.

Let’s take appoggiatura. Western tonal theory conventionally assumes that chord tones will fall on strong beats. An appoggiatura is a non-chord tone on a strong beat that then resolves to the expected chord tone. The canonical example is the first line of “Yesterday”.

The song is in F major, and it begins on an F chord. Paul McCartney sings the first word, “Yesterday”, on G-F-F. That G is the appoggiatura, a non-chord tone on a strong beat, followed by the expected F. This is a common Beatles-ism; they do it in “In My Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “She Said She Said” and lots of other songs, too.

You can assume that the Beatles will be using chord tones as their main melody notes, but what about Fleetwood Mac? Tracy Chapman? Carly Rae Jepsen? Taylor Swift? Thanks to the widespread melodic-harmonic divorce in pop, there isn’t really the same expectation that a main melody note has to be a chord tone at all, so it doesn’t really make sense to classify notes as main or embellishing in those terms.

Do you need to be able to formally classify embellishing tones in order to write or improvise a good melody? I am skeptical, but that’s because I wrote and improvised a whole lot of melodies before I ever learned what an escape tone was. In retrospect, my best melodic education came from listening to multiple recordings of a simple and familiar tune, for example, “Summertime.” Here’s the iconic recording by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

Here’s the equally iconic recording by Miles Davis and Gil Evans.

And here’s a less-celebrated but still awesome recording by the John Coltrane Quartet.

Here are many more recommended jazz versions. Here’s a list of every commercial recording ever made. I think it’s an interesting and worthwhile exercise to study these, to be able to name the qualities that make Ella Fitzgerald’s version sound different from John Coltrane’s. But the main thing is to internalize the recordings, memorize them, sing along with them, play along with them. Analysis should follow from there. That’s hard to do in a one-semester class, though.