In 1973, the Ramsey Lewis Trio performed their arrangement of “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts on German television. This performance has been viewed an astonishing 1.6 million times on YouTube.
I learned that fact fromĀ Paul Thompson‘s analysis of the performance, which includes transcriptions of several of Cleveland Eaton’s basslines. Paul’s YouTube channel is one of the most valuable music education resources on the internet.
The Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry” features a song by Melanie called “People in the Front Row.”
In the last verse, she sings:
These chords that I’m using are usually sad
I had to use them, they’re the best chords that I have
Oh yeah, this progression is usually sad
But it felt my sorrow and I wanted it to feel me glad
This grabbed my ear immediately. I’m always interested in a song that describes its own musical content. But are these chords usually sad? In the context of the Black Mirror episode (it’s about the making of a true crime documentary), the song is incongruously cheerful. But let’s take Melanie at her word. What’s going on here?
I continue to be severely stressed out about the state of America and the world, and I continue to reach to Aretha Franklin for emotional support. This week I soothed myself by studying “Baby, I Love You” from her 1967 album Aretha Arrives.
The song is by Ronnie Shannon, who also wrote “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”. The guitar is by Jimmy Johnson or Joe South, or possibly both of them. Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins plays drums, and Spooner Oldham plays electric piano. The horn section includes Charles Chalmers and King Curtis on tenor saxophone, Tony Studd on bass trombone, and Melvin Lastie on trumpet. The backing vocals are by Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin, along with Aretha herself overdubbed on the chorus.
First, let’s get this out of the way: the title of this post is a joke. No chord progression has any inherent emotional quality. Musical sadness is a matter of cultural convention, and even within a culture or subculture, sadness is the result of harmony interacting with melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre, phrasing, articulation and other intangibles. The listener produces as much of the music’s meaning as the music does, if not more. That said, everything else being equal, there are some chord and voice leading combinations that reliably evoke sadness in Anglo-American listeners. The saddest chord progression that I know of comes from a short passage near the end of Vasily Kalinnikov‘s Symphony No. 1, 2nd movement. Listen at 6:16.
I mean, right? So the question is, what makes this so sad? Some of it is the orchestration and dynamics and so on. But even if you strum these chords on a guitar with minimal expressiveness, they are still sad. Let’s find out why.
Continue reading “The saddest chord progression ever (revisited)”
I need a lot of reassurance that things are going to be okay. This Aretha Franklin groove reliably does the job for me. I say “groove” and not “song”, because while “Rock Steady” does have a minimal song structure, it’s all in support of helping you dance.
The musicians on this track represent the gold standard of R&B session players: Donny Hathaway on organ, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard Purdie on drums, and Robert Popwell and Dr John on percussion. The backing vocals are by Pat Smith and Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma.Ā Aretha herself played a scratch piano part for everyone to follow, but it doesn’t sound like it made it into the final mix. According to an interview with Chuck Rainey, the musicians recorded several takes, but they ended up choosing the very first one as the released version. The Memphis Horns (Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love on tenor sax) were overdubbed later.
Music theory prankster Robert Komaniecki tried to ruin “Over The Rainbow” by singing it in C Phrygian mode:
@robertkomaniecki Where are my Gregorian chant-heads at #musicmajor #musictheory #choir
My son’s reaction to this: “Waaaaggghhh.”
It’s a cliche to say that the harmonic series is the basis of all of music. It is true that the first five harmonics are the basis of Western tuning. The first seven harmonics are a possible basis for the blues. You don’t tend to hear much music based on the higher harmonics, but they can be a great way to build exotic scales that still have a feeling of coherence and order.
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Here are some tracks I made using the pitch ratios derived from the first forty-three natural harmonics.
I made this music using Ableton Live and a tuning plugin called MTS-ESP. I got it so I could try out historical tuning systems, first for my own understanding, and then for teaching music theory. While I was experimenting with the software, I started plugging in weird scales of my own invention. To understand what I was doing, you need to know a little math.
Continue reading “I made some music using modes of the harmonic series”
Last week we brought my first New School Song Factory class to its conclusion. I have taught songwriting many times before, but it was always as a means to learning something else: music theory, production, progressive pedagogical methods. This was my first opportunity to teach songwriting for the sake of songwriting. The final session ended with a spontaneous singalong of “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers, initiated not by me, but by the students. I couldn’t have planned it any better if I had tried.
As kids, my siblings and I watched Labyrinth about eight billion times. It has been super gratifying that my own children love the movie too. Together with their separate David Bowie fandom, that has put “As The World Falls Down” into heavy rotation lately.
When I was a kid, I didn’t especially love this song, I thought it was boring and weird. I started connecting to it in adulthood. It seems like a straightforwardly cheesy pop ballad, so why is it so magical? There’s more musical substance here than you might think.
