The final topic in pop aural skills is harmonic sequences, strings of chords whose roots move in a predictable interval pattern. Sequences are common in European classical music. Listen to Bach’s Chaconne from the D Minor Violin Partita or Contrapunctus VIII from The Art of Fugue for a million examples. Sequences are also pretty common …
Tag Archives: Beatles
Hypermeter
I didn’t find out about hypermeter until very late in my music theory learning journey. I think it should be part of the basic toolkit, especially for songwriters and improvisers. The explanation that follows might seem abstract, but behind the scenes, hypermeter provides the signposts that orient you in medium-scale musical time. The term “hypermeter” …
Identifying augmented chords
Augmented chords don’t come up much, but they are on the aural skills syllabus, and they have that specific quality that no other harmony can create. Their uncanny zero-gravity quality is the result of their symmetry. Any note in an augmented triad could function as its root. When you write the augmented chords on the …
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 …
Improvising over secondary dominants
This week in aural skills we are improvising sung countermelodies over various chord progressions. The goal is to help the students feel the voice leading, the chromatic alterations and so on. This is especially important for playing over secondary dominants or “applied chords” as classical theory folks call them. I won’t explain these chords in …
Improvising countermelodies
How do you improvise a countermelody? Listen to things in the music and respond: imitate, vary, fill in gaps. Which tracks, though? Start with music that is harmonically uncomplicated enough that you can predict where it’s going, but with enough rhythmic interest to give you something to react to. I do not recommend the blues …
Identifying melodic motives
Motivic development is more of a classical music thing than a rock/pop thing. If you want to hear a motive carried through a series of elaborations and variations, you should look to Beethoven rather than the Beatles. Pop songs are a few riffs, repeated or strung together. But there are some songs out there whose …
Identifying embellishing tones
We’re getting started on melody in pop aural skills by talking about embellishing tones. The word “embellish” is from the Old French embelliss-, meaning to make something beautiful by ornamenting it. To understand what embellishing tones are, you first need to know about the tones they are embellishing. In Western tonal music and (non-blues-based) Anglo-American …
Identifying song forms
Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to do with the balancing of surprise and familiarity, of predictability and unpredictability, but if someone has a systematic theory of why some …
Identifying phrase structure
It’s easy to understand what a section of a song is: an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge. It is less easy to understand phrases, the components of a song section. Usually a song section contains between two and four phrases. But what is a phrase? No one seems totally sure. This is important …