Yale courses-Listening to Music-Lecture 7. Harmony: Chords and How to Build Them

All right, let's get started. Here we go again. We'll have some fun again today. Notice, of course, we have the sign-in sheet when you come in every morning, a great thing to do. As we say, this is not Yale's most demanding class, but one thing we do have to do is come to the lectures and come to section. You may know if someday you are in fact ill that you'll get an e-mail message from me about a half hour after class is over. So sorry to hear that you were sick this morning. I hope you're feeling better very soon. So we do look after these things. Such an e-mail went out last time, but I'm preaching to the converted because you guys are already here, so good for you. Let's continue with the discussion of the elements of music. We're going to be working today with harmony. So far we've had two sessions specifically on rhythm, two sessions specifically on melody, and today we come to harmony. Harmony is one of the two things that really distinguishes the music of Western civilization, Western classical music, Western pop music. What are the two things? Well, as mentioned before, this dependence upon heavy usage of written musical notation, not so much in the pop music but certainly in the classical music, writing it all down, being able to manipulate it in that fashion. So that's one thing that distinguishes Western classical music. Another aspect that we're talking about today is harmony. Stop and think about it. Think about the melodies of China and Japan and virtually every and Islamic countries, virtually every musical civilization around the world has more sophisticated melodies than we do in the West. Ours are very blunt in a way. They go from one discrete frequency to another discrete frequency to another discrete frequency and they're not making use of all of the material in between in any sort of nuanced way. Maybe it's because we're so dependent on the keyboard here. So that's important to keep in mind. Let's talk about rhythm for a moment. Is Western rhythm particularly sophisticated? I was listening as I was coming in this morning, WMNR, they had a Strauss Waltz playing there, oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah. How sophisticated is that rhythmically? Think of African music where you have one downbeat and one pattern working against another downbeat and another pattern. Caribbean music, African influence, the same kind of thing. It's world ahead in terms of sophistication with regard to rhythm, but the one thing that's distinguished Western music is this idea of harmony, this concept of superimposing multiple pitches. Interesting idea that you have this sound and you can put another one with it, you put another one with it, another one, something like that, and you can play with these and manipulate these in interesting kinds of ways. So piling up sounds simultaneously, this idea of harmony, is what makes Western music very special. And what we end up with here, I just reach for anything in my office, here is the overture to a score of a Mozart opera. And look here, how many parts we have playing simultaneously. Some of them may be repeating pitch names. Somebody may be playing C here and somebody else a C up there, that sort of thing. They may be duplicating pitch names, but you could have anywhere up to ten, well, in this case about fifteen different sounds going at once, and you don't get that in other musical cultures. Let's talk for a moment about chords. What's a chord? Well, a chord is just a simultaneous sounding of two or more pitches. That's a very basic, general definition of a chord. And a chord can be, of course, consonant. Or it can be dissonant. So let's stick with just consonant chords. We'll be working with consonant chords today. And the most fundamental of the consonant chords is this idea of the triad, this figure that we call the triad. It's the building block, really, of all our harmonies, whether it's pop or classical. And we're going to use a lot of pop music today and there'll be a lot of people pointing out triads there in this pop music. So what's a triad? Well, obviously you get the idea of three pitches. Three pitches. How does it work? Let's go over to the keyboard and the staff here. Let's say we've got a scale and we do have a scale, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, and I wanted to construct a triad above each of these notes of the scale. Well, I take the C, this happens to be a C, middle C here. So a triad is going to have three pitches and it spans five letter names and we go one letter name, two letter names, three letter names, four letter names, five letter names. We take one, three, and five. Here I'm taking C, skipping D, taking E, skipping F, and taking G, and it gives me this three-note aggregate. Take one, skip, take one, skip, take one. And we can do the same thing and so on, right up to the scale in that fashion. Notice, as we said before, we've got the scale and we've got some notes rather important in the scale. Tonic is very important. We said the leading tone is important. So with chords and triads, some are very important. The tonic is very important and this dominant, what we call the dominant, it's not really the most important. It sort of leads into, pulls into, particularly important, setting up the tonic. It's the next important. Right below that is the subdominant. It often pulls into the dominant, which then pulls into the tonic in that fashion. So we would get this idea of here's a chord here, there's the tonic, here's the dominant, there's the subdominant and there's the tonic. We can flip this just a little bit. We could say, all right, here's our tonic up here, and go that way, tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic, that way. So we could go, come up from the tonic or go down from the tonic. Generally speaking, composers are more likely to go down from the tonic and then come back up to the tonic than they are likely to go the other way. So we've got these three basic chords we're going to talk about. There are others there that we've built on the second and seventh degree of the scale, but these are the most important. And it's surprising how much music these three basic chords can accommodate. All the things, dominant, tonic, finally, subdominant, tonic, dominant. So a lot of music is made in that fashion. One of my favorite pieces, and I thought it was because it's a good teaching piece, and I thought it was known just to me and other old codgers, is an old cowboy song called Streets of Laredo. But last night I looked it up on YouTube, not on YouTube, on iTunes, and there are a hundred and thirty-nine recordings of that that you can buy now, Johnny Cash, Arlo Guthrie, but I'd be interested. And anybody ever heard that before? Raise your hand if you've heard that. One, two, three. Well, a few people. So it's a cowboy song. As I walked out in the streets of Laredo, as I walked out in Laredo one day, I spied a cowpoke who was dressed in white linens, dressed in white linens as cold as the gray. And as I was singing that, all I was doing underneath was playing the basic harmony, the chords, and it consists just of two chords. Dominant, tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant. Why do we do that? Why do we have to change these chords? Any ideas? Why don't I just say, as I walked out in the streets of Laredo, why do we change chords? Yeah. The melody changes. And because the melody changes, you keep banging that same aggregate against it, it's going to create what? A dissonance. And we don't want, we don't like dissonances. If we're going to have dissonances, we've got to control them. You know, unless I change that chord underneath, when I get up here, that's very dissonant. So I need to switch to another chord and then switch back to the original. So we change chords to make the harmony consonant or to make the harmony harmonious. All right. So that's something that we need to keep in mind. Here's something else that we're going to ask you to focus on, and that is the rate of harmonic change, the rate of harmonic change. We'll really be asking you two things. Is the harmony changing? Okay? Can you, is the harmony changing or is it static? And if it is changing, is it changing at a regular or irregular rate? By regular rate, every time a chord sounds, it will be holding for exactly the same amount of time. Let's go back to the streets of Laredo. Good job. Three, one, two, three, one, two, three. What do you think? Regular or irregular? Regular. Okay? But no, well, okay, so that's regular. Let's go on to another one. Okay. We're doing a lot there in the bass to make it more interesting, but let's strip that down just to the fundamental chord that's underneath of that. So we're sitting here on the tonic chord and we'll go, and we can even count it out. one, two, two, two, three, two, four, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, two, two, one, two, two, two, three, two, four, two, one, two, two, two, one, two, one, two. So some chords they're holding for, I guess, four measures, four bars, and some for two and some for just one. So that's an irregular rate of harmonic change. So we're not going to be asking you, are we, what chord do we have here and expect you to say subdominant or what chord do we have you here expect you to say dominant. We're going to be working with more fundamental things. Is the harmony changing? Is it changing at a regular or irregular rate? Okay. Notice I was playing up here, all the Jingle Bells. So what is it in music that sets the harmony? What part? Who? What's the foundation of harmony? What instrument plays it? where in the texture is the, are we talking high, low, middle, low, it's the bass. The bass, it's like these pillars. Think of architecture. You put these pilings in and then you can build other things around it. Well, those basic notes, the tonic note, the dominant note, the subdominant note, they're sort of the pilings. Then you can ornament around the piling. That's just a, I could go in that fashion. That would be simple from dominant to tonic. Or I could make it a little more interesting. And that's kind of what bass players do, whether they're playing electric bass in a rock band, maybe in an even more sophisticated way, an acoustic bass in a symphony, or double bass in a bluegrass band. And who is the world's most famous double bass player in a bluegrass band? Anybody know? Well, think here at Yale. Well, we'll see. Now, what we've got here is, Brian, if you could bring up this particular video. This is one that this world-famous bass player was kind enough to loan me. It was something put together by Kentucky Public Television. So let's bring up this screen. Okay. Let's pause it here just for a second. So here's the setup and we're going to turn off the lights. We've got a DVD from Kentucky Public Television involving, as you will see, some people that may look familiar. Does this person look familiar? Does anybody know this person? She's a student around here. She was a Yale undergraduate and she's telling us how she tried out for the Yale Symphony Orchestra and she was designated as an alternate. And she was crestfallen but she then saw this ad where some people wanted her to play in a bluegrass band. So let's watch what happens. Trapped in a classical violinist's body. So I guess they were kind of pessimistic about finding a real fiddle player. So she was like, you're from West Virginia? You should go down there and audition for that. And so luckily, no other fiddle players showed up. They were like, filming her own? I was like, Mozart? So they were very kind and let me kind of get my training on the job and so I started playing with them at that point and it's just been great ever since. ¶¶ Okay. Let's pause it here just for a second. So our mystery bass player is Peter Sullivan, the new provost. And I said, I sent him an e-mail. I said, Peter, look, we're teaching bass over here. Why don't you come in, bring your bass in and you can demonstrate this stuff. Well, I'm a little bit busy at the moment but I got this DVD. You can have this DVD and do whatever you want to it. So what's he doing there? And he's working around these particular notes in this particular piece. We're going to say, here's a C. There's the subdominant. Then he goes, and oftentimes he's going. But again, it's just fleshing out that subdominant chord, dominant chord and tonic chord. And we can all hear this. I mean, do we see? Is this guy playing off of music? Again, we get across the point, not using music. How are they doing this? They're hearing the chords. They're hearing tonic, subdominant and dominant. And I think we can hear them too. Anybody out there hearing these chords? Can you sing along with these? This is wonderful music. It's great. I may like this music. It's happy music again. We should have a whole course on bluegrass music. It could really be good because a lot of interesting ethnic issues involve it. So let's continue here and all sort of bang on the piano and sing the basic pitches of the bass. And I hope you'll join with me here. If you don't like bluegrass, you don't have to sing, but if you like bluegrass, sing along with me here. Okay. Here we go. ¶ I think of him ¶ To be laid ¶ By the side of my garden ¶ There'll be rest for me ¶ There'll be rest ¶ To be laid by the side of my garden ¶ There'll be rest for me on that day Let's hear it, Craig. ¶¶ Okay, maybe that's it. I could listen to this all day. I don't know. Is this too goofy or stay with this or ditch this? I think it's wonderful, but you seem less excited about it than I am. All right. So let's turn the lights back and we'll get back to Mozart and stuff like that. Let's talk about how these basses. We said that the bass note is sort of the foundation and then you add these other things up above it and they produce these chords and the chords are tonic and dominant and so on. Sometimes if you have a solo instrument you can play the bass as just a chord or you could play it the same notes but spinning them out, and we call that an arpeggio probably because the harps play this a lot, sort of arpeggio, taking the notes of a triad and just spinning them out in succession. And arpeggios work particularly well on triads with pieces that happen to be in three. One, two, three, one, two, three. So that's an arpeggio, just a chord, notes played successively to create an arpeggio. It works less well, these triadic arpeggios, with pieces in two. That's not so good, right? Kind of a metrical train wreck there. So what we would do with that would be find another pattern. One of the favorite patterns ever since the eighteenth century was this thing called an Alberti bass. It goes one, then up to the fifth note degree of the triad, one, five, three, five, one, five, three, five. And it sounds very classical but that's a good way of harmonizing a something, making something that's not very interesting sound more interesting. Another way of doing it is just taking a note. Kind of a boogie-woogie bass. You could just take octaves and roll it that way. Beethoven does this in a sonata. And so on. So there you can get the harmony to sound more interesting simply by rolling that octave underneath. So all of these little tricks sort of energize the music and, again, make it more interesting than it otherwise perhaps would be. Sometimes harmonies can stand by themselves. Sometimes you could take just the harmony and it would be very beautiful. J.S. Bach. I should get my music up here. Where's my music? J.S. Bach wrote a prelude to the first book of his Well-Tempered Clavier, and it's a famous work. It goes this way. And so on. All it really is is a succession of chords played as arpeggios. So there it sat for about, well, I would say rather specifically about a hundred and forty years or so, and a French composer in the nineteenth century, Charles Gounaud, came along and said, Well, gee, that's nice, but I could write a melody against that. So we're going to listen to this, listen to Bach's harmony underneath. At the same time we listen to this lovely melody that Charles Gounaud composed for it, and it gives us a chance to think about melody and it gives us a chance to think about the sound of the cello. The cello is a particularly beautiful instrument. I've always said if I ever come back as a musical instrument, I want to come back as a cello. It's just so rich and so beautiful it can soar. So let's listen to a lovely cello line added over top of Bach's original harmony. Descending sequence. Here that pattern shows up again, but a lower step. Now it sounds as if he's going to do it yet a third time, but this time he takes that melody and moves up with it. The rest of this, he's arching for a high moment, and we get to that. It's building. We get to that lovely climax at the top of that. So we need to point out that we've got these two types of chords here. The idea of the, this was all in C major, but we could turn this into C minor. Let's go back and review this. We have up on the board again the scale, and we need to talk about these triads that are made up of either major or minor thirds. Here we could look at it this way, with this particular interval and this particular interval. Let's go over to the keyboard here because I think it's easier to show here. So we're going to start here with C because C is kind of revenue neutral. We'll start here with C and we're going to take, skip one, take one, skip one, take one. So we get C, E, G. Notice coming up here, we have one, two, three, four half steps here. This is an interval. This interval from C up to E is the interval of a third because it spans three letter names. C up to G is a fifth. It spans five letter names. So we have C, D, E being a third with one, two, three, four steps in it, half steps. Now we're going to go from E up to G. Notice here we get one, two, three, just three, and that's because, as said before, we've got this arbitrary division of the octave, according to Greek mathematics, onto which, in the ninth and tenth and eleventh century, the Benedictine monks laid on another system that didn't quite work. So up here this all seems to be the same distance. E to F seems to be the same distance as D to E, but it's not. It's only half the distance. So we get this funny disjunction in the keyboard here. But in any event, the important thing to note is that we have a major triad with the big third on the bottom and the little third on the top. If we switched this around now and went to C, E-flat, G to give us the minor triad, then of course we would have just three half steps here and four here. What are the reciprocal angles or something like that? But that's all that's in play and we've seen this in play before. Just the positioning of that third will determine whether this triad is a major triad or a minor triad. Let's see how this works out in terms of real sound. I'd like you guys down here, just hold that pitch, and T.A.'s, can you sing the fifth? And nice and loud. And everyone else, there's the major third. Work with me. Everybody else sing that third. Now we're going to go minor. Major, major, minor, major. And it's just tweaking that middle note of the triad there. That's all that's really involved. And composers have tweaked this. Here's a piece by Franz Liszt. It was reorchestrated by a contemporary composer called Lugubrious Gondola in French or in English, translated from the French. Let's listen to a bit of it. It starts out with a woodwind instrument. What woodwind instrument is playing here? And then we'll focus on the change from one triad to the next. Okay. Let's stop there. Let's just pause it right there. So what instrument was that? Did you pick that up? Yeah. It was a clarinet. If we were doing this on a quiz or a test, we'd probably play that three times so that you'd hear a lot more than just that, but it was a clarinet. Now we go to this sound and watch what happens. It moves to another chord, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major. Let's pause it there and reset that just a little bit because underneath what's the bass doing here? What's that? Arpeggio. Yeah, just an arpeggio. So sometimes they take these chords and we just use it as an arpeggiated support. Remember last time? That's all Puccini does by way of a harmonic support there, just takes that tonic chord and basically just works that out as an arpeggio underneath. All right. So let's see how, if we can, begin to hear the distinction between a major triad and a minor triad, and for this we're going to turn to a very famous piece, the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven. And I ask you, if you've got a piece of paper there, I hope you do, we're going to play nineteen chords for you and we're going to ask you which is major and which is minor. So you know the piece. So I'm going to sort of strip these down to their essence here. Here's chord number one, major triad or minor triad. Here's chord number two. Here's three, four. Here's six, seven, nine, eleven. Here's twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, here's eighteen, and nineteen. So how did you do? Well, let's see here. Let's go back and double-check this. Well, that's a minor chord. I'll just tell you the answers here. That's major. This is minor. Three is minor. Four is minor. What about that? That may be a tough one. Is that a major? Major. Some of these are hard though. Major. Okay. That was six. Here's seven. Excuse me. Seven is major. Eight is minor. Nine is major. Ten is major. Eleven is minor. Twelve is major. Thirteen is minor. Fourteen minor. Fifteen minor. Sixteen minor. Seventeen major. Eighteen minor. Nineteen major. So we'll be working. This I think is fair game, just to differentiate between a major triad and a minor triad, and we'll be doing that on the test a week from now, but we'll be giving you lots of prepping in that section this week. Let's return to the pop realm and focus continually here on harmony and combine the idea of harmony with major and minor triads. I'm going to play a piece that I've always liked by U2. I don't really know much about them, but it's an interesting piece, Love is Blindness. Let's listen to chunks of this and we'll see what they're doing with the harmony here. What's the meter? Kind of a slow what? Okay. So for copyright reasons we're cutting this exactly short. We don't want to go over what it is. Okay. So we're going to skip ahead now and listen to just a little bit more. I think that's kind of the beat, kind of a slow beat. Let's hear just a little bit more and then I'll start to play along and I want you to count the number of bars, number of measures, in the pattern. This is a pattern that repeats over and over. In music when that pattern repeats we call it an ostinato, ostinare, from the Italian word ostinare, stubborn, pig-headed. So we have an ostinato harmony here. And how many bars is in this ostinato or are there in this ostinato pattern? One, two, three. And it's going to continue again. Anybody able to count the number of bars in the pattern just on that one little quick playing there? Yeah. Betty? Sixteen? Okay. You're on the right track. Roger? Eight. Yeah. It was a sixteen-bar pattern. We played sixteen bars there but the harmony of the second eight bars was identical to the harmony of the first eight bars. It was just repeating that same harmony. What's the harmony? Is this piece by U2 in major or minor? How many think major? Raise your right hand. Sinister minor type, raise your left hand. Okay. It's definitely in minor. So it's one of these unusual pop pieces in minor. All right. So that's chord one. That's the tonic. What about this triad? Major or minor? Major. What about this one? Major. What about this one? Minor. Okay. Then back to minor, major. Okay. So that's our eight-bar pattern. Now maybe even kind of sing along with this. My question to you, and this is the last one with this piece, is this an example of a regular rate of harmonic change or an irregular rate of harmonic change? So here we go. Maybe I'll just play it on the piano, just for the simplest thing here. Ready? Go. So what do you think? Regular or irregular? How many think regular? How many think irregular? It's actually irregular. Thaddeus, tell me why. Anybody tell me why? I'm sorry to put you on the spot here but you got it right. Well, no, they were kind of falling on the meter. Okay. But there was one moment when something was a little bit different. Elizabeth? Okay. It lasted longer. What's the it here? Okay. At the end of the phrase, five, seven, six, seven, two, eight, two. So that one lasted two bars. One, two, two, two, three, two, four, two, five, two, six, two, seven, two, eight, two. So one of those chords lasted twice as long as all the others. Roger, a question? It could conceivably be a rest but that would give us a kind of a seven-bar phrase. I don't like seven-bar phrases. I've never met a seven-bar phrase that I was really comfortable with, and musicians generally don't like that. So it's better to go with, I used this for the first time in section the other day and I'll use it again here a second time, Occam's razor. If there's a simple solution, go for it. So take the idea of symmetry and assume that it's an eight-bar phrase and you've got one chord holding for an extra chord, but theoretically that's possible. Question here? We would not get into that but it would still be considered regular. All they're doing is filling between chords, like Peter Solovey. Okay. All he's doing is and if he comes playing other things along the way, that's still regular, but that's far more sophisticated than we're ever going to get to. We're just going to go plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. Okay? So keep it very much in the straight and narrow. All right. We have one more idea to talk about and that is the concept of key and modulation. Now this piece by U2 is written in a key. It's got the home key here. It's an odd key. It's B-flat minor. Five flats, B-flat minor, but it nonetheless is a key. And the whole piece, at least the vast majority of it, is in that one key. Occasionally composers will change keys. I was thinking I could play right for you here the Beethoven. He starts. So here we are in this minor key and here he is in a new key. This is a major key here. So composers do change keys and when they change keys they affect what's called a modulation. Let's listen to an example of a pretty simple modulation affected by Aaron Copland, an American composer working in New York City in the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. He wrote a ballet suite called Appalachian Spring, and in it he has one section where he's working through a series of variations on a folk tune called A Gift to Be Simple, and he pulls off a modulation. So let's listen to Copland's Appalachian Spring as he proceeds and I'll try to duplicate and go crazy up here at the piano at the moment we get to the modulation. Modulations are hard to hear. The best you can do with it oftentimes is say, this is unsettled, maybe it's modulated, and I'm not even sure we would ask you, has the piece modulated? They're really kind of hard to hear, but let's try anyway. So here's a Copland modulation. I think this is where the modulation comes. Then he's going to bring in the, he's sitting on this note. He brings in the trombone and then the trumpet will jump off from there to a much higher. He was here and now he's modulated up to here. So let's see if we can hear this modulation there. Here we go. Now we're going to pause it there. So that's a modulation. In music, conceptually, it's pretty straightforward, but it's hard to hear. I think I've got one that's easier to hear. It's a piece I like to use because it's just off the charts in terms of what other popular music was doing at that time. It's a piece by the Beach Boys. Beach Boys music is extremely interesting. Right there, the California Airheads. No, no, no, no, no. This is really, musically, just light years ahead of what everybody else was doing, I guess, late fifties, early sixties. So what I've got here on the board is a harmonic scheme. And we're going to, once again, for copyright reasons, just take little chunks of this. But you can see that it's a piece that changes, uses a lot of triads. So every time you see a G up here, that means we have a chord build on G and a triad on E, triad on A, triad on F, D, E. And just looking at this, this isn't shaping out to be one, four, five, one. So it's moving around a lot. Then it gets to a section where it does get very boring. It's very static at that particular point. And then something of interest will happen. So let's listen to a little bit of this. And there are, it's a piece in which there are contrasts between sections of movement, with wild modulations, and then sections of stasis. So here it gets very boring. And we're not going to even listen to it. We're just going to sit there. I'm really hip and I'm having a great time. But then the text comes back to I get around. So let's listen. I think that's what I had to parse this thing out into a Frankenstein, but let's listen to the next thing. I think we go back to the idea of I get around. I get around. More boring stuff at this point, but let's pick it up as we come to the end of what I think is this boring stuff and we'll listen to what they do there. Go ahead. So they're sitting here in which place. So what kind of cadence have they given us there? Deceptive cadence. Deceptive cadence and that takes it up a half step and then it jumps. No. It doesn't jump to the Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring, but it does the same thing. It does exactly the same thing. It uses that intermediate. It's going to jump up from the dominant to the tonic and then slide up one more thing so that we have now a whole section in A-flat and the original was in G, so he's modulated to A-flat. It's extremely sophisticated involving half-step modulations and things like that. Who would have thunk that from the Beach Boys? All right. We're going to stop here. We've got sections this week. We have a test a week from today. If you look at your e-mails later in the day, you'll see an e-mail from me saying that we are posting a prep sheet for the test and it will tell you all you need to know and how to study over the weekend for the test next Thursday. So let's listen to a little bit of the Aaron Copland as you go out.