Chord Progressions

[Retrosaurus Rex]

More likely, no-one is paying any attention anyway.

I'm paying attention...

[Lazz]

Am I correct that rather than starting with a triad and adding to it, you’re looking at chords in a major key as being derived from all seven notes of the major scale, stacked up in thirds?.... VII m7^{(b5)(b9)(b13)}. ….. neither fish nor fowl.

You certainly got the size of it well enough to find the deliberate mistake of inconsistency with my spelling of the VII chord. Noticing the alteration which would be required to make it conform to the others, may help you consider the role of the diminished.

Interesting ‘fish nor fowl’ comment about the VII as a questionable species. Have you ever noticed those vestigial scales on the foot and leg of the chicken ? An ambiguous moment on the evolutionary path. The VII (diminished) often works as a passing chord. The metaphor becomes more apposite.

I am formulating answers to all your questions.

The inadequacies in my attempts to explain are profound.

Give me a little longer.

I do have a few things to say regarding usefulness …………….

[Roflcopter]

Perhaps we might ask the question: "more common amongst whom?"

We've obviously been using different libraries and reading different books.

'The system of diatonic triads is the basis of tonal harmony in music.'

That's not Wikipedia, that's the Encyclopedia Britannica.

[Lazz]

'The system of diatonic triads is the basis of tonal harmony in music.'

That's not Wikipedia, that's the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Alright !!

Maybe I should book the Encyclopedia Britannica to play piano on my next gig.

What is it exactly you're taking issue with, Rob?

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[Roflcopter]

No issue really. You just seemed to doubt my sources ('just about any book I've ever read on music theory') - if you mwuha the EB as a compendium of modern knowledge - I really wouldn't know what would satisfy you.

[Lazz]

No issue really. You just seemed to doubt my sources ('just about any book I've ever read on music theory') - if you mwuha the EB as a compendium of modern knowledge - I really wouldn't know what would satisfy you.

Wow - you never struck me before as the sort of guy who would accept the Encyclopedia Britannica as unquestionable authority on everything.

I think we would have reasonable grounds not to consider it "a book on music theory", at least.

5 years or so ago, 'Nature' magazine held a blind peer review of some articles from EB and Wiki - they found an equal number of serious errors (such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts) from each, and a whole series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements shared amongst both. From the sample of articles used in the review Wikipedia had 162 problems and EB had 123, which they averaged out as 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 mistakes per article for Wiki.

I can imagine and sympathise with the challenges of writing and editing a definitive encyclopedia article - but we still have to keep critical faculties switched on.

What I stated simply - which still appears to be true - is that we obviously read different books on music theory.

For my personal journey to figure an understanding, I have tended to depend on books by guys like Dick Grove, justly famous for his own music school in LA; David Baker, Chair of the Jazz Studies Department at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music; and Dan Haerle, Jazz Studies Division of the College of Music at the University of North Texas. I have also been lucky enough to get a couple of private workshops with Baker. I think they all know their stuff.

You are of course quite welcome to question and critically evaluate any of my sources but, honestly, it seems faintly ludicrous to feel I am expected to defend and justify the type of theoretical underpinnings accepted as basic standards amongst musicians and educators everywhere apart from strictly classical academies - even though those ideas seem to come as a big surprise to you and others.

One clear significant difference in perspectives appears to be that you and the EB are sticking with triads - whereas us other lot build a chord with four notes.

The implications, the consequences, of this difference are quite profound, very illuminating, and highly useful for a musician to understand.

But I wouldn't expect to find it in EB.

What does mwuha mean ?

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[john]

Hi

Personally I think you are taking different perspectives on chordal theory. One nomenclature relates to alias used in one branch of music and the other from another. In this case one perspective is that of intervals (chords described relative to root notes) and the other (harmony) is commonly adopted by those focused on chord progressions as relative to key.

Triads are the basis of the chordal system but there are conventions applied on top of the interval theory of chords. Context is everything. For example playing a minor 7th where the root note of the chord lies on the dominant note of the scale, is called a dominant 7th. The fact is that 4 note chords are commonly enough used that they earn themselves separate names shouldn't be surprising. yes there are many many chords, however it is the commonness of their use that earns these 4 note chords their own name.

You guys are getting all tangled up in the nomenclature for these two different perspectives.

You might find this useful (yes I know this is wikipedia but it saves me typing)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_notation

Cheers

John

[Roflcopter]

I have tended to depend on books by guys like Dick Grove, justly famous for his own music school in LA; David Baker, Chair of the Jazz Studies Department at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music; and Dan Haerle, Jazz Studies Division of the College of Music at the University of North Texas. I have also been lucky enough to get a couple of private workshops with Baker.

What does mwuha mean ?

Nope, never heard of them. My main reason to use EB, was that it has a slghtly better reputation than Wikipedia, which you seem to disdain, and it merely reflects how common the use of triads is in music theory, 's all. I never claimed it was a guide to music, or infallible, or anything. I take it you are familiar with the use of the word compendium - it's kind of the opposite of specialist. It will say that Einstein came up with General Relativity, and maybe claim it was in 1906, while it was actually 1905. Still, it kinda reflects the main issue pretty correctly. It will most likely not claim a certain Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came up with it.

Back to sources.

Also more specialist websites on music theory like Dolmetsch use triads as a starting point when discussing chords - like so many others.

http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory16.htm

Which was my main point - most of my sources do. That's all - and I am not familiar with yours, indeed.

Mwuha is the sound you make when you laugh disdainfully.

[Lazz]

I think you are taking different perspectives on chordal theory.

I think it has always been quite explicit.

Perspectives were (are) exactly the subject we had reached under this topic of 'how to create chord progressions'.

Of those two perspectives which we had got around to intimating in only the vaguest terms, I wanted to offer some thoughts about relative usefulness and I harbour hope that some of the misunderstandings will begin to evaporate and stop interfering with the view.

It’s not clear to me that either system is a more useful way of thinking than the other...

I think it depends entirely on what we want, where we’re aiming, and what makes us happy.

If we want to explore other possibilities beyond the land of triads which I presumed your “standard guitar chord nomenclature” phrase was describing, beyond folk, in a harmonic sense, like ideas about how to create a chord progression, for instance, then we simply gain more mileage from the established and very practical ways of making sense that have been put together by those guys who went before in the strictly non-classical arena.

When you and I were growing, opportunities for tapping into this body of accumulated knowledge and understanding didn’t exist anywhere outside of the active gigging musician’s community. Today, you can go to school to find out. There’s no need to re-invent any wheels.

There’s no requirement or obligation for anyone to explore those perspectives of course – but I would say again that, in terms of thinking about how to create progressions, they can be useful big-time.

One first big bit of usefulness is clarity - being unambiguous about key centre.

Take an Em chord as example – a nice popular guitar chord.

Slap two fingers on the neck – strum E A E A C E – and voila !!

But what sort of Em are we looking at ?

That may sound like a severely dumb question – especially if you’re bass player whose job it is to groove around the root and 5th of whatever chord is flying by, or if you’re the enthusiastic minimalist guitarist sticking with the simple triads….. but if you are someone else called onto a gig where you have to be able to fake your way through a chart and interpret appropriate note choices of your own, then it is very useful to know which chord function we’re dealing with.

Most of the time, I imagine, we would be easily tempted to interpret the appropriate scale tones for Em as E F# G A B C# D and presume it is the II chord in the key of D. However…… if it turns out that our Em is functioning instead as the III chord of C, that C# and F# could have caused some unfortunate and avoidable ugliness.

Spelled out carefully as Emin7, with the b9 & b13 in parenthesis, the tonality is made very explicit.

C Major.

There are times when the clarity of Em7^(b9)(b13) proves more useful than Em

NB - It doesn’t mean you have to squeeze all those notes into a chord.

It’s just telling you where you’re at, what’s going on, and what to look out for.

Like life – you have to use your own judgement about how to ‘voice’ it.

And often – even while being aware of what else is out there – a simple triad can be the right choice.

When I sent along a tune to be considered for a gig by one of our friends here, Joe Roxhythe, he voiced concern about the modifications and alterations in our chord spellings (Alt. chords, #9s, #11s, etc.). The tones being indicated by those spellings, however, were all contained in the melody – they are already being sung and so there is absolutely no need to repeat them, to ‘double’ them. The chord spelling on the lead-sheet tells us what’s going on. And the job of the supporting instruments is to support that melody. Joe understood, and his band renders it in simple triads as some kind of as rag-time bluegrass.

In a more jazzoid context, where the song normally lives, using the broader vocabulary allowed to players in that context, the voicing choices will get made differently.

But whichever style or idiom, we’ve got interpretation being made from the same package of information contained in the chord spelling. The differences in perspective are about how to make the best sense of the intention.

Another big core of usefulness consequent upon seeing chords as being derived from scale tones – the process commonly known as chord-generation – alternate scale tones stacked in thirds, as Coises says – is that it enables you to recognize that a chord sequence which moves from our Emi7 to Ami7^b13, followed by Dmi7 and on to G7, for example, it is still all happening in C Major.

Whatever stylistic genre you might work with, if ever you’re in a position where you’re expected to be able to invent you own part, your own contribution to the whole, a pretty common experience outside the classical arena, that perspective is going to be pretty damn useful I reckon.

Break - Off to work.

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[Lazz]

Also more specialist websites on music theory like Dolmetsch use triads as a starting point when discussing chords - like so many others.

Probably right - I am sure there must be a whole herd of others who continue the same way.

Music educators today, however, on the whole, generally don't do that anymore.

There does remain today, and it may even continue into the future, a huge chasm between the classical academies for orchestral studies and those other, more recent, institutions which prepare musicians for working as professionals in other broader areas of popular music. Outside of pure composition, classical instrumental specialists have little if any need for deep theory other than some retro-active functional analysis. For a non-classical jobbing musician, however, who needs to survive on wits in a variety of different environments, it is theory as praxis which becomes absolutely essential, rather than the highly trained motor-reflexes which enable your classical geezer to stay in the game by being able to read fly-shit. He doesn't need to know why in order to play his note while our contemporary jobbing dude has to have practical theoretical understanding in order to find the note to play.

In that modern world, chords have four notes.

That's where we start.

There is neither contradiction nor incompatibility.

Back to sources.

Do we have to ?

I always feel weird about the alleged need for sources in these contexts as it seems to me that ideas and perspectives stand on their own merits and demonstrable worth above and beyond any proposed 'he said, she said' back-and-forth of referencing. I only listed some books on my shelves so you would see there were actually other places where you can find this stuff discussed and that it isn't something I am inventing out of thin air and just making up on the fly. Interestingly - on thumbing through them once more last night - I find in truth I have no one single volume which really codifies the system definitively and formally - rather, these are books I have on arranging and orchestration and voicings and such which all rest implicitly on the assumption that the reader already knows the theory. Seems a reasonable taken-for-granted assumption, after all. because, as I said earlier, it's pretty basic and fundamental knowledge as a way of thinking amongst players. The only place I find it codified complete in one place is the two loose-leaf files where I have stored all my notes from each private lesson that I have bought.

I am not familiar with yours, indeed.

I wouldn't have expected you to be.

I have no reason to have ever thought of you as a student of music theory.

Mwuha is the sound you make when you laugh disdainfully.

Ok

I tend to snort.

And indeed, the introduction of EB in a context which I understood to be 'books on music theory (which I have read)' was something I found amusingly snortworthy.

Sorry.

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[john]

is all meat to the grist as my gran would have said

[Lazz]

For any innocent by-standers who are scratching their heads and wondering what happened here and what bearing or relevance old jazz and blues and be-bop bollocks might conceivably have on the world of rock'n'roll.........

And subsequent to having heard Coises' music.....

You might find the following enjoyable and illuminating:

Donald Fagen talking with Warren Bernhardt about PEG

PART ONE

PART TWO

Same guys talking about JOSIE

PART ONE

PART TWO

[Lazz]

is all meat to the grist as my gran would have said

Yes.

Meat to the grill.

Mist to the great.

I'm sure I knew your gran.

Rather well.

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[Roflcopter]

I have no reason to have ever thought of you as a student of music theory.

I tend to snort.

I see. That explains a lot.

[Lazz]

I see. That explains a lot.

Please Rob, I would welcome correction if my assumption is mistaken.

(nothing too kinky, mind)

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[Roflcopter]

(nothing too kinky, mind)

I once had so much tonic in my gin it gave my stomach an inversion.

Look, all I know of music theory is the half-dozen or slightly more books I perused on the subject from the local library. I will gladly list their titles, if it makes you feel any better. And yes, I have a library card, and yes, I can actually read.

And what I remember from these, triads seem to be a, if not *the* recurring theme.

[john]

Ok so I think we can AGREE that there are differing perspectives. No need for it to be a contest, because it isn't.

Why are there differing perspectives? Does it matter? What matters is understanding them both and how it affects musicians when they communicate surely?

So can we explore both ways of looking at this? as long as we have a common understanding of terms and notation it is amazing what can be passed from one to another.

So in the spirit of harmony... (hope you like the witty repartee )

[Roflcopter]

Ok so I think we can AGREE that there are differing perspectives. No need for it to be a contest, because it isn't.

The whole point was not about equivalence, that was established a page back - only about ubiquity

[hariossa]

It's funny how we all have different ways to understand music, Allan Holdsworth even invented his own rules and notation... I was educated in this field by Yury Pronin, a russian maestro (who studied with Dimitri Shostakovich) he said to me that in reality the important thing about chords is their "function", there are three kinds of functions: Fundamental, Subdominant and Dominant, a chord can mutate its function when another tension is added (i.e. in C major, the diminished triad b-d-f has a dominant function, but when the seventh is added it mutates to a subdominant function: b-d-f-a). Some times a chord can have two functions, (i.e. Em7, or any third grade in a mayor scale can be fundamental or dominant), Also when modulating to another tonality a chord has two functions, one to the key where it comes and another to the following key. This way of thinking is based on composition, where you are sure that nobody is going to add tensions or added notes to your written chords.

In jazz even if a Dm7 is notated you must take in mind that the pianist or guitarist probably is going to play more tensions of the chord so you must be aware of the whole scale corresponding to that chord all the time.

I like to teach the functions method starting with triads to beginners, they get the picture very clear and simple very fast. Twist and Shout!!

Edited September 27, 2010 by hariossa

[Lazz]

The whole point was not about equivalence, that was established a page back - only about ubiquity

That’s part of our mistake, I think.

My thinking was the absolute opposite.

To slightly rephrase from that same page back: Perhaps we might ask the question: "ubiquitous amongst whom?" – and it then became self-evident (to me, at least) that one bundle of ideas played the Major role in Rob’s universe while another slightly different perspective was Dominant on planet Lazz.

Different contexts; different ubiquities.

But in terms of Coises’ question about relative utility, I didn’t see equivalence established.

Neither do I see incompatibility or contradiction: I see development and growth.

A way to gain access to more rooms in the same house.

The same house of regular functional harmony.

So we seem to be having different conversations.

Why are there differing perspectives?

Does it matter?

Thanks.

Good questions.

Why are there differing perspectives?

Inventions in response to need.

Different musical environments have their own characteristic demands and expectations.

Ways of thinking which are the most sensitive to, and appropriate, for the problem-context.

Survival of the hippest.

Does it matter?

Only if a person is interested.

Only if it solves problems for them.

What matters is understanding them both and how it affects musicians when they communicate surely?

Matters to me.

So can we explore both ways of looking at this?

What a novel idea!

(You’re wasted here, John. Wasted.)

Can I try to move forward by addressing Coise's specific questions to me ?

I know Andrew (King Retro) might still be interested.

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