Rolling Music Theory Thread

"A person would not necessarily notice the ambiguity of the opening seven-second solo guitar part either."

...should have read as "metric ambiguity." That was changed in the editing and is, I think, unclear.

If you look at it that way, it's simply Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus.

But the point is, I guess, that even though there's a more complicated structure going on than verse/chorus, the interplay of the verses and "verse extensions" and choruses is still somewhat regular.

Still it's a good analysis.

The Ramones/Hermans Hermits connection is an interesting one to explore. Gouldman later produced the Ramones album Pleasant Dreams. Try singing the lyrics of Rockaway Beach over “I’m ‘enery the VIIIth I Am”, which is also the source of “second verse same as the first”. Is “Leaning On A Lampost” the inspiration for “53rd and 3rd”?

1-2-C-3
3-4-C-1
1-2-C-3

Actually, looking at it that way is interesting because you notice that the second unit starts by repeating the last section of the first and the third unit starts by repeating the last section of the second.

Still, I don't hear it as a ten line verse. I think the C section functions more as a chorus.

Actually, BBC makes for a twelve line verse. BBCB would make for a sixteen line verse. I don't see it!

No milk today, my love has gone away
The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn
No milk today, it seems a common sight
But people passing by don't know the reason why
How could they know just what this message means
The end of my hopes, the end of all my dreams
How could they know the palace there had been
Behind the door where my love reigned as queen
No milk today, it wasn't always so
The company was gay, we'd turn night into day

Chorus:

But all that's left is a place dark and lonely
A terraced house in a mean street back of town
Becomes a shrine when I think of you only
Just two up two down

Verse 2:

No milk today, it wasn't always so
The company was gay, we'd turn night into day
As music played the faster did we dance
We felt it both at once, the start of our romance
How could they know just what this message means
The end of my hopes, the end of all my dreams
How could they know a palace there had been
Behind the door where my love reigned as queen
No milk today, my love has gone away
The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn

Chorus:
But all that's left is a place dark and lonely
A terraced house in a mean street back of town
Becomes a shrine when I think of you only
Just two up two down

Verse 3:

No milk today, my love has gone away
The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn
No milk today, it seems a common sight
But people passing by don't know the reason why
How could they know just what this message means
The end of my hopes, the end of all my dreams
How could they know a palace there had been
Behind the door where my love reigned as queen
No milk today, it wasn't always so
The company was gay, we'd turn night into day

Chorus/outro:
But all that's left is a place dark and lonely
A terraced house in a mean street back of town
Oh all that's left is a place dark and lonely
A terraced house in a mean street back of town
Oh all that's left is a place dark and lonely
A terraced house in a mean street back of town

Ambiguous, even.

It's surprising that it's really so straightforward without sounding boring or repetative. Compared with "Your Mother Should Know" for example - it's not that much different as it really only consists of a verse and a chorus, yet YMSK sounds pretty turgid, as if it's missing something.

Still, Herman's Hermits were pretty often really basic. Their cover of "Henry the Eight" dispensed with ALL the original verses and just kept the chorus, repeated three times. Pretty rad.

On the other hand, perhaps even pop masterpieces could use improvement:

"A contrasting bridge will almost always improve a song. The more minimalist and repetitive the song, the better a contrasting bridge.
-- Geir Hongro (geirhon...), March 18th, 2005"

Dunno if that makes sense, and it's a bit of a tangent from musical theory, obviously. But this occurred to me while writing a Mojave 3 review a while back, and I'm still stuck on it. (E.g. Mojave 3's versions of country and now rock are deliberately simplified to the point of being "dreamy," I think in ways similar to how the Beatles would also reach back toward mother's music to make it ever-so-vaguely unfamiliar and "dreamy" and drugged.)

(Alternately, think of Ween's pop songs, the way they're so pop that something seems imaginary about them.)

The White Album is totally a Ween record, really.

Yeah, I guess the instrumental bit in YMSK does function as a bridge. The song still feels like it lacks something though. I take Nabisco's point that it's kind of like an endless singalong like you might have on a old fashioned bus trip of the type depicted in Magical Mystery Tour. That makes total sense. I still think I like it the least of Paul's jaunty music hall numbers.

"Your Mother Should Know" one of those half measures at the end of the second verse. I realise that isn't very unusual for the Beatles (Cry Baby Cry, I'll Be Back, All You Need Is Love, Strawberry Fields Forever etc), but this is usually a Lennon trick, rather than something that Paul does.

Gonna plug my blog because I've got some recent stuff up:

http://thisiheard.blogspot.com

Nothing on pedal points.

ten years or so into being a guy who does music and stuff I figure it's time to get some vague sense of what I'm doing. Does anyone have any website or book recommendations for the real basics of theory, e.g. knowing chord construction and keys and stuff? For guitar and keyboard, but especially the latter, as with the former I know how to play in some unconventional way whereas with the latter I'm roughly at the point of knowing that pressing these things makes sounds.

Wrote on appoggiaturas and an instance of something being a hook versus something being less of a hook:

http://thisiheard.blogspot.com

I found this useful:
http://www.outsideshore.com/music/educational-materials/primer/basic-theory/

Wrote on structure of "P.S. I Love You" on blog linked to above if anyone's interested.

OK, changed it around because I made a mistake. Tell me what you think if you're into this stuff at all.

http://thisiheard.blogspot.com

It's a frustrating exercise for me, because like "I have so much to say about Lady Gaga!" but at the same time I cannot, actually, get through reading a single fucking wikipedia page breakdown of any Sibelius symphony, they have been dissected so irrelevantly and uninterestingly by musicologists who, instead of identifying the innovative features in the orchestration or handling-of-material, just throw their "it's in b-minor and then goes to G-major" dicks around. Seriously if you want to see "worst piece of music writing ever" just look at a wiki for a Tchaikovsky symphony, I'll be over here slitting my wrists

― continually topping myself (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, 30 March 2014 00:53 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what I'm trying to say is: musicology is awesome but musicologists need to take an atavan or fifty

― continually topping myself (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, 30 March 2014 00:55 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think there is a place for academic analysis of pop culture (it's sort of why I joined ILX in the first place). Wished more people were going that way instead of down the Buzzfeed style route.

This issue was completely devoted to rock music, for example: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.3/toc.17.3.html

This is something of a 'classic' book: http://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-Rock-Essays-Musical-Analysis/dp/0195100050

Kyle Adams's work on rap and Lori Burns's work generally (http://www.music.uottawa.ca/faculty/burns.html, has a few MTO articles, has written book chapters on Lady Gaga, Dixie Chicks, and Rihanna if you're concerned that the pop being analysed isn't always pop enough) are usually great.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, 30 March 2014 07:05 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, the Dixie Chicks thing was an article.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, 30 March 2014 07:06 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Blind drunk when typing those last two posts, sorry to any musicologists

― continually topping myself (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, 30 March 2014 07:59 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, I mean, Wikipedia is probably not the best source for quality musicological writing. I suspect that people are confusing musicology and music theory on this thread though.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:01 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was wondering about that. What would you say is the difference?

― Bristol Stomper's Breakout (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:03 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ime, on this side of the Atlantic at least, a simple explanation would be:
music theory = formal/structural analysis of music (which includes model composition at the undergrad level)
musicology = humanities or social science approaches to the study of music

I think that in Europe, what I would call music theory can be included as a sub-discipline of musicology, actually, which would weaken my original point.

(Grove on musicology fwiw (they don't have a "music theory" article!):

The term ‘musicology’ has been defined in many different ways. As a method, it is a form of scholarship characterized by the procedures of research. A simple definition in these terms would be ‘the scholarly study of music’. Traditionally, musicology has borrowed from ‘art history for its historiographic paradigms and literary studies for its paleographic and philological principles’ (Treitler, 1995). A committee of the American Musicological Society (AMS) in 1955 also defined musicology as ‘a field of knowledge having as its object the investigation of the art of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon’ (JAMS, viii, p.153). The last of these four attributes gives the definition considerable breadth, although music, and music as an ‘art’, remains at the centre of the investigation.
A third view, which neither of these definitions fully implies, is based on the belief that the advanced study of music should be centred not just on music but also on musicians acting within a social and cultural environment. This shift from music as a product (which tends to imply fixity) to music as a process involving composer, performer and consumer (i.e. listeners) has involved new methods, some of them borrowed from the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, sociology and more recently politics, gender studies and cultural theory. This type of inquiry is also associated with ethnomusicology. Harrison (1963) and other ethnomusicologists have suggested that ‘It is the function of all musicology to be in fact ethnomusicology; that is, to take its range of research to include material that is termed “sociological”’

)
― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:14 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the US/Canada, ime, I think it would more common for theory/composition to be combined in a department or 'area' within a department as for theory/musicology to be combined, although the latter is definitely not unheard of.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:18 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

@ Sund4r I keep up with that journal but have learned to skip the articles about pop rock and rap. My ish is that those pop articles seem intended for an audience of no-one. The language is too academic for people who're interested in Radiohead, and Radiohead is too easily parsed for people who can comprehend an academic theoretical approach. I mean:

“Paranoid Android” was composed and recorded by the alternative rock band Radiohead and appears on their widely acclaimed album OK Computer (1997).(9) As Radiohead critics and fans point out, the title of the rock song references the fictional character “Marvin the Paranoid Android” from Douglas Adams’s 1978 BBC radio comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was later adapted into a series of books. Unlike Adams’s comedic portrayal of the depressed robot Marvin, however, Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” appears to depict a socially alienated and anxiety-ridden persona surrounded by a society consumed by the trappings of capitalism––one of several themes that the album explores. Power (“When I am king”) and materialism (“gucci”; “yuppies”) generate self-importance (“Why don’t you remember my name”) and excess (“piggy”), threatening to consume, impair, and silence (“With your opinions which are of no consequence at all”) in the desire for more (Example 1a). The fear and realization that the capitalist machine has participated in the formation of the subject and created, as a condition of possibility, the potential to equate the valuation of material goods with identity and self-worth, provokes a split subject––a “paranoid android” who recognizes that its individual thoughts and ambitions may also be a product of the capitalist machine (“Please could you stop the noise . . . from all the unborn chicken voices in my head”).(10) The plea to be cleansed (“Rain down on me from a great height”) from the markers of a capitalist identity proves futile in the song’s final section; the potential for grace and intervention is met with a cynicism that God may be passive (“God loves his children, yeah!”), leaving the persona no escape from Pandemonium. That all of the individuals in “Paranoid Android” are condemned to the same fate, regardless of social status or wealth, lends an ironic twist to the song’s ending.

― continually topping myself (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:20 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My eyes glazed over there too but that's just like an introductory paragraph about the song more generally, though, right? The meat of the piece is the actual musical analysis.

I totally disagree with this!:

Radiohead is too easily parsed for people who can comprehend an academic theoretical approach.
It's way easier to parse something that i) is written on paper and/or ii) is played on acoustic instruments, not to mention something that follows CPP harmonic or formal conventions (or is far simpler in those terms than Radiohead is).
― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:31 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Even under the rubric of Theory, don't different people use it to mean different things at different times? An old school classical guy might be referring to something out of the common practice period, particularly the law as laid down by Rameau in 1722, whereas a recent Berklee grad is walking around with his head stuffed up with Chord Scale Theory?

― Bristol Stomper's Breakout (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:32 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My eyes glazed over too but I hadn't put together where the title "Paranoid Android" came from so I learned something.

― Bristol Stomper's Breakout (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:34 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*moves to the other thread*

― continually topping myself (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:36 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Even under the rubric of Theory, don't different people use it to mean different things at different times? An old school classical guy might be referring to something out of the common practice period, particularly the law as laid down by Rameau in 1722, whereas a recent Berklee grad is walking around with his head stuffed up with Chord Scale Theory?
Sure, but they're both doing structural/formal analysis of music. They're just working with different repertoire. They could still present at similar conferences, etc. Anyway, I better go mark some counterpoint.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:36 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(Xp)I guess what I am trying to say is if you define theory as something like "the study of what chords go together and what melodies go with them" then there are different approaches to theory and some explain certain things better than others. What is surprising or not done in one theory is not surprising and done all the time in another. If you don't take this into account then theory is kind of a strawman.

*ok I'm leaving too*

― Bristol Stomper's Breakout (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:39 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(Something about tyranny of theory, blah blah blah)

― Bristol Stomper's Breakout (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:45 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I want to continue this discussion just in the more specific "talking about articles" thread instead of the "lol at this guy" thread

― continually topping myself (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:54 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

HI DERE

Anyway, this is definitely true and I think any sensible theorist would agree:

I guess what I am trying to say is if you define theory as something like "the study of what chords go together and what melodies go with them" then there are different approaches to theory and some explain certain things better than others. What is surprising or not done in one theory is not surprising and done all the time in another. If you don't take this into account then theory is kind of a strawman.

so what is the difference between "technical discussion" as in guitar player magazine (or some better representative mag, or any of them, i don't know them very well) and "technical discussion" in an academic context? do they discuss the same sorts of things? are there lacunae in either that the other addresses? or is it just audience and intent?

(my guess is that trade mags care _way_ more about equipment, partly because they exist as part of a complex whose purpose is to sell equipment, but my question is, does the lack of attention to equipment hurt academic writing? also i know some academic writing cares about the craft and production of instruments v. much. also a guess would be that the academic and the trade approach both don't address the social as much as some [we?] might desire, but fail to address it in radically different ways.)

guitar mag discussion is often looking at playing technique rather than the music in itself, but there is definitely overlap discussing innovation, phrasing w/e

Couple thoughts on Owen's pieces:

Sympathetic to the premise that "Get Lucky" is in the Dorian mode.

When "Teenage Dream" switches from the I chord in the intro to rooting that harmony on the fourth, it creates a major seventh chord on the IV. The softness of that chord is sort of the consolation for the song's weightless state of flux.

Yes, exactly. Theorists are more concerned with the larger-scale questions of what the vocabulary and syntax of a music are, how pieces of music can be understood structurally. Ogmor is definitely right that there can be some overlap, and in these areas, I would think that the difference is comparable to the difference between the academic and popular versions of any field of discussion (Psychology Today vs academic psychology journals, CNN or Fox vs a political science symposium, etc): the level of training that is usually expected and the peer-review process do imo tend to promote a certain level of rigour and originality, if not always readability. Honestly, discussion of theory in guitar magazines is often even riddled with incorrect terminology even for basic things. Doesn't mean (at all) that there's nothing useful there.

Where fgti and I might be on the same page is that its not always entirely clear to me what the ultimate goal or purpose is with a lot of academic analysis of popular music, aside from sheer scholarly interest (and lines on the CV, ha). With guitar mags, it's usually clear that the articles are there for people to learn specific techniques from. With the analysis of art music, it's easy for me to see how the work is useful for people who want to compose and/or play art music (who are the usual audience for these journals). While I still disagree with him that Radiohead (or, say, "Close to the Edge") is too easy to parse for someone with art music training, it's not 100% clear to me what the readers are going to gain from the exercise: it does not seem that this is going to have the direct benefit of helping (most) people learn how to write and play rock music. There can still be some value in understanding how the music 'works' or is put together, though, and it is actually possible for it to influence art music composition tbh (because those artists have probably influenced mine!).

xpost

(xp!)
Don't know what academic discussion you might be referring to, s. clover. You should realize that a good part of academic music studies- Sund4r can correct me if I am wrong- consists of professional programs offering Bachelors or Masters degrees in performance and education. Of course as part of this they teach composition and give instrumental instruction. The purpose of this is to give the students the skills -and accreditation - to enable them to hopefully make a living as player/teachers, so these institutions are not necessarily doing academic research as the word theory might lead you to believe. The theory as such is supposed to aid the awareness of students as composers and improvisers of what notes and chords are available to them at any given point. I haven't read any guitar mags in a bit, but in between the gear articles and the player interviews they always have transcriptions of tunes and, more to the point, regular columns where somebody explains that if you want to play in a certain style these are typical chord progressions and typical things you might play, with a little theoretical gloss thrown in. For instance, Bass Player magazine might have an article entitle "Funk 101: Dorian Octaves." This kind of thing is a bite-sized version of what you might get in one of those programs. Actually one of the authors of a long running popular and useful column in Bass Player was (don't know if he still does it) none other than everybody's favorite Daft Punk bassist, Nathan East.

well if you look at english departments, their main (or at least one main) social role is really to produce people capable of teaching undergrad level reading and composition, but also by dint of being part of the "academic world" one also produces analyses of rhetoric in milton or what have you, and one can argue that this is a good or a bad thing or was a good thing but now is in some ways a bad thing (by obscuring the labor function of academia as a way to explain away low salaries 'for the love of the discipline' or etc), but in any case, is this somewhat the situation in music/musicology depts?

Yes, but the majority of the guys I'm talking about don't have to publish anything like the equivalent of Milton Studies you mention. They are part of the professional side of academia, not the research side, and don't have to go through the same hurdles: orals, writtens, postdoc, maybe another postdoc, tenure track, etc, they just have to come out of a program like the one they end up teaching in, more or less.

That's only true of instrumental teachers (who are generally contract instructors), surely? Neither University of Ottawa nor University of Toronto will even consider someone for a sessional (adjunct) teaching position in composition, music theory, or musicology if he or she does not have a PhD in hand.

(I'll have a lot more to say later on. This is a big question, far bigger than a 'Rolling Music Theory' thread can support if we're going to really get into it.)

Interesting. From what I know in NYC a PhD is not required to teach at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, nor at the Columbia University Department of Music, The New School, or the Manhattan School of Music. A music professor with a PhD, such as Chris Washburne, is the exception not the rule.

Anyway I wanted to ask what people thought of Chord Scale Theory, it's uses and abuses, but maybe we've already bitten off more than we can chew on this thread.

Link to Sund4r's new thread: Music Academia

Still trying to get some eyeballs on this interesting, original idiosyncratic work: http://www.modalogy.net/. I was thinking about it in the context of the mother thread to this one, where the guy talks about the harmonic trick. Not so tricky when you realize that the resolution of modal cadences at weaker than those of a major/minor tune.

Also interested in the question of

• difference between a mode and a scale
• difference in use of term modal in Renaissance/ pre-equal temperament music and in "model jazz"

Thanks. Makes sense and I liked that analysis too. In the tune in which I first came across this sequence, Emily, the Eb7 is an A7, so I think you can safely think of that Eb7 as tritone sub for that A7.

Multiple jazz guys have said it is a tritone sub for the one. There is indeed some trick of subbing a diminished or half diminished I chord for the major I- “Stella By Starlight” is some kind of canonical example of that, I think- but I don’t care for that explanation with this sequence.

I would have definitely analysed Eb7 as a tritone sub for A7 but I believe that the chord is Ebdim7 in "Night and Day", not Eb7? At least it is on the chart I saw: F#m7b5-Fm7-Em7-Ebdim7-Dm7-G7-Cmaj7. As such, I think it is easiest to analyse it as an apparent voice-leading chord.

xp

Oh yeah, you are right.

In “Emily” the tune has modulated to D minor before this, with an A7 leading back at the end of every four bars. So it is interesting that in this case the A7 leads to an F#7b5, which can be used as a D9 no root, so you perhaps you might think there is just some minor/major trick going on.

I usually like this guys explanations: http://brunojazz.com/vt-half-diminished.htm

Guy’s

I guess there are times with songs that ostensibly have key signatures where...you're just not in any key at all. That seems to me to be the case with parts of "Incense and Peppermints." I think it certainly starts out in E minor (with a Dorian aspect), but I'm not so quick to say the chorus - E minor/Eb minor/D/A - is still in that key.

The bridge, to me, seems to start out with a V/I in G, but then goes to an F# minor chord, which strikes me as phrase modulation. Then, it happens again, but seems to resolve on A major.

It still feels like E minor/Dorian at that point to me. The chorus hinges on the chromatic descent E - D# - D - C#. I think the D# minor is subbing in for B major (the V chord).

xp

bridge is in D imo

the F#m - A "should" resolve to D

But that A in no way feels like a dominant chord to me!

I can't hear the D to G as being I to IV either. It settles on the G.

It still feels like E minor/Dorian at that point to me. The chorus hinges on the chromatic descent E - D# - D - C#. I think the D# minor is subbing in for B major (the V chord).

It does to me, too, when it's on the E minor chord and even the chromatic chord, but I can't help feeling that it, again here, seems to rest on that A chord.

that is strange — I don't hear it resolving on the A chord at all!

Plagal cadence on A.

The melody does go to A (over the D chord before it and the A chord).

How would you number that chord? I know it's different because it's modal, but is it a IV chord because E is still the root?

Yikes! Why does chromatic harmony in a pop song move one to question the tonal centre?

Verse
i - IV - i - VI

Bridge
i - vii - bVII - IV

There’s no question the bridge remains in e-minor, the song is defined by i - IV - i movement and the cycle of the bridge continues to reflect that

What I wanna know is what happens on the last bridge into the outro! That part of the song always mystified me

Hm well on another listen, that farfisa’s overtones are just complicating my perception of everything about this song. This actually might be the most subtly complicated song I can think of and it’s weird I don’t know any other songs by this weird band

sorry, when i said "chorus" earlier i meant bridge and likewise "bridge" meant middle 8

Yeah I figured “bridge” meant “chorus”... the actual bridge (or middle 8) is v confusing! The ending too! I don’t have a piano on me rn

Why does chromatic harmony in a pop song move one to question the tonal centre?

I was responding above that I wasn't questioning it relating to the chromatic chord. The D to A that follows it feels like it settles on A to me, though, and there's zero pull back to E minor.

I'm calling that part the chorus, by the way.

The bridge (if that's what it is) - D to G to F# minor - those chords repeated once and then, likewise, feel like they LAND on the A chord to me.

(And I realize it would be A mixolydian)

Ya I get you. I’m hesitant to fall into modal descriptions in chromatic music like this BUT the prevalent open fifths in the vocal harmonies did make me think there was some compositional desire for that manner of interpretation

Alternating E major 7 and D major 7 with that movable bass in the outro?

So, Picardy!

Speaking of this weird band and their other songs, this is their masterpiece:

https://thisiheard.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-strawberry-alarm-clock-pretty-song.html

The one good thing about Coldplay is when it hits you feel no shame about whatever crap you're calling "music" and putting out into the world

The Coldplay/Chainsmokers hit "Something Just Like This" came up in a presentation at SMT in the fall and it just came to mind now as an interesting case when I was thinking about chord progressions and tonality because of a dumb post about pop chord progressions on a classical music FB group. D is the clear tonal centre imo: the melody is completely centred around D, the song starts with D-A repetition in an upper voice, and there is a pedal point on D throughout the first verse and at times afterwards. (Wikipedia says it's in B minor but this seems very wrong to me.) However, I don't think there are any root position I chords at all until after the 3m mark here. (Second-inversion I chords, which don't classically have tonic function, are sometimes produced when the vocal melody places D and F# over As in the accompaniment, e.g. "Hercules and his gifts".) There are some D major arpeggios in the upper keyboard voice around 2:20. The bass motion for almost the entire song is ^4-^5-^6-^5 and we keep coming back to full-on IV-V-vi-V triads. (I imagine the way Bm works like a kind of tonic substitute harmony is why a Wikipedia author identified it as the key but the melody just doesn't support a tonal centre on B imo.)

I actually like Coldplay and was just really feeling the mashup with that post

Ha, yeah, I just thought it was funny that that was what came up when I searched for "coldplay" on this thread. I'm interested in more examples of pop songs with clear tonics that avoid or significantly delay the I chord. A Katy Perry song was mentioned on a theory forum I used to read some years back - "Last Friday Night", I think?

(If anyone hears the tonic of "Something Just Like This" differently, I'm up for discussing that too but I think it's p clear. I saw an online chord chart that identified the key as G major which no imo.)

it was a common trick for katy perry, i think fgti even wrote something for slate about teenage dream

That is correct, although I used "Teenage Dream" as an example (I think "Last Friday Night" is decisively in a minor key). I also cited in passing iirc EWF "September", Fleetwood Mac "Dreams" and "Viva La Vida"

Ah, thanks.

I probably just misremembered the Katy Perry song.

stevie nicks seems to use that trick a good amount in her songwriting--lots of circular progressions that never really settle in major or minor.

I think it intuitively comes to a lot of songwriters (and that charts and the resonance of particular tracks tend to favour songs that do it)... overall I don't think it necessarily needs to be an outright "denial of the tonic" so much as the tendency of certain songs to avoid it creates a harmonic buoyancy, this kind of not-settling that creates the sensation in the listener of "travelling"

i don't know what thread to put this in so i'll put it here. i am losing my mind over how perfect this contraption is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F-vMXuyE5k&list=PLPYiCOgE6NBTQn3qAZUKeGQN8J8S72wz4&index=1

ugh, let me try that again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F-vMXuyE5k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jobhw89wiFc

I think "Last Friday Night" is decisively in a minor key.

I'm curious why! It ends on an F# major chord and I'm not sure that the melodies frame the notes of D# minor any more than they do F# major.

Well like I said, pop songs are strengthened by tonic ambiguity and the main chorus melody is centred around the theoretical tonic of a major that never appears? Instead it keeps dipping to the minor where that “tonic” is the third and suggesting that it’s in a minor key and it works with the content and mood of the lyric

Yeah, I almost feel like the D# minor chord falling on the third measure of the four-bar cycle gives it enough resonance to register as a tonic. That's a weak rhythmic spot for the tonic to fall, but not as weak as the second measure would have been.

it's the Get Lucky progression with the first two chords reversed

the "tonic ambiguity" thing i think is typically pop songwriters loving the IV chord a whole lot. and they'll throw in the ii chord in order to switch up the bass note while keeping that IV feel going.

(VI and iv respectively in minor, obv)

I feel like the reversal of those two chords makes for a more inventive and interesting progression than "Get Lucky." There's no way "Last Friday Night" is resting on B major just because the cycle leaves you there on a downbeat to end the song, whereas "Get Lucky" could easily end on a B minor chord.

Somebody buy this book and report back: http://www.davecreamer.com/TheOctatonicSystem.html

Seems like a lot of it is on Google Books.

There’s some line in there where he describes bebop scales as a “rudimentary approach.”