Rolling Music Theory Thread

Okay, I will reply to fgti and say that CST is not all of or the only Jazz Theory.

One critique of CST is that it divorces the scale choice from harmonic function, it’s simply one scale per chord type. Okay, maybe there is a little more to it but that’s the way it is usually taken. It doesn’t get into the nuances of the different extensions and chromaticisms (chromatics?) that can be used, one size fits all.

I keep thinking about this and why I mostly agree with Iverson but don’t want to post into the void.

… and Lee Konitz too, as far as I know

Was banging out "Keep on Loving You" by REO Speedwagon on piano/voice/guitar tonight and realized it does the same kind of thing as "Man on the Moon" - seems like an F Lydian thing with the chords moving F-G-Am-G over an F pedal point through and a melody line that seems circumscribed by an F arpeggio, and even stays in that space during the pre-chorus with F-G-F-G-Am-G until we finally get C-F-G in the chorus and it's confirmed that F and G are I and IV and the F at the start of the melody is heard as an accented dissonance that resolves down to E.

That was a bit mangled. In the verse, it seems like F Lydian with the chords moving F-G-Am-F over an F pedal point and a melody circumscribed by the F arpeggio and even stays in that space in the pre-chorus. When we get to the chorus, we finally get a C-F-G progression and it's confirmed F and G were IV and V. The F that starts the melody in the chorus is heard as an accented neighbour to E.

The introduction of "Sara" by Fleetwood Mac uses exactly the same chord progression in F Lydian, except it resolves to F major for most of the song (then back to F Lydian for the bridges).

F-G-Am-F

ugh, F-G-Am-G

Interesting re "Sara"; will revisit that

The serious replies to this are lol:

I’m sorry but the UK rhythmic value names make no sense to me pic.twitter.com/Fm5SEIA3Iv

— Robert 🎃 Komaniecki (@Komaniecki_R) October 20, 2021

Tempting:
https://www.7dmedia.com/products/kingcrimsondiscipline

So I never broke down the solo to "Don't Fear the Reaper" (as classic as it is) before but just realized how cool the modulation is. The song is in a modal A minor (Aeolian) but we get that G# sounding like a leading note right under the fermata A minor chord before the solo begins. The G# (Ab) and C get reinterpreted as the two upper voices of an F minor chord in the first arpeggio (F-Ab-C) which then moves to a G7/F (F-G-B) arpeggio, iv and V in the chromatic mediant key of C minor, which becomes the key for the solo (a functional C minor, where the leading note is generally raised).

Good points. Then there's something uncanny about the return to the A minor riff from the G.
Another nice touch in this song is the single E maj chord in the verse (or prechorus), the V of A harmonic minor.

I always get lost metrically (pvmic) during the solo break but still have never gotten around to pinning it down.

Good points. Then there's something uncanny about the return to the A minor riff from the G.

Yeah, it ends on a sustained G (the dominant in C minor), which is the pedal point (on m^7) in the A minor riff.

Is the chord under "the sun" in the pre-chorus E major or E5? I don't hear a third (G#) there and Dharma sings a B in the melody - so it still seems like a modal Aeolian cadence to me. Even if I were to strum full triads there, I think Em would sound more natural than E.

I think it all lines up in 4/4, or at least adds up to multiples of 4, if you count the arpeggios as eighth notes starting on 1, which means the cymbals enter on 1 after four bars and the full band entering on 2 after another four bars + one beat. Pretty tricky because the arpeggio pattern is a three-note pattern accented in 4/4 so the barlines and chord changes always land in different spots in the pattern and it actually runs for a total of 33 eighth notes (eight bars + one beat). Also the drums are a bit unpredictable during the ensemble playing under the lead guitar but I think the bassist mostly keeps the quarter-note pulse.

*full band enters on 2

Thanks, makes sense.

This is too long to watch now but seems like it might be useful for some:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44t2KJQUh3Y

Lots of comments on the order of "I have been trying to understand this stuff for decades with success until I finally saw your explanation. Thanks!"

"Yesterday" by the Beatles and "My Love" by Wings start with the same progression (a fourth apart) of four chords, but because both songs are in F, the harmonic relationship to the respective songs is different:

Yesterday: F -- Em7 -- A7 -- Dm I -- ii of D Dorian -- V of vi -- vi

My Love: B♭maj7 -- Am7 -- D7 -- Gm7 IV -- iii -- V of ii -- ii

(ignoring inversions)

Posting here before possibly posting on the Jazz Thread, written by an old friend of ours: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/barry-harris-obit/

He refers to “Harris’s ‘bebop scale’” but I was under the impression that Barry Harris himself hated that term, despite almost everyone else using it.

Hi dere! Hey Sund4r, are you sure on that G# in the fermata chord on "Reaper?" I hear a G natural in the guitar that's panned a little right (which is kinda cool because it makes it momentarily a seventh resonance on the tonic minor chord).

That F minor arpeggio coming out of the blue feels a little Twilight Zone-ish (although I think actual Twilight Zone riff has a tritone).

The Blackstar thread mentioned Bowie's cover of the Walker Brothers' "Nite Flights". There's something very interesting about these chord changes. Both versions of the song have an intro, one verse and chorus that repeats to fade. Though the melody includes some unusual notes, I would describe the verse as A major and the chorus as D Mixolydian:

VERSE: A C#m F#m C#m I iii vi iii in A major
CHORUS: D C D Am I VII I v in D Mixolydian

Aside from performing the song a tone lower, Bowie changes the chord where the song transitions from verse to chorus ("has hit the bloodlite"): that is, instead of the second iii chord, he uses a ♭III chord (B♭ in his verse key of G).
It's a very different effect; with the Walker Brothers, the C chord coming in three bars into the chorus ("on nite flights") has a dizzying, shifting effect on the harmony; Bowie introducing this chord change at the end of the verse punctuates the start of the chorus, but it's like he shows his hand too soon. He's revealing the harmony of the chorus early, it can't have the same effect as the earlier version.

Are there any good explanations anywhere on the net of modern broadway composition style and where it came from? I just watched Encanto with my kids, and aside from "We Don't Talk About Bruno," which is catchy, I feel like there's this weird modern trend of sort of random-sounding diatonic melodies and chord progressions with a lot of roots and fifths and awkward melodic movement without good voice leading.

Ugh

Actually I guess there were a couple other songs that were ok - Welcome to the Family Madrigal didn't really do what I'm talking about, and neither did Dos Oruguitas, but here's a good example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKKrfr4To14

The melody sounds like someone just randomly noodling around in a scale.

There's something especially awful about it when the chords go from 4 to 5 and the melody goes 5 - 3 - 2 -3, or 5 -3 - 2 -1, it's like nails on a chalkboard for me.

This one is not as awkward, but it still sounds like it was spit out by a diatonic melody generator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ9pHBEUWPo

The first example sounds like an instance where the lyrics were written in advance of the melody. The composer was tasked with having to make something "poppy" and "hooky" but also keep the same rhythm of a recitative. It reminded me most of the "verses" on uh "Hakuna Matata" where a very-hooky chorus had to be cut with narrative-narrative-narrative and Elton John just kinda wrote some notes down and hoped it'd work. I don't think it's anything new, there are similar kinda "the music suffers at this point because we got a lot of words to get through" moments in a lot of pre-1980 musicals. Good recit is challenging, I would imagine? the part of "Guys And Dolls" I admire the most compositionally isn't any hook at all but a recit: "I've imagined every bit of him / from his strong moral fibre / to the wisdom in his head / to the homey aroma of his pipe..." "You have wished yourself a Scarsdale Galahad / the breakfast-eating Brooks Brothers type..." "Yes! and I will meet him when the time is ripe." (Is it "right"? I forget I'm just quoting from memory.)

So yeah it doesn't sound to me like any modern tendency so much as the collision of lyricist: "here are a lot of words" and producer: "get it done by the weekend and make it hooky"

That song from The Greatest Showman sounds so uncannily like another song I can't place. Is it Adele? That song sounds to me that it wasn't written cold but was written as a copy of another song. Lyricist: "here are some words", producer: "make it sounds like Adele", composer submits, producer: "make it sound more like Adele", composer submits, producer: "have you even fucking listened to Adele? I want it to sound like ADELE", composer writes something that exactly follows the tempo and chord progression of an Adele song but sounds obtuse on its own, producer: "good enough"

So yeah in short the former just sounds like big-budget recit written with the pressure of time and producer expectation

And the latter just sounds like the composer was working with a temp score and being pressured by producers to cut closer and closer to the source

I don't hear what you're hearing on "Waiting On A Miracle" though, it sounds about as well-written as your average 6/8 Kate Bush song, that is to say, it's not bad? Moving to the III at the end of each eight bar phrase (after swaying between IV and V for the rest of the phrase) is definitely "not exactly great", and the modulation at 1:45 is a real clunker, but it doesn't really bother me. Totally serviceable Disney song.

Upon hearing that song from "The Greatest Showman" my boyfriend popped around the corner to say that it was his parents favourite musical ever, that they couldn't stop talking about how amazing the music is. Something I always tell myself is that the producers are almost always right, that when they are pressuring the composer to dumb something down they DO in fact have the best interests of the shareholders at heart

Maybe more appropriate for the "Homemade Jokes" thread, but I just typed:

"I call my man Neapolitan because he wasn't my first choice, but he's a close second"

Oh wow, I must have accidentally deleted my bookmark for this thread. So many messages I've missed. Going to catch up!

I was going to say something about how it's interesting that Ed Sheeran's "Shivers" is built from the exact same chord progression (Bm-G-D-A) as "Despacito" and does a lot similarly but the melodic movement in the Sheeran song seems more clearly centred on an Aeolian B minor tonality while "Despacito" seems a little ambiguous between D major and (modal) B minor but it seems v possible to hear D as a tonic.

I was waiting for the awkward melody in the Encanto song and it never happened so I don't really know what you're driving at, man alive

also lol fgti

Hey Sund4r, are you sure on that G# in the fermata chord on "Reaper?" I hear a G natural in the guitar that's panned a little right (which is kinda cool because it makes it momentarily a seventh resonance on the tonic minor chord).

You're totally right. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that.

How did I never learn the phrase rhythmic displacement before today?

I wanna talk about the pre-chorus on Portishead “All Mine” and how unprecedented and amazing those note choices are

And how she changes it up on the last pre-chorus to make it even more unhinged

It seems that the vocal melody is in the E♭ minor of the verse, while the chords underneath go up and down on B min, C# min and D min? Then in the last prechorus, she's singing a semitone higher, so the melody more-or-less matches the chords underneath for the first time.

yeah this is really something -- the instrumental mods but she...declines to do so?

I don’t have perfect pitch so I couldn’t name the keys in the car yesterday while listening, but yes, the two primary chords on the pre chorus are bm and then dm, an attractive mediant association

But Beth sings a single same pitch over both chords and it is not the shared pitch (not the D)

Prechoruses 1 and 2, she picks a pitch that clashes with the bm

Prechorus 3 she switches it so it flashes with the dm

And it REALLY clashes, she sounds like she’s losing her mind. My friend Jessie once said “my god Portishead and their middle-class white lady having a breakdown vibes, it’s irresistible”

Wow

TIL about the augmented sixth chord from Sund4r.

A google about something else suggested that I read an article about Jacob Collier's use of microtonal modulation within his pop constructions. I read it. Then I listened to him for the first time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPZn4x3uOac

What he does at 4:00 is as impressive as was advertised tbh. Good writing, Jacob!