A rondo, for the sake of my readers who do not know the term, is a musical form used in songs, but usually instrumental compositions. The rondo form is: ABACADA….

Imagine a catchy, pithy theme–we’ll call it the RONDO THEME– that section we’ll call A. It’s sticky, memorable, something we want to hear again.

Now, we do something compositionally DIFFERENT. We’ll call that B. If the A section was chordal, let’s do something melodic. If the A section was loud, let’s do something SOFT. Something DIFFERENT.

Now, let’s have a musical transition from where we just were in the B section, and go back to the A section. The listener thinks: hurrah! I know where I am. Aren’t I smart, and, gee, I like this theme.

Then we move to a contrasting C section. Something even more different than the A or the B sections. It’s whatever those musics were not. Something different.

Then we go back to the A section: tra la, tra la. The mind tucks this music away into the background as we ponder what we’ll be doing later in the day. We’ve already heard this music twice before: I’ve got it, I’ve got it.

Sometimes a composer gives you one more music chunk: the D section. And like before, it has music that is different (to an extent) than the other three sections. In this section, the composer may embed the climax of the movement and build and build and build until we finally get one last return of the A section. We all stand, sing the theme one last time, and clink our beer steins together in brotherly harmony.

As I was throwing the ball for the dogs today, I realized that we rarely have an E section in rondos. One loves the concept of a piece that goes: ABACADAEAFAGAHAIAJA… und so weiter. But in reality, people really can only stand four reiterations of the nifty rondo theme. We seem to be able to effectively perceive four chunks/sections of music in a single movement–especially at the end of a multi-movement composition, which is where the rondo usually occurs.

This is not a scientific study, only a casual observation and recommendation for a future dissertation, but it seems composers have a ceiling of four sections in rondos (ABCD) and no more than four statements of the rondo theme (ABACADA and it’s easier-to-digest little sister ABACA)

The piece made Maurice a lot of money all in all, a fact that he was somewhat embarrassed to admit, poo-pooing its form, its youth, its melancholy. Feh. It’s a terrific piece.

The form is A-B-A’-C-A” It’s a rondo whose theme stays the same but the texture varies with each reappearance. Each section has its own phrase logic. The B section is comprised of the first phrase, b1, followed by a variant, b2, and then two overlapping b1 phrases: then this all repeats, is varied texturally, and followed by a final b1 phrase, cast in parallel dominant 9th chords.

I can hear [my old music theory teacher] Bruce Benward now: “Now class, THIS is an example of PARALLELISM” referring to the successive E9 D9 C9 D9 E9 over which the class marvels, having just been warned against the evils of parallel 5th in traditional harmony.

Everything in Benward’s 20th century music class was an “-ism.” Benward might be considered an ism-ist. I, for one, am OVER isms, so I guess I would be and “anti-ism-ist” or better yet: an over-ism. I digress.

We analyzed the A section primarily, given the time we had, and then we turned to Ravel’s 1910 orchestration for “petite” orchestra. We zoomed back and forth between what Ravel did in the piano original, and how it was orchestrated.

I learned that teaching “texture” to freshmen is a tricky task. We listened to the opening passage several times: first, just the horn melody. I warned the terror of the horn player who is nervous or not warmed up or not good enough to handle the part. It is utterly exposed. Beware! And I would have warned Ravel of that as well.

I played the passage again and asked the class to listen to just the “sustain” element. When one plays the piano, we hold down the pedal, thereby sustaining harmonies. One must find the “pedals” in the orchestra.

Then, we concentrated on the pizzicato strings and bass element.

The ever-present eighth note is like a ticking clock throughout, always on the verge of a ritard and popping a sentimental tear.

I can’t really test them as to whether they are following my illustrations, but I think they do. In that they have an orchestration project ahead of them, I hope they follow.

For instance: if I were to say to you “A solo oboe place a long sustained note, crescendoeing, and gaining in vibrato.” Do you hear it? Yes, you do. That’s how composers and orchestrators think. They imagine and hear their ideas and write them down.

We didn’t finish the piece, and analyzing this piece is beyond the scope of the class, but I am confident that they got something. The opening rondo theme and its variant was plenty for our purposes.

One amazing detail I discovered: in the A section, of the 31 chord changes that occur, 23 of them involve a bass line (and usually the root motion) that goes up or down a fifth. Sometimes he’ll march up bass lines in fourths (quartal arpeggios), and sometimes he lingers on just a few–say, three. And then jump a non-fifth interval to open up a new chain of quartal bass lines. He uses this wind-chime effect of fanning a few note many years later in Chanson Madécasses.

I reminded the class that Ravel was 24 when he wrote this piece: a graduate student in modern day equivalence. “The piece you write for your midterm project COULD be a hit someday You never know! NO! It really could.”

Next week: Le Tombeau de Couperin

Today I lectured about what I’m now calling “chord cycles”–a series of chords that repeat over and over. In the Baroque, these types of compositions were called “chaconnes.” Composers think of any repeated set of chords as a chaconne, but historians are sticklers about that progression being a set progression. There are more arguments about the difference between passacaglias and chaconnes. Professor McClary suggested I just refer to a chord cycle as an “ostinato” (Italian for stubborn). Despite the historical sense of it, that didn’t seem like a good phrase either.

So, starting today, I’m going to refer to them as chord cycles, a term that seems self-explanatory, you don’t have to speak Italian, or know Renaissance or Baroque dance forms.

In the lecture I covered “La Folia,” the chaconnes used by Handel, Bach, and Purcell, the “I Got Rhythm” ["rhythm changes"] and “Blue Moon” chord progressions (I vi IV [or ii] V), the “La Bamba” variants (including “Louie Louie,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Wild Thing,” Bob Marley’s chord cycle from “No Woman No Cry” and a couple of more. I also looked at the circle of fifths in songs and how they are used (think: Vivaldi Winter/Four Seasons, “The Autumn Leaves,” and “All the things you are”). I closed with the “Sensitive Female Chord Progression” (vi IV I V) made clear in Joan Osborne’s “What if God Were One of Us.”

If you’d like to hear the whole set, here is a YouTube playlist that I made for the lecture.

[Musical examples from the lecture handout. Pg.2 is missing.]

It always seemed to me that you can tell Paul McCartney’s lyrics as he has a penchant for couplets. Not sure that exactly works here, but this graph is a damn fun analysis of the logic of the lyrics to Hey Jude. I think…

[Thanks to my old pal from Green Bay, Rick Larson for finding this one.]

Yesterday in lecture, my colleague Robert Winter took his turn in imparting the core of functional harmony: the tonic-dominant relationship, or V-I. He pointed out that the tritone–once banned by the church–now had rules of how it is to be resolved: augmented fourths expand out to sixths, and diminished fifths contract into a third. He then played a large number of classical compositions whose harmonic makeup was limited to V and I. Rossini, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Corelli, and to contrast an example of “atonal tonality,” Monteverdi.

We will never forget Robert stomping around on the stage shouting in time with the chordal changes: ONE! FIVE! ONE! FIVE! ONE! FIVE! FIIIIIIIIVE! ONE! This mildly funny and silly dramatization was memorable and, with any luck, effective.

Now in case some of my readers are rusty on V-I, listen to this old German clip of the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony where you will hear, mostly V and I chords. Ja wohl!

1967
The Doors: “Crystal Ship”
Scott McKenzie: “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”

1976
Boston – “Peace of Mind”

1977
Iggy Pop – “The Passenger”

1982
Toto – “Africa”

1985
Heart – “What About Love”

1987
Heart – “Alone”
Loverboy – “Love Will Rise Again”
The Smiths – “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby”

1988
Midnight Oil – “Beds Are Burning”
Roxette – “Listen To Your Heart”

1989
Alice Cooper – “Poison”
Ani DiFranco – “Fire Door”
Starship – “It’s Not Enough”

1990
Jeff Lynne – “What Would It Take”
Yanni – “Almost A Whisper”

1992
Bad Religion – “Generator”
Gin Blossoms – “Until I Fall Away”

1993
The Smashing Pumpkins – “Disarm”
Therapy? – “Screamager”

1994
The Cranberries – “Zombie”
The Offspring – “Gotta Get Away”
The Offspring – “Self Esteem”

1995
Ani DiFranco – “Shy”
Guster – “Window”
Jewel – “Foolish Games”
Joan Osborne – “One Of Us”

1996
Social Distortion – “Don’t Drag Me Down”
The Waifs – “Brain Damage”

1997
Sarah McLachlan – “Building A Mystery”

1998
Eagle Eye Cherry – “Save Tonight”
Jewel – “Hands”
Madonna – “The Power of Good-Bye”
Neutral Milk Hotel – “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea”

1999
Melissa Etheridge – “Angels Would Fall”
The Offspring – “The Kids Aren’t Alright”
The Red Hot Chili Peppers – “Otherside”
Britney Spears – “Born To Make You Happy”

The whole list is here.

Here’s one more from the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Snow (Hey O)”
]]> http://rogerbourland.com/2009/11/11/sensitive-female-chord-progression/feed/ 1 http://rogerbourland.com/2009/10/15/is-music-analysis-interesting-for-regular-folks/ http://rogerbourland.com/2009/10/15/is-music-analysis-interesting-for-regular-folks/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:39:08 +0000 Roger Bourland http://rogerbourland.com/blog/?p=3909

I struggle writing my book analyzing songs by Rufus Wainwright because I keep forgetting who I am writing the book for. I simplify the language so that regular music lovers can appreciate it, but then I address issues that are more appropriate to graduate music analysis seminars for composers or music theorists.

What is it that non-musicians want to know about music? I fear that these music lovers don’t know the questions to ask––so I need to ask interesting questions.

What do classical musicians want to get out of a book that analyzes songs by a pop songwriter? My guess is that we want to see that there are similar compositional methods a classical composer might use, showing up somewhere in the music. Good voice leading along with an organic use of a theme in a pop piece impresses a classical musician.

Who am I writing for? Both audiences.

Sigh.

[Early American doll, photo by RB]

Having finished my composition projects for the summer, I am finally returning to finishing my book on Rufus Wainwright. Having bought Robert O. Gderdingen’s terrific publication “Music in the Galant Style” I have found the book format that I’d like to have for my book: one with relatively large type, but most importantly, a hardback book that can stay open at the piano without breaking the binding. I will have as many musical examples as I am able. Each essay will have a lyric/melody/form analysis — see below.

I was shocked to see how much I’ve already finished. But in that I’m smarter now than when I originally wrote all this I’ll be revising and tweaking each essay.

My new working title is RUFUS WAINWRIGHT: ANALYTIC ESSAYS ON SELECTED EARLY SONGS. I am debating whether to keep or toss a bevy of miscellaneous chapters about Rufus, but otherwise I will focus on analytic observations and less on dish or biography.

In the illustration below, I include the lyrics, the melodic form with respect to repeated melodic figures (a, b1, c, etc.), and the formal structure (A, B, verse, chorus, etc.). Look up and down the left side of the diagram. You see abcd and their variants appearing from left to right. Each letter and its variant have their own column. What this allows the reader to see and understand is exactly when melodic figures are new or repeat. And what we see over and over in Rufus’s music is that they usually repeat, and there are limited melodic figures in each song. If you look at all the a1 figures and the lyrics to the right, you’ll know that they all have the same melody. Now look at a2; and then b; and then c; and finally d. I include a complete transcription at the end of most essays.

Statistically the “a” figures appear most frequently (12 times); the “b” figure 6 times; the c figures 8 times; and the “d” figure is rarest at 3 times. The “a1″ and “a2″ figures are the melodic hooks as well as the title of the song, “Pretty Things.” The “b” figure is a simple melodic turn that joins a1 and a2. The “c” figure is an oscillating 4th, and the “d” figure is a falling 4th that signals the end of the section.

As you look at this illustration, you see that the yellow and blue section together make up one big chunk. This chunk is repeated again, but then varied in its third appearance. Can you see what has changed?

An early Leonard Cohen song revisited in a live performance in San Sebastian in 1988. Cohen’s performance here hasn’t changed much from his original recording. A dark and galloping song. There is no dominant in the opening verse. His sexy flat-six chord has three notes of a French augmented-6th chord (F A B) with a ringing E before it finally resolves to the dominant; a distinctively Spanish sound. Chord progressions that feature a fall from flat-six to the dominant include IV6 to V, the three augmented-6th chords, McCartney’s parallel bVI-flat7 to V7 (”Honey Pie”), and now this chord, which could be described as a flat-six with a flat 5 and a major 7th. The F A moves down to E G#, while the B E are common tones between the two chords. I propose we call this a Spanish flat-VI chord. It is a common progression in Flamenco guitar literature. This harmonic progression is the most violent move in the song.

Last month I wrote about the very popular chord progression from the 50s: I vi IV V and played you a video of seven versions of that song. In case you didn’t read it:

Paul McCartney said that he and John Lennon always tried to make their songs “a little different” implying that they prefer to not repeat themselves. One of the most popular chord progressions of the time before the Beatles came on the scene was the I vi IV V chord progression (a common variant is I vi ii V). For you non-music theory nerds out there, think of the famous “Heart and Soul” song from the 50s.

Compare this looped chord progression to what Lennon and McCartney do here. Instead of the I vi IV V we get the almost-Russian variant: I vi iii V. And part of me wonders — the part of me that knows how to musically “push buttons” — is it that sexy and profound “iii” chord that is making those girls scream and cry? I think then answer is yes. But the fact that the Beatles were too poor to afford a third microphone for George, and so he always had to share with Paul. And that microphone sharing was just as sexy for those girls as the chords, and as the “oooooh”s and as those cute long-haired boys from England.

Here are the lyrics with the chords above them. I had never appreciated how sophisticated the progression is. And this EARLY Beatles. It was their interest in continuing to “make it different.”