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koganbotMark, or someone, why is the harmonic minor scale called the harmonic minor scale? How is it any more harmonic than the natural minor scale? Wikip:
Wikip explains "harmonic" in the name like this:
Here's a natural (rather than harmonic) minor for the v, which sounds fine to me:
So does this:
[EDIT: For the record, those are Tapper Zukie's original "Simpleton Badness" from Man Ah Warrior and Sistar's "Alone."]
Yes, I'm never likely to master music theory. Other stuff is taking my time.
Another reason for this post is that you — especially you who are named "Mark" — may enjoy the ChoColat track for how its harpsichord and melody recall the classic She'kspere/Kandi days of TLC, Destiny's Child, and Pink. Maybe you, more than I, will be able to explain what the melody has in common with those melodies of yore (if I'm right that it does).
"One More Day" is composed in the key of A harmonic minor, meaning though in A minor, it has a G#, an accidental, at the end of the chorus and the end of the second verse. The vocals span around an octave and a half, from C4 to E5. It is written in verse-chorus form, with a bridge section in a rap-form, featuring Sung Hyo Ram from XCROSS as the guest rapper, before the last repeated chorus.
Wikip explains "harmonic" in the name like this:
The scale is so named because it is a common foundation for harmonies (chords) used in a minor key. For example, in the key of A minor, the V chord (the triad built on the note E) is normally a major triad that includes the raised seventh degree of the scale: G♯, as opposed to the unraised G♮ which would make a minor triad.What confuses me about this explanation is that it assumes that, if your i is a minor, then V is somehow more "harmonic" than v is. (That is, that the major chord that's a fifth above the chord that establishes the key is, when the key is minor, more "harmonic" than the minor chord that's the fifth above the original chord.) Now I get that Wikip is saying that the major V is more "normal" or "common" than the minor v. (Where? Among whom?) Is that because it's — somehow — more harmonically related? Is it because of that "leading-tone" business Wikip mentions?
Here's a natural (rather than harmonic) minor for the v, which sounds fine to me:
So does this:
[EDIT: For the record, those are Tapper Zukie's original "Simpleton Badness" from Man Ah Warrior and Sistar's "Alone."]
Yes, I'm never likely to master music theory. Other stuff is taking my time.
Another reason for this post is that you — especially you who are named "Mark" — may enjoy the ChoColat track for how its harpsichord and melody recall the classic She'kspere/Kandi days of TLC, Destiny's Child, and Pink. Maybe you, more than I, will be able to explain what the melody has in common with those melodies of yore (if I'm right that it does).
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no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 09:43 pm (UTC)*My old American Heritage Dictionary doesn't either; though, being a dictionary, it doesn't claim to be encyclopedic.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 08:35 am (UTC)Hence I slightly prefer "natural" despite all the massivecaveats about what's natural in music: the implication being it's the scale that lies under the fingers on the white notes, or some such, whereas "harmonic" suggests an alteration for harmonic purposes, which is stretching a point to the say the least, but not actually silly
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 08:49 am (UTC)The entire purpose of this scale is fleet-fingered facility on that turn: it has no analytical role (in my shaky opinion).
The natural minor -- not a term I learnt at school -- would then be presumably what elsewhere gets called the Aeolian mode: the same as you play up and down, and with no augmented intervallic jump.
(In other words, there are THREE different version of a minor scale, or actually four if you count the up and down of the melodic as two...)
Insight?
Date: 2012-09-28 11:41 pm (UTC)you've basically got it
Date: 2012-09-29 12:39 am (UTC)The harmonic minor has the raised 7th because in harmonic practice, I THINK from the Baroque on, the major V chord leads to the minor i chord. The reason it sounds like it's leading, but the minor v chord doesn't, is because that raised 7th (the third of the Major V chord) wants to lead up a half step to the tonic (the root of the minor i chord). (For instance, in Miley's "See You Again", she sings "see you a-" on the raised 7th, which resolves up to "-gain.") The natural 7th doesn't sound like it wants to lead anywhere, particularly, although in modern blues-based and pop harmonies we've gotten used to hearing minor v chords lead to minor i chords. (In blues you'll often have the melody note as the natural 7th, while the underlying chord is a Major V containing the raised 7th. It sounds really good.) I always think minor v to minor i sounds more poppy, while Major V to minor i sounds more formal or proper or something, but that might just be me rebelling against the conservatory.
I'm trying in vain to think of freestyle examples. The only one I'm coming up with, Expose's "Point of No Return", I think has either a minor v or a major VII (they're not so different), which would mean natural-not-harmonic. But if anything comes to mind I'll let you know.
Re: you've basically got it
Date: 2012-09-29 05:48 am (UTC)Blues and related musics are a different matter, don't really truck with either major or minor, but bend and otherwise play around with the mi, fa, and ti. The ubiquity of such music can lead to songs that do use the do-re-mi scale nonetheless being performed with blue notes — as well as to compositional stuff like the example you mentioned and that you almost certainly have a better handle on than I do.
*Mainstream urban Europe, that is, as opposed to the rural boonies of Britain and Ireland and their American descendants, where the do-re-mi scale never achieved hegemony.
**presumably with African American and rural "white" American music helping push the process along in North America.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 05:07 am (UTC)*The songwriters are Jean T. Na and Jenny Hyun, both American, I think.
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Date: 2012-09-29 01:17 pm (UTC)I imagine there are plenty of places where the "natural" scale is not the one that is actually natural to the idiom. Not sure about this, but I think that Jewish prayers are usually sung in harmonic minor, as opposed to the V-i or V-I "Amen" in Christian music.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 09:06 am (UTC)V to I and V to i are what -- a slightly earlier and less "scientific" -- analysis called "perfect" (or "authentic") (!!) cadences, and from the baroque onwards they became the pivot of composed and official music, the prized nodes in the structure. (Earlier, certainly in church music, the most common ending cadence was IV to I, the plagal or "amen" cadence.) By what I suspect is analytical back-formation, the latterday explanation of the proliferation of the perfect cadence as the most import structural feature is very often that it "identifies the key": I'm a bit unconvinced by this, because I think it's looking at 17th-century composition with 19th-century teacherly eyes. The structures of 19th-century analysis flowered just as the system they were analysing was beginning to break down -- or anyway to evolve into something less stable. (By the late 19th-century composers were able to deploy the rules they'd internalised at school to justify all kinds of moves those rules had never been designed to encompass... )
The leading note in a minor key has a propulsive effect I think for two reasons: one is "we're arriving at a moment of ending -- last passage over, next about to begin", but the other is that the plastic distortion of the "natural" scale opens up (with the context of classical harmony) the vista of other kinds of scale, the potential "adjustment" of other degrees of the scale, and the breakout towards conceptions of music oriental or cubist or both. (Cubist is delbierately anachronistic: but the phrase "weird music plays" was a routine stage-direction in gothic literature and drama from the mid 18th century -- it meant gypsyish, outlandish, a signal that shit is about to HAPPEN...)
Because I'm a materialist, I'd argue that the urban hegemony of doh re mi -- if by this you mean the emplacement of the major scale at the centre of the understanding of music -- is a consequence of the emergence of keyboards and stave-music as the most widely shared pedagogical device. The major scale, the cycle of fifths, the practice of "well-tempering" -- by which a keyboard is tuned to by "out of true" so that "distant" scales like G# don't sound wildly weird -- allowed for a freeplay of modulation through any of the 24 possible keys: Bach's "The Well Tempered Klavier" is (partly) written as a demo for this new technology. The systems of pedagogy that survived in the boonies -- though they could survive in stubborn defiance and rise up now and then as the standard-bearer of counter-hegemonic resistance -- didn't have the same mass-cultural heft, because they relied on (a) one-to-one transmission rather than one-to-many, and (b) require the transmittee to have a good enough ear to pick stuff up that they haven't read.
Of course once recording technology arrived, (a) was no longer a barrier, and (b) exploded into far greater mass-cultural presence than uniformity of music-teaching classes. People learnt themselves to play by listening to records: the rules were "is it like this on the records that I favour?"
"Five to one, baby, one in five: no one else gets out alive..."
Date: 2012-09-29 09:12 am (UTC)In Bach's time, the full final close of a piece in a minor key was quite often the equivalent major: V to I. That said home.
Re: "Five to one, baby, one in five: no one else gets out alive..."
Date: 2012-09-30 04:32 am (UTC)Not sure what this is (unless you mean "augmented seventh").
Re: "Five to one, baby, one in five: no one else gets out alive..."
Date: 2012-09-30 08:46 am (UTC)Major second = an interval of two semitones (C --> D)
Augmented second = an interval of three semitones (C -- >D#)
But yes, there's an ambiguity because an augmented 7th -- besides being the name of an interval (the rather unusual but not impossible C --> B#, ie on a piano it exactly resembles the full octave) it's the name of a seventh chord: C-E-G#-Bb
(Note: I'm starting all my examples with C because it's easier for me to get them right without going to my piano...)
(Of course an augmented second is also a chord: a chord with two notes in it...)
In the harmonic minor scale, the augmented second is the jump beween the flatted sixth and the sharped 7th of the scale, the latter being the leading note. It's this jump that makes the scale somewhat unusual, "gypsyish" and so on. Augmented seconds are much more common in folk music, traditional music, pre-classical music, oriental music and so on -- or rather, are made to feel exotic in classical composed music, though actually there's a ton of them, since "exoticism" is quite a common mood for composed music to be reaching for.
Re: "Five to one, baby, one in five: no one else gets out alive..."
Date: 2012-09-30 07:51 pm (UTC)Ah. So it isn't the second note of the scale (re) that's augmented, but the interval between the sixth and sharped seventh in the minor scale that's an augmented second.
Re: "Five to one, baby, one in five: no one else gets out alive..."
Date: 2012-09-30 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 12:50 pm (UTC)Point i: in a static sense, of course, all chords are equally "harmonic", including dissonances: so -- to expand what I said above -- I think it's in effect a transferred epiphet: the altered chord is selected for "harmonic" reasons in a dynamic sense, to establish a feel of chord progression, a momentum, and so on. Not harmony as identity but harmony as propulsion -- hence "leading note", of course.
Point ii: "more normal/common" -- this may indeed be true in some all-lumped-in statistic, but yes, the provenance of the material for the statistic matters a lot... the role of particular cadences has changed across history, and it's exactly such changes that a statistic would muffle.
There's a deeper -- fascinating but highly questionable -- argument that "harmony as propulsion" (and more broadly a sense and language of harmony that takes the notion of "musical development" for granted as both fact and ideal) is only found in certain traditions and practices (ie in the music of the urbs but not the boonies: in "civilised" rather than "barbarian" music). Obviously this type of categorisation of (sub)cultures has been massively problematised over the last hundred or so years -- which is not to say that some music-makers won't still be fashioning their stance in relation to it, without necessarily calculatedly knowing this is what they're doing. And I'd guess that for Korean pop musicians, the alternatives manifest as stylistic choices within a presented unity -- form as sedimented content -- so that THEIR sense of the inside vs the outside is complicatedly distinct. But this is very much a guess.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 02:22 pm (UTC)I think I'm making two points (against analysis by wikipedia cut-and-paste anyway!): that the musicological means-to-hand for examining modern pop need to push way beyond the jargon developed in the 19th century to explore pre-19th-century music; and that this jargon was never very adequate to the discussion of the music it was developed for (baroque music, for example, had a wealth of twirls and turns that performers used, to taste, to convention, to differentiate themselves, which were structural more than ornamental. 19th century analysis actually refers to them as ornaments -- and 20th century dogma called for a purge of ornament! -- but in both cases the role being played was mis-recognised.
(The argument I once began and never got anywhere with -- that there is a gulf of incommensurability between people who grasp music via learned tonal analytics, and those who haven't learned same and can't -- actually first formed as a hunch when I was contrasting MY attempt to explain what "modal" scales are for in jazz, as opposed to ilx's Arf Arf, who described modal scales formally and technically, absolutely correctly -- but to the bafflement of the questioner. I was trying to get at an answer to "what's gained and what's left aside when a player or composer switches into modal er mode". And Arf Arf -- or so I thought -- basically said no one who hadn't absorbed the technical content could possibly understand or answer such a question. I still don't know if I believe his answer.)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 04:25 am (UTC)Sistar are a "they" not a "she" (though each of them is a "she," and Hyorin, the one with the Jagger-size lips, is something special as a singer, and most crucial to the song). To compensate, Brave Brothers, who wrote and produced "Alone," seems to be a "he" not a "they," though Wikipedia is confusing on this subject. And I believe that Brave Brothers has/have sometimes performed as a duo.
"Alone" starts with an E minor chord, and goes back and forth and back and forth from the E minor to its v (B minor). By "starts with a __ chord," I mean "that's the chord I'd play on the guitar if I were instructed by the bandleader to strum a chord in accompaniment." And obviously, few of the changes from one part of the song to another are propelled by chord progressions, given that most of the track just goes two bars E minor, two bars B minor, two bars E minor, two bars B minor, and on like that. The song is brilliantly constructed. The actual chord variation, when it eventually comes (a couple bars each of VI and V*), is very brief. But might that V chord (rather than v) play a role in keeping us hanging as it leads us into the break?
No section particularly establishes itself as a "chorus" as opposed to a "verse," though if necessary we could arbitrarily choose a part to call the chorus.
The singing is beautiful. The timbre of the instruments is a bit of a problem for me, too bright and chintzy, like the video. With a quarter of the year left, the song's right on the border of my top ten. With a warmer, gentler instrumental sound it would be solidly in.
I'm not clear on what you're saying in the final two of your three paragraphs. Is it that the 19th-century jargon is not adequate to what propels the music, or that it's actively wrong?
Even if it is actively wrong in some instances, that doesn't mean it's fundamentally and overwhelmingly useless. (Not that you're arguing that it is.) But people learn and feel tonal development even when they have no vocabulary for it — just as four-year-olds learn and feel grammar, though they can't make any grammatical explanation whatsoever. Nothing wrong with trying to systematize one's understanding of tones and grammar, though people often mistake their local systematization for something more universal.
*if VI and V are the right way of talking about the role of C major and B major at that point; you'd know better than I.
**and comes right after four bars of what are basically melodic repetition, which itself would be a good example of the "liberation of melody from harmony" I tried to make sense of upthread. (Reggae was never tied to 19th century European ideas of harmony, of course, hence needs no liberation from it; but melodies and chords derived from Europe are in reggae's ancestry.)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 09:19 am (UTC)I think that Victorian analysis of baroque and earlier music is inadequate bordering on wrong (and this was coming to be the musicologically fashionable opinion 30-odd years ago, back when I was keeping up with such things). Baroque music is much more about texture as shaping content than Victorian analysis tended to regard it (or so the fashionable argument went): instrumentation by the mid-19th century had become a secondary element in analysis, which began with and allowed to be primary the "analysis on paper" (which is to say, discussion of chord progression and keys and patterns of modulation; as well as formalist examination of thematic material). And the on-paper analysis of the forest of trills and turns that pepper a Bach score would then be nugatory (and the study of the actual "authentic" instrumentation vanished as completely the relevant instruments had been supplanted by modern instruments -- it was really only in the 1960s that performers and orchestras began to re-explore the sound qualities and such of the instrumentation actually available to an given composer....)
You still occasionally see this misconception with academic musicological analyses of modern pop music: it begins with an extended discussion of the key and such, and only latterly -- if at all -- examines the contentful role of the instrumentation, production, sound-space etc. This is how Carl Dahlhaus -- by no means an idiot -- could claim that there was nothing interesting to say about modern popular song. He meant it offered no harmonic innovations that weren't just degraded echoes of 19th century practice.
I entirely agree that 19th century practice wasn't useless: on the contrary, it was the framework of a vast and abiding corpus of creativity -- and embodied sense of progress and development within this corpus -- that is (imprecisely) known as "classical music". Lots of tremendous stuff there! Its grounding is wack but so what? Except that yes, it is quite a poor guide to the music that came before it (treated as a lead-up to it, and thus mis-perceieved) and the music that came after (considered as a mere degradation and so on).
I should reread Van de Merwe: when I read it I was actually a bit underwhelmed (which no one else seems to have been).
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 09:45 am (UTC)Within a "natural minor" (or indeed modal) landscape, the menu of possible pitches is relatively small (seven, excluding octave equivalency). And folk musics sometimes operate with less still: pentatonic has a menu of just five, classic blues is often just five, only occasionally stretches to seven. So that this establishes what will count as an exciting intrusion, in a context of a certain (rural?) parsimony and changelessness. (Often quite a misleading sense of changelessness: the classic blues form was almost certain invented in the 1920s, or only a little earlier, as part of the interaction of urban singers with recording technology -- and then, as urban fashion moved on, adhered to in the country as a resistance to fashionable citified shallowness and mutability. It's a modern, not an ancient form -- it has African roots of course but they really don't sound that close to Charlie Patton... -- even though part of its shtick quite quickly became the "old-times feel".)
In composed/notated music, from Bach onwards, the key established a home and return space: but actually none of the 12 semitones in the octave was ruled out per se -- there were strict rules about how you got to a "surprise" note, and the fun was in the deftness of how you handled these rules. The landscape wasn't a mush of 12 notes all of equal likelihood at any point: it was a landscape of shifting backdrop and character -- more urban, you might say -- as you passed through what are often referred to as "regions" of "distant" keys, in respect of the home key.
I don't know how much of this sense can be found in these three youtubes: Tapper Zukie seems more "distant" to me, and yet also more familiar (literally more familiar, but also emotionally, if you see what I mean). But I can't reliably say that this arrives out of the harmonic basis of the song: a little perhaps, and that little fairly secondary in my response. All three I think (= I feel I can hear, but haven't checked) present a non-simple menu -- quite quickly --in terms of a natural minor or modal landscape. In all three cases more than seven basic pitches seem comfortably available and unsurprising (guitar-based music -- because of barre-chords -- is absolutely comfortable with chord-progressions that are kind of just pitch-shifting, if that makese sense: a Cmajor to Dmajor chord-change is no more or less surprising or uncommon or peculiar than a Cmajor to Ebmajor chord-change.)
Can't think of much pop -- Zappa maybe? -- which presents a landscape that much resembles the "potential to wander through all possible distant regions" that became the implicit promise in classical composed-notated music. You find it more perhaps in some eras of jazz (50s and 60s especially), except in jazz it often begins to feel like a clogged and cluttered home-landscape, like your house was already full of items from all the regions and you are trying to move gingerly yet impatiently among them.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 10:00 am (UTC)One of the reasons trills and turns came to regarded as ornamental is that they were often treated in the scores as something the performer knew correctly to add: so they weren't written in (and never written out in full). This notational downgrading -- for convenience, and because everyone in 1680 say was on much the same page as regards performance protocols -- became a notational occlusion: stuff not on the page was not analysed because hard to analyse (by 1820 very few performers indeed still had a working knowledge of baroque ornamentation, as I am arguing it should not really be called...)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 04:29 am (UTC)But then there's the break, as well. Still, most of the track simply takes us swinging to and fro, i and v, back and forth.