What's so harmonic about the harmonic minor scale?

[koganbot]

Mark, 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:

"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.

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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:

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So does this:

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[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).

Comments

[koganbot]

To get technical (and trivial) for a second, the Tapper Zukie isn't in A minor anyway, since it starts in C minor (as the tonic, if that term is relevant here, though I think you're arguing that the term is no more than semirelevant) and goes to G minor as its v. Which it certainly does. But what you're getting at, I assume, is that if we want to think about what this song does, or how it moves wherever it moves, saying "it's in C minor" doesn't help us a great deal. Of course, if the guitarist had suddenly played a C# chord, this would have been jarring. So the C minor establishes something. But then, the notes we hear from 0:31 to 0:51, which I can't figure out, make the vamp from C minor to G minor, when it returns, feel as much as if you're returning to G minor as to C minor (when you do return). In any event, the track isn't about chord progressions.

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.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Yes, sorry I was being super-lazy (and misleading): by "A minor" I pretty much just meant "a minor key" (haha ie "a" the indefinite article, not "A" the note). Partly because I don't have anything like perfect pitch and couldn't be bothered to go check. Partly because for the purposes of what I'm talking about, it wouldn't matter which minor key the song was in (since I was arguing that this was not a very adequate way to establish what's significant in the make-up of the song). And partly because when I'm not at a keyboard, I naturally revert to A minor as the minor key I want to think about, because i-- in its "natural" form -- it's all on the white notes and I'm less likely to muddle myself. This is a poor cluster of reasons!

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).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Surprise is I think a good way to break down what I'm getting at.

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.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"pepper a Bach score" -- s/b "pepper some autograph Bach scores but only implicitly (!) pepper the rest"

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...)