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.

Watch on YouTube

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:

Watch on YouTube

So does this:

Watch on YouTube

[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

[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...)