# Schenkerian Analysis



## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 29, 2016)

Allow me to begin this thread with a preface and a bit of personal reflection. Forgive me, it&#8217;s a bit long-winded (like everything else I write), but I hope that it helps to raise some questions and promote some fresh attitudes toward music theory and analysis. You can skip to the second post to get to the meat and potatoes.

====================

I am coming up on my eighth year of membership on SSO&#8212;which is nearly the entire time that I have been studying music and music theory in college&#8212;and boy have I come a long way. I would not be where I am if I did not have this community to bounce ideas off of, so I owe everybody here a big thank you for being so awesome. I have always made an effort to make available the knowledge and methods that I have learned in the classroom to help others gain perspective on the workings of music. My ideas have evolved since 2008, which is a good thing because music school is expensive, but the analytical tools I had to work with have been the same since about 2010 or so. This basically means that the majority of what I have fed back into this message board has been informed by the undergraduate harmony sequence that I satisfied in community college (we used Kostka & Payne - Tonal Harmony, 6ed), my own compositional methods and observation for informal analyses, and a minuscule amount of Baroque counterpoint. You can also find me referring to non-Western musics that I know little about on occasion.

Basically, I deliver &#8220;traditional analysis,&#8221; plus some idiosyncratic notions on how music functions in the popular music repertoire that I have developed from listening to music that I like as well as music that I encounter here on SSO. You guys could get this knowledge for a few hundred bucks and a couple of years at a junior college, or even from a $10 used textbook and an inquisitive mind. Hell, there are even places where you can learn this stuff online for free. That&#8217;s great, but traditional analysis does little more than put labels on fairly surface-level structures. I know that I have craved approaches that discuss form and motive since my time in community college, and slipping Roman numerals under chords doesn&#8217;t really satisfy that. Alright, we can see that the progression is I IV ii V I or whatever. It&#8217;s very general, very modular. You might have a song wherein the entire thing is I IV ii V looping over and over again, but the phrase structure can be mapped to every two cycles of that progression. Do we see that in the chordal analysis? Nope. Do we see what the melody is doing at the beginning, middle, and end of the phrase? Nope. The vital question then is: Can we make statements regarding the efficacy and expressiveness of music on the strength of traditional analysis?

Since beginning graduate studies in composition and music theory in 2015, I have gotten two terms of Schenkerian analysis under my belt and I am currently working on my third. What differentiates Schenkerian analysis from traditional analysis is a focus on how melody moves through a structure. The voice leading models of traditional analysis and four-part harmony tell us a bit about melodic tendency, but it can be incredibly atomic with no sense of phrase. My first chorale writing assignment was an absolute abuse of those principles of consonance/dissonance and resolution, I assure you. Sure, I wrote the chords correctly and obeyed all the rules, but the melody was, frankly, not. I later got wise about my compositional intuition and how to make harmony obey my directives rather than the other way around, but in my capacity as a teacher and compulsive systematist I wanted a scaffold that I could give to students or write a piece of music on in very little time. It is difficult to do that in a convincing manner, and obviously if there was a surefire way to compose music then it would have been discovered by now (although I&#8217;d love to have a beer with whoever coded CPU Bach). Nevertheless, I feel that traditional analysis only tells us so much about the music while leaving out the bits that our ear (and intuition, when suitably developed) seems to grasp quite readily. Enter Schenker. As soon as I started doing Schenkerian analysis, I felt that there was something going on. I acquired words and analytical methods that described things I was thinking but could not quite put my finger on. Rather than looking at vertical structures (i.e., chords), it examines how archetypical counterpoint progresses through music over time, which is something that is completely different from those older analytic methods. That&#8217;s more like it! Schenkerian theory is not really a compositional method, but it does make me think about things that I did not previously consider. It would be quite difficult to work backwards from an analysis and compose the music, but sometimes I do analysis in my head while I am writing and think, &#8220;Oh, of course that sounds bad,&#8221; or &#8220;This bit should really be embellished more than this other bit.&#8221;

Schenkerian theory is usually taught at the graduate level, but I don&#8217;t perceive it as being any more heady than most undergrad theory. In fact, it feels less tedious to me than analyzing all those chords with no direction to the voice leading. In my estimation, Schenker is only taught to grad students because there aren&#8217;t many teachers who are well-trained in Schenkerian analysis to begin with. I hope you all can give me your thoughts on this, because I would like to develop pedagogy to disseminate the potent ideas of the theory to musicians outside of the university/conservatory system, or at least to undergrads. I want to plant this seed among composers and performers of popular music for a particular reason. As I am finding, Schenkerian theory can reveal much about many repertoires, which is not true of traditional analysis that privileges Western classical contrapuntal music from ~1700-1890. Popular music has historically gotten the short end of the stick in theory discussions, but an analytic method that shows the strength of the repertoire could be used to legitimatize and empower rock and roll&#8217;s many offshoots, particularly if the practitioners of that music (you guys) get savvy with it. To that end, it is my hope that this thread will be a place for mutual learning, discussion, and a reference for this forum and beyond.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 29, 2016)

*The Fundamental Structure, Part 1: The Urlinie*

Schenkerian analysis, named after Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), is a system of &#8220;reductive analysis&#8221; that is primarily concerned with the underlying counterpoint of a song or piece. Specifically, it seeks to reveal a paradigmatic linear descent (a fancy way of saying &#8220;descending scale&#8221 that operates in the background of the music. A descending Schenkerian structural line is referred to by its German name, &#8220;Urlinie&#8221; (literally &#8220;fundamental line&#8221, plural &#8220;Urlinien.&#8221; Schenker identifies three Urlinien: the 3-line, the 5-line, and the 8-line.







The 3-line is a descent from scale degree 3, &#8220;mi&#8221;, to scale degree 1, &#8220;do.&#8221; Mi re do, right? 3-2-1. By that token, the 5-line is 5-4-3-2-1 (sol fa mi re do), and the 8-line is 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (do ti la sol fa mi re do). I will provide examples of two Urlinie now, so you can see how these things look/sound in real music. I&#8217;m going to use nursery rhymes that are common in the anglophone world, assuming that most readers are native English speakers and grew up hearing these melodies, so that even if you don&#8217;t read standard notation you can follow along.

3-line:






N.B.: I show the cadences (IAC, &#8220;imperfect authentic cadence&#8221;, and PAC &#8220;perfect authentic cadence&#8221 to show the phrase structure. This will become more important the more advanced we get, but you don&#8217;t need to worry about it too much right now.

You can see that I have created an &#8220;analytic overlay&#8221; on the score. There are some slurs and stems. When there is a big stem coming up from a note, that means that it is structural. A big stem with a flag is a structural neighbor, which means that it is essentially elaborating on a structural tone. The stemmed notes in the first system are E F E. The F is not doing anything other than acting as a neighbor to E, so you could effectively get rid of the F in the background analysis: the entire first system is essentially prolonging the note E. Prolongation is an important concept in Schenkerian theory. In many cases, it dictates what you are going to stem. For example, I stem the F in measure 3 because it is a chord tone and is itself being prolonged by the D that is slurred to it. The same is not true of the C or E in measure 7 (in relation to D), because they are non-chord tones and cannot possibly be prolonged.

Slurs indicate that all of the notes under the slur &#8220;go together.&#8221; This is different from the use of slurs in music that is meant to be performed, wherein the symbol indicates that the notes under a slur &#8220;go to&#8221; the last note in the group. In Schenker, slurs must be attached to a stemmed note. In other words, slurs show how a structural tone is being prolonged.

This melody begins with the &#8220;primary tone&#8221; (3), prolongs the primary tone for the majority of the line, and only reaches 2 and 1 at the cadence. This is normal. The structural 2 and 1 occur only in the cadence, so the rest of the music in a 3-line prolongs the 3.

5-line:






Some familiar things going on here: we see our linear descent pretty clearly, but there are three of them and one does not appear to be complete. This is what the Urlinien look like in this melody:

5 4 3 2 1
5 4 3 2 //
5 4 3 2 1

The phrase structure of this tune is a little more complicated than the last one. If you map the phrases, it comes out as a ternary form: ABA. Specifically, this is a sectional ternary form, because the first A ends with a PAC. As we saw in the last analysis, when a phrase terminates with a PAC, you end up with 2 1 at the end of the line. What about the B phrase? It ends with an HC (&#8220;half cadence&#8221. Whenever you have a half cadence, the urlinie is &#8220;interrupted.&#8221; Interruption is indicated with two hash marks (//). This explains why there is no 1 in the B phrase. Interruption must eventually be satisfied with a complete descent of the Urlinie to the tonic (as happens with the third phrase).

The half cadence in bar 8 also explains why I labeled all the notes of the Urlinie in bars 7-8 and not in 5-6, despite the fact that both sets of bars are exactly the same. Try singing up until the end of bar 6 and then skip to bar 9. Sound weird? That&#8217;s because you&#8217;re missing part of the phrase structure and syntax. 5-8 so desperately wants to be a four-bar phrase. 2 comes on a dominant chord that is part of a cadence, so it has to be the last V in the phrase, right? What I&#8217;ve done with the rest of that line is stem and slur 5-6, to show that there is a &#8220;nested&#8221; Urlinie prolonging the primary tone (5). Essentially, bars 5 to the downbeat of 7 are all prolongation of the primary tone, and the 7-8 is the linear descent to an interruption.

Other things to note: unlike Go Tell Aunt Rhody, the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star does not begin right on the primary tone. This is not a problem, and it is not unique to 5-lines or anything. Sometimes it takes a while to reach the primary tone. Schenker calls this an &#8220;Anstieg,&#8221; or &#8220;initial ascent.&#8221;

The 8-line is a rare and controversial Urlinie, and is problematized by other elements of Heinrich Schenker&#8217;s theory of fundamental structure (despite the fact that Schenker himself codified the 8-line on the strength of 3 or 4 examples out of the 300 or so in his book). I will come back to the 8-line at another time, because it&#8217;s a special case. I would like to move on to the role of the bass line (&#8220;Bassbrechung&#8221 in Schenkerian theory, and how the Bassbrechung interacts with the Urlinie to form the Ursatz (&#8220;fundamental structure&#8221.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 29, 2016)

*The Fundamental Structure, Part 2: Bassbrechung and Ursatz*

The ultimate reduction of music to background elements in Schenkerian analysis reveals a background structure known as an &#8220;Ursatz,&#8221; which is the Urlinie with a bass line (and implied harmonies). Here is what it looks like with a 3-line:






Schenker says this works because there is a stepwise linear descent in the soprano, and the bass is arpeggiating the tonic triad. Each note in the Urlinie is supported by a note from the tonic triad in the Bassbrechung. This probably came from some wacko theory he had about the overtone series being the generating principle behind all music (all &#8220;good&#8221; music, rather; he was a German nationalist bigot who frequently had ugly things to say about &#8220;inferior&#8221; musics), and of course that makes problems whenever something does not fit into that narrow mould, like, say, the *the god damn 5-line*.






The 4 is a dissonant tone in the 5-line Ursatz, and typically neither 4 nor 3 are supported by an accompanying note from the tonic triad in the Bassbrechung. Schenker points this out and calls the bit between 5 and 2 the &#8220;unsupported stretch.&#8221; The fact that it is unsupported does not invalidate the 5-line. I question whether tonic arpeggiation is really what&#8217;s behind the Ursatz, when simple voice leading accomplishes the same with more flexibility and fewer problems. Not a huge problem, but something to consider. At any rate, we see the tonic with the primary tone, then 4 and 3 somehow prolonging the tonic, and finally the PAC accompanying 2 1, as we saw before.

For simplicity&#8217;s sake, I&#8217;m just going to throw the root notes of the chords under the melodies we already looked at, and you should see the Ursatz coming together.












And if you only use the Urlinie notes, you end up with a background sketch:






This is a somewhat pedantic application of Schenkerian theory, in that we are essentially looking for these structures in short musical examples that I chose for convenience, but as we shall see later it is when there are deviations from and resistance against the Ursatz that interesting and expressive things happen in the music. The Ursatz gives us a paradigm against which we can compare pitch structures. For example, you might have an extended passage that tonicizes some weird key, but then through reductive analysis, you see that it becomes subsumed into a prolongation of one of the scale degrees in the Urlinie. You might also see that a section prolongs a single &#8220;Stufe&#8221; (Schenker&#8217;s term for a scale degree or chord that can be prolonged) and does not have its own Urlinie, instead piggybacking onto the Ursatz of another section. In the case of the B phrase in Twinkle Twinkle, you&#8217;ll see that the entire four bars just prolongs the dominant chord. This tells us something about the sectionality of the music, its phrase structure, and formal function. Later on, we can look at more detailed middle ground sketches (where the interesting stuff happens; backgrounds are boring) and talk about how to apply Schenkerian analysis to the genres that we deal with on this forum (pending interest).


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## Varcolac (Mar 29, 2016)

Sounds very interesting. Not a music graduate, but I've always found theorethical models of music interesting (often being the only bugger in a band who knows any) and your posts eminently readable. 

From what I understand of your description of it, it does seem like a much more interesting way of analysing any piece and to an extent I'm wondering why it's not the main tool for musical analysis. After all, if I say "Goldberg Variations," or "Take On Me," or even "Tom Sawyer," you're not going to whistle a chord progression. Melody analysis sounds much more interesting and useful for popular music with its limited harmonic pallette - how many songs can be conventionally analysed as I V vi IV? 

I await your pedagogy!

Holy smokes I didn't have to wait long. Melodic similarities are everywhere so his idea of them being in simple groups holds up in my anecdotal evidence, but that they're all at heart stepwise falling diatonic melodies? Um, OK. Interested to see where this goes.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 31, 2016)

*
Middleground Reduction, Displacement, Linear Intervallic Patterns, Ascending Lines, Motivic Parallelism*


It's a very popular analytical tool in research journals. However, there are plenty of hurdles between laypeople and the sorts of things that go on in peer-reviewed music theory publications. Schenker was not without his critics either, and the points that have been raised against his theory survive. There are many out there who see Schenkerian theory as Procrustean, focusing too much on normative structure while excluding deviations and salient musical elements. I like this quote from Schoenberg on looking at Schenker's sketch of Beethoven's third symphony: "Where are my favorite passages? Ah, there they are, in those tiny notes." (Write All These Down: Essays on Music by Joseph Kerman, page 168.)

I'll talk about middlegrounds in a moment, and you'll see how reductive analysis gradually strips away cool musical things to eventually end up at something boring at the background. To me, this says that you can hang interesting things on a very normative and logical background structure.

Remember that Schenker held a huge bias, and he also intended for this technique to be applied to a rather narrow repertoire: tonal music composed by Austro-German masters of the Classical era (and a bit after). Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms interest him. Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt and Debussy do not, particularly because of their treatment of form and tonality. That said, Schenker's theories continued (and continue) to be developed after his death, and his methods have been applied to all sorts of repertoire that do not match his ideal music. He would be pissed by some of the ways in which his ideas have been bastardized, frankly.

The stepwise descent thing is sometimes a hard pill to swallow, particularly when we have to schmooze the analysis to fit the paradigm, or grab a note out of an inner voice or a melody note that only lasts one 32nd note or something ridiculous like that. Occasionally, it is necessary to imply nonexistent notes to make it match an Ursatz. Some people don't feel cool with that. Others play it fast and loose, allowing for skipping tones in the Urlinie and such. I think his model is mostly true for tonal music, but you can find examples to controvert it. What does it mean when they controvert? If a piece of music does not conform to the norm, we should not force it to fit a Schenkerian model but talk about how it deviates, really test the deviation, then see if we can make an expressive claim about the music based on its strangeness.

There are ascending Urlinien! Schenker did not think so (as far as I know), but David Neumeyer talks about an ascending 5-line (5 6 7 8) in this paper, and I am going to provide an analysis of an ascending 8-line presently.

Rodgers & Hammerstein - The Sound of Music - Do Re Mi


The actual song starts at 0:42. Leadsheet with overlay:






I don't see how you could get a descending structural line out of that. I think the only other option is to grab the E in measure 2, say it's a 3-line, then imply a D in measure 30 while ignoring the very neat, very regular, very sequential rising of the melodic line along the pitches of the major scale that the lyric is based on. I have no question that this is an ascending 8-line, although I would be curious to hear a counterargument.

Let's talk about sketching this thing now. When we start a sketch, we want to do a couple of things:
&#8226; Notate every pitch.
&#8226; Get rid of all rhythm. Schenkerian analysis uses flags, noteheads, and beams to designate pitch hierarchy, not rhythmic relationship. I usually start with nothing but solid noteheads.
&#8226; Get rid of repeated notes. I'm going to leave a few in my sketch for a particular reason that I will get to in a bit.
&#8226; Make sure to write the bass pitches. If you don't have any (or if you're too lazy to find a full score, like I am), then you need to transcribe or follow the lead sheet. I did the latter.
&#8226; Slap a Roman numeral analysis on there, if applicable. I'll use lead sheet symbols as well to make it a little more friendly to those who don't know that style of analysis.






This would be considered a foreground sketch, or at least the beginnings of one. You'll notice that I added an extra note, C, at the very end of the analysis. The G7 a bar before is just a turnaround to get back to the top of the head; it's not structural, and its obvious function is to facilitate a register transfer for the repeat of the melody. In other words, it is embellishing C.

Now I'm going to show what I suppose is still a foreground sketch, but cleaned up a bit. The tune is simple, so the line between foreground and middleground is pretty thin.






I've done a lot. Let me know if you have any questions about how I got from that mess of notes to this sketch. I'll try to describe it as a process:
&#8226; If you didn't get rid of repeated notes before, do it now. You can also remove some repetitive structures. I think you will agree that half of the notes of the first line [C D E C E C E] could be left out without compromising the pitch information: [C D E].
&#8226; Use open noteheads and scale degree numbers to identify Ursatz tones.
&#8226; Stem structural tones. The melody containing the Urlinie (fundamental line) always has stems going up, the Bassbrechung (bass line) has stems going down (except in the case of an auxiliary cadence; we'll touch upon that later).
&#8226; Decide what to slur to stemmed notes.
&#8226; You can also do it the other way: Slur notes that "go together," then decide which note of the group gets the stem.
&#8226; Identify the structural functional chords. There should be a big Tonic (T), Dominant (D), then another Tonic (T). There may be a Pre-Dominant (PD).
&#8226; Pre-Dominants get a stem with a flag, and are slurred to the Dominant. If the dominant is the structural dominant, i.e. the dominant involved in the last cadence, both the structural dominant and its pre-dominant need to have an open notehead.
&#8226; Whenever there is a notehead, especially if stemmed, that means that anything following that notehead in the other voice is being prolonged.
&#8226; Slurs indicate prolongation.
&#8226; This example contains a Linear Intervallic Pattern (LIP), so I'll explain what that is and how I acknowledge its presence.

The linear intervallic pattern in this tune occurs from measure 25 to the downbeat of 28. Really simply, an LIP is a sequence. LIPs are connectives: they go from one point to another and effectively prolong a single harmony. They either facilitate a transfer of the melody to another octave (the sequence continues all the way to an octave away), or invert the first chord over the process of the sequence. The numbers are the "intervallic" part of "linear intervallic pattern." 5 represents the interval of a fifth, 10 represents the interval of a tenth (you can use 3, if you prefer to keep it in simple intervals, but I always see 10 on these things). We can describe LIPs by their interval sequence; this one is 5-10-5-10-5-10. Another common one is 10-10-10-10-10. Another is 7-3-7-3-7-3. They can theoretically go on forever, repeating that pattern, but usually stop after three times. You can link LIPs together: 5-10-5-10-7-3-7-3-7-3. Those are two different LIPS, just conjoined.

To make it easy, I stem every note of a LIP (ignoring the embellishing notes). I also put barlines around it to draw attention to the fact that it is a LIP. I'm keeping the repeated notes in the LIP to show the sequence, by the way. I suppose that you don't have to, but I feel it organizes the sketch. Eventually, the LIP is going to disappear in deeper levels of analysis, as all it is doing is prolonging a single harmony and Ursatz tone.

Any notes that do not have a stem (that is, they are not structural) will disappear in the next level of analysis, so you are about to see this get cleaned up a whole lot.






A lot cleaner, yeah? Check out what I am saying with the first bass note: that C in the bass is being elaborated by 1 2 3 4 5. You can really see how the Ursatz comes to represent long-range prolongation. The LIP is simplified too, now consisting of just the uppermost notes of the pattern (plus bass), but now we have a crazy symbol that we haven't seen before. That line connecting G in the melody to E in the bass is called a "displacement." What a displacement does is move one note over/under another note from the other voice. I will eventually collapse that entire LIP so that the E is under the G (my structural 5).

I am also showing some nested slurs in the melody of the LIP. You'll see what that becomes here:






Isn't that nifty? I don't know if you caught it, but our LIP is now gone, there is an arpeggiation of the tonic triad in the bass (it moves to first inversion under 5; remember that the LIP is elaborating V7/IV, and the leading tone of IV is now in the bass), and we have this three-note ascending figure that was reduced from the sequence that previously stood there. Have we seen that before? You bet your buns we have. The first three notes of the piece are C D E. You know, Do Re Mi, the title of the stinking tune? The same motif is repeated in sequence: DEF, EFG, FGA... and then it changes on G: G CDEFG. We want GAB, but we don't get it. This shows that it is there, but hiding in the middleground. This is what Schenker (and, later, Charles Burkhart) calls motivic parallelism: when a motif exists at multiple analytic levels. This contributes to the tonal unity of the music. Motivic parallelism is more impressive when it occurs over the course of a more formally complicated piece, but here it is in a simple form.

It is also noteworthy that the LIP anticipates the remaining two tones of the 8-line before the tonic cadence, A and B. In my first listening, I grabbed that A and B as the structural 6 and 7, but decided that it was part of a different structure because of the chromaticism and sequential relationship to what is happening on the structural 5. Plus, the LIP is the only chromatic part of the head. We also have to consider what is cadential and what is not: the last A B C has a much stronger cadential feel than the one that comes before.

We can't go much further into the middleground. In the last level or reduction, we end up with just the normalized line (albeit one Schenker would not have been happy with):






Boy would you look at that unsupported stretch. Actually, this seems more feasible to me than a descending 8-line, because the leading tone has a tendency to resolve to tonic (7>8). Anyway, let's talk. What was the most interesting part, as in fragment, of this tune? The LIP was certainly the only place in the song where there was chromaticism. That motivic parallelism and change of sequential pattern in the foreground/shallow middleground was a nice touch too. Shame it disappears in the background, huh? This is why I say the middleground is the most telling part of the sketch. You can see things that are not at the surface of the music, but then they are not so deep in the music as to be purely skeletal.

Strictly speaking, I should be using beams to connect the tones of the Ursatz, but in order to do that with Finale I have to break the program and it becomes very difficult to edit. I'm taking a lot of shortcuts here. Next time, maybe I can talk about Steve Larson's guidelines for strict sketching.

Before I end this, I want to mention that musical analysis is an art. There are decisions to be made in Schenkerian analysis that require subjective hearing, and multiple ways to analyze some tunes. For instance, check out these analyses of Mozart's K.331, i from this site.

The phrase in question:






Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart - Piano Sonata No. 11, K.331, Mvt. 1


Analysis a (3-line): 3 2 // 3 2 1






Analysis b (5-line): 5 4 3 2 // 5 4 3 2 1






Analysis c (5-line): 5 4 3 2 // 5 4 3 2 1






I think I've given you enough information to be able to decipher these to some extent. Let me know if you see what is happening, and whether you prefer one analysis over the others.


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## redstone (Mar 31, 2016)

Never heard of Schenkerian theories but I always analyzed harmony horizontally. Vertical theories lose all credibility when you try to explain what's the logical difference between a ....ty modal progression and a good one. Not interested in debating about Schenker's stuff though, I have my own approach.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 31, 2016)

redstone said:


> Vertical theories lose all credibility when you try to explain what's the logical difference between a ....ty modal progression and a good one.



I find the success of a chord progression relies on voice leading more than the chords themselves.



> I have my own approach.



Care to elucidate?


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## JustMac (Apr 1, 2016)

Holy crap. This feels like sneaking into a statistical thermodynamics lecture! I have read this 4 times now and I'm starting to get light headed.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Apr 1, 2016)

Is there anything in particular that is posing an issue? I would like to make this material as accessible as possible, but I completely acknowledge that this is super dense stuff. (On the terminology: I debated whether to use the German words, but ultimately decided for it since any other resource you might encounter _will_ use those terms. My teacher does not use some of them, then I go to read other materials and ask, "What the hell is that?" I could create/link an index or glossary if the language is a problem.)


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## redstone (Apr 2, 2016)

Mr. Big Noodles said:


> I find the success of a chord progression relies on voice leading more than the chords themselves.
> 
> 
> 
> Care to elucidate?



Okay, let's have some fun, here's a modal progression I made for you, tell me what you can guess about its horizontal structure, and I'll explain how I built it. Vocaroo | Voice message


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Apr 4, 2016)

I don't know if I can guess how you personally composed this passage, but I will tell you what I can get out of it. To keep with the topic, I'll provide an analytical overlay and a shallow middleground analysis to demonstrate how a Schenkerian would break this down, because I think it says something about your compositional choices (even if the analysis is completely _post hoc_).






I would have provided tab, but I'm not quite sure how you're tuned. I played it on my six string and imagined it on a 7 in B standard, for what it's worth. It seems like a pretty standard progression in C# minor to me: i &#9837;VI7 i &#9837;VII iiø7 &#9837;VI V7/V V+ i. It's essentially i iiø7 V i with some other stuff thrown in between. The Schenkerian diagram tells a bit of a story:






(The chord voicings are an "imaginary continuo," the guidelines of which are outlined briefly on page 111 of this slideshow.)

The A7 is prolonging a tonic chord, and then much of the rest of the progression is a prolongation of the pre-dominant: iiø7, &#9837;VI&#8710;, and V7/V are all chords that lead to V. Having ^2 come in over the pre-dominant (especially with ^4 in the bass) is a really common thing, as it prepares the arrival of the dominant, hence the displacement line. I normalized the cadence, because you concatenate V and i at the end of your progression. I was considering calling the last chord C#m&#8710;, but I feel that by the last C# bass not, we're hearing more of a triad than a seventh chord. It's a small point that does not affect the overall hearing for me.


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## redstone (Apr 5, 2016)

So here comes the explication.

Mind, the way I think it is probably not compatible with the normal music vocabulary etc. It's a very different approach from the classics. -- I'm investigating two horizontal aspects of modal progressions... 

1- what chords can or cannot form together a fluid modal progression
2- in what order those chords should or shouldn't be used

My opinions about the 2nd aspect will remain private. As for the first one :


1- The main similarity I notice with tonal progressions and fluid modal progressions is that all tonics form one same scale together. In my example, all tonics are part of C# eolian. Of course it can be subject to progressive changes. Fast changes = instability, abrupt change = harmonic rupture.

2- Now, the main difference is the 3rds and/or 5ths degrees forming their own independent scales as well. In my example, all thirds are part of the same diminished scale, and all 5ths are part of G# eolian (mirroring the tonics, including the augmented 5th at the end).

3- Those horizontal scales of tonics, 3rds, 5ths, etc, are spreading their colors, their emotional content, over the whole progression. Or I guess in a more accurate way to think it : they open opportunities to suggest such content by using the resulting chords in a proper, specific order. This allows to reduce all possibilities to the few options which are optimized to deliver specific colors, without even starting to put the chords in order.

4- In this regard, I also notice that it doesn't matter if, let's say, two degrees from the scale of 3rds (horizontal) are used as a 3rd of the same tonic (vertical). It is only incidental that the degrees from the scale of thirds can be vertically used as 3rd degrees. Even though that is precisely the objective (those vertical incidences), the opportunities to get two different 3rds with a same tonic (or vice versa and any similar relations) are the means to an end and both will actually generate the proper incidences by opening the proper opportunities... because they belong to the right horizontal mode/scale. It would be wrong to think two degrees of the scale of thirds as two degrees relative to one specific tonic : to me, the natural, logical connections don't lie here. At least, they never occured naturally in my mind and I never needed those to avoid modal ruptures intuitively. The augmented and natural 5ths on G# at the end of my progression illustrate that.

5- Vertical extensions (2nd 4th 6th 7th) can be gathered on a same horizontal scale of extensions to add an extra coherent color. A pedal point can be used to quickly figure out the options available : a same note that will sound good with each triad, either as part of them or their extensions. In my example, I used C#. Such pedals enlight some deep shifts in the whole harmonic speech when the alterations progressively reached a point where the pedal needs to be altered as well. I call it a nod. And it's super important. It's damnIalreadyreachedthenod-important, or wherethehellisthedamnnod-important.


To summarize, my chords progression consists in

-The scale of tonics
- The scale of thirds
- The scale of fifths
- The scale of extensions
- The nod

That's how I understand how I understand it.

So, I actually started to build the progression by wondering what emotional content I wanted to display first, what scales and modes hold those attributes, then finding how to make them coincide, then deciding the order of chords.

I wanted to sound as fluid as possible and minor in a lively, secretive way. I used natural minor as a base for the tonics, then I made it more secretive by using a diminished scale of thirds. I also wanted to avoid a depressive dim 5th and keep things lively and dancing, hence I mirrored the tonics to reinforce the brighter options, as a diminished scale of thirds is considerably darkening. Then I put the resulting chord options in order, found the nod that would enlight most the mood and finalized the scale of extensions. The last move would have been to organize the voicings in a a more melodic way but I have nothing special to say about it.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Aug 6, 2016)

Trying to get a mod to fix some of the images, hang on. Imgur doesn't allow hosting on SSO..

Edit: We're up and running again! Thanks, Randy. You're the best.


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## tyler_faith_08 (Aug 13, 2016)

This is pretty interesting. I'm going to have to look more into it but I'm sure now that I'll have to go back over some prerequisite knowledge (still getting back into the groove of things).



redstone said:


> So here comes the explication.
> 1- what chords can or cannot form together a fluid modal progression
> 2- in what order those chords should or shouldn't be used



While I completely understand what you're getting at here and agree, I believe the wording can be very volatile in the hands of those who are just getting into the swing of modes and modal progressions. My field of thought is that you should come up with whatever you like, take notes on what changes (in this case, the mode) sound nice, and save them until the previous and next pieces are decided upon and their potential changes are annotated as well. 

I don't believe that anything is inherently bad, only that it may not fit the current bill. If you compose long enough, even the pieces that you consider to be poorly written will eventually find a potential home in a song.


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