Monthly Archives: January 2013

Beyond I-V-vi-IV or Truth Is, I’m A Junkie

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Words are hard.  They don’t stick in my brain very well.  The idea they convey remains, but the actual words slip away.  And a thought or idea seems simple until it must be put into words – the length of this post is evidence enough.  When it comes to music, the text, the very meaning of the song, takes a back seat to other things.  I might hear a song on the radio a hundred times and still fumble the words, substituting one word for another that sounds similar, or mixing lines from different verses.

No, with most songs it’s in the musical elements where my brain works best.  And of the basic building blocks of music, harmony is where I am most at home.  Rhythm and melody are nice, but harmony is what makes me like a song.  I’m a harmony junkie.  For me, it’s all about the changes.  I suspect that whether other people know it or not, they might be the same way.

There is a musical comedy group in Australia, Axis of Awesome.  Most of their comedy is offensive in some way or another, and this video is no exception.  So . . .

****WARNING****WARNING****WARNING****WARNING****

At 5:20 these guys drop the big one.  If you play this video and don’t want to hear the bomb, keep an eye on the clock and a finger on the pause button.  When you hear the word “birdplane” you have about six seconds to stop the film.  By that point, you really have seen most everything in this very clever and humorous bit showing the common harmonic structure of many pop songs and poking fun at the original (or unoriginal) artists.  I understand they can do this once in movies and keep a PG-13 rating, but wish they wouldn’t.  I really would like if there was a clean version as I could give it an almost-blanket recommend.  Alas. . .  //End Rant//

Here’s the problem.  I like some of these songs, probably at least half of them.  It’s a little like chocolate.  Just because it’s a common Hershey bar, does that mean I won’t eat it because I had one last month, or last week, or yesterday, . . . or even thirty minutes ago?  No, I’m gonna eat the Hershey bar every time.  Go ahead, call me unsophisticated, I don’t care.  It doesn’t have to be fancy chocolate with funny sea salt sprinkled on it.  It doesn’t have to be made from the very best exotic pods.  It doesn’t have to be delivered by a team of fancy purple unicorns.  Normal unicorns are just fine.  A regular Hershey bar is just fine.  And I’m ok with the common I-V-vi-IV progression.  Is it the best?  Is it unique?  No, but it gives my brain a hit.  The chords are the foundation on which a great melody is built and tight inner harmonies are constructed.  It lends music a sense of motion all on its own, of rising and falling, tension and release.  A good progression can certainly be squandered, but having one is a great start.

Suppose you did want a better chocolate bar though. . . How about a longer progression that starts out the same way as I-V-vi-IV, but is deeper and richer. . . although still copied?

Pachelbel Root Position

But first, what’s with all the Roman numerals?  It’s called Functional Harmony, and it helps to show the relationships between chords in a given key.  I is a triad built on the first note in a major scale, V is built on the fifth, vi is built on the sixth, and so forth.  Upper case numerals are major chords, and lower case are minor.  So you can have the same functional harmony in any of the 12 major keys, and it would be expressed with the same sequence of numerals, regardless of the actual chords being played.  So this progression is:

I – V – vi – iii – IV – I – IV – V – I

In the key of G it would go:

G – D – e – b – C – G – C – D – G

In C it goes like this:

C – G – a – e – F – C – F – G – C

As you can see, when changing keys, all the other chords change, but when using the numerals to express functional harmony, the numerals stay the same no matter what key the song is in.  For simplicity, all the printed examples are in the key of C, regardless of what key these recordings are actually done in.  So here are a few tunes I can think of off the top of my head. . .

First, there’s the ever-classic Percy Sledge singing When A Man Loves A Woman.

The Bee Gee’s put it in Holiday.

The Dixie Chicks used it in There’s Your Trouble.

A few years later the Chicks feuded with Toby Keith after he did The Angry American.

Aerosmith built most of Cryin’ on it.

In Blues Traveler’s Hook, John Popper sings that it doesn’t matter what words he sings because you will come back for the hook.  And I do . . .

There is Fastball with the chorus of Out of My Head . . .

And finally, there is the Rance Allen Group singing Let The Music Get Down In Your Soul.

Just for kicks I’ll throw in the Marc Broussard cover of the same song.

What’s going on here?  Something makes me want to keep listing to the same progression over and over.  What makes it so good?  It’s the inner tension of the chords pulling against one another.  Here is the basic progression.  It doesn’t look like much.

Pachelbel Root Position

But if I take the chords and invert them, or move the bottom note up an octave on some of the chords, you can see continuous stepwise movement down the scale from one chord to the next.  These are highlighted in blue.

Pachelbel 1st Inversionb

With a different inversion, the same chords show a continuous upward movement in the notes.  These are marked in red.

Pachelbel 2nd Inversion - ascendingb

Not all of these songs are exactly the same progression.  Many take out the second IV chord because that allows for a continous stepwise scale all the way from upper C to lower C.

Eliminate 2nd IVb

So with the same set of chords, there can be stepwise upward movement and downward movement at the same time – contrary motion.  Human ears usually like this.  Mine do.  Everything works its way back to I.  Some chords have a stronger tension toward I than others, like V – I is stronger than IV – I.  Even stronger is if you add a 7th on top of V for a V7-I.  It all wants to roll downhill back to I.

What’s that?  I left one out?  So I did.  It turns out that this progression has been used for a long time.  In fact, this progression is probably best known for Johann Pachelbel’s use of it in his Canon in D, probably composed sometime in the late 17th century.  Here is an ensemble playing it on period instruments.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNQLJ1_HQ0

What amazes me is that I will listen to songs where I disagree with the words essentially because of the chord progression.  I get Toby Keith, I really do.  I remember being angry like that.  But is it just to seek revenge and revel in the destruction of one’s enemies?  The awesomeness of the song makes me second guess myself.  And there’s Rev. Rance Allen, telling people they will find the answer deep inside themselves.  Please don’t look inside yourself.  You’re full of guts and other gross stuff.  Something about that music?  Do you feel it?  Yes, it’s the chord changes.  That’s all it is.  So-called gospel music without a shred of the real Gospels.  It does get in me somewhere, mainly my brain.  It makes me feel happy, but it doesn’t do a single thing for my soul.

Alright, I’ve been holding out.  There’s one more, a sort of chord progression cousin to Pachelbel.  The overall structure is similar, but there are a few substitutions.  These substitutions function as the V of something other than I.  For example, I7 is the V of IV.  Remember V-I is a strong pull?  This is a strong pull toward something other than the real I.  These constitute a sort of momentary key change where before everything wants to roll downhill to I, first it wants to roll on over to something else first.  What is so cool about this progression is that instead of a regular stepwise motion along an unaltered major scale, a half-stepwise motion is enabled in an upward direction.  The movement between notes marked in red is a mere half-step at each change.  Talk about tension from one note to the next!  The regular downward stepwise motion is in blue.  And an extra bonus is marked in green where the same note can be held for several chords, something previously not possible.  All at the same time, there are notes moving up, moving down, staying the same, moving only by small degrees, and pulling against each other.

A Man Like Me

The song is A Man Like Me by Randy Houser, and this progression is used for the chorus following a very plain verse made simply of I, IV, and V.  It’s like a bite of sweetest chocolate after a sip of plain coffee.

I love it, love it, love it.  Hard swinging rhythm section, honky-tonkin’ piano, sweet pitch-bending and sliding action, built on a great set of changes . . . and the words . . . what more could I ask for?

I’ve got my fix.

Dysfunctional Piano or What’s A Euphonium?

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I would have liked if I had earned a BA Mus. Ed., just so I could tell a joke.

No, instead I have a BM.  Try telling people you have a BM and see what reaction you get.

When I was in the first grade, the music teacher, Mr. Mason, taught our class out of a little book titled Wee Sing Silly Songs.  He played them for us on a piano in the music room.  Our entire school only had 80 students, and what I remember is that his job also included mowing the grass.

Years later, as a student pursuing an . . . erm. . . BM . . . with an emphasis in music education, I was required to complete a course called Functional Piano.  This was so that I could confidently play the ubiquitous music room piano in order to teach Wee Sing Silly Songs to gradeschoolers in my future career.  The idea is that in one semester, your average music major can play all major and minor two octave scales, something Mozart wrote for little children to play, and sight-read a hymn in four parts from the Methodist Hymnal with five or fewer errors.  There were other things on the checklist, but none of them were as horrible as these.  This course took me six terms to complete.

I must have been just about the worst piano student ever.  At one point the standard two-part Mozart children’s piece was abandoned altogether for a substitute because there were so many mistakes learned into my playing that it would be too hard to undo them.  It was better to cut it loose and start from scratch on a new piece.  Worse was the hymn.  Since it was sight-reading, a different hymn was chosen at each lesson.  By the end of the sixth term, all the other requirements of the class had been completed, and so the entire lesson was spent trying to successfully sight-read a hymn.  There are only 552 hymns in that hymnal, and we were running out.  I only had to do it once.  It could be at any tempo.  It could be the largoest of any largo you ever heard.  It could be slow beyond recognition, just as long as one chord followed another at whatever tempo I chose, and five or fewer mistakes were made.   Many times Dr. Hauff pointed out that if a hymn was difficult in real life, at least play the soprano and bass, but that for the purposes of completing the hymn requirement, we would keep hammering away at all four parts.  (A few months ago, I was showing Mom and Dad my new-to-me Hammond organ by crashing through For All The Saints, sans pedals.  Mom kindly pointed out that I might do better if I only played the top and bottom parts.)  Eventually I got one hymn right, or right enough.  I don’t know which hymn it was.

IMG_5197b

But the worst was yet to come.  If I remember right, the final performance didn’t affect whether you passed or not, but it still had to be done.  At the end of the term, all the Functional Piano students who had completed the requirements played at a sort of recital where all the Functional Piano professors heard you play your hymn and two-part little children’s piece.  And the other Functional Piano students heard you too.  They had probably all heard me for three years on the dilapidated Chickering upright in practice room B trying to figure this out, but it didn’t help.  The final was an utter failure on my part.  I wasn’t embarrassed for myself at being bad on an instrument that isn’t my main instrument.  What made this the worst is that in front of the other piano professors and students, I embarrassed Dr. Hauff with the poorest showing after six terms of study.

The class was essentially private piano lessons, so I had plenty of attention. I was just a bad student. I didn’t practice enough. I was over-extended on other classes. The plight of the typical music major is that they have many more classes to fit into four years than any other discipline, and many of them are only one or two credit-hours because you can’t have students with a 32-hour load.  I was never in less than three ensembles playing my native instrument.  I’m sure I could have done better.  I would love to play as well as my cousin, Steve.  Steve can hammer out The Entertainer with speed and force that would make any piano bleed.  Steve drives a motorcycle.  Steve is cool.  But I’m not Steve.  I don’t drive a motorcycle.  And I can’t play piano.

Ultimately, it comes down to how many fingers are involved.  My first real instrument was B-flat trumpet – three fingers, all on one hand.  The same three fingers also worked for baritone horn, valve trombone, F-horn (other hand), euphonium, and tuba.  If you add a thumb or opposite index finger, you can also play the 4th valve of the last four instruments in the list.  With brass instruments, that is pretty much all you need – four fingers, and they all stay on their own keys.  With piano, it takes all 10, and they all have to play different notes.  Beside that there are pedals to push with your feet – these do various and sundry things, only one of which I understand.  With a better brass instrument, there are tuning levers and slides to move on the fly, but this is really beyond the functional level.  So are the brass instruments with more than four rotors or pistons.  With woodwinds, lots of fingers are involved, but at least they don’t each have to push multiple keys.  Things pretty much stay where you start out.  88 keys to push is way too many.  61 on an organ manual is way too many.  There are simply too many fingers and limbs involved, and my brain just can’t get everything in the right place at the right time.  And so, loving piano and organ music, I seriously respect and wonder at musicians who can play keyboards very well.

My instrument was euphonium.  What’s a euphonium?

IMG_5183b

This is my euphonium, Hirsbrunner model 479, serial number 323.  It is most like a tuba, but since the tubing is only half as long, it sounds an octave higher.  Like the tuba, it is also similar to the horn (call it a French horn if you must), in that the tubing is mostly a conical shape.  This gives it a diffuse mellow sound compared to instruments like the trombone, trumpet and baritone horn where the tubing is mostly cylindrical and produce a sharper more focused sound.

I was considered a good player at the time, always first chair, but the pond is small when you are a euphonium player.  And while I loved ensemble work, nerves were always a problem as a soloist.  The most terrified I have ever been was before taking the stage four times to prove proficiency as a soloist in different periods of music.  My last performance was in concert as a soloist with a full wind ensemble, playing the first movement of a concerto I had transcribed.  After a 16-bar intro by the ensemble, I made my entrance . . . about 20 clicks faster than the ensemble was playing.  Nerves throw my sense of time right out the window, along with my endurance.  By the cadenza, my strength was gone, and after just a few improvised notes, I ended while I still could.  I didn’t bother getting a tape of the performance.  Upper range playing was always a problem while my low- and mid-range was rich and robust.  One of my instructors commented that I may never have found the right instrument, and that tuba might have been better.  My axe really deserves a better home than it has.  I got my degree playing instruments owned by the university, and when that was done, had none to play. When the farm machines were sold a few years later, I bought the Hirsbrunner.  I have never really played it.  It’s probably time I do, in a capacity other than originally intended.

I also never taught music.  I did very well in theory, ear-training, history, analysis, orchestration, and anything else that required thinking about music, but when it came to doing, I didn’t meet my own standard.   I wanted to be a good teacher, and thought I wouldn’t be.  I didn’t want to prove the adage that “those who can’t, teach.”  I may have been wrong, but done is done.  And so, having my BM, I now do board-level repair of electronics for a living, a vocation which suits me well.

Well, at least I don’t have to mow the grass at work.

A Tasty Savings Account

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A few years ago I was looking for a piggy bank to give to my year-old nephew for Christmas.  I found all sorts of piggy banks.  Red, blue, green, pink, polka-dots, stripes, solids, furry, football pigs, soccer pigs, bicycle pigs, baseball pigs, sports team pigs, ceramic, cast iron, plastic, clay, leather, brass, wooden, chrome, clear, large, small, flowery, psychedelic, seasonal, electronic, musical, talking, oinking, fat pigs, skinny pigs, and pigs dressed as other animals.  I ended up settling on a blue ceramic piggy bank with red polka dots, or something like that.

But I never found the piggy bank I was looking for.  It seems so obvious!  Why hasn’t anyone made this particular pig yet?

So I think someone should combine the following two pictures:Pig Bank

Cuts_of_Pork

Here is my rendering of what it should look like:

PorkCutBank

The shape should be like a real pig I think, not like a blimp with snout, feet, and ears as an afterthought, you know . . . for accuracy.

So if anyone decides to make this and can make any profit at it, I think that’s great.  But I want a cut . . . something I can have for breakfast.  Ham or bacon.  Either is fine with me.