what is a chord?
the sonic result of multiple, simultaneous melodic strands.
I feel a bit embarrassed admitting this publicly, but I didn't find out where chords came from until I was a master's student. But I feel a bit less embarrassed when I remember that I didn't even learn this from any of my theory teachers; I learned it from my composition teacher. And of course, when he told me, I was like, oh duh.
I reckon many of us simply take chords for granted. Music theory is often taught as if it were law — these are the rules, folks. It's taught that way, in part, because we do written tests to see if you've internalized "the laws," because it's easier to grade and say yes you get it or no you don't. But just like scales, chords are a theoretical construct, too. And just like scales, we've been using the concept of chords for centuries now (also, like scales, not without changes, modifications, developments), so it just seems like a rule, a law, a concrete phenomenon, an immutable thing.
To me, they felt a bit like mysterious blocks. Like, who decided that V goes to I and how did they arrive at that decision? And when you move into post-tonal stuff, how do you figure out what the harmonies should be? It turns out that the answer to both of those questions is basically the same, and to answer it, we can move back to the Medieval and Renaissance times, before people were thinking in terms of chords. Having had spent time playing music from these periods both at the undergrad and master's levels contributed to my "oh duh, I should have been able to figure this out, of course" feeling. I am happy to walk you through it now.
Chords are part of harmony. Well, what is harmony? In its simplest terms, harmony is the background to melody's foreground. It does beg the question: Are non-pitched percussion parts harmony? I think most theorists would say absolutely not, but I think we should reconsider this, probably because I like to poke the bear. We can have a larger umbrella of harmony and simply talk about pitched harmony and unpitched harmony and give the drummer some love, right? But for now, know that when people talk about harmony, they are talking about the pitches in the background, not the percussive parts.
Every now and then, I'll read something that basically says European Classical Music invented harmony. I'm going to say no to that. A drone is harmony. It is a background pitch that establishes a tonal center. It is absolutely harmony. It is not, however, what we call functional harmony. Functional harmony is a theoretical construct designed to explain the sense of moving away from and returning to a tonal center, which did develop in Europe starting in the Medieval period, particularly in music written for Catholic religious purposes. But it's not like no one ever made simultaneous pitched and unpitched sounds anywhere in the world before people in Europe started doing it around 1100!
Is it possible that the experiments in harmonic variety developed outside the Church and then came in? That's a bit beyond my expertise, as I am not a musicologist focused on that time period. While there is some socio-economic class division between who is making and using participatory music for socializing and dancing and who is making and using music for the aristocracy and the church, the separation between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" is far more porous than many on both sides have argued.1 This is to say that, yes, I think it's very possible that the European harmonic sense developed both in- and outside the institutions of aristocracy and the church. I'm not sure how provable it is, but any musicologists who want to pipe up with sources, bring it on.2
Let's visualize our drone as a flat line:
We can then visualize a melody as another line over this drone:
There is space — intervals — between the melody and the drone, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.
Eventually our melody meets up with the drone. The drone has a gravitational pull, metaphorically speaking. Much of the world's musics has been — and still is! — made this way. Some of the intervals, that is the difference between the frequency of the drone and the frequencies of the melody, sound consonant and some sound dissonant.
The perception of consonance ("sounds good together") and dissonance ("sounds bad") is partly cultural and partly physics. From a physics standpoint, consonant sounds reinforce each others' vibrations because they have spectra with many frequencies in common, whereas dissonant sounds have less in common and the spectral frequencies interfere with one another. That said, some intervals are considered consonant or dissonant depending on the style or context in which it happens, e.g. what is called a "perfect fourth" (ratio 4:3).
In general, because we find consonances pleasant, they are emphasized. Two ways to emphasize them are:
• sustain them for longer amounts of time.
• set up a rhythmic pulse and place the consonances at moments of rhythmic importance.
If some consonances become more important than others, we are already making a move toward functional harmony. Let's look and listen to an early Renaissance example that illustrates both of these principles:
Absolon fili mi — Josquin Desprez 0:04-0:32
This piece may or may not have been written by Josquin Desprez. At the turn of the 1500s, we are far from today's copyright laws. But it was published after his death under his name sometime in the 1530s or so. Regardless of who composed it, it's as good an example as any to illustrate how different independent melodies create the harmonies that would eventually become what we call chords.
This is religious music, taking an Old Testament story — not even a story, just a moment, really — and setting it to music.3 In European religious music of this time, the goal is to differentiate itself from music for other purposes, like say, dancing, so it's not beat-oriented. For performance coordination purposes, the durations of each note are given in relation to a beat, and the treatment of consonance and dissonance is also in relation to the beat; however, making the beat explicit as in dance music is not the desired effect here. This is music for contemplation, for setting a certain mood and letting it wash over you.
Let’s illustrate this opening as a graph:
The gray are the melodic strands. Look closely and you'll see everyone starts with the same melodic shape, which is standard for the time. The green fields mean that the relationships between those pitches are consonant; the red fields mean the relationships between those notes are dissonant (the fields on the outside are about the relationship between the outer voices).
There's a dissonance in the inner voices on the weaker macrobeat in measure 5. There are fleeting dissonances in measure 7 as the individual melodies draw their lines and become more rhythmically active. Measures 7 and 8 have more dissonances as we move into the first important cadence ( = phrase ending, both musically and lyrically as the fourth and final voice completes its first statement). Measure 9 has a brief, slight dissonance to keep the motion going. As you can see and hear, more time is spent on consonances, and only measure 8 bucks the trend by putting the dissonance smack dab on the strong macrobeat. Rules are made to be broken, but there are also set up very clearly so that when the break happens, you hear it loud and clear.
At the bottom, I put a sort of modern harmonic analysis. That's not how people where thinking about things yet and that becomes quite clear in measures 7 and 8 where you have vertical pitch sets that do not form nice, modern chords. I started analyzing the piece in Bb because that's what the modern transcription put it in. It becomes obvious very quickly that the tonic at the beginning is Eb. So why did the folks transcribing this into modern notation put it in Bb? The final sonority is a Bb chord — actually, not even. It's just Bb and F because that was how you ended a piece in those days. That final sonority has a lot of D-flats happening before it, so you could even say it's in Bb minor. Except people weren't thinking in majors and minors, either. The transcribers put a Bb and an Eb in the key signature because most of the time those pitches are in play; it is not to say the piece is in Bb major, as it would in a more recent piece. The As and Ds, however, may be flat or they might not be; it depends on how you hear it — that's how it was originally notated. Very different from what we do now.
We could go on and into all the gorey details, but the main point is: Put melodies together in such a way that their lines lead to certain vertical simultaneities and you have a sort of automatic harmony. This worked from Medieval to Renaissance music — and into Baroque to a large extent, too — and it works nicely for post-tonal music as well, if that's your thing. But let's dip back into history, but about 200 years later, at the end of the 1720s.
O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden — Johann Sebastian Bach 0:00-0:15
By the time we get to Bach, we are making this transition — but not complete — from thinking in melodic lines to thinking vertical sonorities. With Protestant Christianity, there's still some washing over you, but we want the words to be crystal clear. To do that, we are becoming more beat-oriented — still definitely not dance music — but everyone is singing the text in near rhythmic unison. It's much easier to analyze this thinking in modern chords. In fact, doing just that — analyzing Bach chorales — is often a large chunk of teaching music theory. Even where I have question marks, I know exactly what I would put if it were on a test. I put the marks there to show that the vertical sonorities there are more a function of making a good melody than from thinking about what vertical harmonies are happening.
Nowadays, in teaching theory we start with Bach and only if you're interested do you look at the Renaissance and before. But spending time with pre-Bach repertoire made it very clear to me how much Bach had one foot still quite firmly placed in Renaissance aesthetics. Each voice is a very singable, interesting melody. Contrast this with a Haydn string quartet from just under fifty years later than the Bach chorale.
String Quartet in F minor, op. 20 no. 5 — Joseph Haydn
0:00-0:20 m1-9
I've made a graph only for measures 1-4; measures 5-9 continue in much the same way, as you will hear. You can also hear and see that only the first violin has a singable, interesting melody. Everyone else is functioning much more like a modern rock rhythm guitar. There is no dissonance in the accompanying parts at all; there are only passing dissonances in the melody. The rate of change in the harmony is much, much slower than in the Bach, where it seems like the harmony changes every beat. Rhythm takes on a much more important role, now that there's only a main melody and no supporting melodies.
We can easily analyze this with modern standard music theory. In fact, this is precisely the kind of music that modern standard music theory comes from. Haydn would have studied the kind of music and theory of the Renaissance and Baroque composers before him. But from that, he made some leaps and innovations.4 My guess, too, is that he was probably well-versed in the folk music of central Europe, and that many of these structural things were happening in those musics, too.
But what we need to perceive in the harmony is that even though the change from chord to chord is much slower, each individual part of what we now call a chord is moving — much like the more active melody above it — mostly by steps (a neighboring pitch) and skips (two away) but only occasional leaps (more than two away). We are still working with melodic shapes, drawing lines that create a sense of inevitable arrival to our chosen destination.
The creation of music and music theory and pedagogy is a tricky dance. While the music always comes first, the latter are always in conversation with the former and the conversation goes both ways. Now it's easier and perhaps more sensible to teach harmony in terms of chords and to add things like voice-leading and counterpoint later. It depends a lot on what musics float your boat. Ultimately, your ears and your heart should be your guides. Theory will help you hear music more deeply and therefore make music more deeply.
I find a lot of times the argument is actually about who has the "real" music. It's all real, folks. However, for whom it works as music is in the ear of the behearer. For more on that, read your Christopher Small.
Part of the issue is that any of these sources would be from members of the educated classes — the church and the aristocracy — writing verbal descriptions or notational transcriptions about the musicking of the other classes. It would be a filtered account. But I suppose it always is.
Book of Samuel. Absalom is one of David's sons. Absalom kills his half-brother for raping his sister, Tamar, and then flees the kingdom. Eventually he rallies an army to try to overthrow David at whom he is angry for doing nothing about the rape of Tamar. Absalom is killed in battle. David mourns his death, saying, "Oh Absalom, would to God I had died in your place." It's this statement alone that is set as the text of the piece.