by Mark Simos
Exercise 5.6. Phrasing Templates
Here’s an exercise, with an example (not quite up to the Fab Four’s standards):
Construct a lyric phrase with chanting tones at the beginning, concluding with a word spotlighted by melismas. In the example, lyrics on chanting tones use internal rhyme, percussive consonants, and short vowels for quick, punchy delivery. The word “cryin’” uses melisma to shift toward more direct expression of emotion.
FIG. 5.17. “Cryin’ for You.” Chanting tone followed by melismas.
Now try reversing the pattern with the melismatic title at the start of the phrase:
FIG. 5.18. “Slap-Back Reverb.” Melismas followed by chanting tones.
As the example suggests, chanting tone passages tend to co-occur with rhythmically driven melodies. The smaller contour moves rhythmic patterns in the delivery of lyric syllables to the foreground, and we move toward a rhythmically dominated texture. Our first melodic settings from strong rhythmic song seeds are likely to be chanting tone heavy. Chanting tones tend to invite even-duration, “motoric” kinds of rhythmic “dit-dit-dit” textures, but can also be set to more speechlike rhythms.
This can present a risk: too much of either rhythmic monotony (mono-rhythm) or rhythmic patterning can start to work against the lyric spotlighting effect of a chanting tone melodic contour. Consider revising chanting tone melodic textures as much by varying rhythmic patterns as by widening their melodic range and contour. The following exercise helps build these skills.
Exercise 5.7. Altering the Rhythm of a Chanting-Tone Melody
Set a lyric line to a chanting tone or small-contour melody. Begin with a “mono-rhythmic” setting—that is, a passage of notes all of the same duration. Gradually transform this to a rhythmically patterned setting with a repeating rhythmic motive within the phrase. Next—either by breaking up and varying the repetitive rhythmic patterns, or starting fresh—work toward a rhythmically free-flowing setting that follows lyric phrasing more closely.
CHAPTER 6
Harmony
As we’ve toured through the songwriter’s compass, we’ve discovered sound vs. sense polarities active for each facet. Lyrics connect intimately to rhythm and melody, through sonic aspects as well as referential meaning. While lyrics are the most obvious carriers of meaning and emotion, rhythms and melodies not only support lyrics, but also bring their own intrinsic and direct kinds of thematic and emotional meaning to the song.
A similar sound/sense polarity is at work in harmony-led writing. In this chapter, we’ll explore the harmonic facet in terms of this sound/sense polarity. We’ll look at techniques for discovering and working from chordal “seeds” as sound-led discoveries, especially techniques at your instrument. We’ll also look at techniques for developing chordal ideas away from an instrument, generally a more challenging creative task for most writers. Then we’ll look at various “sense” or meaning aspects of chords and chord progressions, complementary to those addressed in traditional discussions of harmonic relations: intervallic motion in chord roots; harmonic rhythm; and cyclic, narrative, and motivic progressions. In this discussion, the term “chords” will sometimes be used to encompass both individual chords and progressions. “Harmony” will refer to the facet as a whole, in relation to rhythm, lyrics, and melody.
Sound and Sense in Chords
Harmony springs from multiple pitches sounding together: a chord. Harmonic progressions are sequences of chords flowing according to a particular logic or design. Musicians, especially those with formal training in harmony, are accustomed to thinking of the meaning—the sense—of chords and progressions in terms of a particular harmonic vocabulary (major/minor tonality or functional harmony). But in songwriting, we sometimes work directly with sound aspects of chords, and of progressions—either holding in abeyance or at times even leaving behind a harmonic interpretation of the chordal material. Every part of the song “means,” and has a story to tell—including the harmony.
Sound Aspects of Harmony
The sonority of chords, even of an individual chord, may be a primary source of inspiration for songwriting, especially when writing at your instrument. Through exploration, accident, or just messing around, you can get to chordal material where you have no conscious notion of the chord’s role in a functional progression, or even what the root of the chord is. You can even use seed-catching techniques at your instrument that rely on aleatoric (by chance) discoveries for intriguing and suggestive sounds, voicings, and registral effects. In effect, your instrument becomes “the World,” and you can let it surprise you with unexpected effects and sonic discoveries.
In such sound-led strategies for chordal writing, you want to defer functional interpretations of the found chords and progressions as long as possible. Also typical of this kind of writing is emotional ambiguity of the material. While chords can evoke imagery, memory, and association, you may not be able to easily categorize these reactions in emotional terms. It’s a glorious act of discovery to throw your hands down and hear a chord you couldn’t have imagined without playing it, and that you can’t name or immediately fathom in terms of harmonic function—yet respond to it with powerful emotional or narrative associations.
These exploratory, sound-based, experiential practices of working with chords are used by songwriters spanning widely varying levels of technical knowledge. Technical knowledge can even—temporarily—get in the way when employing these techniques. It’s almost better if you don’t know what you’re playing when you find the chord. More technically advanced musicians therefore sometimes rely on specific disorientation strategies to get themselves into unfamiliar chordal territory. They might put their guitar in new tunings, or try to write on an instrument they don’t play. (The Jackson Pollock exercise described later in this chapter is a useful aleatoric and disorientation technique of this kind.) After the song’s written, of course, it never hurts to expand your knowledge by going back and figuring out what the heck you played!
Sense Aspects of Harmony
A complementary style of harmonic writing emphasizes the sense or meaning of chords and progressions. Here, there’s an interesting reversal of the sound/sense polarity as compared to lyrics, where sense aspects involve referential connotations—words as description of the world. Sense or meaning in chords and progressions lie primarily in their musical meaning: the very systems of internal, self-referential relationships we denote with the term “harmony.”
In some usages, “harmony” might imply a particular vocabulary—i.e., functional harmony in the context of major/minor tonality. Knowledge of this specific harmonic theory and practice is, of course, an advantage to any musician and especially to songwriters. But just as songwriters often work from chords as sonorities, they often create progressions in exploratory ways, not necessarily following conventional voice-leading paths or progressions. Some chord sequences are cyclical, creating a sense of mood and landscape. Some are more through-composed, creating a narrative—a story of a kind. But where standard progressions create their sense of narrative in the context of a key, tonal center, and progression through tonic, subdominant, and dominant functions, there are alternate ways that chords can move in progressions, to create emotion, meaning, and narrative.
Here, I don’t mean particularly those ornery, contrived progressions that make weird moves for their shock-value effect. Though many a progressive metalcore band has built their sound out of such harmonic experimentation, an “anti-harmonic” aesthetic could still be said, ironically, to reference standard harmony in its very act of rebellion. Rather, to expand the harmonic resources available to us as songwriters, we want our repertoire also to include chord sequences that work—“function”—in musical terms, but in ways less typical of “functional-harmonic” progressions. Some of these alternative harmonic vocabularies draw on the rich body of influences and confluences that have shaped contemporary popular music, reflecting the interchange of Western European harmonic practice w
ith African-American, Celtic, Anglo-American, and diverse other cultural sources. Other progressions can be discovered through experimentation, both at or away from your instrument. By understanding different ways chords and progressions can tell a story, we gain powerful new strategies for getting to distinctive thematic material through harmony.
Process Considerations
Some songwriters report that in their experience, melody and chords always come “simultaneously.” While “all at once” is always a strategy option, the focus of this chapter is about gaining extra facility by being able to work independently with the facet of harmony.
The term “harmony” here might be interpreted more narrowly than intended, implying a particular ordering of creative steps—specifically, “harmonizing” in the sense of adding chords to an already present melody. For the full power of the 360° songwriting approach, we want the agility to move in any direction: starting from melody and harmonizing, or possibly starting from harmony—chords and chord progressions—and then “melodizing.” Other pathways are also possible, such as adding rhythmic lyrics to a chord progression even before moving to melody.
It’s particularly powerful to try working from chords before you have melody, lyrics, or any preconceived theme or subject matter for the song. You’re thus
framing from the harmony as you’d frame from an ambiguous lyric title. Surpris-ingly vivid imagery, stories, memories, thoughts, and even themes and issues can arise as you listen to chords and progressions alone, attending to the associations they spark. Conversely, you might cast, searching for chords to fit a song’s theme and story already in progress. Whatever direction you’re working, songwriters must focus as listeners on what the chords evoke, always asking how they complement the overall imagery, narrative, and emotional aspects of the song.
jamming
Many writers who might describe their process informally as beginning “from chords” are using a technique I’d simply call jamming: improvising vocal melody or lyrics against a backdrop of familiar chords, riffs, and progressions. A time-honored technique, especially when writing on chording instruments such as guitar or piano, jamming has no doubt been the genesis of many great songs. However, in jamming, the chords are generally not the focus of attention, and therefore tend to be simple, repeating stock progressions. They thus serve as a creative aid—a sonic “pad” inducing a relaxed state of almost-trance, to inspire imagery and language, or a scaffolding for generating fresh melodic or lyric material. In 360° songwriting terms, the songwriter is “seed catching” from lyric or melodic material improvised over the chords. In contrast, when working from chordal seeds, the chords themselves—voicings, transitions, or progressions—become the first object of creative attention and compositional focus.
While jamming rarely produces innovative chordal discoveries, that’s not generally the goal. Many musical genres are not dependent on original, distinctive chord progressions, but are based on stock or cliché chord riffs and cyclic progressions. Listeners in these genres are oriented to these idiomatic progressions, rather than expecting innovative chords and moves. (This is even reflected in copyright law, which makes it difficult
to protect a chord progression alone, without at least an associated melody and possibly a lyric.)
In principle, even in styles where harmonic innovation is desired, jamming doesn’t compel us to keep the initial chords. Once melody and lyrics are in place, we could rethink and revise our progressions. Surprisingly often, though, we don’t bother. Our scaffolding chords become “the chords.” If these initial chords suit the final song’s theme, style, and emotion, this can work fine. But when lyrics and melody might be better served by new chords, the progression at that point may be baked into the writer’s ear, and into track production. To use jamming most effectively as a strategy, it’s best to treat the chords as, in effect, “filler” material to be revisited and reconsidered later in development of the song. Of course, jamming can also be a way of stumbling across true chordal seeds. Once such a seed is discovered, however, the nature and quality of the creative work shifts.
I believe misuse or over-reliance on “jamming” as a de facto writing strategy has contributed to a kind of chord-lazy writing, widespread now in many genres—resulting in overuse of cliché progressions that thereby lose potency and meaning. In track-driven mainstream pop writing, progressions can sometimes get lost in a no-man’s-land between beat composer, track producer, and top-line writer(s) responsible for lyric and melody. But the problem is just as prevalent in mainstream country or among acoustic singer-songwriters. I’ve been at Nashville “guitar pulls” where playing a song with non-obvious chords that you can’t instantly follow on first listen is treated as a kind of antisocial behavior. Singer-songwriters may put intense focus on poetic lyrics, while treating their chords and progressions neglectfully. We seem to have lost, or weakened, the notion of sparking a song from a unique, fresh voicing or chord progression.
Regardless of the genres you write in, a limited vocabulary of chordal ideas limits in turn the themes and emotional tones you can tackle. You might expect that working with familiar progressions, which you can play without much thought, would at least leave your creative mind freer to focus on generating strong melodic or lyric ideas. But in practice, habitual progressions also seem to invite concessions in other, at least musical, aspects of the song.
Chordal Song Seeds
A chordal song seed is a specific chord or voicing, a chord move or transition, or a progression that has a fresh, distinctive, original aspect—to you, at least. “As Tears Go By,” the first song completed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, is built around a central chordal idea: moving from a II major straight to a IV chord. I’d call that a chord seed—though I can’t vouch for whether that move, strummed on guitar, was their actual starting point in writing the song. I believe the idea felt fresh to them at the time, and was also a relatively fresh sound in pop music.
Yet, if we required our chordal seeds to be chordal phenomena never before experienced by humankind, we’d be setting the bar a little high for songwriters! So, if you’ve never written a song with a major/minor seventh chord, never started a song on the IV chord, never moved from a VI minor straight to a I chord, these might serve as chordal seeds for you. The process distinction is, as with all seed catching, that some aspect of the chords themselves draws your interest in writing. This fresh, surprising content sparks associative creation of other elements of the song—melody, lyrics, theme—in response.
There are significant challenges in catching true harmonic song seeds, rather than just jamming over familiar riffs. In the sections that follow, we’ll examine a variety of harmonic strategies, including: working both at and away from your instrument; working with harmonic material by sound and by sense; and working with individual chords and progressions.
Chords as Sound, Shape, and Feel
An individual chord, taken as a vertical sonority or combination of tones, has powerful acoustic sound and touch associations. Composers, instrumental players, and singers have a sense for affective qualities of specific keys and chords (e.g., C major vs. FA major). This is conditioned by many factors: pitch memory; natural resonances of specific keys on instruments, in acoustic spaces, or relative to human vocal range; for players, ways chords fall on the instrument and the motor memory this invokes; the sound of open vs. stopped strings in certain keys (e.g., A vs. ED tunes for fiddlers).
These qualitative aspects can dramatically shape our writing process as well as the final listener’s experience. Harmonic considerations blend with timbre, orchestration, and dynamics. The feel of a chord as a gesture of the hand on the instrument can affect us, as can placement and voicing of the
chord relative to our vocal range. Each key, and each chord, sits in a distinctive spot relative to that range and creates a distinct connection to our melodic and lyric sense. Playing a progression without accompanying vocal melody, we might still respond
to the chords by silently vocalizing melodies and lyrics.
Chords at Your Instrument
When writing at our instrument (or with instrument in hand), we’ll often play chords and progressions we already know. But we can also discover unexpected, accidental sounds at the keyboard or on guitar, and catch these surprises as chordal seed ideas. Keep your seed-catcher’s ear perked amidst other musical activities, both purposive and drifting: practicing, noodling, daydreaming, playing songs, and making chance mistakes.
Exercise 6.1. Jackson Pollock
The abstract artist Jackson Pollock became known for splashing paint directly on huge canvases laid on the floor, making art out of the (only apparently) random splashes that resulted. Parallel developments in music can be seen in John Cage’s concept of aleatoric or chance music and the “found sounds” of musique concrète or hip-hop beat composing. This “Jackson Pollock” exercise works with musical sounds on an instrument in a similar way to Pollock’s approach with paint. I originally developed it for guitar-playing songwriters; it can be applied to keyboard instruments, or any chordal instrument.
Let your hands fall onto your instrument as if “splashing paint” on canvas. Let your fingers fall onto the strings (or keyboard, etc.) at random, striving to not control your hand movements. The goal is to land in an unfamiliar shape and position, one where you genuinely don’t know how the chord will sound at the time you grab the shape. This will be disorienting, and maybe a little scary. If you tense up, you’ll tend to play shapes you already know, but this will not get you to fresh chordal seed material. You might need to do this a number of times before you stumble on a sound with the right qualities. Between attempts, shake out your hand and release all tension from your fingers, and then try again.