by Mark Simos
Motivic Progressions
Cyclic vs. narrative chord progressions are best thought of as end points on a continuum. In the middle range are progressions involving a fair amount of repetition (like cyclic progressions), but also varying the progression to create a clear sense of a journey throughout the section (like narrative progressions). The repetitions and variations in short sub-sequences of chords form question-answer patterns; hence, I call these motivic progressions. You can understand a given chord progression motivically by breaking the progression as a whole into repeating and varying sub-sequences. These chordal “motives” are similar to motives in melody, but unfold at a slower pace within the song. A workable rule of thumb is to treat the chords accompanying each lyric phrase as a unit. Also, unlike vocal melody, which is naturally punctuated into lyric phrases, the stream of chords in a progression may flow steadily across phrase boundaries. Thus it can be more arbitrary to “parse” a chord progression into motivic units.
Figure 6.13 shows some short examples of these three kinds of progressions.
FIG. 6.13. Example of Cyclic, Motivic, and Narrative Progressions
Cyclic progression. Repeats or cycles a chord sequence multiple times to create the section. Often the sequence is a chord cliché, but novel sequences can be used in a cyclic fashion.
Motivic progression. In the example, the second line contrasts with the first by holding the third chord (I) for two bars, slowing the harmonic rhythm. The fourth line makes a similar change in harmonic rhythm, this time with the V. This chord has additional “motivic” meanings: as a “question-answer” to the I chord in the second line; or as an accelerating metric displacement forward of the V chord in the preceding third line.
Narrative progression. The third example begins by moving through the same chords as the cyclic version, but with different phrasing and harmonic rhythm (X X X ). The second line uses different chords from the first, but repeats its harmonic rhythm. The third line maintains the same harmonic rhythm, repeating individual chords already heard as well as one transition (IV to I), but displaced metrically forward. The fourth line accelerates or makes more dense the harmonic rhythm, with a change of chord in the last bar (X X X X). Unlike the motivic version, each line in this progression is different. Yet there’s enough connection across the different phrases to create a narrative “thread” or through-line.
When I first arrived at Berklee, as a roots-oriented songwriter and Celtic accompanist, I was not a fan of cyclic chord progressions. I felt they were inherently lazy, the sign of lack of harmonic thinking. I have genuinely come to an appreciation of the possibilities for creating meaningful, evocative progressions from anywhere along this continuum. There are also risks and pitfalls with each style of progression—if thrown together in a haphazard way. Cyclic progressions can tell too little of a story. Narrative progressions can wander and meander, telling too much of a story, or too many stories. Motivic progressions, if crowded with too many audible echos and resonances, can bring the progression too much to the foreground, overpowering lyric content or melodic flow.
Whether writing cyclic, narrative, or motivic progressions, in writing from a chord progression as a starting point, the progression is the first object of your creative attention. You’re trying to work with something fresh and original in the progression—an idea to spur the rest of the song. But even uniqueness and innovativeness is not always required, especially in genres built around canonic progressions. What is important is matching the meaning and emotion of the progression to the overall song.
EXERCISE 6.5. Unwinding a Chord Cycle to a Narrative Progression
Begin with a four-chord cycle repeated four times to form a song section. Make a series of one-chord-at-a-time revisions to the cycle, seeing how these changes gradually create more of a motivic, then a through-composed feel for the section. End with a “narrative” version where no line is literally repeated. Test that the section makes narrative sense by seeing whether you can play through it from memory, or even hear the progression “in your mind’s ear.” Use functional notation (Roman numerals or Nashville notation as you prefer), and notate as well the root intervallic contour, the rising/falling root pattern, and the harmonic rhythm of the progression. You can use these auxiliary notations to help guide your incremental revisions, or to assess and possibly polish the final result. In figure 6.14, I’ve applied this cycle-to-narrative revision strategy, starting from the “sensitive-songwriter” VI– IV I V cliché discussed earlier.
FIG. 6.14. Adding Some Sense to the Sensitive Singer-Songwriter Progression
Note the new motivic interest in the progression: With the variations introduced, the remaining repetition of lines 1 and 3 now form a more distinct abac phrase pattern. The chord motive I V is repeated but metrically displaced forward across lines 1 and 2. The chord motive V IV in line 2 recurs, decelerated by rhythmic augmentation, as line 4. Study the progression, seeing what motivic devices you can identify in patterns of chords, chord moves, harmonic rhythm, and phrase structure. Compose your own “unwinding” of the Sensitive
Singer-Songwriter Progression. Then start with your own simple four-chord cycle, unwind it into a narrative progression—and make it into a song.
We’ve explored a few interrelated yet independent ways of creating meaning and emotion in chord progressions: harmonic functions of chords relative to tonal center, key, and mode; intervallic root motion; harmonic rhythm; cyclic, narrative, and motivic progressions. By working with each of these aspects of chord progressions, both in isolation and in interaction, we can create more evocative progressions that are truly “progressive” in a more fundamental sense—possessing that elusive quality Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called “the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
CHAPTER 7
Melody/Harmony
Connections
In this section, we outline a series of melody/harmony strategies, in order of increasing independence of melodic and harmonic elements. Rather than
outline separate process directions of setting from melody to harmony or vice versa, we’ll describe a series of melody/harmony strategies in terms of textures that combine melodic and harmonic material in varying ways. Where appropriate, we may describe complementary textures that invert a given relationship of melody and harmony. While there is no intended aesthetic preference in the order in which these strategies are presented, there is an implied progression in terms of skill levels. Each texture has distinct emotional connotations and spotlighting effects, bringing various facets to the foreground or background.
Used appropriately, each of these textural effects can serve the needs of the song. Some textures may be useful in earlier stages of writing, and then may be transformed or developed as the song progresses. But there’s always a risk of any texture devolving into a “lazy” strategy. We may fall back on certain textures more by habit than by design, and wind up with mismatches between the texture employed and our desired effect. If you’re thinking harmony as you write melody, you’ll tend to fall back on melodic habits requiring less thought, and vice versa.
Imagine the songwriting facets as boundaries inscribing a creative space of possibilities. We want to be able to create material anywhere in this space. We’re not just looking for a life raft to take us from facet to facet; we want to swim in the whole ocean. That means being able to write different kinds of melodies—melodies locked tightly to harmony, melodies that float independently of harmony, and melodies that fall anywhere along this spectrum of possible melody/harmony textures. Rather than thinking in terms of a single creative operation—“setting from melody to harmony”—think of transforming a melody along the melody/harmony continuum. We want similar freedom in our chord progressions, whether we write these in response to melodies or as a springboard for melodies to come.
Independence of Melody
and Harmony
In theory, you can start from a song seed in any facet (rhythm, lyric, melody, or har
mony) and set it to material in any facet. But as Einstein is reputed to have said, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” A repertoire of different strategies helps if applying them gets you to different results. But if the seeds we start with are not actually separable but composites, the promised fruitfulness of this process flexibility is a bit of a fiction. Nowhere is this more of an issue than in relationships between melodies and chord progressions.
Achieving true independence of melody and harmony is not so easy, even when apparently working with each element in isolation. To put this to the test, try to invent a song melody singing a cappella (without playing chords behind it). You’ll likely still hear an implied harmony—your melody generated with associations to imagined chords. Try to write multiple chordal settings for the melody. As
you put different sets of chords to melody, the expected “already heard” chords will sound right; significantly different choices may sound “funny.”
This close linkage of melodic and harmonic materials is in part a consequence of our spending our lives listening to harmonically saturated music. Conventional training in music theory can even work against you, making it more difficult to hear or create melodies without a harmonic context. Most Western-trained musicians and listeners are acculturated to harmony, by osmosis if not by formal training. Thus, they tend to hear a kind of silent chordal accompaniment when listening to even a solo melody.
Working the other way, from chords to melody, presents different problems of independence. We can more easily write chord progressions without singing melodies over them. We may hear filler melodies as we write the chords, but it’s not too hard to hold these in abeyance and revise them later. The challenge here is, I believe, twofold: to find melodies that move sufficiently independently against chord progressions, and to find progressions not confined only to the logic of standard tonal harmony. Again, the influence of our harmonic training and expectations can be surprisingly stubborn. I often challenge student writers to create unusual chord progressions, and then to write melodies to those progressions. A writer may create a distinctive progression, one genuinely new for them. Yet, melodies they write to those progressions frequently sound as if they were written, not to the more innovative progression, but instead to an intuitively heard cliché progression that follows more expected harmonic paths and phrasing.
Musicians with better-developed chops on a harmonic instrument like piano or guitar can generally devise more complex progressions, and even hear them away from their instrument. But that doesn’t translate directly to the skill of writing melodies over those chords that move in a more independent way. To develop this kind of bilateral independence between melody and harmony, we need to both learn and possibly unlearn some things.
If we start only from melodies where chords are already embedded or
implied, or can only hear melodies to chord progressions that are “locked” to
those progressions, then writing in “different directions” won’t yield fundamentally different kinds of songs. To expand the range, scope, innovativeness, and integrity of our songwriting, we want to find our way to new kinds of melodies, chord progressions, and combinations thereof. This is where the proverbial melodic rubber meets the chordal road.
Melody/Harmony Counterpoint
We’ll organize our survey of the repertoire of melody/harmony textures by analogy to principles of counterpoint, adapted to our songwriting context. We’ll further broaden this analogy to counterpoint in our next chapter on structure, adapting the principles to contrasting (i.e., “contrapuntal”) structures and motivic patterns in different facets.
Music theorists first articulated melodic principles in the context of counterpoint—interwoven multiple melodic lines. Some songwriting forms
and genres, such as choral writing or a cappella group arrangements, are intimately tied to multi-voice textures. Our restricted scope of songwriting, here, involves a single vocal melodic line sung to chordal accompaniment. Still, we can adapt some concepts from traditional counterpoint for this more specific songwriting context.
A primary goal of counterpoint is independent motion between voices (though similar and even parallel motion are constituent textures). Similarly, we can recognize a “contrapuntal” relationship between a song’s melody and harmony. Treating the harmonic accompaniment in a song as a “voice” depends on hearing the various implicit “melodic” lines in the chord progression, as discussed in the “Harmony” chapter. Any of these “line” aspects of chord progressions can be heard as countermelodies against the vocal melody, analogous to the multiple peer melodies of choral textures. The analogy is only approximate, however. We respond differently as listeners to vocal melody and to melodies in chord progressions, especially melodies formed by sequences of root tones.
As in traditional counterpoint, we want an overall flexibility of independent motion between these voices, though that may involve passages of similar or parallel motion. We also want process flexibility—the ability to work (set) from either chords or vocal melody as the “given” (i.e., “cantus firmus”) material to which we respond.
Species Counterpoint in Melody/Harmony
Traditional counterpoint16 developed the notion of various species of contrapuntal motion, in part as a pedagogical sequencing into textures of increasing compositional challenge. In first-species counterpoint, notes of respective voices move 1-to-1, at the same melodic pace. Further species change this relationship, so voices move 1 note against 2, 1 against 3, etc. Lastly, “florid” counterpoint allows more freedom of pace across and among voices.
There are characteristic pace relationships between the implied “melodies of the chords” and vocal melody in a song. Typically, movement of chords (and thus of their implied melodic lines) is slower than the changing pitches of vocal melody. Thus the basic melody/harmony connection in songwriting generally feels like counterpoint of species 2 or 3, in contrast to the shifting rhythmic and pace relationships between lyric rhythm and melodic contour (discussed in the “Melody” chapter).
The proportions and pace are not strict. Given overall differences in pace for both melodic and harmonic motion, there’s great freedom in ways these two threads can move. A chord may be held while the melody moves, or chords can move when the melody is still—e.g., behind a long sustained note (or repeated pitches) of the vocal melody, or around phrases. Figure 7.1 shows a simple example section exploiting this variability in the pace of melodic and harmonic movement.
FIG. 7.1. Varying Melodic/Lyric and Harmonic Pace
This sense for the relative pace of motion in vocal melody and chords respectively has practical implications. First, we need to pay close attention to moments where vocal melody sounds against changes in the chord progression. Chord changes are rhythmic spotlight positions, heightening effects such as chord tone vs. non-chord tone relations between melody and the “chord of the moment.” Second, it’s at the slower pace of the “melody of the chords” that rhythmic patterns of the chord progression itself— the harmonic rhythm—are articulated. These patterns are hard to hear, not just because they move slower than rhythmic patterns in vocal melody; they’re also only heard superimposed on (or heard beneath) the melody, unless you work with the harmony in isolation. Chords-first writing helps you to hear this harmonic rhythm more clearly, and eventually to compose and execute more elusive rhythmic patterns. This enables you to experiment more boldly with effects such as rhythmic shifts in the chord progression: varying durations on chords, using anticipations and moves on weak metric beats, etc.
Contrapuntal Motion in Melody/Harmony
Another key concept in counterpoint involves different kinds of motion between voices:
In similar motion, voices move in the same direction (higher or lower in pitch). Parallel motion is similar motion by the same interval (in diatonic scale degrees; that is, one voice might move a minor third while one moves a major third, etc.).
&
nbsp; In oblique motion, one voice stays still as the other moves.
In contrary motion, voices move in different directions.
Contrary motion is given a certain esteem in contrapuntal thinking: in part because it requires the most skill and preparation to conceive and perform, and in part because of its effect on the ear, creating a simultaneous pull of focus to both voices. However, practical contrapuntal textures mix all these types of motion in any extended passage, balancing independence of separate voices with harmonic agreement in their juxtaposition.
Melody/Harmony
Contrapuntal Textures
These different types of contrapuntal motion have counterparts in the varied textural strategies for melody/harmony connections in songwriting we’ll explore in the following sections.
Pedal-Point Melodies
The term “pedal” or “pedal point” is usually applied to a note in a lower bass line of the harmony, repeatedly sounded under a melodic passage. The harmony is usually active during such passages. In a songwriting context, however, simply holding one chord, or even a drone or partial chord, for a passage or a section can be viewed as an extension of this kind of texture.