If you shape your music around a bass line with a series of chords, though, there is a hefty knock-on effect in terms of the sound you create, and the advent of figured bass marked a significant – and clearly audible, even in Corelli’s earliest works – break with the past. The progression from one chord to another became much more purposeful, and chords began to take on a life of their own. Since placing one chord after another in a random succession is not very appealing in any form of music, composers now needed to become much more aware of how to string chords together in a way that was neither haphazard nor ugly. The solution was harmonic progression.
We have already witnessed the fifteenth-century composer Josquin des Prez beginning to harness a sense of ‘home’, or cadence, in his choice of chords, and that this ‘home’ could be moved around within a piece, within reason, to provide variation and movement. But while Josquin lived at a time when very few chords were considered wholesome and acceptable, the permitted harmonies had increased considerably for our seventeenth-century composers. Vincenzo Galilei’s guidelines for the approved use of dissonance, Discorso intorno all’uso delle dissonanze (1588–91), had introduced combinations of notes that would have sounded shocking and disturbing to Josquin, yet even Galilei was considered outdated within twenty years. The chords in Monteverdi’s madrigals likewise shocked contemporary listeners, but his experiments in harmony showed how rewarding and expressive the interplay of chords could be. His successors pushed the boundaries of chordal harmony yet further, revealing powerful gravitational forces at work in the relationship between chords, and it is by experimenting with the juxtaposing of certain chords that they stumbled across harmonic progression. It could just as easily be described as ‘musical gravity’, and it is one of the most rewarding gifts in all music.
Musical notes, as we have seen, are grouped in families called ‘keys’. Within these families certain notes have more prominence than others, a hierarchy evolved from the natural properties of sounds in all resonant materials. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, composers increasingly found that chords had a hierarchy, too: certain chords exert an influence over other chords. If, for example, we are in the family or key of G, the chord of G – the triad G-B-D – is ‘home’. The chord B minor (B-D-F#) is a close relation to G because it shares two of G major’s three notes; it has two-thirds of its DNA, if you like. As we saw with Palestrina’s use of closely related chords to create a soothing, ethereal sound, and Monteverdi’s mischievous use of more distantly related chords to intrigue or surprise the ear, these relationships between chords could be potent elements in any composition. Composers discovered that some chords were drawn magnetically to others: adding an F to the G major triad, G-B-D, made it yearn to move towards the C major triad, for example – of which more shortly. Others changed their character with the addition of an unexpected bass note beneath them.
As well as a general drift towards more adventurous combinations of notes than before, composers of the seventeenth century now had figured bass to work with, and this encouraged them to experiment with the roots of chords. The root of the G major triad, G-B-D, is G, because it lies at the bottom – but if you add a low bass note playing the note E, for example, the root of the chord shifts to E and the chord changes its sound. All triads are transformed in some way if the root in the bass line is not the same as the bottom note of the triad. This seemingly simple device hugely increased the chordal nuances available to composers, and they began constructing sequences of chords whose position was dictated by the gravitational pull exerted on them by the behaviour of the root note in the bass line. These sequences, once discovered, became bread and butter to the music of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and are still in use today in popular songwriting – particularly, as it happens, by songwriters who play the bass, such as Paul McCartney or Sting. Like that which cycles through Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’, these sequences were driven by the direction of travel of the bass line, giving forward momentum to the music, hence the name ‘harmonic progression’.
Composers became so fond of certain chord progressions in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that it was even possible for them to create the impression of chords when there was only one solo instrument playing a melody and no apparent ‘accompaniment’ at all. What might be described as ‘virtual’ or ‘invisible’ harmony was conjured up by skimming up and down the constituent notes of a chord, for example on a solo violin, so that listeners assembled the chord in their heads. It was a kind of aural trompe l’oeil.
A brilliant example of this occurs as the epilogue of Heinrich Biber’s devotional cycle of sixteen solo violin sonatas known as the ‘Rosary’ or ‘Mystery’ sonatas, composed in 1676. Each sonata portrays an aspect of the Virgin Mary’s or Christ’s life – the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and so on – and it ends with a piece for solo violin, called simply ‘The Guardian Angel’. Although there are a few moments in this sonata where the player is in fact able to play two notes simultaneously by drawing the bow against more than one string at once, mostly we only hear one note at a time. Our ears, though, believe we have heard full chords, a whole accompaniment, from this one solitary instrument. It is partly atrick and partly the conditioning of our ears: thanks to the vast musical catalogue that has used these same chord sequences time and again since the seventeenth century, we complete the sequence in our heads without it being spelt out.
Biber’s ‘Guardian Angel’, is an especially interesting piece because it is constructed in a format known as a ‘Passacaglia’, which divided moral opinion in the seventeenth century but continues to influence music today. The Passacaglia structure involves a short sequence of four or eight chords repeated many times, which act as the springboard for a series of unfolding melodic explorations or improvisations. It is a template that would describe a vast amount of twentieth-century jazz, too, although the term Passacaglia has rarely, if ever, been used in that context. It derives from the Spanish prototype, Pasacalle, meaning ‘street steps’ – another example of the fashionable Italian term being universally adopted – which, coupled with the fact that it has a repeating bass line, suggests the form’s origin lay in dance. Indeed, the Passacaglia was also known by the name Chaconne in the seventeenth century, and this most certainly was a dance form, referred to by the Spanish writers Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega as a popular dance among servants, slaves and the Amerindians of colonial New Spain. The term ‘chaconne’, may come from the sound of the Mexican castanets used to accompany the dance.
The Chaconne dance swept Europe in the early 1600s, with a popularity that bordered on a craze. It was deemed so sensuous and irresistible that some supposed it could only have been put on earth by the devil himself to tempt people to behave in a lewd manner. But over the course of the seventeenth century, the
Chaconne lost its wicked reputation and became a courtly dance, its repeated musical pattern increasingly associated with just one sequence of chords (over the descending bass line, for instance G-F-E♭-D). By the time Heinrich Biber incorporated the Chaconne sequence into his sacred devotional pieces in 1676, no one remembered the supposedly Satanic origin of the Chaconne – but they did remember the chord sequence, which is what allowed Biber just to hint at it in order for the listener to hear the full chordal texture. Eventually the dance elements of the Chaconne were abandoned altogether and the chord sequence alone remained in music of all styles and rhythms. The sequence has been among the most persistent in music history, its shape faithfully reproduced, for example, under the chorus of Adele’s ‘Set Fire to the Rain’ (2011).
Though the Rosary/Mystery sonatas weren’t published in Biber’s lifetime, it seems unthinkable that J. S. Bach did not know them when he composed his own set of Sonatas, Partitas and Suites for solo violin and solo cello forty years later, pulling off exactly the same aural illusion with ‘silent’ chords. He too held the Chaconne in high regard, composing as the final movement of his
Second partita for solo violin a Ciaccona lasting an incredible fifteen minutes, possibly written in memory of his late first wife, Maria Barbara Bach. It is one of the undisputed masterpieces of all music for the violin, comprising an astonishing sixty-four continuous variations on a single theme, creating the impression of an orchestra of sound from one single instrument.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was one sequence of chords that composers loved more than any other. They all used it, in virtually every piece, thousands of times in all. It is still in use today, though not quite so obsessively as back then. We have already witnessed composers beginning to play around with this sequence as they became aware of musical gravity, but in the dusty world of music terminology it has a name: the Circle of Fifths.
The circle, or cycle, of fifths, works like this: you start with a triad on any note on the keyboard, say B, and you construct a sequence of chords by dropping down five white notes on each step: B-E-A-D-G-C-F-B, and so on. When the sequence first started appearing profusely in the late seventeenth century, the norm was to cycle through just three or four chords rather than the possible chain of twelve. The sequence works by exploiting a weakness in the first of two chords. If you play a triad, for example G, comprising the notes G-B-D, you can make it vulnerable to change by adding the ‘seventh’ note to it, in this case F: G-B-D-F. Now this triad of G yearns to move to the chord lying a fifth below it, C. Adding a seventh to C will make it yearn to move to F, and so on.
You can find these virtuous circles of three or four (and very occasionally five) chords all over the music of Corelli, Vivaldi, Bach and Handel. What comes across in their work time and again is a relishing of the joys of chords for their own sake, the delicious transition from one to another and the effect it might have. Sometimes they dispensed with melody altogether and simply allowed a lovely chain of chords to unfold, as Vivaldi does in the opening Adagio e spiccato section of the second concerto in his collection unashamedly labelled L’estro armonico (the inspiration of harmony).
What may surprise you is that the dozen or so chord sequences beloved of composers around 1700, including the circle of fifths, are still the top dozen harmonic sequences mined by composers of all styles today; the chord sequence shared by Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ and Procul Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ is just one of innumerable examples. I can guarantee you that there is no chord sequence out there, however fresh its apparent sound or however young and innovative its creator, that hasn’t been thrashed into oblivion many, many times before.
Playing around with musical gravity had one effect that no one quite expected. Since the time of Josquin des Prez, the growing reliance on chordal harmony, on locating a sense of home in the music and on exploiting the chemical reactions between different chords and different ‘homes’, had gradually been undermining the older, medieval system of note-families, the modes, which were above all ways of organising melodies rather than chords. In the late-seventeenth century, the modes finally gave way to their successor: keys.
While the modes adopted by folk music and by the music systems of other cultures, all melody orientated, had a wide range of note choices in them – like a palette with fifty colours on it – the plain-chant modes established by the European Church were made up of a very limited diet of available notes. They had a uniformity and blandness about them, as if our palette now had fewer than a dozen colours. The limitation of both ethnic and ecclesiastical modes was that you had to stay in whatever mode you had started in for the duration of the performance. So in the Church’s mode system, if you were singing a tune in, say, Aeolian mode, your given notes would be ABCDEFGA – all the white notes on a piano or organ keyboard. You would stick loyally to just those notes for the whole piece. This was a cosy, unsophisticated world were you did not wander off mid-song to another ‘home’ or mode, but it was also a pragmatic measure, since medieval instruments had a limited number of notes and generally only played in one or two modes. A penny whistle, to this day, has the same limitation: to play tunes in a range of mode families you have to buy several penny whistles, each calibrated to a different mode.
But during the seventeenth century, musicians intrigued by the forbidden fruit opened up by chord sequences increasingly sought to be able to move from one mode to another. If, for instance, you follow the logic of the circle of fifths sequence, you are forced to move into new modes whether you like it or not. Gradually, then, the restrictive modes were replaced by the more flexible system of keys, which allowed for a larger number of notes to be available at any given time. This was because, through the mechanism of the minor and major third that we encountered in John Dunstaple’s music at the turn of the fifteenth century, keys included in their dual scale (palette) notes that would, under the mode system, have belonged to separate modes. Thus the key of E minor embraces nine notes – E, F#, G, A, B, C, C#, D, D# – and the key of E major adds a tenth note, G#, in contrast to the ecclesiastical Phrygian mode’s modest seven. What’s more, the overlap of notes belonging to closely related keys made moving from one key to another easy.
While it is not, strictly speaking, accurate to say that a minor version of any given key is sad and its major version happy, since there are notable exceptions, the ability to switch from one mood to another, instantaneously and at will, was a very big advantage of the key system over the older modes. Modes were one thing or another, the Ionian and Lydian being sunnier, like modern ‘major’ keys, and the Dorian and Phrygian being darker, like modern ‘minor’ keys, but a key could change its mind about its mood whenever it liked.
The modal sound did not disappear completely after it had been supplanted by the major and minor keys. It lingered at the edges of art music, popping up one moment in Chopin, or another in Debussy. It never went away in folk music, so whenever composers were trying to sound rustic, earthy or homesick for their native countryside, you could expect them to dip back into the modal well for inspiration. But for a trend-setting composer like Corelli, with his well-integrated string ensembles and his radical musical style, the modal sound would have seemed, I suspect, rather old-fashioned and like something better suited to street music. His music, joyfully and abundantly at ease with the new major and minor key palette, was a gateway to the extraordinary creative possibilities opening up with the new system.
Corelli’s influence in creating the new concerto style from the innovative musical ingredients of his day is hard to overestimate, not least because of the effect he had on a red-haired Venetian twenty-five years his junior: Antonio Vivaldi, whose L’estro Armonico concerti grossi of 1711 immediately established him as a genius of the first order. (Its success also marked the moment when Italian-led moveable-type printing for music was replaced by the faster, more accurate, plate-engraving technique.) Compared to the clockwork finesse and gentle charm of Corelli, Vivaldi introduced a sense of drama and virtuosity that took his contemporaries’ breath away. In effect, he was turning his violinists and cellists into divas to rival the opera stars of the day – of whom he knew a thing or two, claiming to have composed ninety-four operas of which only about twenty survive.
It is estimated that Vivaldi composed in excess of five hundred concertos for a variety of instruments, taking Corelli’s big group-little group idea one step further by pitting a charismatic solo violin against the whole ensemble. This dynamic new style of solo concerto announced its arrival on the musical stage in 1714, with a set of concertos Vivaldi proudly unveiled as La Stravaganza (The Extravagance), followed in 1723 by a set of pieces that were to become deservedly, utterly ubiquitous by the twentieth century. The first four concertos, of twelve, were called Le Quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons), but the umbrella title of the collection perfectly captures the spirit of Italy’s monumental contribution to seventeenth-century music: Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (The Contest between Harmony and Invention).
The Four Seasons, as well as showing off the virtuoso capabilities of th
e solo violin, also explored the notion that purely instrumental music could be pictorial, or at least descriptive, in this case of non-musical features in the natural world. Vivaldi came up with musical effects to depict dogs, mosquitoes, a variety of birds, the hunters and the hunted, winter and summer landscapes, rivers, storms and an assortment of rustic characters at play, all of them the imaginative result of experimenting with the various violin-playing techniques pioneered by Corelli, Biber and indeed Vivaldi himself at the end of the seventeenth century. Thus chilly raindrops in winter are evoked by high violin notes being plucked (pizzicato), the chattering of teeth is the high strings playing ultra-fast repeated notes (tremolando), and so on.
Incredibly, the popularity Vivaldi enjoyed during his middle age did not last. After living most of his life in Venice, he moved to Vienna in his sixties and died there lonely and impoverished. For the next two hundred years his prolific body of music would stay silent, his career forgotten.
Almost. Vivaldi’s legacy survived in the somewhat surprising influence he had on another, very different, composer. Vivaldi’s Italian innovations, honed to sensuous perfection in the carnival city of Venice, travelled north across the Alps and found a fan in Lutheran north-east Germany: Johann Sebastian Bach. But it was not just Vivaldi who, musically speaking, migrated from the bustling Arcadia of Italy to the spiritual lucidity of the Protestant north. This phenomenon can be seen almost everywhere you look when it comes to the music of the early eighteenth century, and there is no neater demonstration of this process than in a subject close to Bach’s heart: the invention of new keyboard instruments.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 10