An Exercise

Here's an exercise I invented today.

Take the the chord change I vi ii V7.  It is a very familiar one used in numberless songs.

Play it again, but this time as I vi II7 V.  Now you've taken the relative minor, or vii, and imagined it as the ii of the the V. You have modulated to the dominant or V chord.

Now take that chord and treat is as I, and repeat the same sequence all the way through the circle of fifths.

So

C a d G7
C d D7 G

G e a D7
G e A7 D

D b e A7...

etc....

Now you will know relative minors, I vi ii V7, and ii V7 I, in every key, in a mere 96 measures or fewer depending on what harmonic rhythm you want.

Rule of nine

I learned about this a few months ago.  

The fourth and fifth are the same interval inverted. So a fifth up from C is G, and a fourth down is also G. 

(4+5 = 9).  

The tritone up or down is the same same. You can think of that as four and a half.   

(4.5 + 4.5 = 9).  

So thirds and sixths, and seconds and sevenths, will also be the same. But the minor third, in the other direction, is a major sixth, and vice versa. The same relation holds with major and minor sevenths and seconds. So C up to B is major seventh, and C down a half step to B is a minor second. This makes sense if we think of the major as +.5 and the minor as -.5.   

It's one of those nice little symmetries, like so many in music theory.  

Art Song

The assumption of the Art Song (in the musicological literature) is that the text comes first, and then the setting later, so that we can study the text itself (By Schilller or Goethe) and then see what the composer  did with it. I guess this is accurate, and yet...

1. The experience of the listener is simultaneous. The reader does not first read the poem, interpret it, and then hear the musical setting. She might encounter the melody before the words, if she's heard instrumental versions before hearing the song sung (as happened to me with "Blue Skies" by Irving Berlin.).

2. In the popular song tradition [in many vernacular traditions], we don't give priority to the text over the setting. We simply don't care whether the lyricist wrote a lyric to a melody, or whether the lyricist and  composer worked simultaneously, or whether the composer and lyricist are one person, or whether the composer set a pre-existing lyric to music. In folklore we have songs that come with their words and melodies together, and nobody cares what came first.

3. Words are not prior to music ontologically, then. Putting words first is the artifact of a particular musical tradition.  Nevertheless, this tradition is extremely significant, because, well, we have very significant poets being set to music by equally significant composers. Aside from the Lied, there is the French mélodie.

4. Do we put more value on the music than the words? It depends.  If we have Baudelaire and Debussy... Do we have to think that George is greater than Ira? (Because Ira's rep as a poet is less than George's as a composer?). I admire song lyrics because I cannot write them very well.