FLIP SIDE BEATLES: presentations, books, musical analysis
  • Beatles Minute
  • Pop Goes the Theory
  • Calendar
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • Newsletter Sign-Up
  • Blogs
    • Beatles Blog
    • Pop Music Blog
    • Star Wars Blog
    • Origami Blog
    • Shakespeare Blog
  • Contact

Mode Mixture Homework Assignment: 'You Oughta Know' by Alanis Morisette

6/16/2019

2 Comments

 
The past few days I've blogged of the permanent Picardy third in Linkin Park's 'Somewhere I Belong' and 'Easier to Run', citing them as the first two songs that thoroughly convince me of the technique. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that's not entirely true. Alanis Morisette's 'You Ought Know', from her 1995 mega-hit album Jagged Little Pill is equally convincing:
morisette_-_you_oughta_know.pdf
File Size: 278 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

The song is clearly in F# minor - I don't see how anybody could argue otherwise - and yet the chorus consistently employs an F# major triad. It's also an excellent song to demonstrate mode mixture on IV, so I'll be using this as a homework assignment for my sophomore theory class this fall, when we get to the chapter on mode mixture.
2 Comments

Multifunctional Harmony in Pop Music

2/2/2019

1 Comment

 
Common-practice functional harmony is predicated on the progression from predominant to dominant to tonic. In the below example of Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 13, those functions are abbreviated by their initial.
Picture
Like classical harmony, pop harmony is also functional in the sense that certain chords lead to other chords, usually culminating in a cadence. However, unlike classical music, pop chords are subject to far less strict rules of progression. In other words, the progressions found in pop music are more flexible than those found in classical, with the same chords (or at least the same Roman Numerals) functioning in multiple ways. And that means any theory of popular music harmony must account for this multifunctional flexibility.

Enter Christopher Doll. In his book Hearing Harmony (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Doll implements Greek letters to indicate distance from tonic:
  • The first letter of the Greek alphabet, alpha (α), represents tonic function.
  • The second letter, beta (β), represents pre-tonic function.
  • The third letter, delta (γ), represents pre-pretonic function.
  • The fourth letter, gamma (δ) represents pre-prepretonic function.
  • The fifth letter, epsilon (ε) represents pre-preprepretonic function.

Doll goes into some depth in an appendix, specifying all possible chords in each of these functions and providing names like "hypo pre-subdominant (mediant of a subdominant)" and "medial pre-dominant (mediant of a dominant)". While I appreciate the thoroughness of his theorizing, I find the exhaustive details cumbersome to the point of being unusable in practice. But I find his notion of Greek letter functions quite compelling and practical.

Applying Doll's Greek letters to the same Mozart example shown above yields the following:
Picture
In this case, ii (c) functions as the predominant (​γ), V7 (F7) as dominant (β), and I (Bb) as tonic (α). It's a straight-forward, textbook example. But what about a pop song, such as Alanis Morissette's 'You Oughta Know'? Here's the chorus from that song, which clearly employs functional chord progressions but in a rather different way from Mozart:
Picture
In this case, IV (B) is the pretonic chord (β). It resolves to I (α) on the subsequent downbeat. bIII (A), then, is the pre-pretonic (γ); and bVII (E) the pre-prepretonic (δ).

But that is just one example. What makes these Greek letter functions so compelling and useful is how flexible they are. The same chords can function in different ways depending on their syntactical order. Here is the chorus from Metallica's 'The Unforgiven', which incorporates similar chords but with different functions:
Picture
This time i (a) is α, V (e) is β, bVII (G) is γ, and bIII (C) is δ.

To avoid constantly scrolling up and down to compare the two songs, here are the Greek letter functions of both 'You Oughta Know' and 'The Unforgiven' side-by-side:
Morissette: 'You Oughta Know'
α = I
β = IV
γ = bIII
δ = bVII
Metallica: 'The Unforgiven'
α = i
β = v
γ = bVII
δ
​ = bIII
Tonic, whether major (I) or minor (i), will always be α - that will not change from one progression to another. But all other Greek functions are liable to change. Notice how β is IV in one song but V in the other. And how both bIII and bVII are γ in one but δ in the other. This is what I mean when I say pop harmony is multifunctional - the same chords can function in different ways. This is contrast to classical harmony, where chords typically function one way, and only one way. The value of Christopher Doll's Greek letter functional nomenclature, then, is that it addresses pop music's more flexible rules of progression - it illustrates the linear harmonic motion without the restrictive and loaded terminology of classical analysis.
1 Comment

    Aaron Krerowicz, pop music scholar

    An informal but highly analytic study of popular music.

    Archives

    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018

    Categories

    All
    AABA Form
    Alanis Morissette
    Ariana Grande
    Asymmetric Rhymes
    Augmented Sixths
    Bass Line
    Beatles
    Beck's Bolero
    Billy Joel
    Black Dog
    Bluegrass
    Bolero
    Bon Jovi
    Brian Hebert
    Bring It On Home
    Cheap Trick
    Chordal Accretion
    Christopher Doll
    Country
    Dazed And Confused
    Functional Harmony
    George Harrison
    Good Times Bad Times
    Half-diminished Sevenths
    Harmony
    Have A Cigar
    Here Comes The Sun
    Hexatonic Pole
    Houses Of The Holy (song)
    Howlin Wolf
    How Many More Times
    How Many More Years
    Interview
    James Jamerson
    Jeff Beck
    Jimmie Rodgers
    Jimmy Nash
    Jimmy Ruffin
    Kiss
    Led Zeppelin (album)
    Led Zeppelin (band)
    Led Zeppelin II (album)
    Led Zeppelin III (album)
    Led Zeppelin IV (album)
    Linkin Park
    Los Lonely Boys
    Lou Reed
    Luke Bryan
    Madonna
    Mandocello
    Metallica
    Meteora
    Meter
    Milli Vanilli
    Mode Mixture
    Modulation
    Muddy Waters
    Multifunctional Harmony
    Muse
    Neapolitan Chord
    Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
    Organic Development
    Out On The Tiles
    Physical Graffiti
    Picardy Third
    Pink Floyd
    Pivot Chord
    Plagiarism
    Rhythmic Displacement
    Rock N Roll Animal
    Secondary Diminished
    Shapes Of Things
    Smokestack Lightning
    Something
    Sour Girl
    Stairway To Heaven
    Steve Marriott
    Stone Temple Pilots
    Structure
    Sweet Jane
    The Hunter
    The Small Faces
    The T-Bones
    Tom Waits
    Tragedy
    Welcome To The Machine
    What Becoems Of The Brokenhearted
    When The Levee Breaks
    Whole Lotta Love
    Willie Dixon
    Wish You Were Here

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Beatles Minute
  • Pop Goes the Theory
  • Calendar
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • Newsletter Sign-Up
  • Blogs
    • Beatles Blog
    • Pop Music Blog
    • Star Wars Blog
    • Origami Blog
    • Shakespeare Blog
  • Contact