Category Archives: music theory

Chromatic Neighbor Embellishment

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Chromatic Neighbor Embellishment — Could be the title of a track on a Prog album?

embellishments — add color or sense of motion to main note

Neighbor motion — goes to one of the notes on either side, then comes back

chromatic neighbor motion — moves a semitone. Might not be in the key

Chromatic embellishments of cheerful major key melodies are part of the musical identity of Mario games

not just melody but also harmony and bass notes move like this

Note — these early games had limited polyphony because of sound board. Spells out a chord with root, 5th, and melody note is the 3rd of the chord. If revoiced, the interval between the top notes would be a third. Koji Kondo in interviews said he wanted to use interval of a 6th because it sounds fuller. So — three note spread voice chord, with root on the bottom — means the 3rd has to be on top.

Melody E, Eb, F, E is called Double Neighbor Embellishment; later there’s a chromatic passing note in a run

 

Morning Noodle Report

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I would love to be able to play arpeggios all up and down the keyboard. I can imagine how it would sound (“audiate”), but my hands can’t do it gracefully, and I certainly couldn’t read it! After doing the Morning Noodle I wrote some of it out in Finale. When I had written it by hand, the notes on ledger lines looked horrifying, like Terra Incognito. But when written neatly via Finale it looked less intimidating.

I can’t remember, when I was in elementary school did have trouble reading my own handwriting?

I played some modified arpeggios based on inversions of A minor. The pattern is: top note of the arpeggio, approach second note from underneath, third note of arpeggio, then bottom note and up one.

The chords I used are Fma7 (FACE) Dm6 (FABD), Asus2 (EABD) and Am in the 2nd inversion (EACE).

This could be over a bassline of F, G, A — the ol’ flat 6, flat 7, 1 of a minor scale.

That means that FABD is, like, a G9 with the G missing

Ending on an Am in the second inversion means it’s a cadence but not a perfect cadence, I forget what they are called. Imperfect?

I just remembered, there is a nice chord progression based on FACE FABD

FACE  FABD  EGBD  EGAC  /  DFAC  DFGB  CEGC

Fma7  Dm6    Em7     Am7   /    Dm7    G7        C

IV        ii          iii          vi       /    ii          V7         I

Overtone Series

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Dr. Robert Greenberg talked about this in Understanding the Fundamentals of Music and I wanted to learn more about it. Here’s 2 references.

https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/quick-tip-the-overtone-series–audio-4672

 

Octaves and 5ths are primal intervals, natural to ancient music. The use of the third became prominent in the Renaissance and with composers such as Palestrina in the 1500s. Bach and his contemporaries began to exploit the 7th in the 16th and 17th centuries. The 9th didn’t become an important chord tone until the time of Wagner in the mid 19th Century, and the extended tones of #11 and 13th weren’t commonly accepted until the music of early 20th century composers like Debussy and Stravinsky.

 

The Wiki article is much more complex — it talks about how the harmonics that are integer divisions of the original string (or column of air) are different from the tuning system we use now (equal temperament). The little numbers above the notes indicate how many cents sharp or flat the integer harmonics are from modern tuning.

 

 

I remember Dr. Greenberg talking about Pythagoras (and his students) experimenting with a monochord and finding the ratios for octaves, perfect fifths, perfect fourths, and major and minor thirds. The Wiki article takes it further.

 

Yow. I wonder if this has applications to music that uses microtonal scales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)

 

 

 

Robert Greenberg — Fundamentals

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Back in 2010, my son started attending a private high school which was 45 minutes away. This meant that frequently I was in the car about 3 hrs a day, 5 days a week. I found a great way of taking advantage of the driving time: listening to lectures from The Teaching Company. My favorite instructor was Dr. Robert Greenberg and over the span of 4 years I acquired and listened to many of his courses.

Since I’ll be taking classes at Howard Community College this fall, I thought it might be good to return to my Robert Greenberg lectures; I can listen to them while doing the dishes, cooking, etc.

Today I started with Understanding the Fundamentals of Music. This is a relatively short course, with just 16 lectures (unlike his very long music history course, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music).  The main things I remember from this course were: him telling a funny story about his wife (a piccolo player), making fun of oboeists (the high pressure affects their brains?); examples of solos that each instrument might dream of (ex. bassoon in the beginning of Stravinsksy’s Rite of Spring?), songs with strange meters like “Take Five”, and a very thorough discussion of tonic and dominant chords. I think he actually goes into the Greek experiment with the string and the proportions (Pythagorus?). Good stuff. Lecture 1 today!

David Newman’s educational videos

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I just discovered David Newman’s educational videos. He writes

I’m a classical singer, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University. I started this channel to support my efforts in teaching Sophomore Ear Training at JMU.

Hidden among the more boring videos on this channel are about 18 songs I wrote to teach elements of music theory.

I hope you enjoy them, and learn from them!

Here’s his channel

and here’s an example video. Modes again!

the Dominant 7 song