#anyway of these four notes the lowest A and the E are easiest

[tenspontaneite]

I'll make a proper shakuhachi update post at some point, but for now I just want everyone to appreciate the fact that with the first two holes of this thing closed, like so-

- I have, at some point or other, been able to play a total of FOUR DIFFERENT NOTES. Just by making the air happen differently!

A full accounting of said notes, to the best of my knowledge:

For those who aren't much into reading music, that's an A, an A one octave higher, an E, and an A#.

[two-chords]

Good Times/Rappers Delight

Good Times (1979) Chic Disco, USA

Rapper’s Delight (1979) Sugar Hill Gang Early Hip-Hop/Rap, USA key: E dorian

Euroclassical function names:   tonic   subdominantTagg: tonic   counterpoiseRiemann: t Sscale degrees: i IVchord names: Em A

  Em                A |:/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / /:| loop

mode: E dorian — E F# G A B C# D E melody: Drmfsl form: chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus chorus — AA’A’A’ verse — BB’BB’ BBCB meter: duple suggested time signature: 4|4

Is this a two-chord song? Well, just listening to the bassline, yes. The bass lays down E very clearly and walks on up to A. But then there’s the funky guitar part. And from a guitar point of view, there are four different fingerings to use, which would be thought of as four separate chords. From a classical music perspective — which isn’t the end-all-be-all and may not be entirely appropriate, but is not entirely inappropriate (oh, the conundrum!) — we have a lot of notes that serve more of a “color” function than a harmonic movement function. And that makes sense, because, let’s face it: two chords do not make for much harmonic movement anyway! We have two places to be and let’s bring some color in while we are at it.

Another way to think about it (again, still from a classical perspective) is that we are prolonging the voice leading. Every chord has multiple notes and they all want to move in the easiest way to the next chord — except for the bass, which is allowed to be the leapiest (yup, that’s the most leapy), although we love it when our bass walks places, like it does in this song. Here are the notes of the basic chords we have in root position:

B E G C# E A

What we like to hear is something more like this:

E E B C# G A E A

The lowest note leaps and everyone else moves a step or holds. Now, we add a color note:

D E B C# G A E A

The D in the E minor chord is there for color or flavor or whatever your favorite cross-sensory analogy is. (Isn’t it funny how we so rarely talk about sounds as sounds, but via other senses? Color, shape, line, texture… But I suppose we talk about loud colors, too, so there’s just a lot of crossover. I digress…) Next, we are going to slow down the movement from one chord to the next, by not moving all the voices at once. First, we are going to move the G up to A:

D D E B B C# G A A E E A

This happens right as the bass starts walking, so it’s actually an interesting situation: it’s like the chord tries to move, but gets a little stuck because wait-a-minute-what’s-going-on-in-the-bass?! Once the bass lands on A, the root of the chord changes, but one of the other voices is stuck.

D D D E B B A C# G A A A E E A A

Now this is a bit simplified. You may be asking, what happened to the E in the A chord? And chances are if you are playing this on guitar or ukulele there is an E in there. It’s just that the fifth of the chord is not essential to hearing its function; we really only need the root and the third. So I'm leaving it out to show the primary voice leading movement. Well, fine, but where’s the third? Well, it should be what the D moved down to, but it’s stuck, and the B could have gone there, but it didn’t. Then yet another interesting thing happens. So far I’ve written down a simple A chord as the goal, but that’s not what we actually get. Here’s the voicing as it comes out on my D-tuned uke, plus the bass:

D D D C# B B A A G A A F# E E E E E E A A

In jazz and popular parlance, that last chord is an A6, meaning we have an A major triad with the sixth note above A (within the scale of E dorian), which is F#. You may also notice that it’s the same pitch set as F#m7. This is important. In A6, the F# is a note for color and does not affect the function of the chord. In F#m7, the F# is the root of the chord and, therefore, determines the function. As someone who has studied classical music extensively, I do kind of hear this as an F# minor chord in first inversion (that is, with the 3rd in the bass)! And therefore, I do kind of hear this as a change in function. However, from a jazz and popular perspective, an A6 chord is not the same as an F#m7, even though they have the same pitches in them. Now, I’ve also been hearing this song since 1979 — I grew up listening to as much AM radio as I did classical music in cartoons. So I can also hear this very much as staying in the other harmonic pole, to speak in Taggian terms.

Above, I simplified the bass, but it’s also a bit more complex in the chorus (the verse contrasts this with something a lot closer to just two notes)  — and why we love that bass line. It adds a little more information to how we analyze and think about our harmonies. First, during the first chord we lay down E:

E E E

Then, during the second chord we walk up the scale:

E F# G A B C# D

During the third chord, we lay down A:

A A A

And lastly, we emphasize the flavor notes:

A F# G F# A (still simplified, but here’s a transcription.)

Oh, look at that. There’s a seventh in there along with the sixth. Hmmm. But here’s the thing: play along to the song with just Em and A and it will sound fine. Not particularly funky, but definitely not off. So is it two chords or not? Again, Taggian thinking helps us out a bit. We definitely have two harmonic poles around E and A. Tagg also writes extensively about one-chord songs that aren’t really just one chord, because, although the bass might stay the same, the voices above it keep moving around and implying different harmonies. I think here we have a combination of both. Using anticipation (moving one voice to the next chord tone before the rest of the voices get there) and suspension (holding a voice over from the previous chord while the other voices move on), two static poles become far more dynamic and interesting. So on a chord chart you might read (as you do here): Em7 Em7sus4 A7sus4 A13 (like A6, but also with the minor seventh), but you can also hear that they are just very fancy versions of two basic chords. On the other hand, by putting these intermediary voice-leading steps on the beat and making them last an entire measure, they become new harmonic places-to-be in their own right. Is it two chords? Yes! Is it four chords? Yes!