#severance music

[awanderingtortoise]

Severance music is incredible. The use of chromaticism in the chord progressions is a brilliant yet straightforward way of reflecting the sense of disorientation, mystery and dread that permeates the normalcy facade experienced both viewers and the characters in the show.

The left hand tempo is extremely stable and steady, but the RIGHT HAND chords are just constantly fucking with your head. Major. Lower the third. Minor now? Sudden, VIOLENT dissonance, as if the chord is trying to be major AND minor at the same time. But it doesn't progress into a 'sensical' dissonance, it will return to a standard chord and steady tempo without qualm. All in that placid, 'nothings happening here!' feel that the consistent left hand gives. One stable side, and another that completely refuses to confirm to normal harmonic identities. Sound familiar? In this essay I will

[words-writ-in-starlight]

honestly my mother was a huge champ about her eight-year-old asking to be bought an unabridged edition of the Odyssey for a birthday present, and then she was an equally huge champ about reading her eight-year-old the unabridged Odyssey as a bedtime story and pausing every four lines to define something for me, and let me just say that I have fucking TREASURED the opportunity to reverse that old tradition by more or less forcing her to sit on my couch and listen to Epic and pause it every four lines for my dissertation

[theladyeowyn]

Hadestown // Severance, 2x03 “Who Is Alive?”

[nyssasatelier]

When the captain doesn't accept the blame for your death you know you died dumbly 💀

Inspired by a text post from @caleohateclub

[wolfythewitch]

procrastinating homework hard rn so i redrew a part from a discontinued wip

[voicebones]

hello npmd nation

[r-aindr0p]

the possibility of throuple rugjamidia has captivated me

Ok ok wait though I have to share the vision I have with these 3 !! Been thinking about how Jamil did "quit" his job as a treasure guardian for a life of peace but he still can't chill in his pond for five minutes because of the other two idiots, they just keep coming back....

This is only part one ! Part two is still cooking in the microwave

Hopefully he'll get the blue thing back on his feet and have them go away once and for all (lmao no)

[jamesroach]

ive made a startling discovery about the severance theme

[consultingfujoshi]

ballad of a severed 60 year old man <3

[dykedarling]

see how the serfs work the ground….

[awanderingtortoise]

p2: layman’s vibes analysis of the severance music

p1 here Your local unprofessional is back to ramble on… musical chromaticism! sounds complicated. it is not complicated. this will be chill. bear with me through 30 seconds worth of exposition before we mention Mark Scout.

major, minor, chromatic explained

western music is composed of notes! gee, who knew. these notes are certain distances away from each other. another given.

now for western music, we measure that distance in half steps and whole steps. a half step is-- you guessed it, half of a whole step! Another way of thinking of it is the white and black piano keys. White key to black key: half step

White key to White key (if there’s a black key in between them): Whole step

two white keys directly beside each other are a half step apart.

Please forgive my chicken scrawl.

so we have that. now lets take like, 7 notes. and they are spaced with whole and half steps. we call that series of notes a scale. and for western music, you basically have two scales that define all music keys. (okay theres way more if youre gonna get into it but were not) .

Major Scale 😊🤩😍

Minor Scale 😭☹️😔

a major scale, or that cheery Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do! melody we all learn from Sound Of Music or someplace, is composed of a combination of whole and half steps. What makes it happy (major) is the order in which those whole steps are interrupted with half steps. In a major scale, the third and seventh distances, or intervals, are half steps.

ill represent Whole steps with W, and Half with H. so the major scale:

W+W+H+W+W+W+H

Visual+Audio Representation

or a virtual piano if you wanna try to diy?

that ^ composes the basis of nearly every happy tune you know. Party in the USA. Single Ladies. The Superman theme. yipee. now on the other hand, this guy:

W+H+W+W+H+W+W

Visual+Audio

is called a natural minor. the second and fifth intervals are half steps. This is Schindlers list. This is Bad Romance. Those are two very emotionally distant examples, but they are both minor.

NOW, why are the half steps never next to eachother, you may ask. like H+H? GREAT question. basically, when they made this it wasn’t super trendy yet. because that is chromaticism.

Stay with me! now when everyone started to get bored with normal scales and got real avant garde, some dudes, i dont even know who, started including more scales in their music that followed this pattern:

HHHHHHH

Visual+Audio

and that is what you call a chromatic scale. How does that make you feel? Happy, sad? Neither. Weird, probably! chroma, like color, like gradient, covering all the shades. not major, not minor, something else entirely! its honestly even easier to understand than the major and minor. You guys can just go and press a row of keys on this piano in sequence and youve already done it.

hurray! youre caught up on your first music theory class. isnt that great?

great. can we talk about the theme song now?

yes im sorry. lets listen to apply our new scale knowledge. All we need is the first ten seconds. ignore the bass/left hand chords for now. After the introduction, pay attention to just that first phrase. And let’s watch the beautiful title sequence while we’re at it!

pay attention to the first two melody notes, b and b flat! how far are they from eachother? whole step, or half step? Take a guess by ear or by sight.

if you guessed half step, damn right.

It’s there! Chromatic! We’ve proved it! let me now explain why that fucks up every basic way of categorizing the music into the usual categories of major and minor.

Major or minor melody?

musicians like tiktokers, enjoy sticking labels on every vibe and aesthetic within their grasp. if you put JUST those first 3 descending notes (B, B flat, G if you want to piano) , then tried to categorize it as a part of a major or minor scale?

you cant.

you wont get any part of W+W+H+W+W+W+H or W+H+W+W+H+W+W. you will get a worse math equation.

H+(W+H)

What is that 2nd interval….?! Why do we have Order Of Operations involved?!

the distance from the lowest note to the next is not a whole step or a half step. It’s a one and a half step. its a 1.5 step! Thats not what theyre called but thats what it is. now that does NOT work with the major or minor patterns i showed you earlier. you can look at it and instantly see. H H.

a half step beside a half step. HH. that is chromaticism.

chromaticism makes musical identity fuzzy. it makes everything a little funky, takes neat boxes out of the question. it can make listeners feel a little puzzled and a little uneasy, because we dont know where the music is going. we dont even know what it is. And if that isn’t how we all feel watching this insane show then I am harmony cobel. Here’s googles AI summary to prove my point because if you can’t get rid of that damn thing you might as well see if it supports your answer

additionally, wind the video back and now listen to the 4 left hand chords. Focus on the last 3 chords. In those four chords, the highest notes form a descending chromatic scale, high to low. B flat, A, A flat! Half steps apart.

I used the theme to explain, but the chromaticism is all over all the music. If you hear 2 notes played together that make you cringe? They’re likely chromatic: a half step apart, aka a second interval. Heard it a few times through the show and actually grimaced. Visceral discomfort. Press any white key and its adjacent black key on this piano and that’s how it sounds

now chromaticism can be categorized. It has to be, and usually when you have more context from the chords it’s pretty easy to figure out. The funny thing is, the amount of harmonic context that the Severance chords give? like everything about this show, not very normal, while pretending to be! Cuckoo nuts. Hella vague. Makes you feel like an innie waking up in an ORTBO. Or like a mark remembering he did Helena Eagan. But chord ambiguity will take another essay to explain so that’s a topic for another time, when we’ve all processed the Finale episode that’s about to tear us apart. So that’s all for now, let us await our 72 minute weekly highlight together.

[duckysprouts]

odysseus’s ultimate dream is to hand the work over to his very capable wife who was the only backbone of ithaca for the past 20 years and become a househusband who drinks wine and watches soap operas everyday

modern au where odysseus got drafted lmao

[ricky-mortis]

Starcanpulpwrecked women doodles

[hootyhoowoo]

A little 15 min doodle but first post of the year has to be Bingqiu!

[scyllas-dogs]

zeus is just gonna use it himself. lmao

[perryelornitorrinco]

Wars, in the campfire: anyone wanna share a story?

Fucking Wind: