Searching for Revancy As We Teach Chords - Erik Lynch

Seasoned music educators draw from a myriad of pedagogical modalities to connect with our students. This has been particularly apparent throughout Covid-19, as many of the traditional activities of the performance classroom (warming up, sight reading, rehearsing festival/concert repertoire) were abandoned out of sheer necessity.

In pandemic times or not, music theory is one of the most poignant vessels we can integrate in our daily journeys to help students get “down and dirty” with the music. Music teachers have a golden goose here: human beings, some of whom are our students, love music, and the music we predominantly play and listen to in our culture is grounded in tonal harmony and chords.

However, as we search for relevance with our students, we should be aware that the traditional system of tonal harmony (roman numerals, inversions symbols, etc.) can potentially ostracize students, especially those who read pop/jazz symbols. Therefore, I am proposing that we strike a balance of traditional and contemporary notational symbols when it comes to chord analysis.

Before we go any further, let us address the potential elephant in the room - not all music can be decompressed into chords. It would be frivolous to assign a roman numeral to an excerpt from George Crumb’s Makrokosmos, or to attempt to label an authentic cadence in Edgard Varese’s Ionisation. Fully acknowledging that fact, we cannot deny the importance of chords in tonal harmony. Fresh off the holiday season, I do not remember any of Michael Buble’s tunes using an inverted tone row, or one of the eightyseven versions I heard of “All I Want for Christmas” set aleatorically.

With that said, I think we can all agree that chords are at the epicenter of the structure of classical, symphonic, operatic, jazz, pop, and vernacular music in the Western world. If we anchor ourselves to this presupposition, it is important for music teachers to imagine the different ways we can label a single chord.

A quick bit of background: my training is in orchestral music, with a particular affinity for timpani, meaning that my upbringing steers me in the direction of traditional roman numerals/ chords/ progressions. However, of late, I have been a bit bored with this language, and have been pushing myself to learn more of the jazz canon, challenging myself to play out of the Real Book on piano (though I am in no danger of being picked up by the Village Vanguard Orchestra). I have found that trying to learn the jazz vocabulary, which, in many ways, is the pop vocabulary, has helped me connect on a deeper level with my students, particularly those who play non-traditional band instruments such as guitar and bass. Let’s look at a few examples:

Example 1

Example one illustrates, arguably, the most common overlap in the two styles. Either way we are dealing with the notes D-F-Ab-C (that generally serve pre-dominant functions), but our approach to spelling the chord yields different conceptual paradigms. The first is congruent with a traditional way of teaching seventh chords, focusing on the quality of the triad (D-F-Ab : diminished) and the interval between the root and the seventh (D-C: minor 7th). The jazz/pop approach asks us to imagine a minor seventh chord on D, and then to lower the fifth above the bass to attain the half-diminished quality. Both approaches have validity, with the latter being a gateway to more sophisticated jazz chords (b9, #11, b13, etc.)

Example 2

The second example is easy to understand - both are dominant seventh chords (aka major-minor), yet there is more to unpack here. The larger lens is simple yet fundamental: the dominant seventh chord is the undisputed royalty of seventh chords. It gives us a chance to unpack the word dominant in tonal harmony, (somewhat similar to saying I will have “the fish” at Red Lobster), which has three different connotations: scale degree five, a quality that is major-minor, and, finally, a general encapsulation of chords that move to the tonic. From the jazz/pop side, it is essential to point out that any note followed by a seven is assumed to be dominant in this particular vernacular. Though rudimentary, it is an essential concept for transfer.

Example 3

The final example is a bit more complex, both eliciting a triad portion of the seventh chord that is augmented, a rare quality in both the traditional canon and more modern jazz/pop music. From the tonal harmony schema, it is a great chance to discuss with our students the important distinction between theoretical possibilities and theory-in-practice! In theory (pun intended) there are four types of triads (major, minor, diminished, augmented), yet in practice the augmented is rarely, rarely utilized, and if it does appear, it is likely to do so as a non-chord tone/suspension.

When thinking about the jazz/pop notation of example three, we can reflect upon salient points from the prior two examples: we start with the classic dominant seventh chord, and then raise the E to E# to get the augmented portion of the chord. Perhaps the largest lens here is that jazz is a free, fluid, and ever evolving language.

Coda/Outro

As I evolve as an educator, I am convinced that we must fundamentally connect with our students by building relationships and searching for relevancy in their lives. As reflective practitioners in the arts we are blessed to teach an art form that undoubtedly has universal attributes. Oftentimes, however, politics, bureaucracy, and competition can corrupt the values that we know to be true to us. About two weeks after the pandemic hit, a band director of a competitive program in the United States joined a podcast to help colleagues navigate the educational landscape. This podcast posited that “now” that competitions/festivals/concerts are canceled, we can focus on the historical, contextual, and theoretical aspects of the repertoire and composer. I hope that I do not have to point out what an indictment this is of our culture.

Music theory is a modality like no other to help us motivate and connect with our students. I encourage you to experiment with both classic and modern chord labels as a small example of how to do so.

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