A NOTE FROM DICK GROVE

Welcome to our first Electronic Newsletter. We are looking forward to being in touch with you each month and providing you with interesting and informative articles on the many facets of contemporary music that we hope will make your music more enjoyable and satisfying to you.

We will also be able to announce many of the new courses and instructional packages that we have on the drawing board to you, as well as keep you updated on our clinic schedules and appearances.

As a registered subscriber to our ‘MUSIC NOTES’ Electronic Newsletter you will also be offered special discounts on some of our most popular courses as well as introductory prices for new products.

If you are not already a student of DGSWW we hope as you enjoy these mini-lessons each month that you will come to realize our teaching approaches are unique and get to the point. If you would like to see them applied to indepth courses that will take you ‘miles’, give us a call and we will make sure you are in the right course for your background and goals.

Dick Grove

HARMONIZING MELODIES

Part 1

by Dick Grove

Starting with this issue of Music Notes, I will be writing a series of articles about harmonizing melodies. This is an important aspect of the creative process, and applies to not only writing songs, but to playing introductions, endings, your understanding of how songs are harmonized, and is also a kind of applied eartraining, dealing with harmony.

Our contemporary music (from rock to jazz), can be thought of as being influenced by four basic harmonic styles. They are: modal, blues, the II- V - I styles (diatonic & chromatic), and symmetric (found in fusion music and more compositional areas of music as well as progressive jazz and rock). Each one of the articles in this series will explore one of these four areas, and hopefully can give you some practical techniques and approaches to use in your own creative endeavors.

In styles of music such as all the areas of pop music, pop ballads, country, etc., a unique approach to harmonizing a melody is connected to the restriction of the modal scales. If you are not familiar with modes, the following is a brief overview of what is meant by this term.Modes stem from the ancient Greek terms for 7-note scales, made up of different combinations of whole and half-steps. Our major scale is a mode (Ionian), and the  remaining six modal scales can be thought of as the intervals between tones found when you displace the major scale. In other words, if you take the intervals found when you move from the 2nd tone of a major scale to the 2nd tone an octave higher, you have the Dorian Mode. It works like this:

Moving from the:
1st tone of a major scale up one octave to the 1st is called Ionian:
2nd tone of a major scale up one octave to the 2nd is called Dorian:
3rd tone of a major scale up one octave to the 3rd is called Phyrgian:
4th tone of a major scale up one octave to the 4th is called Lydian:
5th tone of a major scale up one octave to the 5th is called Mixolydian:
6th tone of a major scale up one octave to the 6th is called Aeolian:
7th tone of a major scale up one octave to the 7th is called Locrian.

All these modes are therefore linked to the major scale as the source of their intervals.
We will call that major scale the relative major. The strongest harmony that defines these modal scales will be the IV – V triads of the relative major scale.

Triads contain no dissonant intervals, therefore, any triad can move to any other triad without the added problem of the preparation and resolution of out-of- scale leading tones. We will now discuss how to find the possible triads that will harmonize the melody you compose. 

There are four types of basic triads: major, minor, augmented and diminished. We will restrict our triad choices to only major and minor as they have the strongest shapes, containing a Per5th of the triad as opposed to a diminished 5th or augmented 5th.

There are six major or minor triads that can harmonize any melody note. The working procedure to use is to take the melody note that falls on a strong beat of a measure (1st and 3rd beats in 4/4, 1st beat in 3/4), and decide which of the six triads your ear prefers at that point of the song. Moving to the next strong beat, you go through the same procedure, picking a triad that not only contains the melody note, but one that you think sounds good moving from the previous chord.

This technique is called Melodic Triads. The melody note is the key to deciding on which triads are possible.

To demonstrate this technique, we will take a random melody note that you wish to harmonize. As Example #1 shows, the melody note ‘C’ can be harmonized by three major triads or by three minor triads.

We can see that the melody note functions differently with each triad. Below the notes you will find the function of each melody note to the given triad.

The choice of which of the six triads to use is an ‘ear’ decision. The ‘context’ of the music will influence your ear to a great extent, meaning that the previous chord is noticed as well as the key signature itself, from which the melody is inspired. The connotation here is that we will tend to use Melodic Triads that contain notes diatonic to the key signature more than using triads that contain chromatic tones to the key signature. In this sense, of our six triads shown in Ex.#1, the ‘Ab’ triad would be most chromatic and less used, while the ‘C’, ‘F’, and ‘Ami’ triads would be the most used.

    a. compose a 4 to 8 measure melody
    b. decide where your ‘ear’ hears the chords changing 
    c. based on the melody note at the point of each chord  change, determine the six 
        possible Melodic Triads, (3 major and 3 minor)
    d. from these six, pick one possibility you like, always going back to the beginning to  
        hear the entire chord progression.

Each triad you pick is functioning as either a IV or V triad (if major), or a II or III triad
(if minor) of the relative major scale. This is why, in the study of modal harmony, the triads are the preferred shape, and the change of triad possibility simply means that you are changing the momentary scale at that point

Next time - Blues Harmonization!

Enjoy -

Dick Grove

P.S. - Call me if you have any questions!

THE ARGUMENT FOR SOLFEG
OVER THE NUMBER SYSTEM

by Dick Grove

Every musician deals with their level of musicanship in one way or the other. The primary obstacle most encounter is to get their ability to hear and relate to music to a level where they can be instinctive musicians. Some do it by plugging along year after year until it evolves to the point where they can ‘get to their music’ in a natural, spontaneous manner. Most never make it and end up compromising their potential by settling for a less productive solution.

Those who try to study music and improve in these areas have the options of private teachers, colleges, universities, method books, CD’s, summer camps, etc. One way or the other they are working with teachers and authors who determine how to develop a person’s musicianship.

Musicianship itself is comprised of  two main categories; theory and eartraining. In the discipline of eartraining, private teaches, authors and college curricula chose various tools and approaches to help the student attain their goals. Most use the method they themselves studied, or in the case of schools, they use what has always been used. Professors with tenure balk at any changes!

When one looks at the possible methods that can be used, they find an endless controversy in music education that has to do with how we relate to, and work with, musical tones. Obviously, as a student of music tries to  improve their musicianship and experience the higher levels of musical awareness and potential, there is a need for tools and a terminology that will expedite that process and create more quality productive results.

There are apparently two ‘roads’ that are generally employed to reach these goals. If a poll was taken of music departments in universities and colleges you would probably find that the majority of approaches prefer the number system. This simply means that you relate to each degree of a scale within a tonality as 1 to  7.

Using numbers is an accepted device in the area of chord progressions as they are labeled using Roman numerals to represent the roots of chords, thus the standard IImi7 - V7 - Ima7 terminology for our most prevalent progression of chords. Whereas more traditional harmony will also take that approach and use lower case lettering for minor chord and upper case for major (iimi, vimi, IVma7), most contemporary theoriests will use upper case for all degrees of a scale from which chords are built.

Scale degree tones are different than roots of chords! Any discussion of methods to represent scale degrees should be based on why we need an approach  to specify each tone of the scale. The point of having a practical and helpful approach is to efficiently train our ear to identify the impression made of each diatonic and chromatic tone of a key center.

The term Diatonic means those tones contained within the restriction of a scale while Chromatic relates to the remaining tones not contained in a scale. Our contemporary musical styles are based on melody and harmony that in this sense is either diatonic in character or chromatic (i.e. melody and harmony that stay within the confines of major scales (or modes) or are based on altered major scales, (the most important of which is the Melodic Minor scale).
Any melodic tone or chord that contains a tone chromatic to a major scale creates a minor key center.

We can alter each tone of a major scale up or down a half-step. When a scale tone is sharped or flatted, that tone then replaces the diatonic tone and a chromatic half-step has been created. We therefore end up with a possible 35 different names of notes.

To deal with our contemporary music styles, we obviously need a reference terminology that will allow us to accommodate all of these 35 names and even more importantly, in a way that relates to the sharping or flatting of a diatonic tone of  a major scale. Anything lacking in this versatility would limit our learning capacity and at worse, neglect some important styles of music that we should be able to deal with.

I have found that the number system is used for one of two reasons: (1) it is easier to get started as the student already knows the numbers (2) the teacher or music department does not understand the limitations of using numbers as opposed to the solfeg system.

The number system will work fine if the music is diatonic and there are few alterations. This is why eartraining in the more traditional context you will find that  the number system is maintained. Realistically however, contemporary music, including more and more pop styles, are beginning to use more altered harmony. When you realize that the purpose of eartraining is to prepare the musician’s ear to hear the music they create, then there can be no other conclusion but to use an approach that will condition the ear to hear both diatonic and chromatic harmony.

Anyone deciding to stay with the number system is not really aware of chromatic harmony and how it should be used in from an eartraining standpoint. The conclusion from all of this is that when you study using the number system, as opposed to solfeg, you are not getting a complete education and your evolving level of musicianship will get ‘stuck’ in the early stages of development!

Solfeg is a European concept. Most universities in Europe use this approach, however there are two versions of solfeggio (shortened to ‘solfeg’). The more traditional is called a ‘fixed DO’. This means that the tone ‘C’ is always called ‘DO’ no matter what scale you happen to be using. It is an extremely difficult approach. It is based on the idea that all scales can be thought of as an altered ‘C’ major scale. This is true and works up to a certain point but as music has evolved in the past two hundred years it has become much more sophisticated and complex. So much so that to deal with music that changes key centers as rapidly as with every beat of a measure, the fixed DO concept creates an   impossible gauntlet of obstacles that results in a meaningless victory. What I mean is that even if you could handle a composition in fixed DO you have not accomplished the goal you are after to begin with. The eartraining technique becomes falsely more important than why you are doing the eartraining to begin with!

We do eartraining to ‘hear’ music in a new and clearer fashion, and not to be caught up in what to call a tone (as opposed to hearing the tone). The best and most productive version of solfeg is called ‘moveable DO’. This means that the first note of  the major scale of a key center is considered DO. If you are in ‘F’, then ‘F’ is DO. If you are in ‘Ab’ then ‘Ab’ is DO.

The ability to hear diatonic and chromatic tones of a key is complicated enough (35 letternames!) although when approached in a comprehensive manner the problems can be simplified a great deal. However once the ear knows and can identify the possibilities within a key center, we find that all key centers have the same relationship and sound. The result is that no matter what key you are in, the relationship of tones to each other is exactly the same, the patterns are the same, and the process of absorbing the technique is much easier.

Solfeg has its roots in the 11th century. The syllables used today come from Guido d’Arezzo’s hexachord system of solfeg. They correspond to the first syllable of each verse of the hymn to Saint John. ‘UT queant laxis REsonare fibris MIra gestorum FAmuli tuorum SOLve, polluti LAbii reatum, Sancte Iohannes. The label for the seventh degree came a bit later and was constructed as the ‘S’ of Sancte plus the ‘I’ from Iohannas = SI. In American teaching, the seventh degree is called ‘TI’ instead of ‘SI’, however in all Spanish speaking countries ‘SI’ is preferred. It is clear then that this more southern European nomenclature is deeply rooted in a tradition of centuries.

The process of identifying all the letternames with the appropriate syllables can be accomplished over a period of  time, starting with the diatonic names, and then to the chromatic. The chromatic names start with the same letter as the diatonic and therefore are all logical and easy to remember.

The most practical reason for using the moveable DO solfeg system concerns the chromatic tones of a key center. Comparing this system to the numbered system makes its case immediately. As eartraining  involves singing the correct name for a specific tone, the literal act of singing makes you sing these special ‘lyrics’. It makes more sense to sing a one-syllable name for a tone as opposed to a  2 or 3-syllable name. For example, the flatted 3rd in the key of ‘C’ would require two syllables to sing as numbers. You would sing ‘flat 3'. In solfeg, you would simply sing ME. Singing the augmented 4th in the key of ‘C’ would compare + (plus) 4 to FI. To sing the lowered 7th would be ‘flat seventh’ or TE.

So in tempo or rapid moving rhythms you actually cannot sing multi-syllables  using the number system! Try it! I rest my case!

Below you will find a table of all of the diatonic and chromatic solfeg names, and their equivalents relative to the key of ‘C’.

By substituting any other scale, you of course could arrive at all the syllables in all keys. To aid you in this here is a link to take you to a page for you to print out. This page is a form that allows you to write out the names of all the solfeg names in any key you wish. Just keep printing copies of the form to get as many as you would like to do.

ASSIGNMENT

If you are interested in working with solfeg, there are two things you can do. The first is to learn the above table by writing it out in different keys. If you enroll in the ‘See It - Hear It / Hear It - Play It’ Part 1 Musicianship course you will then learn to apply solfeg to real music, from a melodic and harmonic standpoint.

To aid you in this first step,  just  use this link: to download a Solfeg Form that you can then fill out to have the  relationship of the solfeg syllables in any key you wish. The form is based on the above table but it designed so that, starting with the major scale of each key,  you can write in the lettername of each of the solfeg syllables.

Special thanks to George Abufhele of ProJazz, Chile for the history of solfeg info!