Music question

[icepixie]

Music theorists, I have a question for you. I recently heard Dar Williams's "And a God Descended" for the first time, and I found that there was something really, really musically satisfying about the first line of the chorus, or rather the first two lines, since the melody and arrangement repeats itself. (Here's a clip of the relevant part, with a bit of the preceding verse for context.) It's not necessarily that I think it's pretty, though I do, but rather that it feels very, very right that these notes/chords follow each other in this order. Is there some objective reason why I find it so satisfying, such a particularly strong resolution of the chords involved, or something like that? Or is it pure idiosyncrasy?

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Comments

[alto2.livejournal.com]

I am so not a music theorist, but I am going to take a stab here and say that yes, there's an objective reason. I base this on the fact that, as I mentioned, I am not a music theorist and couldn't tell you what intervals I'm singing if my life depended on it, but I am a DAMN good sight-reader. I mentioned this to the music teachers at school a few years ago and was told that you can either read via intervals or harmonically, and that I probably do the latter since I'm obviously not doing the former. I don't remember what they said beyond that, but I have noticed that there are just harmonies that we expect--I can hear a symphony for the first time and know that certain chords are going to go in certain directions because no other options seem possible (and then there's Schöenberg, which is a whole other conversation).

Which means that all of this is a completely ill-informed and speculative answer to your question which probably isn't very useful at all...

[icepixie]

I was thinking there was an objective reason as well, like perhaps these are all really common major chords that are following a predictable pattern or something.

I am terrible at sight-singing (I can get in the neighborhood, but that's it), but the idea of harmonics vs. intervals makes sense. When I "sing along" with songs on the radio or whatever, I don't so much follow the melody as harmonize/sing a countermelody to it, even if it's the first time I've heard the song, so I think I've also developed some sense of which harmonies to expect in various types of music.