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?

Also, in case anyone missed it, the Small Fandoms/Rarepairs/Rarely-written Characters Promote-a-Thon and Request Line is still going on! Come share your rare fanworks and see if other people have written things you never knew you needed!

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...

[sleepingcbw.livejournal.com]

In the verse, we start out with a generic Pachelbel's Canon sequence (in C major). The bassline goes

do ("the broken glass re-")
sol ("-flects the haze it")
la ("shines like endless")
mi ("holy days")
fa ("struggling to remember")

-- and then we get derailed a bit. Traditionally, we expect another do after the fa -- but instead the bass noodles around fa for awhile (drops to mi and then goes back up).

Then, when the chorus hits, we get the do we expected (although it's... not serving the same purpose as the do we expected, but that's a conversation for another time). Since we all know this progression forwards and backwards, the delay of the bass note we expected builds tension (as does the fact that she sits on fa so much longer than on any of the notes in the progression). Also, at the beginning of the chorus we get a mini-reboot of the sequence we started with (bass: do-sol-la) although it gets rerouted towards the every-other-pop-song-ever I-V-vi-IV at the end.

Non-harmonically, at the beginning of the word "celebrating" you can hear a guitar start a slide up towards do (reached at the beginning of the chorus), which helps. And, of course, when the chorus hits we get tambourines, plus and more vocal lines and a keyboard filling in the textural spaces between the voice/bass/drums in the verse.

[asinpterodactyl.livejournal.com]

My music theory textbook had a fantastic chart inside the front cover which showed how each of the different chords likes to progress. I just attempted to reproduce the chart from memory, and while I'm sure I got a few lines wrong, the general form is accurate.



The arrows show which chords you can go to. So, for example, if you're currently on ii, you can go to V, or vii, but you can't go to iii, or straight to I, because it wouldn't sound good.

The general form that most music follows is something like this:
1. Start at I (the tonic)
2. Jump to any other chord
3. Now try to work your way back to I by following the arrows.