Last week I said that music is a game, with rules, and that we need to know what the basic rules are before we can start breaking them!
Today we'll to talk about the objective of the game. But first, how about some knock-knock jokes! Kids love 'em. I know I did.
"Knock knock!"
[This is how all knock-knock jokes begin.]
"Who's there?"
[The person being told the joke says this line. If they don't know this already, if they stand there staring at you, you must explain the concept of knock-knock jokes to them first. It's quite embarrassing but necessary.]
"Ice Cream Soda!"
"Ice Cream Soda who?
[Of course, if they had said something else, like Boo, you would say Boo who?]
Skip below for more juvenile humor and for some musical examples from Rodgers and Hammerstein, Beethoven, Anton Webern, and a dramatic groundhog.
You don't have to be an experienced knock-knock joke teller, or even a kid, to know that this joke is incomplete. It's not funny. We're all teed up now for the punch line. And since I'm not going to tell it to you, you may feel a bit frustrated now, or even pissed off at me for starting this exercise and wasting your time. A joke that doesn't have a proper ending sucks.
But how do you know what the ending of a joke is? It's cultural, just like the whole script for a knock-knock joke. You grow up learning what the format for jokes are. Knock-knock jokes are handy because the format is so very clear and interactive for the two parties. No wonder kids love them. Not having a punch line breaks the rules and confuses people.
The Cadence
Everybody knows what a cadence is. They just may not have ever heard the term explained to them. I grew up in a musical family, but I never heard the phrase used until I was in college. A cadence is the period on the end of a musical sentence. If I played a melody for you that didn't have a cadence on the end, you would be left in just as much suspense as if I left you standing there, asking, "Ice Cream Soda who?"
There are a number of different types of cadences with different functions, but the important one for us, today, is the perfect cadence, a dominant chord followed by a tonic chord.
For example, if we are playing in C major, the tonic chord (as we remember from our diary, The Physics of Music) is C major itself, and the dominant chord of C is G major. When you want to end a piece of music in C major, you will hear a G major chord followed by C major. The G major sets you up. It's the "Ice Cream Soda who?" And the final C major is "Ice Cream Soda people can here me!" Almost every song you know ends with this kind of cadence; the same is true of most classical music.
Roman Numeral Notation
If we are in C major, going from G to C is a cadence. But it's different in every key. To make our discussion of chords less dependent on our putting everything in terms of C major, we use Roman numberals to describe chords. The tonic then is always I; the dominant chord then is always V. Major chords are in upper case, minor chords in lower case. To describe a cadence in any major key, we can write it as V - I.
We describe any simple three note chord by naming the position of its root and the notes a third and fifth above it. Using roman numerals, I can put those chords into perspective to their relationship to the home key. For instance, if we are playing a song in C major, and we have to use an E minor chord (the notes E, G and B), we can describe the E minor chord as iii because E is the third note of the C major scale. The home key chord is always I or i.
I don't know if we will have much use for roman numeral notation in future diaries or not. I know I wish I had had this during our Brahms diary to help explain the Circle of Fifths. Going down by fifths repeatedly, in roman numerals, looks something like this: i - iv - vii - iii - vi... However, as somebody who plays music for my own entertainment, I've never had any use for it. My brother, who has been a professional musician all his life, has never had a use for it. When he needs to tell somebody to play an E minor chord, he just says "E minor." E minor instantly tells a guitarist where to put his fingers, while "Give me a roman numeral three" is more open to debate. So don't sweat over this. It just makes it easier to describe cadences and the chord progressions that lead to cadences.
You can't have "normal" music without cadences, and by normal, I mean tonal music, and that excludes some of the more radical experiments of the twentieth century, some we will get to eventually. "Normal" music is based on the idea of a central home note, the key, and chords that lead away and eventually back to it.
What does it sound like if you don't get the punch line chord?
Like this:
Let's analyze a simple song, "I'm in love with a wonderful guy" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Starting at 1:14. And, oh, by the way, I have had a huge crush on Mitzi Gaynor because of this film. I'll put the chords in parentheses, and I'm cheating a little to keep it simple.
(I) I'm as corny as Kansas in August
(ii) I'm as normal as (V) blueberry pie
(I) No more a smart girl (IV) with no little heart
(I) I have found me a wonderful guy! (ii) (V)
Now notice, there's a V chord at the end of that last verse. (How do I know these things? I have a guitar in my lap. I'm no musical genius). That's one way you know the song isn't over. Gotta have a V-I cadence to end the song! Sure enough, when you get to the end (about 3:12), she sings, "I'm in love with a wonderful guy!" and it is a cadence, V to I, very final, and you know it's the end, even without the rimshot on the drums.
It's like a game. Like some maze on a Denny's placemat. We start at an I, we go through a number of harmonic twists and turns and backtracks, and when we find it, the exit always has a V-I. There are probably quite a few V-Is before we get there, but the exit is guaranteed to have one. That is, when we follow the usual rules of music.
All music ends with V-I; and it almost always begins with I, as well, although there are notable exceptions, and it takes some clever footwork to pull it off gracefully. My favorite example is the Finale from Beethoven's String Quartet #13 in B flat major. Pay attention to how it begins:
This starts, very unusually, on VI (which in this case is G flat major). Very sneaky. Our instincts lead us to expect the rest of it to be in G flat, but Beethoven sets us straight right away. From VI we go to ii to V and finally to I. And that V to I gives us our audible cue that we've been scammed. Prestidigitation! It's really in B flat major! This little running musical joke is the theme of the whole movement. Such a clever guy, Beethoven was. Geniuses make their own rules, eh? But he didn't really break any rules here -- he just stretched them.
Here's an example of some 20th century music that doesn't follow the normal rules at all, but substitutes its own. We'll talk more about atonal music in other diaries. I introduce it here to show you that there's more than one way to do things. In the maze, above, we understood the rules and how to navigate it. When you don't have anymore the basic rules of chord relationships and cadences to use as guides, the game changes drastically.
Six bagatelles for String Quartet by Anton Webern
The twentieth century and even the late nineteenth century saw increased experimentation that stretched and warped the rules of harmony. That is why it's necessary to understand the "normal" rules of music -- so that when we begin to test the edges of those rules, when we feel lost in the maze without our usual guideposts, we can back up, take a breath, and maybe go, "Oh, I get it now."
If you don't get Webern, don't sweat it. I understand the music well enough to know atonal 12-tone music isn't my favorite kind of experiment. I deliberately threw you in the deep end of the pool just for the sake of the contrast.
Next Week: I'm not sure yet, but there will probably be more chords. And we might hear the Mahler 9th Symphony first movement.