Chords


(Some of) The Many Applications of Forte 4-3

This little cluster of four notes can expand your vocabulary and open the door to exotic scales and chords, including both conventional jazz stuff and more far-out weirdness. I find this especially useful for finding things on piano (which I'm not very good at) but it applies to anything really.

All-Trichord Hexachords

This is a continuation from an earlier post that looked at All Interval Tetrachords. Here we look at some recipes for building their bigger siblings, the All Trichord Hexachords, on the fly and some ideas for using them.

The Wonderful Lulu Chord

The Lulu Chord is what I call a chord formed by playing a perfect fifth with a perfect fourth nestled inside it: for example, C-C#-F#-G. The outer notes, C-G are the fifth and the inner ones, C#-F#, are the fourth. This chord is non-diatonic and, as far as I know, unknown in tonal music. But it was very popular with the Second Viennese School and is a good thing to get a handle on if you're looking for some modernist vocabulary.

All-Interval Tetrachords

I was told something today that surprised me and sent me scurrying off to try it: Any non-overlapping combination of a minor third interval and a tritone interval contains all the possible intervals. Such chords are known as all-interval tetrachords (AITs). I've heard of them for years but never saw how to use them; as usual, it was just a matter of someone showing me the "right" way (for me) to look at them.

A Summary of Some Seventh Chord Vocabulary

Recently I've been returning to early 20th century piano music. The stuff I like often features elements from tonal harmony (such as triad-based chords) combined in non-functional ways. These are also easy to think about and find when improvising. This post started off being about playing seventh chords separated by a semitone but ended up summarizing the wider context of this in my own music.

The Diminished Cycle and ii-V-Is

In the previous ii-V-I post I outlined what I take to be the most standard, well-known ways to play a ii-V-I. This is a quick note of a well-known fact about them.

Some Basic ii-V-I Substitutions

I guess everybody knows the ii-V-I is the most important chord sequence in jazz. A lot of folks also know that there are about a million ways to play it that aren't, in fact, ii-V-I at all. So what's going on with that?

Whole Tone Harmony Part III

We have been thinking about dividing the 12 notes of our ordinary tuning system (12-EDO) into two distinct regions, each of which is a whole-tone scale. Each region can be thought of as a tuning in itself, 6-EDO, the equal division of an octave into six notes. In this post we consider how the Augmented Hexatonic can help us bridge the gap between these two regions.

Whole Tone Harmony Part II: Added Notes

This post is a continuation of the last one in which we look at supplementing the rather limited whole-tone harmony with one or more added notes. The resulting chords take us away from "pure whole-tone harmony" in the same way that, for example, secondary dominants and other borrowed chords take us away from "pure diatonic harmony" while simultaneously enriching it.

Whole-Tone Harmony Part I

Imagine your instrument lost exactly half of its notes, and specifically every alternate one. It might make sense to say you now had an instrument turned not in 12-TET but in 6-TET. In a society that only had such instruments, which harmonies would be available to them?