Music Theory

Anecdote:
When I was a student, we had an old piano in our student house. One day I was playing through a rather chromatic Elgar part song, and discovered with some annoyance that the B flat below middle C had stopped sounding. Later in the piece I was briefly even more annoyed to discover that the A sharp in that register was also out of action. Then I remembered that actually they’re the same key on the piano.

Singers and string players are used to the idea that enharmonic ‘equivalents’ aren’t necessarily the same notes, but players of keyed instruments don’t always grasp this in the same way. I have been somewhat bemused to find myself – a first-study pianist – as pedantic as I am over chromatic spellings, but I really do experience B flats as having different meanings from A sharps, even on the piano.

It wasn’t until I did an interview about synaesthesia for Radio 4 back in May 2008 that I really grasped what’s going on here.

When I was playing about with the ideas that produced my posts on Harmonic Charge and Harmonic Charge and Voicing, I noticed something about the words I was using to describe parameters of musical energy:

High-low (tessitura)
Bright-soft (harmonic quality)
Tight-loose (voicing)

Do you see what I mean? All the high-energy words have an I sound in them, while the low-energy words are built around the letter O.

Now think about how those vowels sit in the mouth when we sing them.

In this post I suggested a model to think about harmonic charge – the degree and quality of a chord’s inherent energy. This is useful for making arrangement decisions at the primary harmony/big-picture planning stage. It can also help with concrete questions of voicing.

I've been thinking quite a lot recently about what music theorists call harmonic charge – that is, the amount of inherent oomph a chord has. Quite clearly some chords are more surprising, more jangly, have more of a frisson of energy than others. Having some way to diagnose the relative level of harmonic charge is useful for making both arrangement decisions and performance decisions.