Re: Beginner song of the week No 2

"Mike Grieff" <mpgrieff@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43150e92_2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Stephen Calder wrote:
> > Mike C. wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> No, more correctly, E7(#9). It's a dominant chord, so it requires a
> >> dominant
> >> chord label. There's a huge difference between a dominant 7 chord with
> >> a #9
> >> and an EMaj chord with a #9 added.
> >>
> >> The dissonance is what makes the chord work. Dominant chords are made
to
> >> create dissonance, in order to resolve back to the tonic. The altered
> >> tension makes the resolution more pronounced. Hendrix used the E7(#9)
> >> a lot.
> >> Many people call this the "Hendrix chord".
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > Ah, thanks, now I can hear it better. It has to be used judiciously,
huh.
> >
> With all do respect, this thread seems to have left the realm of the
> beginner ... whew! That's all over my head!
>
> Mike

Allow me to clarify, then. A dominant 7th chord is a dissonant chord. When
you hear it, you don't clearly hear a resting place. Because of a dissonant
interval within the chord called a tritone, it wants to resolve to it's
tonic chord, usually the I chord. For example, G7 wants to resolve to CMaj.
The unaltered G7 chord is spelled with these notes: G, B, D, and F. Those
are the root, the Major 3rd, the 5th, and the minor 7th notes of the chord,
taken from the C Major scale.

To add more tension to this dominant 7th chord, we can keep adding 3rds on
top: G, B, D, F, A, C, E. If we consider this chord in it's original
hierarchy of 3rds, we have the root, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th. Any
of these notes above the 7th can be added for more harmonic color. The 11th
is questionable, but that's for another post.

We sometimes alter these upper tensions in order to add more dissonance to
the chord, therefore making it sound like it wants to resolve even more.
We've all heard these sounds, although we might not realize it.

Now we add a little history: when the Africans were brought into this
country as slaves, they were singing work songs and such that referred back
to their native singing. These included a lot of minor 3rds, and their sense
of tuning was different than ours. They tended to mix their African melodies
with our church songs, which turned out to be a big part of gospel music.
Anyway, there was a lot of singing minor 3rds over major chord harmony,
which was "wrong" by European classical music rules. As this music seeped
into our American culture, it became the norm to use these "blue" notes in
music, particularly in blues and jazz. Music theorists eventually explained
the purpose of these "wrong" notes by incorporating them into harmonies
created via other scales, such as the melodic minor scale, and therefore
defined "altered" tensions.

The altered tension known as #9 is otherwise the same as a minor 3rd over
the root of the chord. When mixed with the Major 3rd from the harmony, this
minor 3rd is better off considered an altered tension rather than another
3rd. Adding this note to a G7 chord would yield G, B, D, F, A#. Notice that
A# is the same note as Bb, therefore enharmonically the minor 3rd of the
chord. This is quite a dissonant chord, but it has become particularly
popular as the V7 chord in minor tunes, and in tunes using more bluesy
harmony. Rock players such as Hendrix have been using this chord for years
as the tonal center of tunes such as Purple Haze, Foxy Lady, Them Changes,
etc. It can be a difficult chord to hear, as many people confuse it with a
minor chord. One of the earliest places I remember noticing it was in "Born
To Be Wild" by Steppenwolf.

The #9 refers to the tension, not the chord. Chords that have an unaltered
tension such as 9 or 13 refer to a dominant chord, meaning that the chord
includes the minor 7th interval, therefore making the chord a dominant
chord. However, a chord with no reference to major, minor, or dominant, but
with an altered tension are not correctly named, and are ambiguous. A
seasoned player could certainly figure out what the composer or arranger had
in mind, but the chord is still incorrectly labeled.

--
Mike C.
http://mikecrutcher.com
Teaching: http://findmeateacher.com/contact.php?id=1107

"As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I
sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking
and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way."
- Jack Handey


.

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