Applied
Putting It Together
Putting it together is the work of using the whole course at once: a fixed order of questions for taking a piece of music apart, three worked examples of that order in use, and the same questions turned round to face the other way — to write music, to play music that was never written down, and to carry theory onto a stage.
Advanced · 5 sections
A Repeatable Procedure
Play the first: eight bars, one chord to a bar, with a tune above them. Play the second: the same eight bars with nothing but the lowest note of each. Play the third: the same eight bars with the chords and no tune. Play all three in order, then say how many bars go by before the music first sounds as though it has come to a stop — and whether it has stopped for good or only for a moment.
- What the eight bars contain
- One chord to a bar: , , , , then , , , . In C major that is , , , , then , , , . The first four bars stop on the chord of the fifth degree and the last four arrive on the first.
- What the tune does above them
- One note to a bar: , , , , then , , , . Every one of the eight is a note of the chord underneath it, and the last two are the seventh degree of the key followed by the first — a Minor Second upward.
- What the second and third clips leave out
- The second clip is the lowest note of each bar and nothing else: , , , , , , , . The third clip is the first three notes of each bar — the bass and the two inner notes — with the tune removed. Between them they are the first clip taken apart, which is what the first two steps of the table ask you to do by ear.
| Step | The question to ask | Where you learned to answer it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Find the pulse and the meter | How fast is the pulse, and how many beats fall in a bar before the pattern of strong and weak begins again? | Chapter 3, the beat · Chapter 15, the time signature |
| 2. Find the key | Which note sounds like home when the music stops, and which seven note names keep coming back? | Chapter 8, the key |
| 3. Label the chords with numerals | Which degree of that key is each chord built on, and what quality is it? | Chapter 11, the roman numeral |
| 4. Mark the chords from outside the key, and their door | Does any chord use a note the key does not supply — and did it come in as a dominant aimed elsewhere, as a chord borrowed from the parallel minor, or as the start of a new key? | Chapter 14, the chromatic chord |
| 5. Mark the stopping points and count the bars between them | Where does a phrase end, which of the four endings is it, and how many bars long is each phrase? | Chapter 11, the cadence · Chapter 13, the phrase |
| 6. Letter the sections | Which stretches of music repeat, which contrast, and in what order do they run? | Chapter 16, formal analysis |
| 7. Read the melody against the chords | Is each melody note in the chord beneath it — and if it is not, how did the line arrive at it and how does it leave? | Chapter 13, the chord tone · Chapter 12, the non-chord tone |
| 8. Note the register, the texture and the doubling | Which band of the pitch range does each part sit in, how many independent lines are there, and which note is being sounded twice? | Chapter 18, register · texture · doubling |
Song analysis is the work of listening to a piece of music and writing down what it is made of: its pulse and its meter, its key, the degree of that key each chord is built on, the chords that come from outside it, where its phrases stop and how far apart those stops are, how its sections are ordered, how its melody sits against its harmony, and where in the pitch range each part has been put.
The eight rows of the table are that job in the order it is worth doing. Nothing about the music requires the order — you can notice anything at any moment — but each answer supplies what the next question needs. A numeral is a number in a key, so step 3 depends on step 2. A chord is foreign only with respect to a set of native notes, so step 4 depends on step 3. A section is a stretch bounded by stopping points, so step 6 depends on step 5. Work in this order and you will rarely have to go back; work in any other and you will.
One caution about a word. Chapter 14 taught harmonic analysis — reading a passage as a succession of numbered chords and accounting for every note outside the key. That is steps 3 and 4 of the eight above, and it is the part of the job that has a written notation and a settled vocabulary. It is not another name for what this section describes, and treating it as one is the commonest way an analysis comes out useless: a page of correct numerals that says nothing about why the music is eight bars long, why the second half sounds like an answer, or why the tune is up where it is.
The practical value of a fixed procedure is that it converts a vague instruction — work out what is going on — into eight questions, each of which has an answer or a plain admission that there is none. A step with no answer is answered in one word and left behind. Most popular songs have nothing at all at step 4, and saying so is a finding rather than a failure; a great many have almost nothing at step 5, which is exactly what chapter 17 meant by a chord loop. The procedure is worth as much for what it rules out as for what it finds.
Fact
A key is settled by the notes that are present, not by the chord a passage begins on. The eight bars above use A, B, C, D, E, F and G and no accidental anywhere, which is the note collection of exactly one major key, C major — and they both begin and end on . Where the two tests disagree, the second is the weaker one: a great many pieces in C major open on or , and a piece that opens on may be in F major and simply starting on its fifth degree.
Convention
An analysis is written in a standard layout so that another reader can check it. Roman numerals go under the staff or under the chord symbols, one per chord, with the key named once at the left as "C:" and again wherever it changes. A modulation is marked with a bracket carrying two readings of the pivot chord, its old numeral above its new one. Section letters — A, B, A′ — go above the top staff at the bar the section begins. None of this is required by the music; it is required by the next person to read the page.
Tendency
The eight steps take very unequal amounts of time, and which ones are expensive tells you what kind of music you are looking at. In a pop record steps 1, 2, 3 and 6 are usually done inside ten minutes and steps 4 and 5 are empty. In a nineteenth-century art song step 4 can take longer than all the others together. Noticing which steps were hard is itself a description of the piece.
Applies to: the Western repertoire this course covers — common-practice art music and the popular music descended from it. Music built on modes, on rhythmic cycles or on a fixed melodic framework rather than on functional harmony will empty out steps 3 and 4 entirely and need questions this table does not ask, which is the limit chapter 17 stated outright
You already know this
- The roman numeral from Chapter 11 — a chord named by the degree of the key it is built on rather than by its letter, so that the same label describes the same move in every key — which is what step 3 of the table writes down
- Formal analysis from Chapter 16 — listening for where one stretch of music ends and the next begins, and giving each stretch a letter so that repetition and contrast can be seen at a glance — which is step 6, and which depends on the stopping points step 5 has already marked
- The key from Chapter 8 — a home note and the seven notes that surround it, which together decide what counts as inside and what counts as outside — because every one of steps 3 to 7 is a question asked relative to it
In real music
- Canon in D, Johann Pachelbel — the cellos play the same eight notes over and over from the first bar to the last, one to a bar, and every violin part above them is fitted to those eight. Play the first thirty seconds and write the eight notes down. You will have finished steps 1, 2 and most of 3 before the second violin has entered
See also
Choose a recording under three minutes long that you have heard many times. Write the numbers 1 to 8 down the left of a sheet of paper and answer the eight questions in the table in that order, playing the recording as many times as you need. Give yourself one line per answer and write "none" wherever there is nothing to say. When you reach the bottom, read the eight lines back as a paragraph and see whether it describes the record you know.
Check 1
The eight bars once more. Steps 1, 2 and 3 have already been done for this passage: the pulse falls in fours, the key is C major, and every chord has been given its numeral. Predict which question the procedure asks next.
Analysing a Song
Play all three. Each is a short fragment from a different kind of music, written out here exactly as it would be played, one chord to a bar with a tune on top. Play them in the order they are given and then again in the reverse order, and for each one ask two things: how many bars go by before anything comes back, and whether the fragment sounds finished when it stops.
- What fragment one plays
- Eight bars, one chord to a bar: , , , , and then the same four again. The tune above them is , , , , , , , — every note of it a note of the chord beneath it, and every change of note a step except the return to in bar 5 and the drop to at the end.
- What fragment two plays
- , then , then , then . The third chord is D♭, F, A♭ and C♭, and its C♭ is the same key as B: the clip plays it as , at the same pitch as the of the it stands in for, with above it. Those two notes are a Tritone apart, and they are the pair that pulls. Going into the falls a half step to and the does not move at all.
- What fragment three plays
- , , , , then , , , . Its first two bars and its fifth and sixth are identical, note for note. The of bar 6 is the hinge: it is in C major and the chord on the second degree of G major, and the that follows it — D, F♯, A and C — is the dominant seventh of G. The tune ends , , , which is the new key’s sixth degree, its leading tone and its home note.
| Fragment | Step | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| One — pop | 1. Pulse and meter | Four beats to a bar, one chord to a bar, eight bars in all |
| One — pop | 2. Key | C major. The eight bars use A, B, C, D, E, F and G and nothing else |
| One — pop | 3. Numerals | , and then the same four again |
| One — pop | 5. Stopping points | None. The pattern hands straight back from to , and the one move it never makes is to — which is what Chapter 17 called loop-based harmony |
| One — pop | 6. Sections | A four-bar unit played twice. A verse and a chorus built on this are told apart by what enters above the chords, not by the chords, because the chords are the same |
| One — pop | 7. Melody against the chords | Every note is a note of its chord; there is nothing between them to account for |
| Two — jazz | 2. Key | C major, arrived at in the fourth bar and never left, although two of the four chords contain notes from outside it |
| Two — jazz | 3. Function | is the dominant of D minor; is the chord on the second degree; stands where the dominant of C should be; is home |
| Two — jazz | 4. Chords from outside the key | Two. is a secondary dominant — its C♯ is the leading tone of D minor, the chord it points at. is a tritone substitution: it replaces and keeps that chord’s third and seventh, and |
| Two — jazz | 7. Voice leading | The of the third chord stays put and becomes the seventh of ; the above it falls a Minor Second to . The bass falls a half step, from D♭ to C, instead of a fifth |
| Three — classical | 4. Chords from outside the key | One, and it is a door rather than a colour: the of bar 7 has an F♯, and the key has changed. Everything from the pivot onward is numbered in G major |
| Three — classical | 5. Stopping points | Two, four bars apart. Bar 4 stops on without arriving — a half cadence. Bar 8 arrives, to , which is an authentic cadence in the new key |
| Three — classical | 6. Form | A period: a four-bar antecedent that stops open and a four-bar consequent that closes. The two halves share their first two bars, which makes it a parallel period |
| Three — classical | 8. Register and texture | One bass note, two inner notes and a tune, in that order from the bottom, in every bar of all three fragments — one line carrying the tune and the rest supporting it, which is homophony |
A worked analysis is one complete pass of a fixed procedure over one short piece of music, written out step by step, so that every label can be checked against the sound it claims to describe.
Three fragments were chosen because the differences between them are differences in which steps have answers, not in the difficulty of any step. The pop fragment has no answer at step 5 at all: the four chords hand back to their own first chord and the pattern could run for three minutes without ever closing, so the work that a cadence does elsewhere is done here by what enters and leaves above the harmony. The jazz fragment has two answers at step 4 in four bars — a dominant aimed at a chord that is not home, and a dominant replaced by the one a tritone away — and no form to speak of, because four bars is not a form. The classical fragment has the fullest step 5 and step 6 of the three and a step 4 that is a change of key rather than a splash of colour.
The thing to take from the three together is that a chord from outside the key is not one thing. Fragment two’s is a colour: it borrows the leading tone of the chord it points at, leans on it for one bar and gives it back. Fragment two’s is a substitution: it does the job of a chord that is not there, and keeps the two notes that made that chord work. Fragment three’s is a door: nothing after it belongs to C major any more, and the numerals change. Step 4 of the procedure asks for the door, not just the note, because the note alone tells you almost nothing.
Two habits make an analysis worth writing down. The first is to date every claim to a clip or a bar number, so that a reader can go and check it — every row of the table above names a bar or a note. The second is to write down what you could not decide. Two competent analysts will place the pivot in fragment three differently: bar 6 is the obvious choice because belongs to both keys, but a reader who hears the change only when the F♯ arrives will put it in bar 7 and be no less right. An analysis that admits that is more useful than one that hides it.
Convention
Where a passage changes key, everything after the pivot is numbered in the new key rather than continuing in the old one. Fragment three’s last two bars are written then — not as a chord with an accidental in C major — and the pivot chord carries both readings stacked, above and the second degree of G below. The alternative, numbering the whole passage in its opening key, is used in some analytical traditions and makes the same music look like a sequence of foreign chords rather than a journey.
Tendency
Where a fragment has no cadence, look at what is entering and leaving rather than at the chords. A loop that never closes gives the ear no harmonic reason to expect anything, so the structure of the music is carried entirely by texture, register and arrangement — the questions of step 8 rather than step 5. Reading such a track for its harmony alone will always produce the finding that nothing happens.
Applies to: Anglo-American popular music since roughly 1990 and the dance and hip-hop production that shares its methods. Popular song before about 1965, and the whole jazz standard repertoire, cadence at the end of nearly every phrase and reward exactly the opposite emphasis
Constraint
A label has to be checkable against the sound. Naming a chord means being able to spell its notes and point to where they are in the clip; naming a cadence means being able to say which two chords it consists of and which bar they fall in; naming a section boundary means being able to say which bar it falls on. A term used without that backing — "modal", "jazzy", "a bit chromatic" — is a description of an impression rather than an analysis, and it cannot be argued with, which is the same as saying it cannot be useful.
Applies to: written analysis meant to be read by somebody else. Listening privately for pleasure needs none of this, and an impression is often the true beginning of an analysis — it simply is not the end of one
You already know this
- The tritone substitution from Chapter 17 — a dominant chord replaced by the dominant a tritone away, which contains the same third and seventh and therefore pulls in the same direction — which is the third chord of fragment two and the reason its bass falls a half step rather than a fifth
- Modulation from Chapter 14 — a change of key rather than a visit to a foreign chord, hinged on a chord that belongs to both keys at once — which is what fragment three does in its sixth bar and the reason its last two chords are numbered in G rather than in C
- Loop-based harmony from Chapter 17 — a short chord pattern repeated with nothing inside it marking an end — which is why fragment one has nothing at all to say at step 5 of the procedure and why that silence is a finding rather than an oversight
In real music
- Let It Be, The Beatles — the verse opens on exactly fragment one — C, G, A minor, F — and then, in its second half, does the one thing fragment one never does: C, G, F, C, closing on the home chord. Play the verse twice and mark the bar where the harmony stops. Then play fragment one twice and try to mark the same bar; there is nothing there to mark, and what tells you the loop has come round is the tambourine and the drums
- Fly Me to the Moon, Bart Howard — the first four bars fall by fifths — A minor seventh, D minor seventh, G seventh, C major seventh — so the last three of them are the approach and arrival that fragment two substitutes into. Listen to the bass on those four changes and then to fragment two, where the bass slides down a half step instead of leaping down a fifth
- Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140, Johann Sebastian Bach — the closing chorale, the last two minutes. It is a chain of four-bar phrases, each of which stops audibly, and about half of those stops are in a key other than the one it started in. Take any two adjacent phrases and run steps 5 and 4 of the procedure on them in that order
Take three recordings you like from three different kinds of music and find eight bars of each that you can hum from memory. Run the eight steps on all three, on one sheet of paper with three columns, so that each step is a row you can read across. Then look at the rows rather than the columns and write one sentence about the step where the three differ most. That sentence is what those three kinds of music actually disagree about.
Find the key from the chords you wrote down, then read them as numerals
Check 1
Fragment one, then fragment two, then the second half of fragment three, with a silence between them. Exactly one of them uses only the seven notes of C major from its first bar to its last. Decide which.
Composing
Play the first: three notes and then a silence, one bar long. Play the second: four bars, the first of which is that same bar. Play the third: eight bars, the first four of which are that same four. Play them in order and listen for the place in the third clip where it stops being a repeat of the second — and for what the last note of each half does to the feeling that something is over.
- The motif, and what is done to it
- The first clip is , , and then a rest of the same length. The second clip plays it, then plays it again from — , , — and then again from . That is the same shape started one scale step higher each time, which Chapter 13 called a sequence.
- What the two halves do differently
- Both halves begin , , , rest, , , , rest — two bars that are identical. The first half then climbs to and holds it for a whole bar. The second half turns round instead, , , , and holds for a whole bar. is the second degree of C major and is the first, which is the whole difference between a half that asks and a half that answers.
| Decision | What you are choosing | Where you learned to choose it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Meter and tempo | How many beats in a bar, and how fast they go. Everything else is measured in bars, so this is the unit before it is a decision | Chapter 3, tempo · Chapter 15, the time signature |
| 2. Key | Which note is home. On an instrument this is also a decision about which notes are easy, and for a singer it is a decision about where the tune will sit in the voice | Chapter 8, choosing a key |
| 3. Harmony: a loop or a progression that closes | Whether the chords will come round without ever settling, or set out and arrive. This one choice decides more about the finished piece than any other on the list | Chapter 11, the cadence · Chapter 17, loop-based harmony |
| 4. A motif | A short figure — three or four notes with a shape of its own — that is worth hearing more than once | Chapter 13, the motif |
| 5. Development | What to do to the motif the second, third and fourth times: start it a step higher, turn it upside down, stretch it, shorten it, or put it on a different beat | Chapter 13, motif and development |
| 6. A phrase pair | Two phrases, the first stopping open and the second closing, usually four bars each and usually beginning the same way | Chapter 13, the phrase · Chapter 11, the half cadence |
| 7. The form | How many sections, in what order, and which of them come back. Two periods make a section; sections make the shape of the piece | Chapter 16, from phrase to section · verse-chorus form |
| 8. The arrangement | Which band of the pitch range each part sits in, how many independent lines there are, and what gets doubled. Written last, because there has to be something to place | Chapter 18, register · texture · doubling |
Composition is the making of a piece of music by decision rather than by performance: choosing its meter and key, its harmony, its melodic material, the shape of its phrases and the order of its sections, and fixing those choices so that the piece is the same the next time it is played.
Songwriting is a kind of composition rather than a different activity — the same decisions, taken for a song, usually with words arriving somewhere in the middle of them and usually without notation. The distinction people are reaching for when they use the two words differently is about how the result is stored, not about what was done: a composer writes the decisions down and a songwriter often keeps them in a recording. Everything in the table applies to both.
The order in the table is not the order of importance and it is certainly not the order of inspiration. Motifs arrive first far more often than meters do, and there is nothing wrong with starting at row 4 and working outward. What the order is good for is finishing: it is a list of the decisions a piece needs to have had taken, and a piece that stalls is almost always a piece with an unmade decision somewhere in rows 3, 6 or 7. The commonest of all is row 6 — plenty of material and no phrase that ends.
Development is the row that separates a piece from a pile of ideas, and it is the cheapest of the eight. The four bars in the second clip above contain one idea, three notes long, played three times: once as it is, once a step higher, once a step higher again. Nothing has been invented after the first bar. That is not a trick for beginners — it is what the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony does for its whole length — and the reason it works is that a listener who has heard a figure twice will follow it anywhere. New material asks for attention; developed material has it already.
Fact
The eight bars of the third clip contain twenty struck notes, six rests and six steps of held sound — the last note of each half carrying on through the three steps that follow it — and every one of the twenty is drawn from five pitches: , , , and . There is no pitch in the second four bars that is not already in the first four, and exactly one pitch in the first four — — that is not already in the first two. The material is one three-note figure, and everything else is placement.
Convention
A phrase pair of this kind is called a period, its first half an antecedent and its second a consequent, and the pair is called parallel when the two halves begin alike and contrasting when they do not. The terms come from classical theory and the eight-bar, four-plus-four shape is a classroom norm rather than a law: phrase pairs of six and six, of five and seven, and of four and six are all common, and popular song is full of pairs whose second half is longer than its first.
Tendency
The second half of a phrase pair begins the same way as the first and differs only near its end. Repeating the opening makes the pair read as one idea stated twice rather than as two unrelated ideas, and it puts all of the listener’s attention on the one place where something has changed — which is exactly where the composer wants it, because that is where the pair either closes or does not.
Applies to: Western art music of the classical period and the popular song that inherited its phrase structure, where the parallel period is the default and a contrasting one is the marked choice. Music built on continuous variation, on modal improvisation or on a repeating loop has no such expectation to work with
You already know this
- The motif from Chapter 13 — a figure of a few notes short enough to be recognised whenever it comes back, and the techniques for bringing it back changed rather than merely repeated — which is the only material any of the three clips above is made of
- The ladder from Chapter 16 — motif, phrase, period, section — where each rung is two or four of the rung below it, which is what turns row 4 of the table into row 7 without anything new having to be invented on the way
- The phrase pair from Chapter 13 — a first phrase that ends inconclusively and a second, usually beginning the same way, that ends on the tonic — which is what makes eight bars sound like one sentence rather than two half ones
In real music
- Symphony No. 9, fourth movement, Ludwig van Beethoven — the tune everybody knows, first heard on cellos and basses alone. It is eight bars in two halves; the halves begin identically and part company only in their last bar, and the first half stops on a note that is plainly not home while the second arrives. Sing it and stop after four bars to hear how unfinished four bars are
- Eine kleine Nachtmusik, first movement, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — the opening ten seconds are a phrase pair built from one rising figure. The figure is played, answered, and then played again from a different note; nothing new is introduced. Count the bars until the first point at which the music could plausibly stop
See also
Write eight bars on your instrument, in this order and no other. Choose a meter and a tempo and clap four bars of it. Choose a key. Choose four chords and decide before you play them whether the fourth hands back to the first or arrives at it. Now write three or four notes that fit the first chord and play them twice to be sure you can remember them. Fill bars two and three by playing that figure again from a higher note each time. Make bar four stop on a note that is not the home note. Then write four more bars that begin exactly like the first two and end on the home note. Play the eight bars to somebody and ask them where they thought it was going to stop.
Check 1
The eight bars again, cut one note short: the last note of the second half has been removed, so the clip stops on the note before it. Predict the note the second half lands on.
Improvising
Play the first: four chords, one to a bar, which hand back to the first when they end. Play the second: the same four chords, each struck twice, with one note above each strike. Play the third: the same four chords again, each struck four times, with one note above each strike. Play the second and the third back to back and say which of them keeps landing on notes that are already sounding underneath, and which of them passes through notes that are not.
- The loop, and why it is voiced this way
- , , , . Each is played with three notes — root, third and seventh — and its fifth left out: , , ; , , ; , , ; , , . The fifth is the note a chord can most afford to lose, and dropping it leaves room for a note of the line on top without making a five-note handful.
- The second clip: eight notes, all of them in their chord
- and over ; and over ; and over ; and over . Check any of them against the three notes beneath it and against the fifth that was left out, and it is there. Nothing in this clip can sound wrong, and only one of its seven moves — to , across the change from to — is a step; every other one is a leap or a repeated note.
- The third clip: sixteen notes, six of which are not in their chord
- Over : , , , — and are not in the chord. Over : , , , — and are not. Over : , , , — is not. Over : , , , — is not. Every one of the six is in the chord’s own scale and every one of them is a step away from a note that is in the chord.
| Strategy | What you play | When it is the right one | Where you learned it | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chord tones on the strong beats | Land on a note of the chord whenever the beat is strong, whatever you do in between | Always, and exclusively when the chords are moving fast or when you do not know the tune. It is the strategy that cannot produce a wrong note | Chapter 13, the chord tone | |
| Scale tones between them | Fill the gaps with notes from the scale that fits the chord — the chord’s own seven notes, not the key’s | When the line needs to move by step rather than leap, which is most of the time. It is what turns the first strategy from an exercise into a melody | Chapter 17, chord-scale theory · Chapter 12, the non-chord tone | |
| Aim at the next chord’s third | Choose your note for the first beat of the next chord before you get there, and make it that chord’s third | At every chord change, and above all where the harmony is moving somewhere — the third is the note that says which chord has arrived, because it is the note that makes it major or minor | Chapter 12, voice leading · Chapter 11, harmonic function | |
| Five notes and nothing else | Play only the notes of the pentatonic scale of the key, ignoring the chord changes entirely | Over a loop that stays in one key, and when the aim is rhythm and shape rather than harmony. It removes every note that can clash, and with it most of the harmonic interest | Chapter 7, the pentatonic scale |
Improvisation is the composing of music in the moment of performing it: choosing the notes while playing rather than in advance, inside a framework — a chord sequence, a scale, a rhythmic cycle, a form — that has been agreed beforehand and is not itself being invented.
The framework is the part beginners underestimate. Nothing about improvising is free in the sense of unconstrained: a jazz musician taking a chorus knows the number of bars, the chord in every one of them, the key, the tempo and the point at which the chorus hands back, and is choosing notes inside all of that. What the three strategies in the table give you is a way of using those constraints instead of fighting them. The chords are not an obstacle to the line; they are the only reason any note sounds like a choice rather than an accident.
The first strategy is a floor rather than a goal. Play only chord tones and nothing will ever sound wrong, which is worth a great deal when a tune is moving at two chords a bar and you are reading the chart for the first time — but a line made only of chord tones leaps everywhere and sounds like an exercise, which is precisely what the second clip above sounds like. The second strategy fixes it by supplying the notes between: the chord’s own scale, which is chapter 17’s pairing of a chord with a scale, and the notes of it that are not in the chord are chapter 12’s non-chord tones, arrived at by step and left by step.
The third strategy is the one that separates a player following the chords from a player playing the changes. Decide, before you get there, what note you are going to be on when the next chord starts, and make it that chord’s third. A line that does this sounds like it knew where it was going, because it did — and the reason the third is the note to aim at rather than the root is that the root is the note the bass player is already on, while the third is the note that announces what kind of chord has arrived.
Fact
Each of the four chords in the loop above pairs with a seven-note scale, and three of the four scales differ from C major. takes C Ionian, which is C major. takes D Dorian and takes G Mixolydian, and both of those contain exactly the seven notes of C major started from a different degree. takes A Mixolydian — A, B, C♯, D, E, F♯, G — which shares five notes with C major and adds two it does not have.
Constraint
A note that is not in the chord has to be approached by step and left by step, and it must not fall on the beat the chord changes on. A passing tone reached by a leap sounds like a mistake rather than like a passing tone, because the ear has nothing to relate it to; one that arrives exactly as the chord changes sounds like the wrong chord rather than like an inflection of the right one. The first note of each chord is the one place a line has no room to be approximate.
Applies to: lines played over moving functional harmony — jazz, blues, standards, and soloing over a changing chord sequence in popular music. Modal playing over one chord held for sixteen bars has no changes to land on and treats every note of the mode as available; free improvisation sets the constraint aside entirely
Tendency
Players learn a vocabulary of short figures and reuse them, transposed to fit whatever chord has arrived, rather than inventing every note. A recognisable style is largely a particular set of those figures and a particular set of habits about where to put them, which is why a player is identifiable after four bars and why transcribing somebody else’s solo is the standard way of learning.
Applies to: jazz and blues practice, where the vocabulary is explicitly taught and transcription is the normal method of study. Indian classical improvisation and Middle Eastern maqam practice have vocabularies far larger and far more strictly governed, and free improvisation is defined by the attempt to do without one
You already know this
- Chord-scale theory from Chapter 17 — pairing each chord with the scale that contains its notes, so that the question at every chord change is which seven notes are available rather than which four are safe — which is the second strategy in the table and the source of every note in the third clip
- The non-chord tone from Chapter 12 — a note that does not belong to the chord sounding with it, approached by step and left by step, which is heard as motion between two chord tones rather than as a wrong note — which is exactly what the six extra notes of the third clip are
- The pentatonic scale from Chapter 7 — five notes chosen so that none of them lies a half step from another, which is what makes it the scale that cannot clash — which is the fourth row of the table and the first thing most players improvise with
In real music
- So What, Miles Davis — thirty-two bars of two chords: sixteen on one, eight on another a half step higher, eight back on the first. Every solo on the record is improvised inside that, and the change is so slow that you can hear each player decide what to do about it. Listen for the moment the second chord arrives and for what each soloist plays in the bar after it
- Blue Monk, Thelonious Monk — a twelve-bar blues whose head is a chromatic rise and whose solos stay close to it. Listen to the first chorus after the head and count how many of its figures you have already heard in the tune — the answer is most of them, which is the third paragraph of this section in action
See also
Loop four chords on your instrument, or record yourself playing them and play the recording back. Over them, do three things in turn. First play only notes that are in the chord sounding at that moment, one or two to a bar. Second play four notes to a bar, using the chord notes on the first and third beats and filling the second and fourth from the scale that fits the chord. Third, before each chord change, decide which note you will be on when it arrives and make it that chord’s third. Record all three passes and listen back. Write down which pass you would want a listener to hear and why.
Check 1
Eight notes over the same four chords, one line you have not heard before. Decide what the notes are drawn from.
Theory in Performance
Play the first: four bars that arrive at a home chord. Play the second: the same four bars with every note moved by the same distance, so that the shape is identical and the height is not. Play the third: the same four bars again with the same chords and the same tune, but with five steps to a bar instead of four and weight on the first and the fourth. Play all three and say, for each, what has changed from the first and what has not.
- What the first clip plays
- , , , — one chord to a bar, with , , , above them. The last two chords are the fifth degree of the key followed by the first, which Chapter 11 called an authentic cadence, and the tune arrives on the home note with them.
- What the second clip changes
- Every note is exactly two half steps higher. becomes , becomes , becomes ; the tune becomes , , , . Every distance inside the phrase is untouched, which is the whole definition of a transposition — and the key has acquired two sharps, so a player reading it has two more accidentals to remember and a singer has a phrase sitting a whole step higher in the voice.
- What the third clip changes, and what it does not
- Not one note. The chords are still , , , and the tune is still , , , . Each bar now runs for five steps rather than four, with the chord and its tune note struck on the first step and ringing through the second and third, and the chord alone struck on the fourth and ringing through the fifth — three steps of one sound, then two of another. Counting a bar as three then two, rather than as five, is what Chapter 15 said every player of an odd meter actually does.
| On the stand | What theory gives you | Where you learned it |
|---|---|---|
| Knowing where you are | The form. Counting bars is unreliable under pressure; hearing the joins between sections is not, and a player who hears them cannot get lost for longer than a phrase | Chapter 16, formal analysis |
| Shaping a phrase | The cadence. Hearing an ending arrive before it arrives is what lets you put the dynamic on it rather than after it — the difference between playing the notes and playing the phrase | Chapter 11, the cadence |
| Moving a song for a singer | Transposition. Every note by the same number of half steps, which changes the key signature and nothing else. A singer asking for it down a whole step is asking for one operation, not for a rewrite | Chapter 8, transposition |
| Reading a chord chart | The chord symbol. A letter and a suffix tell you which notes; nothing on the page tells you how to voice them, which is left to you and is most of what playing from a chart consists of | Chapter 10, the chord symbol |
| Counting a bar that is not in four | The grouping. Seven is not counted to seven; it is counted as three and two and two, or as two and two and three, or as two and three and two, and which one it is decides where the weight goes | Chapter 15, the odd meter |
| Tuning to the people around you | The interval. Two instruments are tuned to each other by listening to the beating between a Perfect Fifth or a Perfect Fourth and slowing it until it stops — a skill of the ear, not of a meter | Chapter 5, interval quality · Chapter 6, ear training |
Performance practice, in the working sense a player uses the phrase, is what theory does while you are playing rather than while you are studying: hearing where in the form the music has reached, hearing a phrase end in time to shape it, knowing a key well enough to move a song into another one on request, reading a chord chart at sight, counting a bar that is not in four, and tuning by ear to the people beside you.
None of the six is new material. Every one of them was taught somewhere in the last eighteen chapters, and what changes on a stand is only the deadline: on the page you have as long as you like to work out that the chord is the dominant of the relative minor, and in performance you have half a beat. That is why the six become useful only when they have been practised as reflexes rather than as knowledge, and why the practice for them is not more reading but playing with the theory deliberately switched on — counting the bars of a song you already know, naming the cadence at the end of every phrase you play, transposing something familiar into a key you avoid.
The ear is doing more of this work than the eye. A player who can hear a cadence coming shapes the phrase toward it without deciding to; a player who has to work out that a cadence is coming is already too late. Chapter 6 made the argument in full and it is worth restating here in its practical form: the theory that is any use on stage is the theory you have heard often enough to recognise without thinking about it. Everything else is preparation for that.
One thing worth saying plainly, because the whole of this course could be misread as an argument against it. Theory does not tell you how to play. It tells you what is there, quickly and in words you can say to another musician, and it is worth exactly as much as the time it saves and no more. A player who cannot name a single chord and can hear all of them is a better musician than one who can name every chord and hear none, and the point of the eighteen chapters behind this one was always to make the first player faster, never to replace them.
Convention
In musicology the phrase "performance practice" names something narrower than this section uses it for: the study of how music of a given period was actually played at the time — what instruments, what tuning, what tempo, what ornamentation — and the attempt to reconstruct it. Both usages are current and neither is wrong. This section uses the working one, the set of things a player does with theory in the act of playing, and says so here so that the other meaning is not a surprise when you meet it.
Constraint
A transposition moves every note by the same number of half steps and nothing else. Move the melody and leave a chord behind and the result is not the piece in another key; it is a mistake. Move the notes correctly and the key signature follows automatically, because the set of accidentals is a consequence of the new home note rather than a separate decision. On a transposing instrument the same operation happens twice over — once for the new key and once for the interval the instrument already sounds at — which is why a clarinettist handed a part in concert pitch has arithmetic to do before the downbeat.
Applies to: any tuning in which the twelve notes are equally spaced — the tuning of virtually all Western instruments since about 1800, and the assumption behind every key signature in this course. In unequal historical temperaments a transposition genuinely changes the sound of a piece, because the intervals themselves are slightly different in different keys, which is where the old claims about the character of particular keys come from
Tendency
Players count an odd meter as a pattern of small groups rather than as a number. Seven is heard as three and two and two, or as two and two and three, five as three and two, and the choice is audible: it decides which beats carry weight. Asking a drummer to play in seven is asking a question they cannot answer until you say which seven you mean.
Applies to: the odd meters of jazz, progressive rock and Balkan folk music, where the grouping is fixed for a given tune. Some contemporary concert music deliberately leaves the grouping unspecified or changes it bar by bar, and there the number really is the instruction
You already know this
- Transposition from Chapter 8 — moving every note of a piece by the same distance, so that every interval inside it is preserved and only the pitch it sits at changes — which is the second clip above and the single most requested thing anybody will ever ask you to do on a stand
- The odd meter from Chapter 15 — a bar of five or seven, counted as a pattern of twos and threes rather than as a number, because that is what decides where the weight falls — which is the third clip above and what turns an unplayable bar into a playable one
- Ear training from Chapter 6 — the deliberate practice of hearing relationships rather than pitches, so that the same distance is recognised wherever it starts from — which is the reason any of the six rows in the table above can happen at performance speed at all
- Dynamics from Chapter 18 — the marks that name a level relative to the levels around it, and the two wedges that ask for a change between them — which is the one thing on the page that a score can only ask for and never supply, and therefore the part of it that is most obviously yours
In real music
- Take Five, The Dave Brubeck Quartet — five beats to a bar for the whole record, and the drums tell you the grouping in the first two bars: three and then two, never five counted flat. Tap along with the piano vamp and you will find your hand doing three and two without being told
- Blue Rondo à la Turk, The Dave Brubeck Quartet — nine beats to a bar, grouped two, two, two and three for three bars and then three, three and three for the fourth. Count the opening piano figure out loud and you will hear the grouping change under you on every fourth bar, which is the difference between a number and a pattern
See also
Take a short piece you can already play from memory. Perform it once, straight through, with a pencil and a copy of the music or a blank sheet beside you. Immediately afterwards, mark on the paper every point at which a phrase ended and write next to each one whether the music stopped for good or only paused. Then perform it a second time and make the dynamic arrive exactly at each of those marks rather than after them. Finally, play the first four bars again two half steps higher than written, from memory, without writing anything down.
Transpose a chart on the spot, the way a singer will ask you to
Check 1
Four bars, a silence, then the same four bars moved. Decide what was done to them the second time.
Key Takeaways
- Song analysis is eight questions asked in a fixed order: meter, key, numerals, chromatic chords, cadences and phrase lengths, sections, melody against harmony, and register and texture.
- The order matters because each answer supplies what the next question needs — you cannot number a chord without a key, or letter a section without knowing where the music stops.
- Harmonic analysis is two of those eight steps, not another name for the whole job.
- A step with no answer is answered in one word and left behind; most popular songs have nothing at all at the chromatic-chord step, and saying so is a finding.
- A chord from outside the key can be a colour, a substitution or a door into a new key, and the analysis has to say which.
- Composing is the same eight questions turned round: decide the meter, the key, the harmony, a motif, what you will do to it, the phrase pair, the form, and the arrangement.
- Development is the cheapest thing in composition and the thing that turns a pile of ideas into a piece: one three-note figure can carry four bars without a single new note.
- A phrase pair works because both halves begin the same way and differ only at the end, which puts all the listener’s attention on the one place something changed.
- Improvising safely has three cumulative strategies: chord tones on strong beats, scale tones between them, and the next chord’s third aimed at before it arrives.
- A note that is not in the chord must be approached by step, left by step, and kept off the beat the chord changes on.
- Theory earns its place in performance in six ways: hearing the form, hearing cadences, transposing, reading charts, grouping odd meters, and tuning by interval.
- A transposition moves every note by the same number of half steps and changes nothing else; the key signature follows from the new home note rather than being a separate decision.
- Theory tells you what is there and how to say it to another musician quickly; it is worth the time it saves and it is no substitute for hearing.
Last updated September 22, 2026
Questions
- How do you analyse a song?
- Work through eight questions in a fixed order: find the pulse and meter, find the key, number the chords, mark any chord from outside the key, mark where phrases stop, letter the sections, read the melody against the chords, and note the register and texture. Each answer supplies what the next question needs.
- What is the difference between song analysis and harmonic analysis?
- Harmonic analysis is the numbering of chords and the accounting for notes outside the key. It is two of the eight steps of a full song analysis, and the two with a settled written notation. The other six cover meter, phrase structure, form, melody and arrangement, and a page of numerals alone explains none of them.
- How do you start composing a piece of music?
- Fix a meter, a tempo and a key, then choose whether your chords will come round without closing or set out and arrive. Write a figure of three or four notes. Play it again from a higher note twice. Stop the fourth bar somewhere other than home, and answer it with four bars that begin identically and end at home.
- What notes can I play when improvising over a chord?
- Start with the chord’s own notes and put them on strong beats: nothing there can sound wrong. Fill the gaps with the scale that fits the chord, approaching and leaving each added note by step. Then aim at the next chord’s third as it arrives, which is what makes a line sound like it knew where it was going.
- Does music theory help you perform better?
- It helps in six specific places: knowing where you are in the form, hearing a phrase end in time to shape it, transposing for a singer, reading a chord chart, counting odd meters as groupings rather than numbers, and tuning by interval. It saves time, and it is worth exactly that much and no more.
- Do I need to analyse music to enjoy it?
- No. Analysis is a tool for describing music to somebody else, for learning from what other people have written, and for finding out why something you already like works. It adds a way of hearing and takes nothing away — but the hearing came first, and a musician who hears everything and names nothing is not the poorer one.