Radiohead, David Bowie, and even Steven
Universe use a simple technique with their chord progressions that make their
music more impactful and emotional. The trick is to use chords that don't actually
belong there, and in this video I'm going to focus on one chord in particular that even theBbeatles
used in their first number one hit in the US. I recently made a video about a
book called Japanese Music Harmony, which is not as unrelated as
it sounds. Just bear with me. In the book Kayano Chino lays out
a theory for why Japanese anime and J-Pop and video game music has a unique sound. The book is basically about how
to mix and match different keys and Kayano outlines three different
categories for how to do that. Today I'm going to focus on the first and simplest
one which is called relative multipolar tonality. But to show you that it's not
just Japanese composers who do this I'll be using examples from
American and British pop music. Usually when you play a song all your
notes and chords come from a single key. So in C major these are our notes... and these are the chords. Here's an example by the Postal Service of a song
that uses only chords from the key of F major. Pay attention to the iii chord here
because we'll be coming back to that. With relative multipolar tonality you mix and match the chords from your relative
major and minor keys, hence the name. Relative keys are the major and minor
keys that share all the same notes. For example C major and A minor which
both have no flats and no sharps. The exception, and this is the main point, is
that in minor you can raise the seventh tone, called the leading tone, to lead more satisfyingly
back to the tonic or the home of the key. When you do this you also
change the fifth chord of the minor key from a minor chord to a major chord. So continuing with a minor, that would
change the e minor to an e major. Technically this is called the
harmonic minor scale because of how it's used to control the harmony,
but you'll find this five major chord being used in pretty much any
flavor of minor fairly often. So in a normal major key we're supposed to have
a minor chord as the third chord from our key, like in that Postal Service song or
like in this example from Aerosmith. But if we mix the chords from the relative major and minor keys we end up with
a three major chord instead. So here's Don't Look Back in Anger from
Oasis which uses the same chord progression, but a three major instead of a three minor. What ends up happening is that wrong note,
that raised leading tone from the minor key, gives us this unexpected dissonance and this
desire to pull forward into the next chord. I Want To Hold Your Hand by the Beatles the
first two chords are the one and five from the major key, the second two chords are the
one and major five from the relative minor key. That B major chord does not
belong in the key of G major. And even if you know some
more advanced music theory, this is not like a secondary dominant
because the order of the chords is all wrong. This is a very clear example of
relative multipolar tonality. The Beatles are using both the relative
major and relative minor keys together. So we've seen that it's this wrong note
that gives us the extra spice and yearning. Now i'll show you a few more examples
that use that and take it up a level. This is beyond relative multipolar tonality
but i still think it's pretty cool. So if raising into this accidental gives
us this feeling of lift and energy, lowering into that same accidental
actually gives us the opposite effect. It ends up being more melancholy or
nostalgic or even kind of depressing. In the song Creep by Radiohead the first
and third chords in the progression act like these stable tentpoles, but the second
chord here borrows from the relative minor, just like we've seen in the other examples. And the last chord goes in the opposite direction, lowering into that same wrong note and giving
us the four minor chord from the parallel minor. Space Oddity by David Bowie, which is probably
one of my favorite songs ever, does this too. He even flips back and forth a few times
between the four major and the four minor so it keeps playing with that question of "Is it
happy or is it sad? Is it hopeful or hopeless?"
