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?
