CPOTW #2

for the week of August 14th, 2023

Note: this post of part of my “Chord Progression of the Week” series. A new entry will be released every Saturday.

Introduction

This week I’d like to go back to basics, and see what kinds of sounds we can get out of a (mostly) diatonic progression. I find that this helps me reconnect with some of the aspects of music that I might neglect were I to focus too much on harmonic intricacy.

We were in Eb last week, so let’s go to the most distant possible key from there: A. Our equal-tempered system ensures that all keys have the same internal pitch-relationships, but as musicians playing on physical instruments we often get comfortable with the physical properties of some keys over others: traveling somewhat diametrically apropos the circle of 5th can be a way to prevent any tendencies toward stasis that may arise from these preferences.

The Chords

The basic progression is as follows:

A major -> B minor 7 -> C# minor 6 -> B minor major 7 -> A major 7

A couple things: first, all chords are strictly in the key with the exception of B minor major 7, which includes the leading-tone from the B minor scale as its 7th degree: that note is A#, which is quite a surprising note to encounter in the midst of diatonic A major material. I think it adds some really nice color to the progression, offering a pinch of bitterness before the sweet resolution of the A major 7. Second, the C# minor 6 is equivalent to an A major 7 in 1st inversion, so although the structure reads as major->minor->minor->minor->major, it sounds more like the alternating major->minor->major->minor->major. I wrote the chords this way to get the satisfying a->b->c#->b->a symmetric bass motion, which opens up some nice voice-leading possibilities.

Here are some voicings, written out and recorded (and with much better sound quality than last week):

Applications

Here are 2 improvisations I recorded that make use of the progression in some varied ways:

The first features soprano melodies over a walking bassline that also sits in a high register, with some baroque ornaments.

The second is a tranquil exploration of some consonances and dissonances arising from variations of the chords under a simple melodic figure. I enjoyed returning to the opening idea at the end. Something that took me far too long to realize when learning to improvise is the importance of remembering your ideas and being able to return to them: eschewing sheet music gives us no excuse to play incoherently.

Outro

That’s all I have for the second installment of Chord Progression of the Week. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to the examples as much as I enjoyed playing them.

Materials

I generate my score pdfs with Lilypond, a program that compiles a plaintext encoding of music notation to a pdf which conforms automatically to notational standards and best-practices. I find this a more efficient way to work than using more standard graphical programs such as Musescore.

The Lilypond files (.ly), pdf files (in case they did not render properly), and audio files (.mp3) are here: