Twin Sons from Different Mothers?: Harmonic Convergence in Jazz and Classical Music, Part 1: "The Blues"

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Introduction

In my article about Harmony and the Harmonic Series, I suggest that the relationship and tension between the dominant and the tonic is the engine of all harmonic activity in tonal music. In that article, to keep it as clear and easy to understand as possible, I dealt only with triads. The dominant is most often, however, found as a four-note chord—the triad with the 7th added—which is the dominant 7th chord. The dominant 7th chord is used similarly in jazz and classical music—the dominant chord is used as the final closing Authentic Cadence in most jazz and classical music. In that role, it is generally in root position, but it is also found as a passing or neighbor chord. When found in the latter role, it is often found in second inversion, which minimizes its power to invoke the tonic, taking on a "connective tissue" role instead.

In both styles (and in popular music of all kinds), it is quite common to find the dominant of the dominant chord, which introduces a pitch which is not the key. Using these "secondary dominants" expands the number of pitches available from seven (the major scale) to eight (V/V, F#), nine (V/ii, C#), ten (V/iii, D#), eleven (V/IV, B♭) and twelve (V/vi, G#). Both styles also use dominant 7th and other sonorities in different ways:

• In jazz, the dominant 7th is treated as a stable sonority (Part 1).
• In jazz, the dominant 7th sonority is also found as "tri-tone substitution" (Part 2).
• In classical music, it is found as "augmented 6th" chords (Part 3).
• Somewhat related is the Neapolitan 6th chord, which is regularly used in classical music, but is quite rare in jazz (Part 4).

These differences provide a fascinating look into the aesthetic values of two genres that developed in different cultures, centuries apart, but utilizing most of the same musical materials.

I. The Blues

The blues are the foundational bedrock of jazz, stemming from the folk and gospel music of the slaves in the Deep South. Over time, the early jazz and blues musicians added chords to the melodies. The first tune with "Blues" in the title was "I Got The Blues" by Antony Maggio, which was published in 1908. It was "respectfully dedicated to all those who have the blues," but it was ragtime, not blues.



After that, many tunes featured the word "blues" in the title. Still, we would hardly recognize them as "the blues" today. Bert Williams' "Unlucky Blues" is a song from 1920, but although "bluesy," it is not what we think of today as "the blues."



By the early 1920s, however, musicians were coalescing around an elemental form that would become the standard harmonic accompaniment to the blues—the 12-Bar Blues:



The 12-bar form was often found as one section of a longer song, as in "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith from 1923.



In this tune, the 12-bar blues form (from 0:47-1:15) appears as the second section of a larger song form.

Other tunes, like Daddy Stovepipe's "Sundown Blues" from 1924, were entirely based on the emerging 12-bar blues form.



Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Got the Blues," from 1926, has the guideposts of the form, but it's quite free and melismatic. In this instance, form follows function as the lyrical content drives the shape of the piece.



And then there is the inimitable Son House, whose renditions of the blues form were often idiosyncratic, but very powerful and effective. Here is his famous piece "Grinnin' In Your Face" from 1929, which is quite free and amorphous, with no chordal accompaniment and rhythmic punctuation from clapping that is often a bit woozy and jarring.



But they were still missing one important element in terms of modern blues—they were still using triads rather than dominant 7th chords on the tonic (I), subdominant (IV) and dominant (V) chords.

By the 1930s, the 7th started showing up on all three primary chords, as we can hear in Bo Carter's "Pussy Cat Blues" from 1936. (This is a variation of the 12-bar blues, with four measures added in the middle, making it a 16-bar blues.)



Meanwhile, jazz musicians had long been adding new chords to the simple 12-bar form. The new harmonies called for a greatly expanded approach in the improvisation that certainly included the blues scale but also required new scales and strategies to capitalize on the new harmonies they had incorporated. One of the trailblazers in this "reharmonization" exercise that would quickly become standard practice for jazz musicians to this day was pianist Earl Hines. He was already reaching far into the future with his approach to the blues (and everything else!) in the late 1920s, as he did in "Caution Blues" from 1928.



The main point is that both blues and jazz musicians were doing something that had never, ever happened in classical music—the tonic of a piece of music was not a stable triad, but rather it was the unstable dominant 7th chord. It was the chord that most powerfully calls for its tonic as a resolution, and here, that was completely flipped on its head. It was used as a stable chord that did not need resolution, which cannot be found in classical music. The nearest example I can find is the end of the first song in Robert Schumann's song cycle, "Dichterliebe," composed in 1840, which is in F# minor. The first song "ends" enigmatically on C#7 (V7 in F# minor), but no one would perform this song as a "stand-alone" piece—it is part of a song cycle that is intended to move on to the next piece, which is in A major, the relative major of F# minor. This can be heard as a deceptive cadence (V7-VI) or, more appropriately, in my opinion, it is an example of a chromatic mediant relationship (C#7-A major, movement by a major third with chromatic alterations), which was a popular new device for the burgeoning romantics in the 1830s. These Romantic composers were enamored with the delightfully surprising and fantastical quality of chromatic mediant chord progressions.



Not to belabor the point, but this is a profound difference between the two styles. No one, in the countless pieces written over centuries in the classical style, had ever seen the potential for the use of a dominant 7th chord as a stable tonic. The aesthetic implications are noteworthy—classical music up until the end of the Romantic Era (circa 1900) was entirely devoted to music that was goal-directed, with all elements—harmony, melody, and rhythm—adhering to teleological principles. In other words, pieces generally follow some kind of a narrative arch—they start somewhere stable (or soon arrive somewhere stable), they become unstable and "travel" through different keys, and they eventually return to where they started from, and the "story" is over. In order for this to happen, the piece must end on a stable triad or unison.

The blues certainly has a similar narrative quality—the blues tell a story, even without lyrics, but they do so in an open-ended harmonic milieu. When a blues tune starts, it is like stepping onto a moving escalator; you are joining a story that has been "in progress," and when it ends, it does not really end, you are just stepping off the escalator back into the real world. This is only possible by making the dominant 7th the "stable" tonic of the chord, but harmonically, it is still unstable, which means that, on some level, the tune is still not over—it is still searching for the "answer." Viewed in this way, we can see the blues as a quest for existential answers to questions that have always been and always will be—they have no beginning and no end. The assertion of the dominant 7th as a stable chord is the harmonic means to this aesthetic end.

We simply cannot find examples of this aesthetic in classical music, at least before the advent of minimalism, which was itself heavily influenced by jazz. Perhaps the only example that comes close is the enigmatic ending of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra," which vacillates between a very high register and piercing B major chord (in the woodwinds, violins, violas and harp) and a repeated C major chord with a raised fourth (Lydian) in the low register (in the cellos, double bass and trombones). Still, in the end, the B major chord disappears, and all we are left with is the unresolved, brooding and ominous C major chord repeating thrice more at extremely low volume (ppp). (The harmonic analysis of this section is as follows: I—♭II, the tonic followed by a root position "Neapolitan" with a raised fourth. (The Neapolitan chord will be discussed in detail later in Part 4 of this series.) It feels like there is no definitive ending—the effect is as if the piece continues onward, a traveler slowly moving out of sight... This is exceedingly unusual for classical music, whose teleological aesthetic is omnipresent. The piece, however, is from very late in the Romantic era (1896), literally the fin de siècle—it is on the cusp of a new era emerging in classical music, where the aesthetics of the previous centuries will be challenged and changed.



Why did classical music not use the dominant 7th as a stable sonority? Some might argue that it did—in the modal music that predated the "Common Practice Period" (1600-1900). The mode on the dominant, Mixolydian, was certainly used, but no piece of modal music from those eras ends on a dominant 7th chord. Yet this is precisely what the African-American folk musicians did, and they did it instinctually, naturally and even casually, without any awareness of what a radical departure this was from the classical music aesthetic. And that departure spawned the most successful, widespread and enduring music of all time—all genres of popular music today find their progenitors in the fields and farms of the Deep South in the 1800s.

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