Cross-relations/Expansion of Musical Understanding
Having done both glee club and university chorus this past semester, I think my singing ability improved quite a lot during that time. So did my powers of musical understanding. One of the most tangible breakthroughs was recognizing and understanding cross-relations. I was studying all night for my math finals, which fell right next to each other on the last day of tests, Differential Equations at 8 AM and Combinatorics at noon. I usually do stay up all night when I have an 8 AM final because I'll feel more awake during it than if I had slept some and then had to get up after 4 hours. (Also it avoids the danger of me just sleeping through the final completely.) So there I was, studying all night in the SLC, getting up periodically to go to the vending machines or walk around the building. I usually hum to myself when I'm working intently, and this night I was going between two songs: "If I Fell" by The Beatles, and a choral piece we did in glee club called "Thou Didst Delight My Eyes." I was savoring one particularly juicy part of the melody in the choral song, and sort of realized something I'd never noticed before about it. In the third verse (beginning "For what wert thou to me?"), the tenor part goes through some particularly wonderful phrases (such as the descending arpeggio on "poured her midnight noon," the large jumps on "sail" and "cheered"), and one part especially was catching my ear: the line, right after that arpeggio, "upon this wrecking sea." I noticed that the syllables wre- and sea sort of "clashed" with each other. (I don't have the music handy, so I can't give note names, which makes the discussion pretty clunky, but oh well.) "Sea" comes right after "wre-" and the intervening "-cking," and is one half step lower. Even though they are not sung simultaneously and could very well have different harmonic functions, the syllable "sea" still sounds like a clash, and takes a certain effort to sing right. Here's the recording of our performance at the fall concert. I assume all the copyright stuff checks out. The cross-relation happens at 1:26 in the song. Now, perhaps it was just coincidence that I had "If I Fell" in mind, or perhaps my brain was associating the two songs with each other because of the cross-relations, but I soon recognized the same trick in the bridge of the Beatles song! "If I Fell" is one of my favorite Beatles songs, for the two part vocal lines in the verse (plus the rhyming which is pretty good as well), but I'd never particularly liked the bridge part. I was singing the second line of it over and over, and noticed the cross-relation where I never had before: "would be sad if our new love was in vain." I probably had never even heard it clearly enough to tell that the pitches were different, but I was singing it and singing it right and suddenly realized that they were different, and it was the same thing going on as in "Thou Didst Delight My Eyes." In this case, the pitches on "our new love" are f-g-f#, so this one actually moves up, but it's the same. When Paul sings the f#, it just sticks out, sounds like a new song or something, elevates the feeling of the whole line to a new intensity. Here, it comes at the end of the bridge, which travels more into minor territory than the verse does. The bridge begins on G, the IV chord of the original key, D major. It shifts to g minor on the words "and I," and staying more of a g-minor scale, runs up d-e-f-g. Then on the word "love," when the harmony goes back to D Major, it resolutely lands on f#. To check whether my suspicion on this song was even correct, I went to Alan Pollack, Beatles music guru, and found confirmation of my theory ("The phrase 'sad if our new love' contains an unusual melodic cross-relation between the F-natural (on the word 'our') and the F# two words later on 'love'"). That half-step change makes all the difference. It really does make the "love" seem new. It happens at 1:09 in this video:
The cross-relation (or false relation, as wikipedia calls it) is a pretty cool little melodic trick, and is perhaps the most tangible one thing I picked up on in music this semester. Ever since I took music theory from Mr. Bishop in 11th grade, my understanding of music has just been growing constantly, and it happens in episodes like this. I remember the first time I heard and understood the use of secondary dominants. I was listening to the song "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones.
I was familiar enough with chords to distinguish basic I-IV-V movement, which in this song would be the chords G, C, and D. At that time of my life, Bob Dylan was almost all that I listened to, and mid-sixties Bob Dylan almost completely limits himself to I-IV-V chords (and that usually in the two keys of G and C). So in the Rolling Stones song, I could hear the movement between G, C, and D, but the second line of the verse had something different, something that did not fit that scheme. I tried it on my guitar, and before long found that the song goes from G up to A major, which then goes to D. It makes a non-harmonic jump to the II chord, which then makes sense once it goes to D: it is the V of V. Once I heard this, I began hearing many more examples of this in popular music (it's a common progression), and also began hearing movements like G-E-Am, for example, or G-B-Em. These sorts of breakthroughs are exciting for me. They happen more often when I'm involved in a singing group, and they enrich the experience of listening to/performing music. Next semester I'll be in the glee club, the vocal group Classic City Jazz, and the early music (as in, renaissance and baroque) group Collegium Musicum. Hopefully I'll be learning many more cool things; maybe I'll report them back here if I do!
