Strange Arpeggios

[AGiambra 13]

In Measure 62 of Star Wars Suite For Orchestra, the 1st and 2nd strings play an arpeggio using note from a C major chord.  But the Cellos are playing an arpeggio using notes from a Db chord.  Every note in a Db chord is one half step from the notes in a C major chord.  How in the world did John Williams know that this would work?  The chord that is playing by all the instruments in Measure 62 is a Db Maj7 with an augmented 9th.  So the notes are Db, F, Ab, C and E.

 

This makes me crazy and I hope there is someone who can make some sense out of this and explain it.

[Loert 2,786]

Remember that John Williams used to be a jazz musician. (Read up on jazz harmony, I am sure it will blow your mind )

 

P.S. Welcome to the forums!

 

EDIT: I should also say that the Neptune movement from Holst's "The Planets" uses harmony in a very similar way, and that was likely an inspiration for the specific segment you mentioned.

 

For example, measure 3 here:

 

 

That's a G# minor chord (piano 2) over an A minor chord (piano 1), which has a very similar relationship to the C Major over Db Major chord in your example.

In the Holst example, one can explain the "clash" by saying that the G# minor chord is acting as a suspension. But what someone like John Williams would do is take that clash and make it a sonority of its own (and indeed, Holst does the same thing later in the piece).

[karelm 3,126]

Yes, welcome and this is a favorite topic of many of us here.  Basically, how did he know to do that thing he did.  This particular instance is a very famous "spacey" example and is a space cliche (time honored tradition).  He's immediately setting the location of distant, mysterious location using musical tropes of polytonality just like others did before every time they wanted to evoke the same thing.  The lesson here is that JW didn't invent this but studied this.  Many other works do this exact same thing as Loert points out.  Holst's Planets which you absolutely must study but also Vaughan Williams Sinfonia Antarctica which similarly referenced this vernacular.  Major up high and minor a half step above down below is suggestive of mysteries expansiveness.  In Holst, Neptune uses E minor in the trumpets and G# major in the trombones.  This works because it's tonally unsettling.  You have E, G, B, G#, C, D# (everything's a half step off) this minor second is unsettling but separated in tonal space just feels otherworldly.  We can even dive in to this deeper by showing that dissonances separated are more pleasing.  Of course, JW knew this.  He wasn't looking for harshness but for ambiguity...setting the stage most succinctly.  Every great artist looks to say the most with the least words.  JW did so musically in the example you are asking about. 

[AGiambra 13]

First of all, thanks for the welcome.  And thanks for the informative replies.  I recently purchased the sheet music for the Star Wars Suite simply because I had to know what chord was playing in Measure 62.  It is the strangest chord and yet it sounds so beautiful and otherwordly.  It's basically a Db major seventh chord (Db, F,Ab and C) but then Williams has the flutes up on top playing C and E.  It's that high E, clashing with the F being played by the lower instruments, that makes the chord sound so weird.  I just love the sound of it.

 

Thanks for your responses.  It really helped me understand what is going on.

 

Yes, I am familiar by the way with Holst's The Planets.  I heard this many years ago when I was in my teens (actually way more than many years ago).  And I am familiar with the passages in Star Wars that borrow from it.  I've read that some people are upset because they feel Williams copied from Holst but I am pretty confident that this was actually a salute to Holst by Williams.  There is nothing wrong with referencing another work; it makes sense since both Star Wars and The Planets share the same subject matter (space, the universe, the planets).

[Falstaft 2,176]

Funny, I've spent the past couple days writing about exactly this magical passage you've brought up, @AGiambra! Williams's harmonic vocabulary is incredibly rich, and progressions like you mention do not always lend themselves to "explanations" in a standard, functionally tonal sense. Which is not to say they're constructed in an arbitrary way at all!

 

The harmonic weirdness doesn't end with the C|Db chord either! Immediately afterwards, you get C|A and finally C|Eaug. And then the section with the iconic piccolo solo, which is a *tiny* bit more explicable -- basically, a prolonged C(b6) chord, with the piccolo suggesting a C-mixolydian(b6) scale.

 

These augmented chord complexes--and the scales that go along with them (wholetone, hexatonic, mix-b6)--have a fair bit of history in suggesting ~~cosmic~~ states. To offer just a little bit more for you to explore, check out Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica, the eerie textures and harmonic effects of which I imagine were in Williams's ear  -- and certainly Jerry Goldsmith's a few years later in the sublime ST:TMP!.

 

 

I also suspect you'll find the introduction to Schreker's Die Gezeichneten up your alley:

 

[Jurassic Shark 13,742]

20 hours ago, AGiambra said:

The chord that is playing by all the instruments in Measure 62 is a Db Maj7 with an augmented 9th.  So the notes are Db, F, Ab, C and E.

 

Just add an augmented 11th and you've got the C major chord contained in the other chord.

[AGiambra 13]

Falstaft, thank you for Sinfonia Antartica.  I will definitely listen to this several times.  As I listen for the first time right now, I hear what you are talking about, the eerie textures and harmonic effects.  And thanks to Jurassic Shark for explaining how the Db Maj7 chord can contain a C major within it.

 

I am so glad I discovered this forum.  There is so much to learn and I can tell that I am among friends with finely tuned ears.  I look forward to future discussions.

[AGiambra 13]

The other day I was listening to The Mission, the NBC News theme, also written by Williams.  At 2:29 into the theme, he ends a phrase with three fantastic chords.  When I first heard these chords, my head split open because they are so incredibly rich.  I just had to figure it out.

 

The theme is written in Bb.  If I were writing it, I'd probably use some boring old chords to return to Bb.  Perhaps simply an F7 which would work but as I said would sound pretty boring.  What does Williams play?

 

He plays an Eb maj7 with the ninth and eleventh added,  The melody is on the eleventh.  This is followed by an Ab maj7 also with the ninth and eleventh added.  Finally he ends on Bb.

 

I've used this combination of chords before to return to the root chord, but with simpler versions of the chords.  In C it would be F, Bb and C.  But I never thought of using it the way Williams does, with the melody sitting on the eleventh of the chord.  What genius!

 

 

[Jay 40,305]

I LOVE posts like this, even though I don't fully understand it all.  Keep em coming!

[Jurassic Shark 13,742]

3 hours ago, AGiambra said:

He plays an Eb maj7 with the ninth and eleventh added,  The melody is on the eleventh.  This is followed by an Ab maj7 also with the ninth and eleventh added. 

 

I guess the 11th of Eb maj7 can be interpreted as an anticipation of the Ab maj7 chord.

[Davis 3,358]

These are times when I would give anything to be able to fully read and write music. I know these themes so well that sometimes I feel I could conduct them with an orchestra by heart, but of course not from sheet music. 

[QuartalHarmony 720]

I find that I hear it like a II ~ V ~ I, isn’t that odd? Maybe it’s due to the rall plus what my ears are accustomed to (or what JW has cleverly set them up to expect).

 

I’m away from home, my copy of the music and a convenient keyboard to play it through on, but I wonder if the Eb > Ab works as a V ~ I (or maybe a II  ~ V in Db? Hmmm) and then the Ab > Bb just works because

1) we’re expecting the melody to resolve down a tone

2) we’re back in the tonic and

3) bVII > I isn’t t too jarring, just unusual enough to be interesting.

 

All just speculation, of course!

 

Mark

[Loert 2,786]

I think this is one of those instances where "labelling" the melody line with chord symbols based on the bass line may obscure what's happening.

 

I think Williams knew that he wanted a climactic, "Americana" instance of the last three notes of the Mission Theme, and he decided that there was going to be some kind of extended harmony involved. And I think all that Williams did was move vertically downwards from the melody line, building up the harmony that way.

 

For example, for the first note, we could harmonize it like Bbmaj7 with the A at the top...because we like maj7s, and it keeps us in the right key (as opposed to, say, Dmaj7, with the A on top, which would take us out of the key).

 

But Bbmaj7 doesn't sound rich enough. So we can keep going down, first to G (Gm9), then Eb (Ebmaj#11). We could still have gone down to C (Cm13), but JW didn't.

 

The next note might have been built downwards the same way. JW decided to stop at Ab this time, thus giving us a 13th chord, "richer" than the preceding 11th. So we get a buildup in harmonic richness before arriving at the tonic.

 

But here's the thing with the final chord: we could have gone down to F, in which case the bass would in fact be the dominant tone. And if you add the extra F at the bottom, it really doesn't sound that different from the final result (far less noticeable than if you had changed the top note, for instance). So, in fact, it is a kind of v -> I cadence, only you can say that JW left out the bass note, thus replacing the v with a chord of somewhat air-ier, more ambiguous quality.

 

Anyway, this is how I would think about that passage in particular. Using chord symbols makes the most sense IMO when you have a meaningful bass line, but in this particular case I would argue that there is no "bass line" as such.

[karelm 3,126]

4 hours ago, Loert said:

I think this is one of those instances where "labelling" the melody line with chord symbols based on the bass line may obscure what's happening.

 

I think Williams knew that he wanted a climactic, "Americana" instance of the last three notes of the Mission Theme, and he decided that there was going to be some kind of extended harmony involved. And I think all that Williams did was move vertically downards from the melody line, building up the harmony that way.

 

For example, for the first note, we could harmonize it like Bbmaj7 with the A at the top...because we like maj7s, and it keeps us in the right key (as opposed to, say, Dmaj7, with the A on top, which would take us out of the key).

 

But Bbmaj7 doesn't sound rich enough. So we can keep going down, first to G (G9), then Eb (Ebmaj#11). We could still have gone down to C (Cm13), but JW didn't.

 

The next note might have been built downwards the same way. JW decided to stop at Ab this time, thus giving us a 13th chord, "richer" than the preceding 11th. Thus we get a buildup in harmonic richness before arriving at the tonic.

 

But note with the final chord, that we could have gone down to F, in which case the bass would in fact be the dominant tone. If you add the extra F at the bottom, it really doesn't sound that different from the final result (far less noticeable if you had changed the top note, for instance). So in fact it is a kind of v -> I cadence, only you can say that JW left out the bass note, thus replacing the v with a chord of somewhat air-ier, more ambiguous quality.

 

Anyway, this is how I would think about that passage in particular. Using chord symbols makes the most sense IMO when you have a meaningful bass line, but in this particular case I would argue that there is no "bass line" as such.

That's a really good point you made.  To analyze harmony, you have to include melody otherwise you miss context of what's happening.  How it goes from chord to chord does impact how you think of this contextually.  Music exists in a multi-planal existence...it is multidimensional like time, space, gravity, mass, energy, etc.  To understand melody, you need to keep harmony, melody, rhythm, and structure all in mind.  To understand what is happening harmonically, you need to observe melody and rhythm too.  Great point, Loert! 

[pablo.composer 2]

Hello everyone! My two cents to the discussion, I love this stuff.

 

@Jurassic Shark I haven't checked the score, but I think the 11th of the Eb chord is actually a sharp 11th (A natural), so it cannot be an anticipation of the next chord (Ab). It creates actually a pretty dissonant chromatic cross-relationship with the Ab in the bass that follows.

 

@Loert I don't agree with your rejection of functionality in this context. I would interpret the passage as being a clever harmonization of a diatonic major 7-5-1. The harmonization is a 4 b7 1 progression (I'm using Nashville system). It can be interpreted as a variant of a backdoor cadence (b6 b7 1 or, even closer to this instance, 4m b7 1). Notice also that the three chords are from the ascending circle of fifths (b7 4 1, a very common cadence in the Beatles for instance) which mirrors its more traditional descending version (2 5 1). 

 

I hope not to have offended you with my counterarguments. I just like to think about this stuff, and I have taken your comments as an opportunity for thinking about those chords. Thank you!

[Not Mr. Big 4,750]

On 26/07/2023 at 11:42 AM, Falstaft said:

Funny, I've spent the past couple days writing about exactly this magical passage you've brought up, @AGiambra! Williams's harmonic vocabulary is incredibly rich, and progressions like you mention do not always lend themselves to "explanations" in a standard, functionally tonal sense. Which is not to say they're constructed in an arbitrary way at all!

 

The harmonic weirdness doesn't end with the C|Db chord either! Immediately afterwards, you get C|A and finally C|Eaug. And then the section with the iconic piccolo solo, which is a *tiny* bit more explicable -- basically, a prolonged C(b6) chord, with the piccolo suggesting a C-mixolydian(b6) scale.

 

These augmented chord complexes--and the scales that go along with them (wholetone, hexatonic, mix-b6)--have a fair bit of history in suggesting ~~cosmic~~ states. To offer just a little bit more for you to explore, check out Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica, the eerie textures and harmonic effects of which I imagine were in Williams's ear  -- and certainly Jerry Goldsmith's a few years later in the sublime ST:TMP!.

 

 

I hear the chord from the beginning of The Werewolf Scene too (which plays over The Moon, which is also in space).  A fun nod to space in a largely earthly fantasy