- Hi, I'm Gareth, and in this video,
we're going to consider something
that's often called an echappée.
If you have some kind of English upbringing,
you might know this as an escape note.
If you're more in the American tradition,
you'll probably know it as an escape tone
if you've come across it at all.
Now, the echappée or the escape note, the escape tone
is one of these things that we call inessential notes,
and often, it's the one that people are least familiar with.
So what do I mean by inessential notes?
What I mean is using notes that don't belong
to the prevailing chord.
So this example is in the key of D major,
so let's think in D major for a moment.
If I've got a chord of D major,
then it will be D, F-sharp and A,
and all the notes I'm playing are
either D or F-sharp or A,
so that means they're all what we call harmony notes.
They all belong to the chord.
But if I did this,
so at the top, I've gone D, C-sharp, D,
then that C-sharp is what we call a lower auxiliary note,
or if I go D, E, D, at the top,
that's an upper auxiliary note.
So auxiliary notes are an example of inessential notes.
In other words, it's a note that doesn't belong
to the chord because if I go up to E,
E doesn't belong to this D major chord,
or if I go down to the C-sharp,
C-sharp doesn't belong to the D major chord,
but they're just notes next door.
I'm just going up one or I'm going down one
and coming back.
So those are auxiliary notes.
They're kind of one form of inessential notes.
Or you might've come across the passing note
or the passing tone
where say I'm doing something like this.
So I've got a D major chord followed by
another D major chord.
So all those notes are D, F-sharp or A,
but I've slipped in passing notes in between
in the top two parts.
So in the soprano and the alto part,
the note in the middle is passing by step
between this and this, and because it's happening
in two parts, I call it double passing notes.
I might have anticipatory notes, so I might go
from a chord of A,
to a chord of D.
All those are harmony notes because all these belong
to the chord of A.
All these belong to the chord of D,
but if I use the chord of A
and then I anticipate the D in the melody
so it slightly clashes with that chord of A
but then it belongs to the chord of D,
that's an anticipatory note.
It's anticipating what comes next.
So these are kind of the forms of inessential notes
that, generally speaking, people are more familiar with.
So let's talk about the a echappée
because there are four things that we want to know
about the echappée or the escape note, escape tone.
The first thing is it has to be a neighbouring note
that doesn't belong to the chord.
So here I've written two examples.
So in other words, these notes both belong
to a chord of D.
These belong to what I think would be a chord A seven,
and then the last belongs to a chord of D.
So if I'm thinking about this chord of D here,
that G is nothing to do with a chord of D,
so it must be an inessential note.
But the first thing is it's a neighbouring note,
so you can't be leaping off.
You can't be, for example, going
F-sharp up to B or something.
There's got to be a neighbouring note, all right?
So it qualifies, step one.
It's a neighbouring note.
It's always, if it's an echappée, unaccented.
In other words, it comes between beats.
It doesn't come on beats.
So you can see that these two notes here
are coming in between the beats.
That comes after the first beat,
second half of the first beat.
This is on the second half of the second beat.
So that's the second thing.
So a neighbouring note, it doesn't run to the chord,
first thing.
Second thing, it's got to be unaccented.
It's got to come between the beats, all right?
And it's preceded by step from the previous note.
Okay, now, the third thing to say about an echappée
is that in nearly every case, it will move up.
So you can see I've got an F-sharp here.
It's moving up to G.
I've got an E here.
It's moving up to F-sharp.
So that's what you would expect the echappée to do.
The fourth thing to know about it
is that it's normally followed by a leap
nearly always downward.
So I've gone by step from a harmony note
to this echappée nextdoor,
but then I've got to leap down onto the next note,
and I've done the same thing again.
Here we are using a harmony note
that belongs to this chord, this A seven chord.
We've gone up by step to a note
that doesn't belong to the chord,
but then we've got a leap down.
So that's how they work.
Just remember, it's got to be a neighbouring note
that doesn't belong to the chord.
It's always unaccented between the beats,
preceded by step from the previous chord.
It normally moves up,
and after you've done the ecahppee,
we're normally following it with a leap
nearly always downward.
So that's how those things work.
So there's another inessential note
that you might want to add to your collection
if you're writing, and if you're playing music
and you're looking at something and thinking,
"Well, what's that note doing there?
"It doesn't seem to belong to the chord,
"but I can't see what it is,"
well, ask yourself if it's one of these.