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hey, welcome to 12tone! as a fairly well-known theorist, I often get asked questions like
this one: (ADAM: "hey 12tone, what's your favorite chord progression?") and I'll usually
say something like my favorite chord progression is the one that best conveys the narrative
and emotional intent of the music it's supporting.
that's a great answer: it's dry, academic, and it sounds really insightful without actually
saying much of anything.
but it's not true.
my favorite chord progression is this: (bang)
this is called the Andalusian Cadence, named after the Andalusia region of Spain.
that's because it's an incredibly common progression in Flamenco music, but it's such a great sound
that it's spread all around the world, even showing up in pop and rock songs like Hotel
California and Smooth Criminal.
it's one of those chord progressions that you could just loop forever and I'd probably
never get sick of it, but why?
what makes it so interesting?
well, at its heart, the Andalusian Cadence is just a beautiful study of duality on a
lot of different levels.
let's start at the top: in effect, what we're doing is walking down the minor scale.
we start on I minor, then go to bVII major, then bVI major.
after that, we might expect to see V minor, which is what we'd get if we stuck to the
natural minor scale, but replacing it with V major is such a common approach that it
barely even registers anymore.
the structure clearly indicates that this is a minor harmony, but if we look at the
chords themselves, they're almost entirely major.
we're leaning on the brighter side of a dark scale.
we can also see that duality in the way the chords move: we have this long walk down,
and then suddenly at the end we turn around and have a big jump up.
that jump from V to I is meant to provide a sense of stability and resolution, which
is juxtaposed against the rest of the progression which feels like it's constantly falling.
taken all together, it almost feels like we're falling down a hole and every once in a while
we hit a ledge.
it's not really lifting us back up, it's just slowing our descent for a moment.
but there's an even deeper duality here, and it has to do with how the chords relate. at
first glance, the Andalusian Cadence looks like a great example of functional harmony,
which, as we've mentioned before, is the idea that different chords in a key have different
predefined functions, or jobs to do. in the case of the Andalusian Cadence, it ends with
the V major going back to I minor, which is like the fundamental chord motion in functional
harmony.
these two chords have the two most important jobs in the system: the V chord has what's
called dominant function, which means it points you back home, and the I chord has what's
called tonic function, which means it is home.
in fact, capturing this functional feel is why it's so common to see V major instead
of V minor, even when we're playing in a minor key.
dominant function relies on the note a half-step below the root of the key in order to provide
its sense of directionality.
that note is so good at pointing you back home that theorists have nicknamed it the
leading tone, but it doesn't exist in the natural minor scale so in order to make functional
progressions work we have to borrow it from major.
that means the Andalusian Cadence is going out of its way to feel functional. on the
other hand, the minor 7th shows up earlier in the progression, as the root of the bVII
chord, so we're kinda getting both sounds there too.
but really, the entire progression is kind of just an elaborated version of a I-V-I,
but if we look at how it's elaborated, our model starts to fall apart a little bit.
we can assign chord functions to these middle two chords if we want, but that doesn't actually
do much to tell us what they're doing.
a better approach would be to use a model I like to call proximate harmony, where chords
are connected not by any sort of complex harmonic relationships but by physical closeness.
it doesn't really matter what roles the bVII and bVI play, because the actual reason they
work here is just that they're directly below the chords that come before them and directly
above the chords that come after.
again, we're just walking down the scale.
putting these two models together gives us an incredibly functional skeleton that's wearing
a pretty non-functional skin.
enjoy that mental image.
anyway, moving on from the duality of the progression, another thing that makes it so
interesting is that it's kind of a blank slate.
you can do lots of different things with it.
the Andalusian Cadence provides a really strong harmonic framework, but beyond having that
descending bassline it doesn't actually have many requirements, so you can pretty freely
experiment, and I thought it'd be fun to go over some of those options.
the most obvious change we can make is to replace the V major with a V dominant: (bang)
this doesn't really change much, it just accents that dominant function that's already there
to make it even more directional.
a more interesting change, though, would be to use a dominant 7th chord in place of the
bVI major instead.
(bang) this turns it into what's called a tritone substitution, which is just a fancy
word for a dominant 7th chord that resolves down a half-step.
this helps set up the V chord, making the eventually return to I feel even more resolved.
it makes the progression feel a bit less non-functional, but the descending line means it keeps that
same Andalusian flavor.
another thing we can do is start flipping chord qualities.
for instance, we mentioned that the progression is mostly major chords, so what if we got
rid of the last hold-out and turned the I chord major too?
(bang) it's an interesting sound: it's not common to see three major triads a whole step
apart, especially not descending ones.
sometimes we'll see bVI-bVII-I as a sort of resolution, most notably in the music from
the Super Mario games, which has earned it the name Mario Cadence, but here we're going
down, and it feels almost… unnerving to my ears, like the brightness of the major
triads is lying to me somehow.
on the other hand, we could also go the other way and try to add more minor chords to it.
like, we could stick with the natural minor scale and replace the V chord with its minor
version: (bang) which also sounds pretty nice.
a bit more melancholy, because we don't have that strong resolution to lift us back up
at the end, but it's a lovely sound.
it also works well with that tritone substitution change we did earlier: (bang)
moving up, we could try replacing the bVI with its minor version: (bang) but I don't
think that works super well, 'cause bVI major contains the root of the scale, so in order
to make it minor we have to play a flattened root, which is… a bit much.
a more effective approach might be to borrow the natural VI minor chord from the major
scale (bang) which works a bit better, but I think flip-flopping chord qualities like
that is still kind of distracting from the point of the progression.
on the other hand, I'm a huge fan of replacing the bVII major with a minor chord: (bang)
this puts it next to the I minor, again playing up the duality theme where we start dark and
fall down into the light.
it also implies that we're in a scale called phrygian, which is like minor but with a flat
2, and it's one favorite scales. it's dark and brooding, and applying that sort of energy
really brings out a cool side of the Andalusian Cadence.
another, more extreme thing we could do is drop the bVII entirely, giving us this: (bang)
this is another common progression in Latin and other Spanish-influenced music, and it's
usually played with what's called an anticipation, where the V chord is hit slightly early for
a bit of extra rhythmic interest: (bang) dropping the bVII still gives us some of the feel of
an Andalusian Cadence but it lets us lean on the V chord for longer, and the whole thing
fits a bit better into a completely functional analysis.
you don't usually see it with the tritone substitution: (bang) but it totally works,
and even if you you don't actually add the dominant 7th, it kinda feels implied.
the last variation I want to look at is one that I actually haven't seen before, but I
started thinking about what the opposite of an Andalusian Cadence would sound like, and
I think it works pretty well.
check it out: (bang) here, the roots are moving in the opposite direction and all the chord
qualities are flipped, so we start on I major, then walk up to II minor, III minor, and IV
minor before falling back down.
this is basically just a walk up the major scale, much like we were walking down the
minor scale earlier, except that where we'd expect a IV major, we get hit with this IV
minor borrowed from natural minor instead, which resolves back to our I major nicely.
this movement from IV minor to I is a fairly common one in more advanced harmonic circles,
and a lot of different theoretical models have tried to explain it so it has plenty
of different names, like the minor plagal cadence, the Nebenverwandt, and the negative
dominant, but however you want to describe it, it's a really cool sound that brings a
nice sprinkling of extra flavor to this anti-Andalusian Cadence, or Antilusian Cadence, if you'll
pardon the play on words.
there's plenty more you can do with this chord progression, but in the end I think my main
point is just that the Andalusian Cadence is awesome and everyone should use it for
everything all the time.
or, I guess, you can use whichever chord progression best conveys the narrative and emotional intent
of the music it's supporting, but if you're ever not sure, probably just use the Andalusian
Cadence.
trust me.
it's great.
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