Welcome to 'Sticker' era.
We have a short-lived college concept,
questionable word choices,
and a whole bunch of dominant to tonic relations.
Let's talk about the latter of these in this episode of
Classical Composer Breaks Down the K
First, what do these terms mean?
The tonic is the note that feels most stable,
the most central to a key.
If we say a song is in G minor, then G is the tonic.
The dominant, by contrast, is something unstable,
something made to lead to the tonic.
Now, if you've learned some western music theory
you might be thinking:
"Yeah, those are the names of scale degrees.
Tonic is the first scale degree and dominant is the fifth."
And that's true,
but in this video we're going to be looking
less at individual notes or chords
but more broadly at how they function within the key.
The fifth scale degree, the dominant in that sense,
is the quintessential dominant function.
Just going from that to the tonic has some of the effect.
But if you add an unstable chord over the dominant...
and then go to a stable chord build on tonic...
you get a much stronger sense
of moving from tension to resolution.
But let's say we don't use the fifth scale degree,
can we create a progression with the same effect?
Yes.
Yes we can.
Now if you've done some jazz you might recognize that
as a tritone substitution.
You take the original dominant chord,
keep the tritone that was making it so unstable,
but then move the bass a tritone away,
and now you have a new chord,
it's different,
but fills the same function of leading to tonic.
You can take this pretty far if you want, for example...
still has the feeling of a dominant moving to the tonic,
even though the dominant chord didn't contain the 5th scale degree,
had some weird notes in it,
and the tonic also had some dissonance in it.
And lest anyone think that dominant and tonic are a binary,
there are also chords with predominant functions,
which generally work to set up the dominant
or sometimes to move more gently back to tonic.
And there are chords on the boundaries between functions.
But for this video I will be focusing
primarily on dominant and tonic functions.
Also some music uses harmonies with each primarily for its own color,
not as functions in a system supporting a given tonic.
For example, you could try to put function labels
on the chords in 'Highway to Heaven'...
...but they don't describe a particularly strong leading function,
nothing really seems to point strongly towards a particular tonic
and that's a lot of what makes it feel so spacious
and like it just keeps on driving without stopping.
It's useful to know exactly what a harmony is
but sometimes getting stuck in the details of a harmony
can get in the way of recognizing what a harmony is doing.
So we can listen to this:
and say, okay, there is a F♯ diminished triad
and there is a D in the flute but that might not count cuz it's moving
and there's a sub D in the bass but that's hard to hear,
there's also an F♮ in the flute against the F♯ in the piano
and there's a G and that wasn't at the time-
It's a dominant harmony.
It's an unstable structure made to move to this tonic.
Yes, the details of how the flute's line
interacts with the piano's chords are interesting,
but getting caught up in the complexity of the harmony
can result in missing that the essence of it
is an unstable dominant moving to a relatively stable tonic.
If the dominant is characterized by instability
and the tonic by stability,
what if we modify the notes in a chord
to make it more or less stable?
To understand this, let's take a detour to-
'Don't Call Me'!
This part...
sounds like a pretty unstable chord built on A.
Sounds like a dominant.
It will probably resolve to D like this.
But that's not what happens.
It actually goes:
And that...
sounds a lot like a dominant harmony,
but now built on D,
which would probably resolve to a tonic harmony built on...
G!
Back when A was the dominant...
G would have seemed like a predominant chord.
But now, because the notes on the D chord were altered,
it redirects the sense of tonic towards G.
And that's the power of harmonic functions.
Tweak a chord a bit and it can switch functions,
and that can shift the whole sense of tonal center.
Back on 'Sticker' the prechorus starts with...
Straight forward enough, we have a tonic...
into a predominant...
and back around.
Except that now D sounds like the tonic
whereas before D sounded like the dominant and the tonic was G,
because back then D was spicy...
and now it's not spicy anymore,
so it can be the tonic for now.
Going back into the chorus, D becomes spicy again...
going back into a stable tonic...
G.
And having a dominant on D resolving to a tonic on G
sounds a lot like:
Let's back this up even further.
The verse was centered on G,
the prechorus was in D, and then the chorus is back in G.
Now this looks a lot like a progression,
but not at the scale of individual chords,
but at the scale of sections of the song,
from an original tonic G to a temporary tonic,
D, the dominant of G,
and then back to the original tonic, G.
So this harmonic architecture is in effect
at multiple levels in this song.
The bridge uses a lot more predominant functions
than other sections
but is overall centered on D,
which means, like the prechorus,
it's another move to D, the original dominant,
setting up a move back to G, the original tonic.
The final chorus sounds a lot like the others,
but I wonder:
What if this happened at an even larger scale?
What if 'Sticker' had an ending that said that the whole song,
with all of its rhythmic and harmonic instability,
was a large setup, a dominant for one final resolution.
So let's take a trick from 'Zimzalabim'
and have the final chorus keep building up tension.
In this case by holding onto the dominant
through the final chorus
to set up a new outro,
which emphatically lands on G, creating a resolution,
not just to a dominant chord or even a section,
but to the whole song.
"Like a Sticker, Sticker,
Sticke-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-r".
And a whole bunch of donicked to-
Nope, that's not how that word goes.