harmonic language in prog

Now go listen to The Inner Mounting Flame album by the Mahavishnu Orchestra - whats the first chord you hear on that album? Its that same chord....

aldri7

yeah, your strings are tuned in fourths so that would be the same finger? :)   Heh, heh.........(i shouldn't laugh) - some things on guitar are easier than on the piano, like key shifts, but not ELP, I guess. Which begs the question - if Keith had been a guitar player, would his music have sounded a lot different harmonically? :)

aldri7

very true in the case of Steely Dan, which reminds me.....

A cousin of the C major to A flat major shift is the C major to E flat major shift. Its very similar. Again, its also like a switch from C major to C minor in that the E goes from natural to flatted. Anyway, "Rikki don't lose that number" uses that shift in the refrain. Also, ELP uses it in "Abaddon's Bolero" every time the theme returns to the beginning..

aldri7

For example, I love the Lydian mode. Thats the one with the sharped fourth (F in the key of C). One classic example of the use of this scale would be "Maria" from  West Side Story.  For prog bands that use this mode a lot, I'm looking for examples, but don't have too many yet. 

I also like major/minor shifts in the same key for example, shifting back and fourth between C major and C minor. Genesis did this a lot (The Music Box) and is probably the main reason why I have always loved their music. When you make this shift (thinking C again), its similar to shifting back an fourth between C major and, for example, A flat major. Pat Metheny built his entire song "Phase Dance" on that shift. Another great example of this which I just heard for the first time is the song "Inside" by the band Finn Arild. Finally, there is the intro to "I talk to the Wind" (King Crimson) - same shift. 

The harmonies pioneered by guys like Dave Stewart and ubiquitous in UK bands like U.K., Bill Bruford, and then later Allan Holdsworth are great too. Really cool uses of 11th, 13 chords, etc and frequent key shifts. And Chicago's horn section in the early years did likewise with chords like in the Intro to "does anybody really know what time it is")

Keith Emerson built a lot of his work around stacked fourths. That opening left hand riff in Tarkus is all fourths...

And then there are altered scales which John McLaughlin sometimes used on Birds of Fire. For atonality, of course there is Zappa. Jazz Fusion harmonies like those used by John Scofield are  cool too. A lot of the harmonies used there are based on chord inversions where the 7th in particular (also 9th, 11th, etc) is in the base and so is dissonant against the other notes. Another guy with a unique harmonic language is Ralph Towner.

But thats barely scratching the surface. I haven't seriously searched for new music since about 1985. And so I have a ton of catching up to do. And so what I notice is that with prog today, you have 8,000 bands while in 1985 they probably numbered in the low hundreds. But to find those using the harmonies like I mentioned above you have to wade through an awful lot of I, IV, V music. There are rewards in searching, though, like finding Thieves Kitchen and Sylvan which I did the other day. Maybe if others are inclined to play this game, we can put up some other prog bands based on their harmonic signatures. Unique signatures is what I am looking for. I think that it tends to be true that most bands stick to a particular language or two because those are the only ones that they emotionally connect to. It reminds me about how so much music in alt rock these days and, owing to Pink Floyd maybe, a lot of prog too is based on the minor scale with the melody hanging on the "re" (as in do, re, me..). In C, thats D. And then from there, you do as Pink Floyd did, you shift between the C minor triad and A flat major triad while hanging on that D. The emotional power of that D over the C minor gives the music a sadness which appeals to tons of listeners out there (including me). I can think of no other melodic note over a chord that packs that kind of emotional power outside of the raised fourth in the Lydian mode and maybe hanging on the "ti" (seventh) in the major keys. 

And then in a few months, maybe I can do more than just reference bands and music that is more than 25 years old, Sorry, but thats how long I have been away from popular music. Retirement does give you more free time to do the things you love...

aldri7