Contents
Before getting deeper into chord theory, I’d like talk about the concept “key” in a little more detail.
1. Major Key or Minor Key
Traditional Western music theory is based on the thesis that a song can be classified either as “major key” or “minor key”. Each key represents the corresponding scale—major scale and minor scale, respectively.
Major Key
Minor Key
Major scale and minor scale (or major key and minor key) are like members of the same family, hence “relative“.
The collection of pitches is identical between the two, so the distinction can be drawn only via your brain; which tone seems to behave as the tonal center.
But Isn’t it unconvincing that there’s no clear border between the two? It doesn’t sound “theoretical” at all! In fact, Classical Harmony theory has a rigid system to make this point clear.
2. Tonality in Classical Music
Classical music (18thC) established a strict system where major key and minor key have distinct rules unique to each other; In major key you must use bright sounding chords in high ratio, and vice versa.
So classical music songs basically have key information in their names. It is not after the song is written, but before the songwriting starts that they decide in which key a song will belong to.
As a result, a major key song is so bright as if an awards ceremony is starting, while a minor key song is so dark as if it’s the end of the world.
Classical composers made use of this contrast to express confrontations like life/death, meeting/parting, joy/sorrow or love/hatred. That was how they constructed the “story” in music, which entertained people at that time. From that standpoint, the distinction between major/minor must be clear.
The idea that major/minor keys form a mirror symmetry to each other, representing the very opposite character, is called Dualism1.
Jazz theory, though not so strict as Classics, also inherits this idea in principle.
3. Tonality in Popular Music
However, as times passed by, artists cut across these boundaries, mixing up major and minor to express more complexed themes. Now about 300 years have passed, songs with ambiguous tonality is very common in popular music.
Above is the collection of Top 10 hit songs from the chart “Billboard Year-End Charts” from 2015 to 2021.
It must be hard for you to judge whether they’re “bright” or “dark”. It definitely is so because in terms of musical structure they’re really in the middle, blending the essence of both major/minor keys.
This is a result of natural selection. Even if you want a song with bright taste, you don’t want it to be as bright as “an awards ceremony”, or even if you want a dark song, what you expect is not something as dark as “the end of the world”, in most cases.
What people today ask for music is more sensitive expressions such as “You may get lost, but be strong”, “We broke up, but I don’t regret”, “The sky is dark but stars are shining” or whatever.
In other words, it is what was ruled out by Classical music theory that actually rules over the pop music world today.
This phenomenon is akin to the trend in movie scenarios; where people get sick of simple poetic justice and prefer more complex story such as “a friend of a hero turning a villain” or “The opposite of a justice is another justice”.
This trend is getting so prominent today that even authentic theory books begin to make a note for that:
What if you did not want to establish the tonal center at all in the entire song but, instead, only imply it? This is what many contemporary songwriters choose to do. By choosing to imply rather than state the tonic* throughout, the music becomes more alight, buoyant, intriguing, and, possibly, more inviting. …… This expansion of harmonic movements provides a greater freedom for expression, giving you options otherwise not available.
(*tonic : A synonym for “tonal center”.)
Perricone, Jack. Great Songwriting Techniques (p.146 / p.149). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
This is a quote from a book written in 2018 by Jack Perricone, a co-founder of Berklee College of Music’s Songwriting Department. We’re really in the era of great reformation!
Review
A major key is always paired with a certain minor key, which are “relative” to each other. They have the same tone members so if you make a song without restraints, the key naturally becomes ambiguous.
Classical Harmony theory, having thought this situation unfavorable, established the “dualistic” system in order to separate major/minor keys clearly and classical composers made songs according to it.
Popular music artists today, on the other hand, have no framework like that. So it’s common for their songs to have vague tonality, which is now a kind of trending.
This is one of the hot topics in the academic filed as well in the last 2-3 decades. You can find a number of papers regarding this issue, by googling like “Pop/rock tonalities”, “Tonal ambiguity in popular music”, bla bla.
How LMT Treats Keys
Summing up, it is a bit misleading to say that “music is divided into either major key or minor key”. The truth is; “Classical composers wrote songs under the creed that music must be divided into either key”.
Now that the styles of music have radically changed, this “dualistic” system leads to learners’ disadvantage.
- You will be suffered by the gap between theory and practice.
- Simply speaking, the amount of topics you have to learn is doubled.
- Learning “dualistic” formats could be an obstacle to making modern sounding music.
- When analyzing a song, you’ll get stuck in the process of key judgement.
- Since such judgements may vary among people, it can cause miscommunication.
Here lies a part of the reason why music theory is thought complicated, cumbersome or remote from the reality. LMT, to avoid these troubles, construct theory on the premise that a song can be major key, minor key or somewhere in between.
By thinking this way, music theory can get much closer to the reality and reduce its complexity as well. Compared to the term “dualism”, LMT call this borderless concept Monism.
- Monism in Tonality
- The concept that the “relative” major key and minor key are essentially connected and a song may waver between these two keys depending on its melody lines or chord progressions.
…Or it could be called pluralism. Anyway, the motto for 21st century’s music theory is diversity.
Now we’ve already broken out one of the “jails” traditional music theory has! With these reconsiderations LMT takes the smartest course of learning theory for popular music.
Summery
- “Relative” major/minor keys don’t have clear border, so the tonality could be ambiguous.
- Classical Harmony theory has a system to separate major/minor keys, but modern pop songs aren’t made under such rigid system.
- LMT adopts the idea of “monism” in tonality, to have better compatibility with today’s music.
