dissecting music

Lets say you’re a little brat and you want to go to the park to play soccer, because just being at home all the time is boring to you. In order to get to the park you must go down the street that goes through your neighborhood.

What is a cadence?

Remember the chords we built from the major scale in the last article? We got a lot of chords this way and without a context it’s not very easy to figure out which one to use in which situation. But I have good news! By the power of cheesy metaphors, I’ll make sure you get a solid grasp of this.

In the last article we built the chords of the C-major scale. Let’s use these chords again, but keep in mind, that it doesn’t have to be C-Major – we could build chords starting from any note. It’s not the key that matters so much, it is the relationship between the notes!

So, our first Chord was C Major. We’ll get to the terms on the right of the images in a second.

Since we built it starting from the first note, we call it our I chord. The I chord stands for when you are at home. You feel safe here and you know you can stay here as long as you want and always come back. When you’re at home you can feel stability. But always staying there gets boring after a while. So, one afternoon, you decide to go into the park to play with your friends. In order to get to the park, you have to go down the street you live in. The street stands for your II chord. The chord that we built on top of the second note was D Minor.

While you’re on the street you can’t think of anything else than the park. You are so close and know your friends are there – you just can’t wait to see them. So, just like being on the street, is making you want to get to the park as fast as possible, the II chord pulls you strongly to the V chord.

The chord we built from the fifth note was G Major.

So, – you guessed it – the V chord is the park. It’s the most fun place to be, because all your friends are here and there is so much you can do here. But you know that it will get evening soon and you’ll have to get home. After playing with your friends, you’re exhausted and hungry and actually want to go home for dinner. Luckily, your mom picks you up from the park in the evening by car. You can go home directly, without having to walk up the whole street again.

This means the V chord takes you directly to the I chord. If you play all of those chords one after the other you get

I II V I

But you don’t actually have to start with the I chord. It will actually work just the same if you start with the II chord. Think of it as a story in a book or a movie that can start anywhere, as they often do. If you start on the II chord, you get

II V I

That’s what is called a cadence. You can play this in any key and each chord will always have the same effect of wanting you to go to a particular place.

What about the other chords?

Good question! Don’t worry – they all can be used and we can actually use the same story again to explain how. But let me first explain three musical terms that will make it, in the long run, easier to understand what’s coming next:

Tonic, Sub-Dominant and Dominant.

• Tonic means home.

• Sub-Dominant means the route you have to take, so you can get to

• Dominant, which is the exciting place you want to visit (but you know you’ll have to go home (Tonic) again eventually)

These three terms are not specific chords, but the funtions a chord can have. The I chord has a Tonic function. The II chord has a Sub-Dominant function. And the V chord has a Dominant function. Whenever chords derived from a common key are played in this order (Tonic, Sub-Dominant, Dominant, Tonic) it makes sense for our ears and we intuitively get an idea of how the next chord should sound like. This concept is called Functional Harmony.

So, let’s see how other chords work in our little story. We said that in order to get to the park from our home we need to go down the street. But we only take this route, because it’s the fastest.

We can also go through the woods to get to the park. The woods would be our IV chord, which also has Sub-Dominant function. If we build a chord from the fourth note of C Major we get F Major.

So if we write down the chords that stand for Home – Woods – Park – Back Home we get:

I IV V I

or if we start our story directly in the woods

IV V I

What if we do not wan’t to go into the park at all, since it’s raining? We can go watch a movie in the cinema instead. The cinema is our VII chord and has Dominant function just like the V chord. Remember that the chord built from the seventh note has a special structure. The chord built from the seventh note of C Major is B Minor Flat 5.

We now can also freely combine the VII chord with the others as long as we stick to the rules of functional harmony. So, this also makes sense to our ears:

II VII I

You can even go to the cinema through the woods if you feel like it, altough it doesnt make sense according to the drawing. Let’s just say there is a portal behing the tree on the top right:

IV VII I

We now have dealt with most of the chords derived from the Major scale, but so far the III and the VI chords have remained untouched. “What’s the matter with them?”, you may ask. These are a little trickier to explain than the others, but bear with me, it will make perfect sense. In the next article I will explain how and when to use them, and then we’ll derive a set of rules that can be applied in the paradigm of functional harmony.