Fourths against minor 7 chords.

[jster]

JonR may be just the guy to address this but of course beggars can't be choosers!

From a composition standpoint, I find myself getting a bit confused when it comes to 4ths in the melody against minor 7 chords. Are they good resting places? Or are they more passing notes? They sound rather bland to me. (And what do we call them? min7add11?)

And what about the F#-7b5 in the bridge of Autumn Leaves. There is a fourth there. (What do we call it? min7b5add11) Putting that 4 on top, it sounds much better than the 4 against the minor 7. Why is that? Just cool "dissonance"?

Thanks in advance.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

1. Fourths in the melody against minor 7ths are common in jazz standards. Maybe the song originally just had the dominant seventh, and then that melody note is the root of the dom7. (For example, a tune originally has a G over G7, and that G7 hangs around for two measures. Someone decides to stick in the secondary Dmin7 and there's your G over Dmim7.
2. Resting or passing? It's consonant -- more consonant than the minor chord's 9th, but has an ambiguous quartal feel. So my vote is for something more neutral than resting or passing -- you shouldn't be resting on a ii chord any way. In a minor key, you certainly wouldn't have a melody end on the fourth over the i chord, right?
3. I call it min7 -- the melody note doesn't have to be registered in the chord symbol. If I want to reflect it in the chord symbol, min11. The name min7(add4) or min7(add 11) is too hard on the old eyeballs.
4. For the same reasons, I'd call that half-diminished chord min11b5, if I had to mention the fourth. It sounds cooler because it is cooler -- everybody loves a minor second/major seventh interval:

Dmin11b5: x56563

[jster]

Thanks Big Daddy.

That helps. Maybe "resting" and "passing" aren't the right terms. But if you look at that Autumn Leaves, the fourth just gets one beat. The three note phrase begins and ends on the root with the fourth in between, the final root getting two beats. And similarly in the next bar, it just gets a beat.

You write:

"Fourths in the melody against minor 7ths are common in jazz standards."

And:

"In a minor key, you certainly wouldn't have a melody end on the fourth over the i chord, right?"

I accept the first on your authority , and I agree with the second. So aren't you just saying, yes hit those fourths, but don't end/focus on them? I just think of that as pass, but don't rest. I'm only looking at a bar or two and the phrase within that bar or two. So I might actually be on say iiim7 for two bars in a major key.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

That helps. Maybe "resting" and "passing" aren't the right terms. But if you look at that Autumn Leaves, the fourth just gets one beat. The three note phrase begins and ends on the root with the fourth in between, the final root getting two beats. And similarly in the next bar, it just gets a beat.

That part in the B section (F# B F# over F#m7b5 followed by a B7(b9)) sounds like it used to be just a B7 to begin with and the F#m7b5 was added as an elaboration.

As for improvising, every note or interval has its own character. The fourth over a ii7 (or ii7b5) sounds fine to land on or stress. In the same way the sixth or ninth works over a major seventh chord. I think it's cool to end or focus on them. I think ending or focusing on a chord tone is overrated. Anybody else?

EDIT: here's an idea. It may make more sense over a major seventh chord, say in an A section, that ends a phrase. First time through end or focus on the root or fifth. Second time through, highlight the third or seventh. third time through, highlight the sixth or ninth. Hmmm...

[jster]

Well, here's a little background. I write melodies. Then when I try to harmonize them, I keep coming up against this problem of bland quartal sounding fourths appearing uninvited, and I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong. Is it the original melody? Or is it the harmony. I guess I have to look at more standards tonight.

[JensL]

Well, here's a little background. I write melodies. Then when I try to harmonize them, I keep coming up against this problem of bland quartal sounding fourths appearing uninvited, and I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong. Is it the original melody? Or is it the harmony. I guess I have to look at more standards tonight.

I think that you've probably found a good solution at the end there. I think you'd have to post an example for anyone to really say if it is the melody or the harmony? I often found it useful to check the same song and how (very?) different people harmonized it, Miles quintet versions of Stella and My Funny Valentine (since you have both 1st and 2nd quintet recordings of that)

The fourth is indeed a common note and as BDLH said, it is a handy way to avoid having melody and bass being unison.

Maybe if you think about it in a structured way, it is mostly happening on the II chord? (as a sustained not passing note)
I guess I am thinking of a standard like song here...

How many ways can you hamonize the note G in C major? (Abmaj7, Dm7b5, Dbmaj7, Fmin7, Fm6 etc etc)

Jens

[jster]

Hey Jens,

Thanks. Here's the way I do things. I am struck by some melody of say about 8 bars. Let's say it sounds like a major thing. Then I try and first harmonize it with I, IV, and V. First just the bass. Then the chords. See if I can identify tonic, subdominant, and dominant bars. Then I try the relative minors for each of those chords (except around the beginning and the end since we need a defined major tonic) and see how those sound. .

Yes there are many ways to harmonize. But at this time, I'm not interested in hip hamonizations. What I'm trying to understand is how the heck to deduce the most natural harmonization. Assume you had a simple sensible vanilla yet catchy melody. How do you determine the natural harmony. Take Greensleeves, the standard harmony seems to fit like a glove and I get the feeling that the melody came first and that one can almost read the harmony off the melody.

I've asked around and I just don't know what book to buy. Some of the guys on the AAJ forum put me onto the little method I outlined above. But I wonder how to develop it. Could you write a computer program that took a melody and gave the natural harmonization? It seems if you stick to hummable melodies for kids, then there should be a pretty clear method for deducing the harmony.

Beyond that, of course, I'd like to know the answers to move involved questions. To what extent can one read secondary dominants, various extensions, and pivot chords/key changes off a melody? Are there certain melodic patterns that present special difficulties for harmonization, such as consecutive phrases beginning a half step apart? Or: we all know harmonic cliches, Ed Byrne has a list of about 40; Where is the list of melodic cliches? I think that would be very interesting. Maybe there are great books out there that explain it all. I don't know. You would think Mozart must have known a ton about what every little melodic move was implying harmonically. What was he thinking!?

So my little problem with fourths against minor 7ths is just part of the how to heck to harmonize question. I think I can put a little file on soundcloud tomorrow. Now if I can only remember the login info!

[JensL]

Hi Paul,

I think the approach with finding the functional areas of the melody and work from there is good. If you harmonize a standard melody with just I IV V then how does that sound? (probably not that good...)

The chords I suggested I more or less consider diatonic (or extended-diatonic for a lack of a better term) to C major, hip really begins somewhere else, and probably more in how the progressions are constructed than the choice of chords.

Maybe what you should do is look at the notes you have in the melody, standard tunes have a certain kind of melodic language that is different from childrens songs or other styles for that matter. If you try to harmonize a childrens song using jazz language you might get a sense of what I mean. For a standard melody it has a lot to do with often avoiding having the root in the melody in all places except the ending and on the dominant. Somehow standard melodies are often by themselves very strong with harmony, so the note choice is showing the color of the chord more than it does in a childrens song.

The auxiliary dominants will usually appear when you look(well listen actually..) at the melody and has to find a way to go from one place to the next. To me harmonizing was also applying the different ways of getting from A to B that I knew from the standards I know, there is however not one way to go about that, so for a lot of songs there are more choices as to harmonizing it (an example would be when All of Me goes to the IV it can go back to I with IVm but #IV dim works just as well)

sorry for the long post, it is hard to write short explanations about this...

Jens

[bondmorkret]

I agree with the 'blandness' of the 4th interval against a minor7 chord, but I guess that's hugely subjective and down to personal taste. It's definitely consonant, for the reasons mentioned above, but if I'd be more inclined to rest on the chord tones, or the 9th if I had a choice

[JensL]

I agree with the 'blandness' of the 4th interval against a minor7 chord, but I guess that's hugely subjective and down to personal taste. It's definitely consonant, for the reasons mentioned above, but if I'd be more inclined to rest on the chord tones, or the 9th if I had a choice

Hm.. I don't know about these statements. FWIW Jobim, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans and Cole Porter all do not have any problems with that, I think it is all about context and not so much about the color of a 4th against a minor chord.

Jens

[bako]

Chord tone, extensions/color tones, passing tones, suspensions/appoggiaturas

In many ways the difference between these is based on the temporal usage as it is about the note choice itself.

Extensions/Color tones become chord tones when they are presented without resolution to primary chord tones.

Passing tones are notes used as pathways to chord tones. It is also possible for primary chord tones to be used as a path to extensions/color tones.

Suspensions/Appoggiaturas are passing tones that hang around longer but ultimately resolve to a chord tone.

Jster,

Post an example if you can, audio or written.

[jster]

Jster,

Post an example if you can, audio or written.

Probably going to fall into the be careful what you wish for category!

OK, I don't like the soupy sound at during the first two beats of the second and fourth bars. I can't find a better harmonization. Then I wonder whether the melody is just problematic, maybe not as a melody, but as a candidate for harmonization. Perhaps too many minor seconds to deal with? I just don't know how to think about what's going on.

OK, I gotta go to the music store and buy some more picks. You guys are making me nervous.

[JensL]

Well ok so the melody is more or less the same phrase transposed a 4th diatonically.

If you harmonize it like this (actually ignoring that a bit..) you could go

Em7 A7 | Am7 D7 | Gma7 Bbdim | Am7 D7 Gmaj / |

Changing between Em7 and Gmaj7 is a really weak close to neutral harmonic movement, and the melody somhow
suggests that it is always resolving and moving towards the 3 of the bar so the harmony should probably reflect that.
I think that in bars 2 and 4 the Em7 and Am7 does not really fit the melody that well.

Is the melody ending on the 3rd beat?

This is just what I hear and a quickly made suggestion for an alternative, I am sure that there are more elegant solutions.
I hear more Gmajor than Eminor in this fragment for some reason.

Jens

[jster]

Thanks Jens, Was there something about the melody that I should have known early on was problematic?

[bako]

Due to time constraints I stretched out the melodic rhythm to conform with what I was hearing.
No doubt there are simpler solutions but I wanted to share what I came up with anyway.

I did this before your last post. Sounds like a fun project.

[JensL]

Well since you harmonize the F# with an Em I take it you want it to sound jazzy? That is not exactly country or Spanish in any case.

For my tast ending on the 3rd beat is not a very strong melody, and I get the feeling that this melody should move on that's why I ask. I sort of hear a 2 bar movement and then a similar movement, but it does not resolve.

It might even make more sense to shift the whole thing 2 beats so that the first two beats were an upbeat? The 1 of the bar is a better resting point than the 3 in most cases. Try and refer it to standard ballads and how they move, I can only think of 1 or 2 that don't do that.

You could do this:
Em7 A7 | Am7 D7(D#dim) |Em7 A7 | Am7 D7 |

or in fact this:
| Gma7 Bbdim | Am7 D7 || Gma7 Bbdim | Am7 D7 |

Right now I don't have an idea how you would keep the two progression the same but a 4th apart somehow one or the other is going to be awkward or far fetched.

Another observation about the harmonical content of the melody in bar 2 chord tones from D7 with diatonic embellishments. That is probably why the Em is so strange there.

Jens

[jster]

Thanks to both of you. I'm going to work on your suggestions tonight. I'll have some feedback in an hour or two. Sorry Jens, I probably shouldn't edit so much after posting. I originally thought this was just going to sound something like Greensleeves, English folk, just major and minor triads. Then when I got harmonizing, somehow, perhaps because it was so slow, I put it in Eminor, so then I needed a 9th chord. And that sounded kind of Satie like. So it started to morph a bit in that direction. But, no, it was actually supposed to be decidedly non-jazzy originally. I actually would still like to somehow harmonize it with just triads to see if that is possible and if not why not. Maybe the problem is I put a saddish song in Em/G and started on an pronounced F#? Maybe that's when things went south?

[jster]

Also one more thing that I think is odd about it is that you have the long F#s, then at bar 2 you get the quick Gs. It's not easy to hear or sing because it goes by so quickly. I don't think many melodies do quick jerks like that. But I dunno.

[JensL]

Also one more thing that I think is odd about it is that you have the long F#s, then at bar 2 you get the quick Gs. It's not easy to hear or sing because it goes by so quickly. I don't think many melodies do quick jerks like that. But I dunno.

We don't know the tempo of the tune...
Ballad does not really tell you that much could be anything from 40 to 100 bpm.

I think it is interesting, I guess folk does not have a lot of major 7ths in the melody
but that does not really matter. It's a fun exercise to harmonize a tune anyway.

So more minor less extensions:

|D Am|Em D Em Am D / |
|G D |C G/B Am D G / | (So in bars 2 and 4 I harmonize each 8th note of the 1st half of the bar)

You could end on Em too...

Jens

[jster]

Sorry. Tempo no more than 70bpm.

[shrp11]

The Beatles standard "Yesterday" features an 11th (4th) prominently in the bridge ("why she, had to go ...").

Also can be found in "This Guy" by Burt Bacharach ("who looks at you the way I do ...").

And many other tunes ...

It's common and sounds great, imo.

[bako]

Jster,

Bar 1 and 3 are very simple. At first I felt it was the rhythm acceleration that complicates things to quickly and that's why I elongated the melodic rhythm.

What if bar 2 repeated the phrase GB A GB A F# and bar 4 CE D CE D B.
That would perhaps keep it closer to an Irish protest song vibe.

[jster]

To get it to end on Em, maybe this:

|D Am|Em D Em Am D / |
|G D |C Bm Am Bm Em / |

The thing I find very interesting about this is that to harmonize with triads you felt the need for all those extra chords.

[jster]

Jster,

Bar 1 and 3 are very simple. At first I felt it was the rhythm acceleration that complicates things to quickly and that's why I elongated the melodic rhythm.

What if bar 2 repeated the phrase GB A GB A F# and bar 4 CE D CE D B.
That would perhaps keep it closer to an Irish protest song vibe.

Actually, it is against my rules to do that kind of thing. I try to have the melody go up or down depending on the vowel sounds. I begin by assigning vowel sounds to notes (oo being lower than ee, etc, and when I'm really getting into it, putting in bends for dipthongs), then try and find a rhythm that gives it some coherence. There is a term for it actually that I can't remember at the moment. I can shift things up or down, maybe changing whole steps into half and half into whole (while remaining in the key--it is amazing how different things sound when you do that by the way as you might imagine.). But I can't replace that C by an A because it is for a higher vowel.

By the way, I liked your version quite a bit Bako and I have some unrelated questions about it which I'll hold on for the moment.

I'm not wedded to the Irish protest thing. But what I find interesting is that if you start with this melody and try and harmonize it with triads, that seems to be what you are comitted to.

[jster]

I think I really screwed up in not giving you the exact tempo at the outset.

I think that at 70bpm what I was hearing was just two beats each Em G D G Am C G C. This is nice and parallel.

Jens got me to see that it was more a D chord than an Em on bar 2.

UPDATE: But I think the thing I didn't like about that originally was the G, a fourth over a major chord!