FOTOGRAFíA E ILUSTRACIONES:

Rhythm guitarists in rock or pop bands play chords most of the time to provide the harmonies which accompany the melody of the song. Their job usually involves strumming several strings at once to produce a chord, which they repeat a few times before moving on to another one.

The notes which make up the chords are chosen to support the notes within the melodies, and this means that the chords and melodies often use some of the same notes. For example, if a certain bit of the tune uses the notes A–B–C–D–E, then a typical accompaniment would be the chord made up of the notes A, C, E. We don’t slavishly follow every note used in the tune; we just pick suitable ones which fit. This chord would obviously give most support to the notes within it (A, C, E), so we would use it if those were the notes we were emphasizing in the song. If we had wanted to give prominence to the notes B and D in the same bit of tune, we could have used the chord which uses the notes B, D, F.

You may have noticed that I am not using consecutive letters for my chords. The simplest chords don’t involve notes which are right next to each other in the scale because, as I’ve discussed, notes that are too close together produce harsh combinations. Consecutive notes of a scale are either a semitone or a tone apart in pitch, and I mentioned earlier that notes a semitone apart compete for our attention rather than support each other. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for notes a tone apart, so any consecutive notes from a scale will clash if they are played at the same time. For this reason, a chord made up of the notes A, B, and C, for example, would sound very anguished indeed, as the B would clash with both the A and the C. This sort of chord would not be of much use in accompanying a melody, but it would be right at home in something very tense like “The Devil’s Staircase.”

The notes in simple, harmonious chords need some breathing space between them in order to support each other, and three alternate notes from whatever scale is being used gives us the commonest type of

pleasant combination. However, even in pop songs it is customary to add a little bit of spice to occasional chords by first building a “nice” team of three notes and then adding a single clashing note. So we might use C, E, and G, with a B thrown in to add a bit of tension because it will clash with the C. Our rhythm guitarist (who should really be called the harmony guitarist) provides these groups of notes as a background to the melodies produced by the lead guitarist or singer.

In other musical situations we don’t have one person providing the melody and another giving us the harmony. Solo pianists, for example, do both jobs at once, generally playing the melody with their right hand and the chords/harmony with their left. On the other hand, classical music often involves a large team of orchestral players. When an orchestra plays, only a few of the members will be playing melodies at any one time, and the other musicians will play harmonies to accompany them.

T h e composer will often pass melodies around from one group of musicians to another to keep the listener interested. In Boléro by the French composer Ravel, the music gradually gets louder as the tune is passed around the orchestra and more instruments join in. The harmonies are kept pleasant and warm until just near the end, where the composer injects a lot of tension for a dramatic final climax.

Chords and harmonies form the background to the melody and also support the punctuation of the phrasing of the music. In fact, you could remove the words and tune from any song and still be able to tell where the ends of the verses were from the harmony alone.

If you are accompanying a melody with chords, the simplest thing you can do is to repeatedly play all the notes of the chord together.

Alternatively, you can add an extra layer of interest to the music by playing the notes of the chords one at a time as a sort of continuous, overlapping stream of notes. A chord played as a stream of its individual notes is called an arpeggio and this is the basis of the popular folk guitar technique of finger-picking. (Good finger-picking guitar players can play the arpeggios of the chords and a melody at the same time.) Arpeggios

add a layer of complexity and subtlety to music because you can choose exactly which notes from the chord will coincide with particular notes in the tune and also add a rhythm to the arpeggio pattern.

Arpeggios are common throughout music and can be found in just about any classical piece, particularly anything with “romance” in the title. The famous slow movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is a stream of arpeggios with a tune on top, but possibly the best example of a piece made entirely of arpeggios is the “Prelude in C Major” by J. S.

Bach. There is no real tune, just a series of chords played as arpeggios.

Confronted with a piece like this, composed by Bach, most other composers would treat it, quite rightly, as a precious jewel to be admired to the point of jealousy. Not so the nineteenth-century French composer, Charles Gounod. Gounod took one look at Bach’s Prelude and thought “A piece made entirely of arpeggios? What a waste… where’s my book of spare tunes?” The result of this rush of blood to the head was “Ave Maria”—accompaniment by Bach, tune by Gounod—and I have to admit

—they revel in rapid repeats of full chords for a high energy effect.

Beethoven and Status Quo are in total agreement on this “loud, repeated full chords = energy,” as you can tell if you listen to the opening seconds of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata or his Fifth Symphony (the one which goes Da Da Da Daah! Da Da Da Daah!).

The most complex type of harmony is called counterpoint.

“Counterpoint” describes the situation in which you accompany one melody with another melody—in this way you can have two, three or even more tunes playing at the same time. For most of us, the only personal involvement we have in this are those children’s songs where two or three singers start the same song after a certain delay—like this:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez vous?…

This method of playing the same tune after a certain delay is called a canon. The delay means that you are both singing different notes at any one time—which is a similar musical effect to both of you singing different tunes. A slightly cleverer version of the canon involves this idea of singing the same song after a slight delay—but starting on a higher or lower note.

Counterpoint often employs these techniques, but can also involve different tunes played at the same time. The tunes must work together and, usually, some of the tunes accompanying the main melody are kept fairly simple to prevent the whole thing turning to incomprehensible musical mush. You can’t just play any old tunes at the same time because the combinations of notes would occasionally sound dreadful.

Composers have to use a lot of skill to write counterpoint—and a piece which relies on the interplay of counterpoint as its main content is often called a fugue. A master of this technique, such as Bach, can organize eight or more tunes playing simultaneously. But this is too clever for us mere mortals—our ears probably can’t distinguish more than three tunes at once. If you want to hear some excellent examples of counterpoint, I recommend the Concerto for Two Violins (in D minor) by Bach, and if you want to hear a great fugue, it’s best to listen to one played on a solo instrument so you can hear the separate tunes (called voices) clearly.

Bach’s “Little Fugue in G minor” played on a piano is a good example. It starts with a melody played without accompaniment, but before it finishes the same melody starts up again, played on lower notes, and it starts up again a bit later, played on even lower notes. There are other

tunes mixed in but they are short and simple by comparison. One distinctive feature of most fugues is that they involve tunes which have an easily recognized beginning, so that each time the main tune jumps into the mix you can hear it clearly.

One or more of the basic techniques of harmony (drones, chords, arpeggios and counterpoint) will have been used in nearly all the Western