Measure For Measure: Don’t Know Much Trigonometry

A jazz solo doesn’t have much to do with the songwriting of Eric Church — or does it?

A bebop solo is a rollercoaster ride up and down over a cool chord progression on a toboggan of scales and arpeggios, with all kinds of acrobatic stunts along the way. An agile instrument — be it guitar, sax, or keyboard — that can pour out notes as fast as your fingers can fly is what makes it possible.

Speed figures in some vocal styles, too, such as scat-singing, but singers usually lean on other resources, such as prolonging and caressing a note, quavering, swelling, or fading sadly, like a wave receding from the shore. Examples? Too numerous to mention, but try Roberta Flack, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” and Ken Boothe, “Red Red Wine,” for starters. Speed has nothing to do with the emotive power of their melodic lines.

What’s the common ground? Geometry. If you blur your ears at a song you’ll notice that certain notes stand out in every phrase: the highest or lowest. And the same is true of an instrumental solo — it may take more notes to climb a peak, but peaks (and valleys) shape the phrase. Motifs (brief patterns) matter, but broad patterns define structure. The prominence of highs and lows implies something else: a median line, a departure point.

These three reference points — high, low and median — form musical triangles that suggest a new way to listen to a song, or more important, create one.

Take Eric Church’s “Springsteen,” for example. So much is going right in this song, it’s easy to get lost in the world it creates. What we want to do instead is blur out the detail and focus on three notes in every phrase: the median note, which occurs early (sometimes first), the last note, and the high (or low) note that comes in between. Everything else is background.

Like many songs, “Springsteen” is made up of two-measure phrases. The first phrase extends from “To this day” to “on that lawn.” Listen to the words and pick out the notes on “day,” “song,” and “lawn.”

Immediately, we detect that these three notes create a triangular structure on which hangs the musical meaning of the phrase. While it seems almost sacrilegious to slow a song down and pick it apart, it’s worthwhile if it enhances our creativity in the end, so let’s dive a little deeper.

Measure 1 (through “song”) and measure 2 (through “lawn”) are in a call-and-response, question/answer pattern. One rises, the other falls. Together, they form an arc, or what we’ve termed a “rainbow” in other columns. But the rainbow goes by fast, and focusing on “day,” “song,” and “lawn” simplifies the structure to three points — a triangle, in other words. Triangles have stability and completeness. Think of a tripod, a three-act play, a three-line joke, or A-B-A song form. They also have dynamic tension: Think of a lover’s triangle.

“Day” is the median note because it drums on the stable 5th of the tonic chord (D major). Hopefully you’re familiar with the concept of scale-tone mood from previous columns and you recognize the soulful feeling emanating from this resonant tone, which also figures largely in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

“Song” steps upward from “hope” to “joy” (scale tone 5 to 6) briefly, hitting the high note in the first phrase. Its clipped brevity implies “joy interrupted,” which coincides with Church’s theme of romantic nostalgia.

After peaking on “song,” Church descends through the emotional 3rd of the tonic chord (on “I see you stand – in’ there on…”) to home-base on “that lawn.” Because “lawn” is far below the median (“day”), it has an introspective quality, as if looking inside to find truth (the tonic). The third tone in the triangle completes the message and tells us where we’re going next.

With this in mind, listen to phrase 1 again, perhaps more than once, and realize that Church achieves an emotionally stirring effect by broadcasting meaning on multiple channels, as one can only do in a song.

Skipping ahead to the pre-chorus—“When I think about you – oo”—it seems we leave trigonometry behind: Church hits the high note (tonic) immediately. But this isn’t quite true. The tonic falls to the yearning 7th scale tone on “you – oo,” creating two points. But where’s the third? It’s the whole of the first 16 measures. The new high point establishes a much larger triangle, building tremendous momentum going into the chorus (“Spring-steen”).

Almost all songs (and instrumental solos) have small triangles nested within large triangles, such as we find in “Springsteen.” Church planted the highest note in the pre-chorus, but it might come in the chorus, too. It’s a matter of artistic choice. We’ve barely scratched the surface here, but it’s enough to get a handle on a new and useful songwriting tool.

Creative challenge: Listen to “Springsteen” and other songs and see if you can sort out the triangles. Then try to invent a few yourself. Having a plan can be empowering: You know where you’re headed, and the background notes have a habit of falling into place without effort.