Orchestral Voicings Part 7: Surrounding Context

Up to this point, we were looking at voicings from a quite microscopic perspective observing individual voicings in an empty space. In the last part we were putting them into a little more context, talking about tension and resolution. However the focus remained more on the individual voicings.

But of course, voicings never exist in an empty space but always in context of their surroundings. In fact, most decisions considering the voicing of a chord are based on its surrounding.

Usually most attention should be given to the immediate surrounding of the preceding and following voicing. In the last part of this tutorial, we were already having a look at how the amount of tension and resolution between voicings should be consequential in order to create a satisfying musical logic.

And musical logic should be what is driving any decision in regards of how to voice a chord.

One of my favourite examples in this regard is the chord of a Dominant7sus4(add10) chord which doesn't work except when it does:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/d7sus4add10/s-YsyECsSAIl1

Basically, this is a chord that simultaneously has its sus4 and major third which according to common rules should be mutually exclusive. You could also call it a D11, however in order to indicate the F# being voiced above the G (to avoid a possible minor ninth), the rather uncommon "add10" (with the 10 actually being the third) gives a little more structural guideline to the voicing.

Still, we might probably agree that on its own this chord pretty much sounds like an accident and doesn't make any structural sense to our ear.

However, let me put it into context where it does make a lot of sense. (If you are from Germany you might recognize this chord progression from a locally very popular pop song from the 90s ;)

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/d7sus4add10-context/s-SKWReihE2LK

Notice how this fourth chord in spite of a usually problematic structure works very well here and actually is the most interesting part of that chord sequence.

What makes this chord change here plausible are the notes C and G that sustain over the chord change (even if they are not in the same octave). To make it more obvious, let's isolate this:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/connecting-structure/s-EEAe2JKu0LP

The whole structural instability of the second chord gets "explained" through the first chord which puts it into a very understandable context for our ear.

The bottom line from our observations so far is that context seems to matter a lot and that connections over mutual chord tones seem to create a lot of logic.

In fact, one of the fundamental rules of part writing is to move every voice as little as possible (ideally sustaining) from chord to chord. While we don't treat that rule as strictly anymore in today's music as it has been done for instance in the Baroque era, there still is a high relevance to this.

Up to now we looked at this more from a chord aspect. The D7sus4add10 chord makes sense if it is preceded by a C major chord, independently of its voicing as long as it is halfway decent.

But obviously the higher potential of connecting chords with this strategy lies in the choice of voicing. And this is where we circle back to the beginning. An isolated voicing can sound brilliant on its own and still be unplausible in its surrounding context.

Let me demonstrate this with the following chord sequence:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/chord-progression-1/s-djHf7cGV5Yc

While all voicings independently are perfectly fine and follow all the structural rules we talked about in the previous six parts, there is an obvious disconnect between all of them:

• the top note keeps jumping around without establishing any meaningful melodic quality
• common tones between chords are rarely sustained
• chordal structure jumps between closed and open position

Let's try making this progression more logical:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/chord-progression-2/s-9zAZjGO38gO

Here, I took the approach to sustain as many notes as possible over the chord changes and in spite of the individual voicings losing a bit of structural excitement compared to the previous example, in the context of the entire progression there seems to be more logic here.

Depending on what happens on top of this (e.g. a melody playing) this second version could work reasonably well.

We could however try to voice the chords in a way that the highest voice gets a bit more melodic quality:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/chord-progression-3/s-vyTyMeBXQJS

You might have noticed that we touch quite heavily on the topic of "voice leading" here which is one of the strongest forces in music. Basically, every voice that sustains over a chord change or moves in the smallest possible steps (ideally minor or major seconds) feels particularly logical to our ear and the more individual voices we can optimize in this regard the more the music will sound homogenous and connected.

And this opens up the biggest can of worms when voicing chords which is the constant conflict between moving the voices in a most melodic way on the horizontal structure while creating great sounding voicings in the vertical structure.

Approaching this and finding a way to prioritize will be the topic of the next part of this tutorial.