Dear Friends,                                                 Weird chords, diminished sevenths

“The easiest way to write a bad song is to try to write a hit. Write the opposite of what you think a hit is. Write what speaks to you, write something that only you can write. Write the music you want to listen to yourself. Add the weird chord progression and key change, and call men stupid in as many ways as you can.”

                                                                        Sabrina Carpenter

“My dear fellow, the surprising effects that many people ascribe to the natural genius of the composer are often enough achieved quite simply by the correct use and resolution of chords of the diminished seventh.”

                                                                        Ludwig van Beethoven                                      

I’m not sure what Ludwig would think about Sabrina’s last suggestion; but her “weird chord progression and key change” and his “correct use and resolution of chords of the diminished seventh” are very precisely on the same page. Though Beethoven is quite disparaging about it he was himself a great diminished seventher, and we are all better off because of it.

They make it all seem so easy. But still their advice is very good advice (about weird chords and diminished sevenths at least, I think I’ll leave calling men stupid to Sabrina – she is very good at it). Never feel that somehow it’s cheating to do a weird chord progression, or a diminished seventh resolved correctly – if Ludwig and Sabrina can do it – and they do! – so can we, holding our heads high!

The weird chord progression and key change are music following its path both inevitable and unknowable in advance. The diminished seventh chord strode that path. One thing about surprising effects and weird chord progressions is that they always remain weird and surprising however many times you hear them, even when you’re listening for them.

The weird chord progression is already there to be recognized. The diminished seventh chord is an already existing, objective, reality. It was always a possibility, but so many conditions need to be realized to come to its actual presence, right now, resounding in space and in our ears, and those conditions must be realized anew every time, and that’s why it continues to be surprising, why it is surprising every time.

Theodor Adorno, referring to Beethoven’s remark on the diminished seventh – “a truth worthy of him, [an] inexhaustible sentence” – says: “There is nothing immediate in originality.” When I first read that I thought there was something mean about it, disparaging originality, and Adorno can be very mean (sometimes stupid) about a lot of things. But I think I was wrong, at least in this case: Originality doesn’t come out of nowhere but out of everything that was already there. That is why the original is at the same time a surprise, never heard before, and something that we immediately recognize: Oh, yes! I was waiting for that!

I’m not going to introduce Theo and Sabrina to each other, apart from the fact that he’s been dead these many years, he is notoriously stupid about popular culture – his essays on jazz are exemplary. Don’t read them, he has so much to say that we need right now, they’ll just be a distraction. Sabrina could certainly find in them more ways to call men stupid, but she’s already got quite enough to be getting on with.

Both Ludwig and Sabrina focus on the weird progression, the diminished seventh chord. But they achieve equally wonderful effects often without dramatic chord progressions, or seventh chords, but by very simple transformations.

Let’s not get into too much detail, but listen to the transition from the short Introduzione to the final movement of Ludwig’s piano sonata in C, Op. 53, the Waldstein, just listen, but maybe note the high G that keeps coming back at the end of the Introduzione, and then becomes the opening of the wonderful theme of the last movement. Or listen to Sabrina’s wonderful song Lie to Girls, listen to what happens in the ending, a magical transformation of the verses and chorus into such a simple, rocking movement, up and down, whole tone and semitone, over and over.

Schoenberg’s second string quartet caused a riot at its premiere – 21 December 1908, at the Bösendorfer-Saal, Vienna – not only because the two final movements were settings of poems (by Stefan George) but also because the audience were the first – first audience ever – to hear, first in the galaxy, in the final movement, atonal music, music with no tonal center. Mahler, who fiercely defended his younger friends, even though he admitted that he was not sure what they were doing, almost got into a fist fight with one of the (reactionary) rioters, luckily Schoenberg had a large friend who got in between them. This is what the audience heard before the riot began

in Schoenberg’s manuscript. I do urge you all to listen to it, you too, Sabrina! And you, Ludwig, if you’re listening! We all continue to hear these tones as new, as the first audience heard them, leading to the haunting line:

Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten

“I feel the air of another planet”. Weird chord progressions are forever.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby

The Federal government no longer exists.