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Yes.[1] In particular your point about analyzing chords in isolation is spot on. In “An Introduction to Musical Analysis”[2], Nicholas Cook says something that

Yes.[1] In particular your point about analyzing chords in isolation is spot on. In “An Introduction to Musical Analysis”[2], Nicholas Cook says something that I have always considered very profound and applies widely, not just in music, which is > All notation is analysis So whenever you write something down in music you are (of course) making some simplifications and you are also doing it for a particular purpose. Usually the purpose is performance. So when you write something you are providing an instruction to the performer. So when you write Cma7 for a jazzer, that’s an instruction that you are generally in the major tonal area and they may well play a Cma9 or a Cma7#11 for example. This is why my functional harmony teacher used to get annoyed by people writing the “Crosstown Traffic”/“Purple Haze” Hendrix chord as E7#9 (which you see a lot). He would say it is E7b10 because that g natural is coming from the minor modes so it’s actually the fourth degree which has been flattened. If you call it a #9 you’re telling players the wrong scale for improvisation (pretty much everyone else in the whole world calls it E7#9 though). Likewise going back to your point about slash chords, a lot of people learning this stuff get hung up on “what is this slash chord really?” (Eg if I’ve got B/C or whatever what actually is that) whereas when I’ve talked to really serious musicians in that world who play that kind of intense modal music they really are thinking about what the slash chords are in terms of where they come from and what they are leading to. Because that gives a sense for what the underlying tonality is. You can’t get it just from the notes of the chord vertically in that one instant. If you look at baroque music and earlier, if you just do a vertical chord analysis (eg something like Gesualdo if you really want an extreme example) the chords make absolutely no sense in many cases but that’s because they work in terms of voice leading (ie context) rather than vertical relationships. Analysts used to call that feature “vertical false relations” because they found the vertical chord analysis troubling. [1] ex-professional musician with a degree and postgrad in jazz, contemporary and popular music here. Wife is a professional musician who teaches at a couple of conservatoires and mostly plays baroque and early music with some 20th and 21st C music thrown in for good measure. Lots of pro musician friends. Not trying to argue purely from authority but I do talk music a lot with people who know a lot, and this topic comes up a lot. [2] Which stands out as a great book in a field with lots of terrible books btw.

anentropic 2y ago
> This is why my functional harmony teacher used to get annoyed by people writing the “Crosstown Traffic”/“Purple Haze” Hendrix chord as E7#9 (which you see a lot). He would say it is E7b10 because that g natural is coming from the minor modes so it’s actually the fourth degree which has been flattened. If you call it a #9 you’re telling players the wrong scale for improvisation (pretty much everyone else in the whole world calls it E7#9 though). you mean the third degree I think? at first I thought your teacher seems overly pedantic here, but it does kinda make sense... I'm surprised I've never heard anyone argue that before!
- derriz 2y ago
  Yep! It’s far more logical. This chord blends major and minor so the obvious way to indicate this is by adding a flattened 3rd.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  yes. Blame it on lack of sleep. Also as a sibling to your comment points out it's a blend of major and minor, so also in jazz you'll often see something like E7b9#9b13 written, but that really makes no sense in terms of a scale. The 9th is either flattened or sharpened, can't be both. So the next degree of the scale is the b10, which also makes sense when you think about something like a "diminished" scale which people play over this chord often. He also used not to like the name diminished for the scale btw, but would refer to it as one of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition. I can't remember Messiaen's nomenclature exactly but the scales which people call the wholetone/semitone diminished and semitone/wholetone diminished are one of his symmetrical system of scales. IIRC there are 3 distinct "diminished" scales and all the other ones are just modes of these three. So you can see that the st/wt diminished starting on D is just a mode of the wt/st diminished starting on C for example.[1] [1] This is him https://williamkinghorn.org/Biography https://williamkinghorn.org/Biography he was an awesome guy and I learned a lot from him
- rerdavies 2y ago
  I'm not sure your teacher is right. The notation should be Em7b11. Ultimately, I think it would depend on whether Hendrix included F or F# in the scales that he used to solo over The Hendrix Chord. If he includes F, E7#9 would be the better notation, since it suggests an altered mode: I, IIdim, IIImi, IVdim(and probably Vdim). (E, F, G, Ab, Bb, C D) . If he includes F#, then you could make a case for E7b10, which I would read as implying a blues scale, although I've never ever seen that notation: I, II, IIImi, IIImaj, IV, V (E, F#, G, G# A B C D). My bet is that Hendrix plays F, not F#, given that he was a jazz musician before he was a rock musician. The argument for Em7b11 would be that the major third is actually the FOURTH note of an altered scale. . Better still: Em7b9b11. Or I suppose you could be uncontroversial and just write Ealt. Chords derived from altered scales, and chords based on quartal stacks are both severely broken cases in modern chord notation. Neither seems to have settled chord notations, and the chord notations that do exists vary greatly by dialect. (Jazz guitarist who very much prefers modern functional chord notation, that implies both scale and chord, to the older Broadway jazz notation style).

anentropic 2y ago

> This is why my functional harmony teacher used to get annoyed by people writing the “Crosstown Traffic”/“Purple Haze” Hendrix chord as E7#9 (which you see a lot). He would say it is E7b10 because that g natural is coming from the minor modes so it’s actually the fourth degree which has been flattened. If you call it a #9 you’re telling players the wrong scale for improvisation (pretty much everyone else in the whole world calls it E7#9 though). you mean the third degree I think? at first I thought your teacher seems overly pedantic here, but it does kinda make sense... I'm surprised I've never heard anyone argue that before!

derriz 2y ago
Yep! It’s far more logical. This chord blends major and minor so the obvious way to indicate this is by adding a flattened 3rd.
seanhunter 2y ago
yes. Blame it on lack of sleep. Also as a sibling to your comment points out it's a blend of major and minor, so also in jazz you'll often see something like E7b9#9b13 written, but that really makes no sense in terms of a scale. The 9th is either flattened or sharpened, can't be both. So the next degree of the scale is the b10, which also makes sense when you think about something like a "diminished" scale which people play over this chord often. He also used not to like the name diminished for the scale btw, but would refer to it as one of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition. I can't remember Messiaen's nomenclature exactly but the scales which people call the wholetone/semitone diminished and semitone/wholetone diminished are one of his symmetrical system of scales. IIRC there are 3 distinct "diminished" scales and all the other ones are just modes of these three. So you can see that the st/wt diminished starting on D is just a mode of the wt/st diminished starting on C for example.[1] [1] This is him https://williamkinghorn.org/Biography https://williamkinghorn.org/Biography he was an awesome guy and I learned a lot from him
rerdavies 2y ago
I'm not sure your teacher is right. The notation should be Em7b11. Ultimately, I think it would depend on whether Hendrix included F or F# in the scales that he used to solo over The Hendrix Chord. If he includes F, E7#9 would be the better notation, since it suggests an altered mode: I, IIdim, IIImi, IVdim(and probably Vdim). (E, F, G, Ab, Bb, C D) . If he includes F#, then you could make a case for E7b10, which I would read as implying a blues scale, although I've never ever seen that notation: I, II, IIImi, IIImaj, IV, V (E, F#, G, G# A B C D). My bet is that Hendrix plays F, not F#, given that he was a jazz musician before he was a rock musician. The argument for Em7b11 would be that the major third is actually the FOURTH note of an altered scale. . Better still: Em7b9b11. Or I suppose you could be uncontroversial and just write Ealt. Chords derived from altered scales, and chords based on quartal stacks are both severely broken cases in modern chord notation. Neither seems to have settled chord notations, and the chord notations that do exists vary greatly by dialect. (Jazz guitarist who very much prefers modern functional chord notation, that implies both scale and chord, to the older Broadway jazz notation style).