The Ellington Century (32 page)

VI (C major). We might call this “kitten on the keys,” if that title were not already in use. The wrong-note half-step melodic figure, played by the thumb, sounds accidental until we realize that it develops the sliding triad theme of the previous waltz. Again we hear second harmonies, but here Ravel develops a contrast of
melodic minor seconds and harmonic major seconds into a blur that disguises a simple V-I progression in C major.

VII (A major). This is the most elaborate of the waltzes and the one that Ravel cited as most characteristic; he later incorporated parts of it into
La Valse
, the waltz to end all waltzes. The main tune appears as a thickened melody of three-note chords that eventually swells to become a melody of seventh chords. The ultimate harmonic shock comes in the middle section, which seems to superimpose a melody in E major on a bass in F. Ravel analyzed this passage as an example of “unresolved appoggiaturas,” which he illustrated, tellingly, using a figured bass and compared to the opening chord in Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 31, no. 3.
⁵
He may have been joking. Because the melody in the right hand sounds tonally close to the A major of the outer section, it feels consonant while the bass seems “wrong,” a half step too high. Not surprisingly, the surreal, dreamlike effect of this superimposition proved useful in Hollywood, but it also appears in several Richard Rodgers standards such as “Spring Is Here” and “The Sound of Music.”

VIII “Épilogue” (G major). A new melody, voiced in parallel triads, drifts slowly over a nearly static bass line that, halfway through, comes to rest on a low G. Between reorchestrated and reharmonized recurrences of the melody, reminiscences of all the waltzes flash by against a tolling B. The music comes to rest with the return of the mysterious passage from the end of Waltz II, cadencing, just as it would in jazz, not on a tonic chord but on a dominant ninth.

Ravel's harmonic discoveries did not end with
Valses nobles et sentimentales.
In later works he absorbed influences from Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, and Gershwin; but this was a kind of payback since he had already influenced all of those composers except for Schoenberg. Ravel's oeuvre provides models for harmonic idioms by composers from Bartók and Berg to Mingus and Monk that retain a functional bass line and a sense of progression while pushing the envelope of dissonance. I hear a particular connection between Ravel's sensibility and Billy Stray-horn's (though Strayhorn's distinctive harmonic style also resembles Alban Berg's at times). Strayhorn began “Lush Life,” composed in 1933 when he was eighteen, with an unusual harmonic progression, a major seventh on the tonic moving, out of the key, to a major seventh on the flat seventh degree, straight out of Ravel's
Sonatine.
“Chelsea Bridge,”
with its parallel augmented eleventh chords, is perhaps the most obvious homage, but I also hear a tribute to Ravel in Strayhorn's own
valse sentimentale
, “Lotus Blossom,” Ellington's favorite composition by his alter ego.

GOING MODAL: DEBUSSY AND SHOSTAKOVICH

In 1959 Miles Davis's Mixolydian “All Blues” launched modal jazz, and just a few years later the Beatles gave popular music a modal makeover in “Eleanor Rigby” and “Norwegian Wood.” When music theorists speak about modes, they mean scale patterns that differ from the usual major and minor, although technically speaking those are modes also. The scale from D to D on the white keys of the piano is called Dorian; E to E, Phrygian; F to F, Lydian; G to G, Mixolydian; A to A, Aeolian. (The names of the modes derive from a misreading of Greek music theory, not from actual ancient Greek music.) If you build triads on the notes of each mode you will see that compared to the major scale they do not have major triads on the fourth and fifth scale degrees. They do not produce the usual IV-V-I progression needed to define the key. Harmonies based on modal scales either have a looser sense of harmonic progression or find different ways of producing tonal function. In “Lush Life” and in many Beatles songs the major triad a step below the tonic (the flat seven from the Mixolydian mode) substitutes for the usual dominant. In jazz the use of modal scales emerged from the rich harmonies of bebop, in which chords often contained five or six pitches. Thinking modally, jazz players treated the subdominant not as a 117 chord, which, by adding thirds, might contain (in C major) the pitches D, F, A, C, E, G, and B, but as the Dorian mode, which contains these same pitches. Modal harmony helped jazz musicians conceive their music more linearly, less chordally. Just as they had done in Impressionist music, the modes cleared the air.

In French music modal harmony came back to life with the three
Gymnopédies
of Erik Satie, composed in 1888. The first twenty bars of the first
Gymnopédie
employ only the pitches of the D major scale, but they don't sound like D major. The harmony rocks between two major seventh chords built on G and D; since there are no dominant-sounding chords we could be in either D major or G Lydian. Satie avoided major triads that would strengthen a sense of key; for a final cadence on D he used a minor chord as the dominant rather than the usual major triad or dominant seventh chord. In the third
Gymnopédie
the melodic line
stays on the white keys throughout and the harmony falls on the white keys except for a few B
s, which support a general strategy of avoiding major triads. Even though the piece sounds harmonically simple, it uses only one major triad, an inverted one at that, and only one dominant chord, a dominant ninth on G, which does not resolve in tonal fashion to C. Dominant progressions made music march; Satie's harmonies allowed music to float. You could draw up a long list of his imitators, beginning with Debussy, who orchestrated the
Gymnopédies
, and Ravel, who imitated them in his
Mother Goose
as well as in the
Valses nobles.

Debussy's most rigorously modal composition is the first movement, “Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d'été,” of his
Six épigraphes antiques.
The music appeared as a piano duet in 1914, but it had been composed in 1900, at the height of Debussy's association with Satie, as (unpublished) background music for recitations of the faux Greek
Chansons de Bilitis
by Debussy's friend Pierre Louÿs. (Satie had established a precedent for using the “Greek” modes to illustrate Greek subjects in the
Gymnopédies
and
Gnossiennes.)
The movement uses only the notes of the G Dorian scale; its opening melody, presented unharmonized, is pentatonic, omitting the E and B
of the mode. These excluded notes form the interval of the tritone, which would tend to focus the harmony on the tonality of F. The pentatonic subset of G Dorian, lacking that dissonant interval, is tonally ambiguous. It could be harmonized in C major, or F major, or any of the modes derived from those keys. Debussy, however, further limited the harmonic possibilities by allowing no chromatic alteration of the pitches of G Dorian. He nevertheless shifted the tonal center of gravity from one phrase to the next, so that at first we hear the piece in C Mixolydian, then B
Lydian, then D Aeolian. Only at the end is there a cadence on G, and it is set up with a progression of major triads on B
and C (III and IV) playing the roles of subdominant and dominant, respectively. Throughout the movement Debussy breaks rules of academic tonality just as he had begun to do back in his conservatory days, with parallel fifths and unresolved ninths, but the overall effect is of a rediscovered consonance, music minus anxiety.

There are many later examples of “white key” music in the twentieth century. Prokofiev in particular liked to give diatonic melodies his own personal stamp. In the first piece, a slow waltz, of his
Visions fugitives
, op. 22, written between 1915 and 1917, the melody sits entirely on the white keys except for a single D
six bars before the end that is marked
misterioso.
Prokofiev harmonized the melody with a counterpoint of
seventh chords that move in parallel but don't resolve or define a key. When the phrase repeats a new chromatic inner voice adds a little spice but no tonal direction. This time the phrase drifts downward to a b
minor triad, which turns (by way of the logic of tritone substitution) into a kind of dominant. It allows the music to close on e minor, where, it turns out, it actually began.