Reharmonisation Part 8: Avoiding Standard Cadences 2

In the last part we were discussing how to avoid standard cadences by not using the structural pillars of tonic and dominant at expectable moments.

In this part, I want to extend this approach even further by almost completely avoiding any cadential harmony or even a clear tonal center.

One essential premise is that we understand that the audience's tolerance for harmonic paths has grown tremendously over the last centuries. Effectively, any chord can follow any chord, as long as you sell it well. We hear a lot of music more in the "key of the moment" than relying heavily on strucutural big arcs of a cadential progressions.

This allows us way more freedom when harmonizing and gives us the chance to use chords that are seemingly disconnected as long as we make them plausible.

One prime example where we can observe this strategy is Danny Elfman's Spider-Man Theme which seems to "mindlessly" jump through all sorts of keys without creating the gravitational pull of a stable tonic (which of course could be interpreted as a musical analogy of the main character).

But let's have a closer look at it. Here is an (approximate) harmonic reduction of the theme:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/spider-man-reduction/s-NClGXfhH8tO

There are several remarkable things happening in this theme:

• it doesn't much feel like a melody but more as if the chord progression is the melody and we mainly have top notes of the chords as "melody" with just a few motivic or melodic gesture
• the theme consistently avoids any tonal center, it constantly keeps moving through tonalities without ever reaching a point where you can clearly say which key it is in
• it creates this absolute ambiguity even in spite of some harmonic motions that could be considered cadential
• in spite of the relatively long note heavy theme, there are some clear melodic motifs
• he uses "harmonic motifs" several times which again gives structure

So let's unwrap this a bit more in detail.

1. Melodic Motifs: 

We see a clear melodic connection between bar 2,3 and 6 as well as 10,13,14 & 17 with similar ascending rhythms or "up and down swinging" triplet motifs. These are not particularly strong motifs but clear enough to  be noticeable

2. Tonal Center:

We could consider the first 6 bars as some E/C#m tonality, even with a lydian #11 in bar 3 but without any preparation, bar 7 switches to Fm tonality(?) followed by a G in 8. 9-12 seem to be at least relatively close together harmonically speaking while bar 13 again shifts without prepartion to an Abm (or is it G#m?) and so on. Even in the passages where it seems like several chords belong together in one tonality, it is unclear which of the ones actually creates the most tonal gravity so we remain without a tonic center

3. Cadences?

There are indeed cadential passages. 3-6 in isolation could be seen as a I-V-vi-IV in E even though its structural placement makes it not feel like this, there is something cadential about bar 15 and also some other chord progressions like 11 creates a somewhat cadential motion with the fourth leap in the bass. And yet, whenever we have the feeling that it seems to be targeting a tonality he breaks this expectation by radically switching somewhere else.

4. Harmonic Motifs

More interestingly, he re-uses several harmonics motions which then could be seen as a motivic idea. For instance there is a tendency for tritone relationships between chords, i.e. bar 8-9, 17-18, 21-22.

The question is why do these often seemingly random chord connections work in this theme and don't make it feel disjointed?

The answer is that he often uses two main strategies. One is the one that we've mentioned already of (faux) cadential motion with fourths or fifths between chords. The other, and more often used one is the connection via common tones.

If two chords have one or more tones in common, you can use this as a vehicle to bind them together even if they are tonally speaking quite remote. Elfman uses this strategy quite a lot here. For instance bar 15-16, the A moves to a Db+ by connecting the C#/Db as well as the A over which then connect the F and A over to the F major chord which in b.17 connect the F over into the Bbm. 9-11 is a similarly working passage. But then again, we also see quite a few disconnected chord progressions here that seem random. We could try to squeeze a square peg in a round hole by trying to find "plausible" chord relations for every chord progression here which with some music theory voodoo would be possible in most cases but would defeat the way how we hear this.

These radical shifts in this sequence create a rich harmonic colour (just notice how simple these chords are structurally - they are all plain triads except for a few augmented fifths) with constant changes of colors by shifting to a different tonality.

Strictly speaking, this approach can not really be considered as a "reharmonisation" strategy as these specific chord changes need a specific melody to actually work with, so it is usually necessary to write the melody "with" the chords. But the strategy to connect chords over common tones can also be used in reharmonisation approaches. This strategy gets even more useful when you work with extended chords where you have more options to connect common notes by using the upper strucuture of the chords. We will dive into this approach a bit deeper in one of the next parts.