As summer winds down and students begin to embark on new worlds of learning, let's consider seven chords from Antonín Dvořák's famous Symphony No. 9 titled “From the New World.” Although most of the discussion of the “New World” quality of this symphony focuses on melodic material that might borrow from Native-American or African-American influences, the opening of the second movement has an other-worldly quality which comes mostly from its unconventional harmonic progression.
Someone posted last week on a Facebook Music Theory group asking how these harmonies would have been understood by theorists in Dvořák's time. Most of the hundred-plus responses focused more on how one might now analyze the harmonies, and that's what I'll do as well;
but it seems likely these notes inspired some awe, as they still do.
As is often true on such Facebook groups, there were many non-useful answers, with commenters suggesting the passage shows that key signatures don't matter or that conventional tonal concepts need not apply here. But there were also plenty of good answers, explaining that, although Dvořák's unusual modulation is spelled in a particularly confounding way - what with all those sharps in a flat key - there are some pretty basic underlying principles of tonal harmony which can help us understand the progression. That's not to say that the progression is basic, but rather that the composer's innovative choices get much of their power from how they work with and against tonal expectation.
My favorite response (by Michael Meixner, a Viennese musician and professor) presents a brief evolution from a very conventional four-bar phrase in a single key transformed into what Dvořák actually wrote, with a couple of steps along the way. Meixner also makes the very wise choice to transpose everything into a C Major context. This is because Dvořák's original moves from a key with lots of sharps (C-sharp Minor) to one with lots of flats (D-flat Major), all notated in D-flat Major which results in lots of unruly accidentals. Just the appearance of the notation looks "new," which may well be intentional. But notating everything in C Major makes it easier to see what's going on without having to contemplate strange keys like D-flat Minor (a key which would include B-double-flat in its key signature!).
Although a careful reading of all the comments would cover most of what I have to say here, I thought it would be useful to get all the main ideas into one place, with analysis shown and, most importantly, with the opportunity to hear the stages of evolution as proposed by Meixner. We'll get to those evolutionary stages a bit later.
First, a little background. The symphony is in E Minor, and the first movement ends firmly in that key. The second movement is going to be in D-flat Major which is a pretty distant key from E Minor. Nineteenth-century composers had been choosing unconventional key relationships between movements often enough, but Dvořák seems interested in highlighting that choice by starting with an arresting modulation which accentuates the exotic relationship.
The first curveball is to start in E Major rather than E Minor. But since we're heading to D-flat Major, it's actually most useful to think of the opening as in C-sharp Minor (the relative minor of E Major) and to hear the modulation as moving to C-sharp Major (which is just another way of spelling D-flat Major). It was perfectly logical for Dvořák to choose D-flat Major as his landing key as that key is more comfortable for what comes next in lots of ways, but since we're just interested in the arrival, it helps to keep everything with the same tonic (C-sharp).
Viewed this way, the music doesn't look nearly as frightening, although the B-flat Major triad in the first bar seems out of place, and some people may not love the look of that C-sharp Major key signature! (I promise we'll get to see this in good 'ol C Major soon enough.) Modulations are often built around a pivot chord which exists in both the old and new keys. Although our ears hear that first E Major triad as a connection to the previous movement (minor i becomes Major I), looking ahead, we can also think of it as III chord in C-sharp Minor, so that's the pivot point. We'll try to make sense of everything else with C-sharp as our tonic, though we will be mode-shifting from minor to major.
To be fair, in addition to that unusual B-flat Major triad, the passage does not feature a standard "authentic" cadence which would prepare the C-sharp Major arrival with a V chord (in this case, G-sharp Major). Here, the C-sharp Major arrival is preceded by a minor iv chord (F-sharp Minor), which makes this a kind of "plagal cadence." Plagal Cadences are much less common in tonal harmony, especially as a means of establishing a key, and the fact that we are coming from a minor key into major makes it sound that much more unusual. (See: mode mixture.) A typical plagal cadence would be IV-I in major or iv-i in minor; this iv-I blends the two. The VI chord which precedes the iv is also what we expect in a minor key. (If that's confusing, just trust me.) One thing that makes a plagal cadence a bit "gentler" as a setup for the tonic chord is that the tonic pitch is already part of the IV (or iv) chord. That common tone (C-sharp) turns out to be present in each of the last four chords, even though Dvořák's spelling obscures that.
Now, we'll pivot to Meixner's evolutionary conception to see how what Dvořák has done can be seen/heard as an alteration of a very generic progression. Again, we're moving everything into C Major for starters to make things really easy to see. Meixner first shows us a very basic progression, quite similar in the top voice to Dvořák, but with no modulation at all. Three of those chords will change in the next two stages, though in subtle ways connected to voice-leading choices. Notably, we end with the melody ascending through scale degrees 1-3 with an imperfect authentic cadence (viio6 to I).
In the second stage, we're reinterpreting C Major as its relative A Minor (same key signature) so that the first chord is again a III. However, the second chord has been shifted down by a half-step to a fully chromatic harmony (not any of the pitches are in the given key). Commenters have suggested various ways to make sense of this chord, but its most important features are: 1) its root is an unstable tritone away from the previous chord, and 2) the music immediately returns to the previous chord. Thus, it has a "neighbor" function, which in spite of the dissonant relationship, still functions to prolong the opening chord in the phrase. (Two of the pitches are connected by a half-step between the chords, and the other by a whole step, which is what it makes it neighborly.) So, I'm just calling it a "Tritone Neighbor" chord (TrN). Its job is to provide color without really taking us anywhere new since we return right back to where we started. But it certainly evokes a sense of mystery.
The second stage also introduces the idea of resolving the progression with a surprise major chord. Here, a passing note is introduced (the quarter note B) to help lead our ears up from A to the C-sharp which defines the major mode. There's an interesting connection here to that 1-2-3 ascent in the upper voice, two whole steps now recontextualized as 3-4-5. By raising the C to a C-sharp, that inner voice also moves twice by whole step from 1 to 2 to the newly raised 3.
The final stage (equivalent to what the composer wrote) shows how the second melody note of m.2 is raised by a half-step (C to C#) to create an A Major triad, anticipating where we are going while also imitating the half-step motion in m.1. This makes the previous tritone neighbor chord seem like a wrong turn in retrospect (but an enjoyable one). The analysis is admittedly a little overstuffed with information, but I've tried to highlight a few of the most significant aspects of voice-leading. You will be able to listen to all of these stages in the video at the end of this post.
[click image to see more clearly]
One characteristic of the phrase structure (see final version above) which emerges is how the first two bars each feature the same two-note melodic gesture, but spelled/harmonized in two different ways. Each of the first three bars begins with a C, the first two struggling up by half-step, the final one confidently ascending by whole-step into the final bar. In the second bar, the bass reaches down an extra half-step to "discover" what will become the new tonic chord. The final two bars feature the aforementioned 1-3 ascent in an inner voice, with the notes now moving in whole steps as if having found surer footing. Although this passage tends to sound more like "just chords" than a melody, the 1+1+2 organization of the melodic motives is a perfect example of sentence structure. Sentence structure is so common that it can seem obvious to point it out, but the concept helps us see how the phrase evolves melodically from a single note, with the chromatic harmonic choices providing forward momentum.
The yellow-shaded horizontal bar in the final stage above shows how starting with that fourth chord in m.2, the tonic pitch (A) is present throughout. This helps to ground the surprising arrival on a major tonic chord. The cadence in a major key approached by chords from the natural minor has a sound which reminds me of the so-called "Super Mario Cadence," notably used in the iconic Nintendo game, Disney songs, and other heroic contexts. Mario's melodic ascent from the lowered 6th to lowered 7th to tonic creates an epic effect, partly caused by the "planing" of consecutive major triads. Although Dvořák's cadence features a minor iv chord, there's still something about cadencing with two triads built on roots from the minor key which sounds similar to the very satisfying surprise of the "New World" resolution. The two progressions also share that VI (from the minor key) chord preceding iv (Dvořák) or VII (Mario.) (And don't forget that the Super Mario fanfare signals your readiness to visit a new world!)
...and back-to-back with Dvořák!
And speaking of epic, I couldn't resist sending this progression into the Epic Online Orchestra, a fun website which makes it easy to toss chords together and hear them given the sweeping soundtrack treatment. The site has a whimsical feature which assigns evocative moods to each two-chord succession. If one begins with Dvořák's E Major and asks for "Outer Space," the tritone-related B-flat chord is what you get. "Strange new worlds" indeed.
Here's a quick demo of the Epic Online Orchestra which fills in all of Dvořák's chords (though not necessarily voiced the same) to impressive effect. (You may also go directly here and click on the green PLAY CHORDS button near the bottom of the screen.)
The point of observing these tenuous connections to video game and space music is simply to see how some of the ways in which Dvořák creates a sense of awe and grandeur can be more broadly generalized across many genres. (There are many examples, but the ending of Whitney Houston's famous rendition of the national anthem has her holding on to the tonic on "brave" while the orchestra plays the epic bVI - b-VII - I beneath. Hear are 3:01.)
So that just leaves us with one more demo, a video which walks you through Meixner's three evolutionary stages in C Major, A Minor/A Major, and then again in Dvořák's actual key, but spelled as E Major, C# Minor/C# Major.
But wait, there's more! Dvořák seems to have been pleased with this little progression because it occurs four times in the symphony:
beginning of 2nd movement
m.22 of 2nd movement after the primary theme has been presented, but without modulation, so it begins and ends in D-flat Major.
m.120 of the 2nd movement to usher in the final bars, again without modulation in D-flat Major.
m.299 of the 4th movement Finale in a blaze of orchestral fury. In E Minor, with no modulation, but with the added drama of a Neapolitan (flatted 2nd) chord preceding the final E Minor, which creates a powerful half-step motion in the bass.
That last version is especially striking because the core "melody" is pretty much just those two half-steps going back and forth - which is reminiscent of the opening of the Finale, perhaps the second most famous half-steps in music history. (Sorry, Dvořák.*) This climactic return of the "outer space" progression clearly recalls those ominous half-steps.
So at the end of the video, you hear an orchestra play numbers 1, 2, and 4. Be careful out there!
P.S. At the risk of overstating the obvious, it should be stated that none of these subtleties needs to be noticed consciously by any listener, and there's no claim here that Dvořák was definitely thinking in the ways described. The point of this kind of theoretical exercise is to observe patterns and practices which connect this music with what we know about how musical language tends to work. I was listening to this symphony while taking a walk today and struck by how quickly these moments pass by - moments I've spent a lot of time tinkering with. It makes sense that something worth listening to might exhibit many levels of artistry which can be broken down into bits, but just as easily not noticed when listening for pleasure.
P.P.S. Just remembered that I once wrote program notes for the Dvořák symphony. Read them here.
* By the way, as much as Dvořák seems to be the inspiration for the Jawstheme, check out the opening of Ravel's La Valse, which begins with the same subterranean E-F pair. You may read more about that here.
LYRIC POET: Are we embarking on a study of the meaning of meaning? YOUNGER BROTHER: I sure hope not. (from Leonard Bernstein's The Joy of Music)
NOTE: There are more than 550 possible outcomes.
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MICHAEL MONROE
I'm a pianist and college music professor in the Boston area. This is not me. Neither is this. Curiously, these most Googleable Michael Monroe's are each musicians. This IS me.
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