 | A chord can be more than just a sound – it can give a message, or introduce an important idea... |
The opening chord of Emerging Dances is a mysterious-sounding cluster chord of five notes.
It isn’t immediately obvious why David Horne decided to mix these particular notes together.
In the opening chord, you can hear intervals of a whole tone, 2 sets perfect fourths and a perfect fifth. These intervals provide a regular pattern of notes all the way through Emerging Dances – a harmonic system.
To put it another way, perhaps most music’s harmony is organised around a system of major and minor chords.
Tunde Jegede’s song Moving Away is an example of this.
And if you upset this system, and change it for something else, you quickly get something quite different.
Emerging Dances’ system isn’t based around the usual major and minor chords, but neither are the notes randomly arranged.
These intervals are all contained in a pentatonic scale – a scale of only five pitches. David Horne uses the patterns and intervals of this pentatonic scale to organise the notes of Emerging Dances.
So where a lot of different types of music build a sense of harmonic unity from major and minor chords, in Emerging Dances, this unity is created by the use of the pentatonic scale.
What David Horne is doing, in the opening chord, is introducing the harmony – harmonic language – of Emerging Dances. And the harmonic language of the piece is based on the patterns and intervals of the pentatonic scale. That’s why there are so many whole tones, perfect fourths and perfect fifths all the way through the piece.
What is it about the pentatonic scale that attracted David Horne?
The opening chord | Why the pentatonic scale? |
