Rock Harmony Reconsidered: Tonal, Modal and Contrapuntal Voice‐Leading Systems in Radiohead

Abstract

A great deal of the harmony and voice leading in the British rock group Radiohead's recorded output between 1997 and 2011 can be heard as elaborating either traditional tonal structures or establishing pitch centricity through purely contrapuntal means.1 A theory that highlights these tonal and contrapuntal elements departs from a number of developed approaches in rock scholarship: first, theories that focus on fretboard-ergonomic melodic gestures such as axefall and box patterns; 2 second, a proclivity towards analysing chord roots rather than melody and voice leading; 3 and third, a methodology that at least tacitly conflates the ideas of hypermetric emphasis and pitch centre.Despite being initially yoked to the musical conventions of punk and grunge (and their attendant guitar-centric compositional practice), Radiohead's 1997-2011 corpus features few of the characteristic fretboard gestures associated with rock harmony (partly because so much of this music is composed at the keyboard) and thus demands reconsideration on its own terms. This mature period represents the fullest expression of Radiohead's unique harmonic, formal, timbral and rhythmic idiolect, 4 as well as its evolved instrumentation, centring on keyboard and electronics. The point here is not to isolate Radiohead's harmonic practice as something fundamentally different from all rock which came before it. Rather, by depending less on rock-paradigmatic gestures such as pentatonic box patterns on the fretboard, their music invites us to consider how such practices align with existing theories of rock harmony while diverging from others.Functional tonal systems (FT), the first of three systems I will apply to Radiohead's voice-leading practice, will corroborate the observation made by such scholars as Walter Everett (2008) and Drew Nobile (2011): that many rock harmonic structures can be fruitfully understood as elaborating a highly functional tonal syntax which relies on descending-fifth root motions to harmonise2 and7 (leading note) converging on the tonic. Pitch centres that are not created through FT structures may also be established through relatively simple passing, neighbour and plagal motions and thus belong in my second category, contrapuntal systems (CP). In the wake of a rigorous definition and illustration of the first two systems, a clear niche emerges for functional modal systems (FM), in which the minor dominant is used to support2 and b7 (the subtonic) converging on the tonic. 5 Rather than identifying modes through mere scalar construction, this third system recognises modal syntax only in terms of Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) 59

Tonal Ambiguity in Popular Music’s Axis Progressions

“…For an account of how middleground harmonic and contrapuntal motions create tonality in Radiohead, seeOsborn 2017a, ch. 5, and2017b. Return to text 5. Notably, however, the progression is not always in the same rotation due to the starting points of the vocal phrases.…”

The Logic of Six-Based Minor for Harmonic Analyses of Popular Music

“…(1) Approaches include those based on the seven diatonic modes (Moore 1992;Biamonte 2010), three harmonic pale es (Stephenson 2002), and six tonal systems (Evere 2004). Some authors suggest unique schemes for specific artists or sub-styles, such as the music of Radiohead (Osborn 2017), Frank Zappa (Clement 2014), or post-millennial "hipster" rock (Heetderks 2015). Despite the various differences in how these authors cast the harmonic practice(s) of popular music, a feature common to all is that in each, the minor tonic chord is always represented as "i" (i.e., Roman numeral "one").…”