Introduction to reharmonization (chord substitutions)

Starting in this lesson, I am going to attempt to tackle the ambitious task of teaching harmony–specifically how to improve the harmony (chord progressions) that you normally see in hymn books. I am not going to get far today–in fact, all I am going to cover today is an overview and a brief history of harmony.

Some Background
Why we need chord substitutions in the first place? We don’t need chord substitutions, but they certainly do improve our church music. Consider these two examples.

Just As I Am

I	V	I	V	IV	I
Just as I am	without one	plea, but	that thy blood was	shed for	me.

Some Day My Prince Will Come (Disney from Snow
White)

IMaj7	III7	IVMaj7	VI7	ii7	VI7	II7	V7
Some	day my	prince will	come	Some	day we’ll	meet	again

These two songs are somewhat similar stylistically. They both have simple but nice melodies and they are both stylistically laid back. The main difference is the harmony–you could not make the chords in your hymnbook for “Just As I Am” more boring if you tried for ten years. I took the chords for “Some Day My Prince Will Come” from a book I have at home, and you will note that they just look more interesting. Trust me when I say they sound more interesting too, though they themselves would be considered pretty boring by many musicians’ standards.

There is absolutely no reason why the chords for “Just As I Am” cannot be every bit as interesting and beautiful as these chords for “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” Over the next several weeks, I hope to systematically give you some ways to move your music in that direction.

If you have had experiences like me, you might have taken hymn playing classes in the past that attempted to teach chord substitutions. For example, you might have heard that you can substitute a minor iii or minor iv for a I chord. The problem is that there are few substitutions that work all the time–it is much more likely that a particular substitution will work only some of the time.

I can remember many times standing over the shoulder of a teacher who was playing a hymn. Out of the blue, he would use an interesting chord substitution and say something like “you can do this here.” The problem was he never explained why you could do it there or why you could not do the same thing in another part of the song. This is frustrating to say the least. If you are going to learn chord substitutions, you need to know when they will work and why they work. And yes, there is almost always an explainable reason for why a substitution works.

The main factor that determines whether or not a substitution will work is the harmonic progression (meaning the chords in front of and behind the substitution). Because of this, I am going to refrain from just teaching isolated chord substitutions and discuss this topic from the prospective of chord progressions. This approach is often associated with the study of something called functional harmony, which is a way that modern composers analyze and plan music.

A Brief History of Harmony
While I try to avoid controversy in these lessons as much as possible, I think it is important for you to know a bit of background of the history of harmony.

If you went back to the dawn of Western music (ancient Greece), you would find that music had no harmony at all–there were only melody lines. Gradually over the centuries, harmony became slowly introduced. At first, the harmony was very pure–perhaps two voices an octave apart and then later, a perfect fifth or perfect fourth apart.

What this meant was that there was no dissonance in the music for centuries. Very gradually, the Western ear became more and more accustomed to dissonance. By the time of Bach, certain barriers were broken, but until Beethoven, dissonance as we think of it today was rarely found in music. For example, while Bach or even Mozart may have used 7ths, they used them rarely and not in the way they are used today. The practice of using 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths in chords (extended chords) came later, and not until the 20th Century were they used like we are accustomed to hearing. Debussy for example used extended chords, but mostly to create an illusion of atonality. However, today, even our tonal music uses these chords regularly.

Many modern composers and musicians tend to see Western musical history as an evolution of dissonance (whether or not this is an accurate view of history is fiercely debated). It is not debatable however that our ears welcome a level of complexity and dissonance in our chords that would have been very offensive to listeners a few hundred years ago.

Now, back to hymns. There are at least two reasons why the chords in our hymns are so boring.

Many of them are old and use old harmony that lacks the complexity we now are accustomed to. Look at newer hymns in your hymnal and you will see that many of them use more interesting harmony.
Song writers avoid complex harmony to make it easier for congregations to sing together. Interesting harmony is harder to sing than I, IV, and V chords.

Essentially, the tinkering we do with chords helps to make the music more modern by introducing complexity and dissonance.

My Harmonic Preferences
It is worth discussing what type of music we should model our harmony after. The chords I use are not unique to me but have been discovered throughout Western music history–mainly in the last 150 years. Many of the specific chords I regularly use became popular during the first half of the 20th Century and are distinctly American.

I do not want to sound like an elitist or a Pharisee, but unless you know where to look, you are not going to find much harmonic genius in the current popular music markets. There have been times in my life when I liked some pop music but I now find it very unsatisfying. I recently heard a Pop/Christian musician complaining about the complexity of chords in the hymnbook. If he thought those chords are complex, I shudder to think how boring his chords are.

That is not to say that music is bad. God can use all kinds of music regardless of what I think about it. There are great Christians in every genre and style, and complex harmony is not a prerequisite for godliness. But my preference would be to use harmony from music that is modern (Beethoven and forward) but not pop. I especially like the harmony that was discovered in the writing of the great songs of the American Songbook era–1920’s through 1950’s. (Note I said “discovered”; harmony is not invented–we just have to discover it.)

I do not like dissonance for the sake of dissonance, a tactic embraced by many modern composers. I want the harmony I use to be complex, tastefully dissonant, and above all, beautiful. If you want to know what kind of harmony I like and am going to teach in these lessons, listen to music from my last CD, Reflections on a Journey. I should say that my opinions are simply that–others will disagree with the chords I use, and they are welcome to their opinions as well.

The harmony used in most Christian music is very weak–from the most conservative music to Christian rock; the good news is that it all can be much improved. Next week, we will get more in depth on this topic and discuss some of the myths of chord substitutions that many church pianists struggle with.