(Mike Eppley wrote this fascinating response to the Cuckoo post and gave me permission to put it on Organic Piano 101. Besides playing the Big Literature on piano, Mike plays with a well-known blues group and has twelve YouTube videos under the name MrMikeyboards.)
"Am I singing the bottom of a minor chord, or the top of a major chord?"
Among the many things I found myself wondering:Do children latch on to that minor 3rd interval partially because of its tension, the need to resolve to a root note if the minor 3rd is really used as the top (steps 5 & 3) of a major chord? Think of "Ring Around the Rosie," when you sing "ashes, ashes (we all fall down)." Ashes, ashes equals cuckoo, cuckoo, but instead of a minor-ish context, it's really used as the top of a major chord that wants to resolve to its root. Whereas, normally when we think of a minor 3rd interval, we think of it as the 1st & 3rd steps of a minor chord, with a sad or suspenseful sound.
(I always notice this interval in movies, the moment they want you to feel suspense. If you pay attention, you'll hear it all the time! Then, of course, you can curse me for drawing it to your attention, after which you'll never be able to ignore it again while watching many movies.)
I guess it all comes down to which note in between the notes of a minor 3rd interval are being implied. There are exactly 2 notes (in Western music, anyway) in between the defining notes of a minor 3rd. If you "hear" the lower of those 2 notes as part of a scale/sequence that also includes the cuckoo notes, then it implies steps 3, 4, & 5 of a major scale/chord. But if you "hear" the higher of the 2 notes situated between the cuckoo notes, then you've constructed the first 3 notes of a minor scale.
Perhaps this duality is what's so intriguing about the minor 3rd interval? It's the Jekyl & Hyde interval of our diatonic system. (Yes, other intervals have dual contexts as well, but with this interval, the 2 contexts seem so opposite, so different, to me.)
An interesting way to think of notes, intervals, chords (that's all been occurring to me as a result of thinking about Mikie's cuckoo posting), is that a single note by itself has no context (at least a theoretical note, if you ignore timbre, etc.). It's like a "point" in mathematics (or in "flatland"); it has only one dimension. It has no context, nor relationship to anything else.
But when you add another note, you now have 2 dimensions, context, a relationship... meaning! Perhaps you could even say that you already have 3 dimensions, with only those 2 notes, because the 3rd dimension (a chord) is now implied. Maybe even parallel 3rd dimensions, since there's more than one interpretation, different types of chords/universes in which those 2 notes can live. Okay... I've gone into outer space here (I've gone cuckoo); my apologies! I'm just passing on the thoughts I've been having on the subject over the last couple of days. (I blame Mikie ;-) )
Composers can and do use these concepts all the time. They may start a piece with a single note, the future/context of which cannot be predicted by the listener until more notes are added. Then more meaning is divulged, new relationships abound, and a landscape is opened up to us. If I really wanted to go out there on a limb, I might say that we are all like notes in a musical composition. As we move through time, we build relationships to other notes. (Some might say the composer is God.)
If you've made it this far in this unrequested followup to Mikie's lesson, then I wish you a Happy New Year, as we move on in the master compositions of our lives!
(Note: Anjaline and I are currently on vacation in Arizona. Maybe the southwest is what's bringing out all this mysticism in me!)
Mike E.
