Ethan Hein's new post on that one weird chord in "Sir Duke" and my response post, on hearing the chorus of "Sir Duke" as a transformation of the opening chords of "Warm Valley"

Since I did recently ask if Ethan could do a post on "Sir Duke" I am very pleased to read his newest post. Maybe he was planning his post anyway, but this year there should be a ton of discussion of Stevie Wonder's music.  

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/that-one-weird-chord-in-sir-duke/

 

Sir Duke” is one of the greatest songs written in the last fifty years, bar none.  Yeah, I’m just putting my cards on the table about this.  Normally I actually hate music that sings the praises of music but Wonder gets away with it because his song is a tribute to Duke Ellington and to the big band jazz greats of the past who inspired him. To put this in staid Romantic terms, when a genius pays tribute to a genius the genius can get away with stuff that other people shouldn't even seriously consider trying. 

 

The chords in the chorus of “Sir Duke” are amazing in their simplicity and in the magnificent weirdness of that F minor 7^th chord. It’s not unheard of to have a tritone pivot in music like this.  I can think of a B minor to F major shift in the first theme of String Quartet No. 7 by Shostakovich, for instance (00:14-00:17).  But B major to F minor 7^th is a lot weirder.

 

I think the introduction sets up the chorus chord in a very simple, easily overlooked way.  The introduction moves from B major to G sharp minor to G natural major to F# major.  Right from the start we have a progression that goes from the tonic to the submediant and immediately flattens the submediant and drops to the dominant.  That chromatic modal borrowing plants a seed that Wonder is going to do whatever chromatic alterations will sound fun, and what sounds fun is chromatic mutation of roots and fifths while leaving thirds and (if applicable) sevenths) alone. We should also not forget those chromatic chains of chords in the pre-chorus.  The key has been so thoroughly destabilized by the time the chorus hits F minor 7 really does sound like the most natural chord to hear despite the fact that it could be read as a minor dominant chord built on a flattened fifth as easily as a sharpened fourth. 

 

Ethan Hein links to a video where Adam Neely discusses a couple of theories as to what is going on in the chorus of “Sir Duke” that is well worth checking out. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NckkwiYrjTw

The shadow chord thesis is interesting. The G#7 isn't how I hear it and I think there's a simpler and far more direct way to argue that Wonder was drawing on Ellington's linear/harmonic nexus of chord formation.

 

Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" has a chorus with chords that go as follows:

 

B major, F (natural) minor 7th, E major 7th, C# minor 7th, F sharp 7

 

I was looking at those changes and then it hit me, “Hey, wait a minute. I am pretty sure I know which Ellington standard has something like these chord changes in the first three bars.”

 

"Warm Valley" which has

B flat major 7th, E7,      E-flat 7 and so on ...

Now, just do a handful of individually simple things:

1. Kick the key up a half step into B major

2. Remove the major 7th from the first chord

3. Sustain the 7th factor of the E7 but

4. Drop the third into parallel minor (this will yield the F minor 7th chord of "Sir Duke"

5. Retrain the G# and D# and then let the bass and alto of the SATB texture drop by parallel fifths while the S and T factors stay in place. 

 

The oblique motion off-setting parallel motion in interlocked voices is what makes this voice-leading genius on Stevie Wonder's part.  It also manages to evoke a legendary Ellington standard.  Where “Warm Valley” is a famously languid ballad, “Sir Duke” is a buoyant tribute”.  The chordal kernel, if you will, can be heard in common across the two songs. 

 

I think the core of the shadow progression idea makes sense but I think it makes way more sense to just go straight from "Sir Duke" back to Ellington's "Warm Valley".  No "shadow progression" is needed to hear the connection.  We can just make the connection very directly by comparing the two songs. 

 

The “Warm Valley”/”Sir Duke” connection is an intuitive association on my part having listened to Ellington and Wonder for decades.  I didn’t start putting it together, though, until I read Ethan Hein and heard Adam Neely discuss the chord progressions and then it clicked for me that a half-step transposition and a gentle modal mutation showed that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

SECONDARY SECTION

Now ever since I slogged through that CT podcast series I've been loathe to mention podcasts.  What Ethan has done with "Sir Duke" is exceptional enough that I'm breaking my rule of not linking to podcasts because you should give him a listen as he walks through the chords that Stevie Wonder "could" have chosen that make more sense based on prescribed theories and why they don't actually work as well as what Wonder did.

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/you-can-feel-it-all-over

Adam Neely and Ethan Hein bounce ideas back and forth on why the major sixth was considered a kind of dissonant interval in Renaissance music (or not), some rusty observations ...

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/why-did-13th-century-europeans-think-that-major-sixths-were-dissonant/

Okay, so the first thought I had, having sung a few choral works from the Renaissance is that we may want to back up the truck and ask not why a major sixth was considered a dissonant interval for "harmony" and ask why it may have been viewed as a dodgy interval in melodic writing.  It's been, I admit, decades since I have sung Renaissance vocal music and just as long since I fielded theoretical reading on that topic but ... I remember noticing that major sixths were not common melodic intervals.

Now imagine, if you will, that you are in a vocal ensemble performing music and you get your starting pitches but you have no instrumental back up or if you have instrumental back up you are singing with the notes (scholars have debated whether this is legit but I don't want to rabbit hole into historically informed practice and how Taruskin and others expressed doubts about how HIP the HIP could really be). Let's bear in mind that many of the singers may not be professionals and some of the singers may be professionals but there may be kids in there (boys singing parts that would eventually be sung by women or girls, not counting castrati).  Imagine that, with no back up for your pitches, you all have to sing a descending major sixth.  How many of you have done this?  In my experience large descending intervals like sixths are perilously easy to screw up.  

The warnings against major sixths in Renaissance treatment may, if memory serves, reflect some practical realizations that there are intervals that may be so badly bungled so often by less-than-ideal-singers it was better to warn composers to just not use those intervals.  Vile an loathsome discords can have practice-based reasons that are not "just" related to tuning systems, although surely tuning systems have played a part.  Even with college choirs if you have enough melodic sixths that get bungled by music majors a piece that was cued up in C major by the choir director at the start can end in A flat major even though there are no modulations specified in the work and no scored changes of mode.  I am not speaking hypothetically.  I was in a choir that screwed up in exactly this sort of way and I think it was some kind of Romantic era choral work.  Maybe.

Renaissance rules about vocal writing put a lot of restraints on melodic writing practices that can seem opaque and absurd to us because we're used to choral music where everyone has accompaniment and back up notes or can listen to practice tracks.  Imagine you have none of that, that you have to be able to sing what's on the page under not-so-ideal conditions, and that you got one shot at this.  Do you want to have some major sixth in your melodic line then?  Eh ... I hope you're getting an idea of why certain intervals were carefully handled in Renaissance music.  Bear in mind I'm not a professional musician and I'm not claiming more than rusty first-hand experience singing Renaissance era music, but I am thinking back about how, yeah, major sixths were handled with care.  It wasn't that you could never use them, it's that they had contextual preparations.  

If I wanted to end this with some pseudo-Marxist flourish I'd say the material means of production were hugely important and this would mean not just the tuning systems but also the sheer limits of the not-always professional human singing voices that had to perform this stuff.  

Ethan Hein links to Adam Neely's discussion of "Hey Joe"--some thoughts on the plagal cascade as a guitarist's rhetorical equivalent to the circle-of-fifths chain used by pianists

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/adam-neely-video-on-hey-joe-and-blues-tonality/

Along the way there's mention of modal mixture and modal mutation; the concept of the plagal cascade (i.e. C-G-D-A-E chord progression that makes up the song); and blues tonality with some comments from Ethan Hein, which, of course, you can get to by way of Ethan Hein's link to Adam Neely's discussion. 

Now something that's fun about Neely's presentation is that he points out that plagal cascades are a morphological outworking of the tuning of the guitar.  To put that in more colloquial terms, when guitarists let their fingers do the walking they tend to let their fingers be guided by shifts of consecutive fourths that let them use as many open chord root movement shifts as possible.  In Baroque keyboard-based music, by contrast, circle of fifth chain progressions were the norm. 

https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/CircleOfFifths.html

Thus "Fly Me to The Moon" and "I Will Survive" use chains of circle progressions (variants of the V-I/V-i/vii-I) in contrast to guitar music that tends to use plagal cascades a la "Hey Joe".  Depending on how short the plagal cascade loop is D-A-E could be just short enough to define one of the more prevalent chord loops in rock and blues.