Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" is the best rondo written in the last fifty years (a brief essay for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life)

Okay, having done a fairly detailed analysis on Matiegka's Op. 23, II not too long ago, I wanted to really change gears, seeing as we're approaching the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder's epic double album Songs in the Key of Life, by discussing my favorite later 20th century rondo.

Not that you really asked me, but if you did ask me “What is the most important rondo composed in the last fifty years?”, I would immediately say Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" from Songs in the Key of Life. 

 

Why?  Because it is a five-part rondo.  For those who don’t already know, a rondo is a musical form in which a refrain alternates with contrasting episodes.  People normally think of this as entailing something like ABACA or ABACADA, but that's not strictly required.  It's possible to obtain the effect of a five-part rondo just alternating a refrain with a single episode, which is exactly how Wonder organized "Contusion"

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xDSTP3uecE

 

Intro:               00:00 to 00:24

Refrain (A)       00:25 to 01:04

Episode (B)      01:05 to 01:34

Refrain (A)       01:35 to 02:14

Episode (B)      02:15 to 02:44

Refrain (A)       02:45 to 03:18

Coda                03:19 to 03:47

 

The song ends on an unresolved half cadential gesture that prepares the entrance of the next track “Sir Duke”, which makes the end of "Contusion" the most spectacular transition in the history of American popular music, as far as I'm concerned.  Now "Sir Duke" was discussed earlier this year by Ethan Hein,  and I couldn't resist suggesting Ellington's "Warm Valley" as a possible inspiration for its chorus.  So "Contusion" is an amazing track within the context of its full album, but I want to mention that more in passing, because this is a piece that is fun to hear entirely on its own terms, too, and I'd like to explain a little of what I have come to love about it over the course of my life. Yet to do that I feel like I need to situate it between two different extremities in basically white rock musical trends. 

 

Across the 1970s you had the emergence of art rock or progressive rock (we’re not going to count jazz fusion here even if many could legitimately argue that “Contusion” is an example of jazz/rock fusion in the manner of Miles Davis or maybe Weather Report).  There was also the reaction movement known as punk.  We can think of the extremes as being exemplified by Yes and The Sex Pistols.  I didn’t warm up to either of those bands. While prog rock generally had so many ideas you couldn’t actually keep track of them all, punk embodied what was, for me, an essentially reactionary and punitive rubric of “authenticity” in which the more raw and simple the music the more “real” it was.  That is nonsense and has never been aesthetically compelling to me.  Both prog rock and punk erred in opposite directions.

 

This would be where “Contusion” has stood as an alternative.  If you’ve heard it you can hear that its surface is quite complex in terms of rhythm and modal mutations.  I will, frankly, leave it to someone like Ethan Hein (if he has time and opportunity) to tackle a more detailed analysis if that’s something he’s game for.  I’m a classical guitarist and hobbyist composer so I don’t have the score for “Contusion” on me, alas.  

But what I can tell you is that the sheer complexity of Stevie Wonder’s surface is balanced by the elegant simplicity of his approach to form.  You get a two-part refrain alternating with a two-part episode.  As each refrain is presented there is more room for improvisation or rocking out.  We’ve heard the refrain enough times that more liberties can be taken in performance without the listener being at a loss for “where” we are in the musical form.  In that sense it’s not at all like a song by Rush such as, oh, “Zanadu”, which you can’t even start mapping out without getting far enough into the alphabet to get to E through G.  Wonder’s rondo, by contrast, is as simply and perfectly put together as a rondo by, say, Haydn (and I am very much a Haydn fan).  Haydn’s complaint about many of his contemporaries was they swamped listeners with so many ideas there were none of them that stuck in the memory long enough for the listener to have any emotional resonance with any of those ideas.

 

I submit that Stevie Wonder has never had that problem.  He avoided the Scylla and Charibdys that were exemplified by prog rock and punk, styles of 1970s rock that strained too far in the direction of complexity and simplicity in the name of "seriousness" and "authenticity" without necessarily achieving either.  Wonder's formal instincts have always been impeccable, so impeccable, in fact, that when we listen to his music we are not likely to do “structural listening” because we’re having fun.  I think I can go out on a limb and say that both Haydn and Stevie Wonder would want you to have the fun first and then come back for a more analytical take on what’s going on in the music later.  

 

So in that sense, too, “Contusion” has been the best rondo written in the last fifty years.

 

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

Alan Jacobs' against Ross Barkan on the idea that gatekeepers need to police art nostalgia, Berlioz 2.0 "Forget the classics, listen to MY stuff instead" for the 2020s

https://blog.ayjay.org/this-post-is-obviously-against-all-new-things/

May 1, 2026

this post is obviously against all new things

Ross Barkan:

The culture … does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead writer we can celebrate. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I begin work, for this Substack, on an essay celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds. But I want new musical horizons, too. Imagine if the rock musicians of the 1960s spent much of their day fixating on the pop of the 1940s. As a culture, we need less mimesis and less retrogression. A lot of this is the fault of the algorithmic internet, which rewards copycat trends and wearying groupthink. Cultural nostalgia is nothing new, though it can feel especially repressive these days.

Responses:

1) There is no art without “mimesis,” in the sense that Barkan uses the term here: all art responds to prior art in a thousand ways. And the problem, according to him, is not people copying older art but rather being too interested in it. He seems to want, as an alternative to mimesis, amnesia. 

2) Interest in and knowledge of the past is neither “retrogression” nor “nostalgia” — not does it constitute “groupthink,” because a staggeringly wide range of opinions is possible (and indeed extant) about pre–21st-century cultural productions.

3) It’s noteworthy that Barkan, because he edits a Substack publication, thinks of himself as a cultural policeman who can “crack down” on those overly attentive to the past. (Remember this day the next time you want to write a piece about an old book, comrade!)

 

4) Writing an essay on Pet Sounds is not, in my judgment, something to feel “guilty” about. …

5) Indeed, “There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art” — which makes for a great opportunity to write about it, alert readers to its existence and its excellences, and maybe even inspire young artists to try to match it. Bob Dylan wasn’t “fixating on the pop of the 1940s,” but he was compulsively fascinated by and profoundly knowledgable about the long great history of demotic American music, what he calls “historical-traditional music.” And his absorption in that vast old musical world was absolutely essential to his greatness. When we write about great things from the past, we’re helping to feed future Dylans. 

…

This is the point at which I interrupt Alan Jacobs’ rebuttal to point out that Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece Innervisions has now been around for more than half a century and literally nobody on the planet has attempted to publish a monograph analyzing every track in musical and lyrical terms; situating the album in the historical and cultural context of the United States in the early 1970s as a way to convey its cultural impact; and a handful of essays I have come across discuss Stevie Wonder as a disabled black musician without really seeming to discuss his brilliant songs.  Now I have a visual disability myself so it’s not like I can’t connect at all to discussions of how disabled musicians handle music in ways that maybe other able-bodied musicians don’t.  It’s just that it would be nice if the music itself got discussed. 

Ethan Hein on Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry `Bout A Thing" a couple of thoughts on harmonic language and contrapuntal variation in the song

So Ethan Hein has written about another Stevie Wonder song and while I don’t have a lot I am going to write I can’t not write about this masterpiece of a song, seeing as this year is the 50^th anniversary of the release of Innervisions and this song is on that album. First, go read Ethan Hein’s post:
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/dont-you-worry-bout-a-thing/

it's the 50th anniversary of the release of Stevie Wonder's album Innervisions a linkathon of past writings in lieu of having been able to put together something more fitting for this anniversary

Part of me had hoped to have had something actually put together for this day by way of blogging, but I don't.  Such is life.  But ... I can post links of stuff I've written in the past, a great blog post by Ethan Hein, and share that by way of the back and forth we've had about "Living for the City" which you can see after the break.

on Dark Side of the Moon at 50, discussing what's going on in "Great Gig in the Sky", and a few riffs on riffs about 1970s pop that seem ill-advised

For the 50^th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon there have been a few pieces, of course.  Contemporary writing about the album can seem full of, well, contemporary bromides.  Take the claim that “Money” is a song written against capitalism.  The men in Pink Floyd wanted to become rich and famous and they surely did, so does ambition or even avarice have to be a distinctly “capitalist” disposition?  That the article went on to quote Roger Waters saying he took the “enormous risk of being truly banal about a lot of it” might be a reminder we need that nobody keeps coming back to the album as a listening experience because of the lyrics.  It was Talking Heads who once intoned in liner notes that lyrics are a trick to get people to listen to music longer. 

 

Ethan Hein discusses Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City"--the fun of bringing different theoretical approaches to the same amazing song--and has anyone written a monograph on the music of Innervisions (the 50th anniversary will soon be upon us!)

Over the years I've written blog posts picking up on songs Ethan Hein has written about. This year Ethan has written a blog post about a song I blogged about in the past, Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City", one of the greatest English-language songs ever written in the last century.  I'm not going to pretend I don't adore Wonder's music.  I spent most of my time writing about what Ethan Hein has called the "synth break".

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/12/in-wake-of-slates-wonder-week-tribute.html

He has a different analysis (and a transcription) of the synth break than I do that you should go read here.

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/living-for-the-city/

Ethan Hein discusses "Fugue as sample flip"--explanations of sampling techniques remind me that "looping" might fit Schenkerian "knupftechnik", and other ways in which the compositional techniques across hip hop and fugal writing may potentially overlap, with a pitch for the idea that a fugal language can be built from Stevie Wonder songs

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/fugue-as-sample-flip/

...

In the video that Deb links to, DJ Dahi says that three are three main techniques you can use to flip a sample: looping it, chopping it, and reversing it.

• Looping is the simplest of the three techniques, but its musical significance is deeper than you might think. In his must-read book Making Beats, Joe Schloss points out that looping a sample juxtaposes the sampled material with itself by connecting the end of a phrase with its beginning. In so doing, “looping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance” (p. 137). Looping can take an idea that was meant to be linear and turn it into something circular, and that act can have political valence.
• Chopping means splitting a sample into segments (e.g. individual drum hits or notes) and then recombining the segments out of order, and/or removing some of them. Audio Two’s “Top Billin'” beat is a chop of the “Impeach the President” drums. Pete Rock created the beat in “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by chopping the drum intro to James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).”
• Reversing is the least common technique of the three, but when it appears, it’s conspicuous. The best example I can think of is the chorus to “Work It” by Missy Elliott. She follows the line “Put my thang down, flip it and reverse it” with that same line backwards, repeated twice.

...

Now what's intriguing about this is that coming at things from the perspective of being a classical guitarist who studied what could be called Eurological compositional techniques each of these techniques arguably has correspondences with gestural transformation in what's colloquially known as classical music.

Roger Scruton on George Rochberg's legacy raises a question, was Rochberg's innovation turning "back" to tonality or moving forward into systematizing code-switching across tonal and atonal idioms? I lean the latter, Scruton the former

https://www.futuresymphony.org/renewing-and-rejecting/

...

Our model for the future should therefore not be the sterile works of Stockhausen and Boulez but the patient attempts to adapt the old to the new, and to find notes that touch the hearts of listeners because they express the heart of their composer. George Rochberg's music points us in this direction. But it raises the question that surely troubles all serious music-lovers now, which is whether we can find our way to a musical syntax which is as expressive as the tonal language of Rochberg, but which is not shut off from the surrounding world of popular culture. This is the theme to which I shall address myself in the next post.

There was clearly a nostalgic impulse in Rochberg's work when he repudiated purity of methodology when he abandoned serialism.  His son died of cancer. He had the bluntest and simplest reason to cast aside serialism as a musical language that was not up to expressing the grief he felt over the death of his child.  Even so ... I've read enough of Rochberg's work (i.e. The Aesthetics of Survival) that I am not so sure Scruton has ever done that much to represent what Rochberg said he was attempting to express. 

The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music
George Rochberg
Copyright © 1984 by the University of Michigan
ISBN 0-472-10037-8

Page 240
… the twentieth century has pointed—however reluctant we may be to accept it in all areas of life, social as well as political, cultural as well as intellectual—toward a difficult-to-define pluralism, a world of new mixtures and combinations of everything we have inherited from the past and whatever we individually or collectively value in the inventions of our own present, replete with juxtapositions of opposites (or seeming opposites) and contraries. …

Page 241 (from “On the Third String Quartet”) [which you can hear here]

Granting pluralism, how is a composer to deal with it? From the inside out, i.e., from the internal psychic imagery which becomes the musical gesture to its artistic manifestation. Gesture, singly or in combination, successive or simultaneous, is the determining factor—not style, language, system or method.

Scruton hears in the neo-tonal music of Rochberg someone who repudiated atonality.  That isn't exactly what happened.  Rochberg repudiated the necessity of internal consistency in a musical language.  Depending on how you presented the break, the American composer introduced pastiche.  

Take the Caprice variations, where Rochberg explicitly builds on a Paganini caprice and  varies it along the styles of, for instance, Beethoven and Schubert. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66oj02Qtg1U

What Rochberg introduced was not just a rejection of total or integral serialism but a rejection of the idea that a musical work had to retain a single cohesive style.  An Andrew Clements could regard Rochberg's variations on a Paganini caprice as a "pointless exercise" but that has to be assumed on the basis of an assumption that there could not be any point to Rochberg composing dozens of variations on a well-known caprice in the styles of composers spanning centuries of Western traditions.  

I recently finished Richard Cohn's book Audacious Euphony and he pointed out an idea from linguistics that's known as "code-switching". If you want to read something that discusses what code-switching is in linguistics and how its relevant to some current events, John McWhorter has something at The Atlantic of potential interest.

The idea is that people can habitually shift across languages within a conversation or switch dialects of a single language in a conversation and that people can keep up with this.  Given the common core of equal temperament in the string quartet idiom what Rochberg did in his Third String Quartet can be thought of as making a point of "code switching" between atonal and tonal idioms.  He wasn't even the only composer who was exploring this range of possibilities in the early 1970s.  Schnittke was playing with this sort of eclecticism, as was Berio, and to a lesser-known degree Rodion Shchedrin.  The main point I'm trying to make here is to point out that what Rochberg did was not exactly revolutionary in terms of the sheer principle of what he did in developing a poly-stylistic framework for a chamber music work, but that he chose to do so after having refined the total serialist style.  

What I sometimes think guys like Roger Scruton and John Borstlap have done is present Rochberg's turn from serialism primarily as a turn "back" to tonality away from total serialism.  But to go by what Rochberg wrote himself, his turn was not "complete". You certainly aren't hearing lyric Beethoven style quartet writing in the first movement of Rochberg's Third String Quartet.  If we go by what Rochberg said himself, he was considering that pluralism in society and music was the great challenge of his day (and, by extension, ours).  He regarded gesture as the foundational basis for dealing with the social and artistic reality of pluralism.  System, language, methodology were not adequate to the task of dealing with pluralism in Rochberg's assessment, quoted above.  

That does not read as if it were a "return" to tonality of the sort that someone like Scruton would say happened in Rochberg's career.  

Rochberg's rejection of atonality in its serialized form tends to be what men like Scruton or Borstlap zero in on,  but since they don't bother to quote Rochberg himself very much they miss what that refusal entailed. Rochberg explicitly said was the challenge of the recent modern age, finding a way to come to terms with pluralism in art and society. 

Let anyone get the impression I'm suggesting that a polystylistic or code-switching paradigm of shifting across forms of musical language was only happening in classical music in the 1970s that's hardly the case I intend to make.  I've written about the genius of Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" and how in that song he starts off with a I, IV, V style chordal vamp that moves forward from an oscillating set of chord changes that include minor third ornamental chordal patterns.  It means that he has the circle of fifths style harmonic language for the verses and choruses but for the bridge or post-chorus "tag", easily the most legendary part of the song, he shifts into a chain of minor third relationships floating above a descending octatonic bass line.  

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/12/in-wake-of-slates-wonder-week-tribute.html

In other words, one of Stevie Wonder's greatest songs in a great career features code-switching in its tonal organization, from a circle of fifths to a chain of minor thirds, from a broadly diatonic tonal with blues elements to a more octatonic system.  

That musicians who have mastered these sorts of code switching approaches at a gestural level have been African American musicians like Stevie Wonder or Jewish composers like George Rochberg might be some kind of anthropological study for someone who is actually an academic.  Since I'm not I can only just toss the idea out into the realm of the internet as something of possible interest.  It's a bit faddish, perhaps, to talk about code-switching at a linguistic level but the concept seems like an important one to bring into musicology and has probably already been bountifully chronicled in a lot of writings I just haven't had the time or resources to go read yet.  

Code-switching may not have to happen within or across skin color patterns.  Some of my lineage involves Calvinist Native Americans and white Arminians, for instance, so there can be theological as well as ethnic divides to navigate.  The basic idea of code-switching as it has been discussed in scholarly and journalistic contexts is that a good number of us can jump from language to language and dialect to dialect and a lot of people will understand us.  There will be those who don't, and there can be those who regard the shift in dialects or languages as a fault.  For advocates of serialism what Rochberg did was a betrayal. For advocates of traditional tonality (whatever that is, since it seems to vary a bit depending on what a polemicists for tonality wants it to be), Rochberg may not have gone far enough back to the post-Romantic tonal language.  

I guess I don't mind that Scruton makes a point of citing Rochberg as an example of a composer who mastered serialism and twelve-tone techniques and then dropped them, but the more I read Scruton's take on Rochberg compared to what Rochberg wrote as a composer and what he wrote expressing his ideas in prose about composing the less clear it is to me that Scruton's version of Rochberg is more than an anti-atonalist.  I think there's more value to Rochberg's ideas and music than just that.  I'll grant that Rochberg is going to be marginal because in a sense he was never "important" enough for advocates of high modernists to keep in mind when he broke from high modernism, and yet his lyricism and nostalgic element in his music aren't nearly lyrical or nostalgic enough for the sorts of music fans who want their nostalgia and lyricism 200 proof.  

One person I compared notes with on Rochberg said that he couldn't help but admire the "balls of steel" it took to formally repudiate total serialism when he did, but that a lot of Rochberg's music just doesn't stick with him.  In Rochberg's way of putting it, his music rendered itself forgettable, though perhaps not necessarily because it demands so much of listeners the cognitive overload dooms the music to oblivion.  It might be simpler to say that Rochbergs work is impeccably crafted but sometimes wants for compelling, memorable tunes.  But then Roger Scruton has made a point of saying hardly anybody seems able to write tunes in classical music these days and he doesn't want to grant that tunes really exist in contemporary popular song, either.  

I would say perhaps the problem is that Scruton needs to listen to a whole lot more Stevie Wonder.  

POSTSCRIPT 5-1-2019

If I had to articulate my frustration with Scruton's approach it's to say this, he's had fifty years in which to contemplate "... whether we can find our way to a musical syntax which is as expressive as the tonal language of Rochberg, but which is not shut off from the surrounding world of popular culture. ... "  As I was saying, Stevie Wonder would get the job done within the realm of popular music.  If by "musical syntax" Scruton means a musical syntax that exists within the realm of what Richard Taruskin has called the literate musical traditions of the West the level of syntax we're looking for would probably not be a chord by chord or melodic line by melodic line language.  And to put my point more starkly, Scruton is a philosopher who deals in aesthetics and has had half a century to make some progress toward the stated potential goal.  What progress has he made?  That he can recognize the nature of the musical problem as he perceives it is noteworthy but he hasn't given me a reason to think he's going to develop a solution.  That solution will, of course, have to be developed by those musicians and composers who think there's a solution of some kind that's worth chasing down. 

For guitarist composers, whether it's Leo Brouwer or Dusan Bogdanovic or ... myself ... the straightforward answer  seems to be some kind of fusion of classical and popular idioms.  This has, as Brouwer has pointed out, been going on for generations, but it's not the kind of music-making academics like to spend time on. 

in the wake of Slate's Wonder Week tribute to Stevie Wonder, let's discuss exactly why the chorus for "Living for the City" is a work of genius-a fusion of chromatic mediant pivot chords soaring above an octatonic bass line

"At least we still have Stevie" coming from Slate could be the most jinx-causing headline an online publication could possibly run with this late in 2016.  David Bowie and Prince died, right?  We lost Alan Rickman.  Given the number of musicians who have passed this year Slate saying "at least we ... " could be asking for trouble.

We do, however, for the time being, still have Stevie Wonder around.  There are some fun and fascinating pieces at Slate's Wonder Week but ... but ... it's disappointingly short on what we musicians call the shop talk of "what did he actually do?"

This post is going to try to rectify that by discussing what is easily one of the most justifiably legendary chorus in a pop song from the last fifty years, that chorus from "Living for the City".  First we need to look at what's over on Slate about this chorus.

https://redux.slate.com/cover_story/2016/12/the-greatest-creative-run-in-the-history-of-pop-music.html
...
Innervisions also marked Wonder’s full ascendance as a composer. At 23 years old, the kid who could play every instrument on earth (including chromatic harmonica like it was Charlie Parker’s alto sax) was now writing like some combination of George Gershwin and Smokey Robinson. The bridge to “Living for the City”—“da-da-da DAH, dah dah, DAH …”—is among the more harmonically counterintuitive chord progressions in pop music, a bunch of sounds that shouldn’t fit next to each according to every rule in the book and yet somehow fit perfectly.
***
I'm going to make a slightly long-form case that this sentiment about how the sounds "shouldn't fit next to each other according to every rule in the book" is completely wrong.  Music theory is a post hoc explanation of what works, not a prescriptive explanation of what you're allowed to do.  Okay, maybe it became that in the wake of dodecaphonic and serial procedures but within the realm of more conventional tonal organization based on diatonic or non-diatonic scales ... the rules are less hard-and-fast prescriptions that aggregated summaries of the things you can reliably get to "work" in the sense of asking moderately trained musicians you've never met before to reproduce reliably for you from a score.  Keep that in mind, because when you keep that kind of thing in mind you may find that Stevie Wonder didn't break the rules because those rules aren't necessarily there.  I'm on a kick against 19th century era musical pedagogy creating double binds by laying down as a law the kind of rules it claimed to be against being stuck with.  We were just talking last week about how in the 18th century there wasn't actually a thing known as sonata form.  By extension, we can do in writing about popular music what we did last week talking about sonata procedures in early 19th century guitar music, we can take some time to look at what was actually done without feeling obligated to say it does or doesn't "break the rules". 

So ...

I regard what Hamilton calls "the bridge" to be the actual chorus itself.  Everything in the harmonic and melodic activity of the song is building up to this point.  Besides, if we're going to call it a bridge why is it the "bridge" that ends the song?  It's not that you can't end a song with material that could be regarded as "bridge".  I've done that myself, it's that I think it's fairly audible that what Hamilton calls "the bridge" is the chorus for Wonder's song.  The bridge, I think, is where the recorded voice-over conversations are in the song, which can be omitted altogether during live performance.  Composing a transitional bridge that only needs to show up on the album performance is another kind of musical shrewdness that could be discussed by someone else at some other time.  On to the chorus ...

The justifiably legendary chorus shows up for the first time at 1:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc0XEw4m-3w&t=1m09s

I'm going to enharmonically respell the descending bass line for those who think of this song as being in G flat. 

CHORD
F#7   A Fr6    G  D    C   C7    A    G   F#

BASS NOTE
E       D#         D        C   A#    A    G   F#

Wonder's melody sounds pretty pentatonic because of that initial hook but he chromatically shifts from A sharp to A natural and then swivels in melodic fourths between A, D and E.  The line is decorated, obviously, but in the movement from the D in the bass line to the C he's swooped through the interval of a minor seventh. 

There are several things that can be highlighted about this little chorus.  If we listen for perceivable root movement what this chorus has is a series of chromatic mediant relationships in which Wonder starts on one chord, uses oblique and parallel motion to leap to a chord with a root a minor third above the previous chord, and then uses that chord as a way to repeat the process with occasionally help from passing chords.  The effect of that second inversion G (chord 3) is to set up an implied circle progression (D here is just a passing chord, albeit an amazing passing chord) from G to C.  Wonder sets up a move to the tritone chord of G flat/F sharp major with help from a G-C progression that's the strongest root movement you can have in conventional tonal harmony. 

But we're obviously not dealing with conventional tonal harmony.  Most crucially nobody except music journalists and other people who write about music ever said we had to.  Look at that bass line.  Granting the D natural may potentially fuzzy the overall linear movement what makes that descending bass line remarkable for a pop chorus is that it's in the octatonic scale, the scale of alternating whole steps and half steps that divides the octave into eight rather than seven tones (i.e. the diatonic scale we're probably taught is the foundational scale in Western music). 

So Wonder has a cycle of chromatic mediant pivots from F sharp to A to C natural and back to A and
back to F sharp.  This set of root movements outlines a diminished triad.  The majority of the notes in ths chorus are explicable in terms of the octatonic scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octatonic_scale

One of the only times I'm going to regard a wiki as worth referencing because you're probably not going to trawl through many theory textbooks or music history surveys on this weekend.

The octatonic scale features prominently in the work of composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky.  It's a scale with a history of being favored by a number of early 20th century avant garde composers in the Western tradition.  Chromatic mediant relationships go back fairly far.  Schubert and Beethoven were playing with mediant relationship modulations in large-scale formal units in the early 19th century.  Debussy and others played with chromatic mediants.  Wagner had a chromatic submediant or two in a few of his works. 

The short version of this point is that what makes Stevie Wonder's chorus to "Living for the City" so remarkable is that we can hear French sixth chords, octatonic bass lines, chromatic mediant pivoting by minor thirds from the initial tonic to the tritone chord and back through circular harmonic pivoting--and thanks to help from a neapolitan to tonic phrygian plagal cadence we're back to our opening chord like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Stevie Wonder's legendary chorus just took us through all the most durable harmonic innovations of the last two centuries of avant garde experimentation in tonal organization this side of the twelve-tone row and he did it in a merely twelve second chorus tagged on after what we thought (at first hearing) was going to be a pretty standard issue I-IV-V pop song. And he did all this in one of the simplest and most haunting chorus hooks in the 20th century. 

But the genius of the chorus is that it does not, in fact, come out of the blue.  Wonder has been preparing us for it calmly and steadily from the opening chords throughout that first full minute of the song. Those opening four chords move through a linear 1-2-3-1 in F sharp minor while harmonizing the chords in G flat major/F sharp major. This tension between minor mode linear movement and major mode tonality doesn't reveal its full range of possibilities for a minute, not until after Wonder's given us that classic IV-V-I conventional tonal resolution.  He gives us the most by-the-book harmonic resolution for Western pop music and the high Classic era.  Okay, now that we've got that done, bam, the music takes flight into that remarkable chorus. 

And it's also the end of the song, obviously.  It's here where the genius of the harmonic/melodic craft is also audible.  What Wonder does is simple, he refuses to let the step-wise root movement in the octatonic bass line reach its by-now predictable end point.  We're not going to go back to where we were before.  We can stop at a higher, brighter, more shining place.  That G major chord, the Neapolitan harmony, is allowed to do two things.  First, remember how I mentioned that the G was set up as an implicit dominant that moves by circle progression to C?  It gets to play that harmonic role, a kind of half cadence to a never-arrived-at C major triad that is as harmonically far away from the "ground" of G flat major as could be possible.  The voices are striving ever upward toward a world in which no one has to live just enough or give just enough for the city (let's just throw in a direct reference to "the city" as Babylon or the City of Man while we're at it, that's not inimical to Wonder's approach). 

But there's a second way in which this non-resolved G chord can function, as the new tonic.  It's able to be heard or "read" as arriving at a new, higher, better and brighter tomorrow or as the aspiration toward it (the aforementioned function of the G chord as a dominant that pushes toward C major).  The key of G flat major, in terms of extra-musical association and symbolism, can telegraph that the people who live in Wonder's song-world live in a world of all flats and the emergence of G major is the paradoxically "natural" world that does not yet exist, where things will be made right and the oppression of racism no longer exists.  With either interpretation of the final harmony we're given a vivid musical image of an eagerly anticipated world in which injustice has been defeated.  Wonder has deployed several of the musical tools of the trade of mystical apocalyptic of the sort we might also hear in Scriabin but puts it to more compelling and socially engaged use.  Yes, I said that, it's not meant as an offense to Scriabin fans as such, I just enjoy Stevie Wonder more than Scriabin if I "have" to pick one of the two. 

But in both cases we could propose there's the possibility, existing as a flame within the music itself, of apocalyptic that is not a thing predicated primarily on fear (more or less the base line for the super-majority of apocalyptic imagination in 20th century pop culture a la James Cameron's Terminator or Kubrick's Strangelove), but apocalyptic expressing the paradoxical but natural mixture of anger and hope.  If that closing G chord is the new tonic it may just be a dream, if the closing G major chord is, as it has been up until the end, a quasi-dominant function preparing to launch us into C major, then the harmonic irresolution/resolution is wordlessly asking a question--we could be on the cusp of launching into C major, that bright shining realm in which the injustices of racism no longer define how blacks get treated in the city ... but will we get there?  Not just "we" in the sense of Wonder addressing "his" people, but all of us in the United States who can hear his song.  Wonder has made a song in which "we" can be read at different levels.  He couldn't have been more direct about his voice of sorrow and his hope that what we hear in it will motivate us to make a better tomorrow.

This isn't a chorus that somehow breaks every rule in the book, it's a chorus written by someone who, however he opted to do it, familiarized himself with the panoply of harmonic innovations from avant garde music in the Western idioms over the last two centuries and distilled them into a twelve-second chorus that uses musical ideas we could also hear in Debussy, Scriabin, Stravinsky and other composers in what's known as the classical tradition, but all within Wonder's idiom of R&B/Motown. 

As I was saying earlier about genres such as early 19th century classical guitar and ragtime, it's one thing to say that genre doesn't exist and another thing to say that genre boundaries are permeable.   People who say genres don't exist in music are being morons of the sort who would have us believe a cinematic equivalent, that there's no such thing as superhero movies.  But that the boundaries between and within genres are permeable is something we can be reminded of by those musical geniuses who show rather than tell us that this is the case.  The octatonic scale isn't the exclusive property of Russian or French avant garde pianist composers from the late 19th and early 20th century.  French sixth chords are just called that because the French were most observably likely to use them.  Chromatic mediant pivoting well outside a previously established key was common in German music since the early 19th century.  But there's no reason a black pop musician in 1970s America couldn't take all of these musical innovations and distill them into a single twelve-second tag in a pop song that sums up the greatest innovations in the Western musical traditions.  That's not "breaking the rules" at all, except the most draconian and generally unwritten rules of musical styles, expectations of what "ought" to be in a genre on the basis of what writers write about music.

The thing is, too many writers want to keep the genius of what Wonder did mysterious.  It's amazing but not necessarily mysterious in the sense that we can't work out what it was he did in that beautiful chorus and explain it in terms that at least musicians can understand. 

But non-musicians can understand the affect of what's going on.  While the doctrine of affect from the Baroque era won't really be applicable today we can at least say that the cyclical vamping Wonder lays down at the start of the song can be a kind of meta-textual tone-painting of the circularity and confinement black people deal with.  Living just enough for the city is confining, we get that clearly from the words but we ALSO get it from the music.  The plea to stop living just enough for the city abandons conventional words for the chorus, which bursts open the deliberate strait-jacketed I-IV-V in favor of letting the minor-mode linear pattern of the upper-voice in the keyboard guide the entire musical substance into the chromatic mediant shifting octatonic chorus.  Wonder saves this explosion of harmonically expanded music, a musical symbol, perhaps, of what the music can be like if we don't live just enough for the city, until he's made the primary plea.  All of this octatonic/mediant shifting music is the sort of thing we can also hear in Scriabin and, well, Stevie Wonder's kind of pan-spiritual 1970s New Age optimism and activism isn't "that" impossible to correlate to Scriabin's apocalyptic theosophical aspiration for universal human brotherhood, is it? 

Maybe Stevie Wonder could be regarded as a kind of late 20th century pop-maestro American counterpart to Scriabin ...

if Scriabin wrote gorgeous, unforgettable hooks for pop songs that dealt with the plight of black people in the United States dealing with systemic racism. 

That only took about 2,600 words to explain what's so brilliant about twelve seconds of music in a Stevie Wonder song.  What's nagged at me this week is that Slate has been that when it came to explicating Wonder's genius there was a more telling than showing when it came to discussing that musical genius.  Go ahead, tell us (again) that Wonder is one of the greatest pop musicians of the age.  I've never disagreed!  When I added love for Haydn and Bach to my musical admirations Stevie Wonder was in no way displaced.  But let's not shy away from explaining, even in technical and theoretical terms, what it is that Wonder's done in his music that's so brilliant.  If we don't do even this it's almost as though we pay lip service to the brilliance without showing we have to wrestle a bit with understanding it.  When we're talking about a musician who called one of his albums Music of My Mind, the least we can do is take seriously that however schmaltzy some of those love songs are, there is also a vibrant intellectual substance to it.  It's just that, perhaps, with Wonder the intellectual substance may be pulsating within the music itself and far too few people who deign to write about Wonder's music may have the technical and theoretical interests to discuss the genius of what the music does, preferring instead to use bromides about how it somehow breaks the rules.  Well if it does break the rules, at least say what those rules are.  If Wagner fans can write reams on the Tristan chord can't fans of Stevie Wonder spare a few thousand words for that twelve-second break in "Living for the City" to describe what it is that's so amazing about it?  I think that's the least we can do.

POSTSCRIPT
04-26-2017
10.00pm

Here's something extra to consider about the chorus. The two chords that don't fit into the octatonic scale that would seem to explain the instrumental parts are G and D.  These two chords would obviously not fit into the octatonic collection that would start on F sharp or, if one chord could the other one could not.  It's known as the "diminished" scale because a dominant-tonic circle progression can't happen in the alternation of whole and half steps that characterizes the scale.  Secondary dominant functionality obviously also doesn't happen.   What the chords G and D have is that they have to be borrowed from the other two transpositions of the octatonic scale, a mode of limited transposition.  So the sense of aspiration and transcendental grandeur that the song ends with can "still" be explicable in terms of octatonic sets if we take it to mean that Wonder sets up a chorus with an octatonic collection for the instrumental parts that uses passing chords to borrow chords from the other two transpositions that are available before pitch replication occurs in a way that precludes truly differentiated sets within the twelve-tones of the chromatic scale.