This course will introduce students to the theory of music, providing them with the skills needed to read and write Western music notation, as well as to understand, analyse, and listen informedly. It will cover material such as pitches and scales, intervals, clefs, rhythm, form, meter, phrases and cadences, and basic harmony. This course covers the fundamentals of Western music theory, from the absolute basics to some more advanced concepts and, as such, is the perfect course for beginners and more experienced musicians alike. Follow us on twitter @musictheorymooc #edmusictheory
Modulations II
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From the course by The University of Edinburgh
Fundamentals of Music Theory
669 ratings
Meet the Instructors
Dr Michael Edwards
Reid School of Music, ECA
Dr Zack MoirTeaching Fellow
Reid School of Music, Edinburgh College of Art
Richard Worth
Edinburgh College of Art
Dr Nikki Moran
Reid School of Music, ECA
Dr John Philip Kitchen, MA BMus PhD FRCO LRAM
Reid School of Music
Okay, so looking at the forms I'm looking at.
Facebook [SOUND] and
[COUGH] Twitter et cetera it seems obvious that some people would benefit from.
Just a wee bit of an intro video about modulations and,
talking about how music changes key.
Hm, and some of the ways in which it does that.
So, that's what I'm going to do for you just now.
What I want to say, very, very, very, clearly is, a little disclaimer.
And that is.
That.
What I'm going to do for you just now is, in no way,
an in depth or a thorough, explanation of modulations.
Neither is it a kind of, perfect guide to how music should modulate.
What I'm going to do, in this little section is I'm just going to show you
some chords on the piano, and I'm going to show you,
some common ways that music will start to change key.
[COUGH] What we'll try and do is provide some extra resources for people who
want to go into this more in depth, but, really this is just a quick way for
me to go through it and talk to you about it, and highlight some interesting things
that, crop up that you'll hopefully be able to apply to your, final assessment.
So, what I'm going to do first of all [COUGH].
[MUSIC] Actually you can also say that I'm.
And, by no means a piano player.
I'm a saxophone player that kind of knows what the buttons are called.
That's about as far as I can go from my piano playing.
But, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to play a chord generally speaking,
I'm going to play them in root position.
Hopefully you'll see.
Roughly what it is that I'm doing.
But, what I'm going to say first of all, is I'm going to play some chords.
[MUSIC]
In the key of C, without changing key, [SOUND] and
I'll talk through what I'm doing while I'm doing it.
[MUSIC]
So I'm playing chord one in a key of C.
So
[MUSIC]
Four, which is chord F.
[MUSIC]
Chord three.
[MUSIC]
D Minor, chord two which is D Minor.
[MUSIC]
Then chord five which is G, turn a knot to G7, which 457.
[MUSIC]
And you can feel the pull that wants to bring us back to one chord,
but our C chord.
[SOUND] Hopefully heard that and hopefully you,
you've got a rough idea of what I was doing there as I was going through.
Now you felt the pool.
[MUSIC] Strengthen [SOUND] when we played the G7
chord to take us back to [SOUND] the C major chord.
Now because of that pull ,and because of the fact that that dominant to dominant
pull is so strong, we can, we can kind of be a little bit cheeky and we can use that
to exploit people, and to that the music wants to move in different directions.
So I put chord five.
[MUSIC]
And chord.
[MUSIC]
Chord five.
And then chord five, seven, to take us back to the key of C.
The chord of C.
Okay, so what I did was played chord five.
[MUSIC]
Then chord five, seven.
And then head.
[MUSIC]
To that one that took us back to the key of C.
But because chord five is the dominant chord,
it wants to pull us back to the tonic.
Now what happens if we build a dominant chord, on a different degree of the scale.
Well, the feel of the dominant chord and
the sound of the dominant chord wants to bring us back to.
A tonic.
But, if we build it on a different degree of the scale it doesn't want to bring us
back to one, or not the one in the key that we're already thinking about.
So let's have a little look at this one.
[MUSIC]
Just chord one and chord four.
[MUSIC]
C F, C, F.
Back to C turn that in to C7.
[MUSIC]
And then play that F again.
The thing where you're here or there, is we're at a C chord.
We turned it into C7 chord by adding this B-flat, and
all of a sudden that had a pull.
That became a dominant seventh chord, and
it wanted to pull us back to the tonic of its key.
Now, NC if we turn that into C7 that becomes five
over key which gives it become five of, [SOUND] F.
Okay so let's try another one then.
We're on key C.
[MUSIC]
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to place, C part one.
Then A minor, which is chord six.
Then I'm going to play chord two.
Then five.
It feels like it needs to fill back to, one.
[MUSIC]
Okay?
Next thing what I'm going to do is I'm going to play chord one, C.
[MUSIC]
Then A minor.
[MUSIC]
I'm going to play chord two, but
then I'm going to turn that into a dominant chord, so now we've got D7.
We were starting out with the key of C,
we've got chord two, and that chord two's now been made into dominant second chord.
And that's now chord five of something.
Well, it's actually chord five of G.
[MUSIC]
And it wants to pull us back to G.
So listen again.
Chord one.
In the key of C.
Back to chord one.
[MUSIC]
Six.
[MUSIC]
Chord two.
[MUSIC]
Time to enter dominant seventh chord,
feel it's got a real new strong pull that wants to take us back to G.
[SOUND] Now when it gets to G, that feels like the new tonic.
So that's our way of modulating from the key of C to G, which is the dominant.
So it's our way of modulating to the dominant.
Okay.
Let's try another one. We're in the key of C.
And we're going to, this time, go C.
[MUSIC]
A minor, C, A minor.
Just chord one, chord six.
Chord one, chord six.
And you've probably heard that in a million pop and rock ballads type tracks.
So we've got chord one.
[MUSIC]
C, A Minor.
And that could happily run round forever, and
it doesn't ever feel like that the A Minor's got any strong pull to it.
In fact, if anything.
[MUSIC]
When we hear the A Minor, it wants to pull us back to C.
Okay, so let's work, kind of the other way around here.
Let's say we want to make [SOUND] A Minor our new tonic.
A Minor is the relative minor of C, so
this would be us trying to modulate to the relative minor.
Well, how are we going to do that?
Well, okay, we need to think, because we are talking about this strong tonic and
dominant pull, we need to create some sort of dominant pull.
We need to create a nice dominant seventh chord before the E,
to make it feels like the tonic, to use the, the musical terminology.
To tonicize it, to make it feel like the new tonic.
So, we need to work out what is the first degree of A.
So we can have a nice five, one cadence back down to.
Well, A, B, C, D, E.
So E no the key of C of original key E [SOUND] would be a minor chord or
a minor seventh chord.
If we, [SOUND] make that into a dominant seventh chord by changing the,
[SOUND] G to a G-sharp that then has a nicer feel to the A minor.
So listen we've got one.
[MUSIC]
Which is C to A minor.
[MUSIC]
Doesn't feel like any strong feel to the A minor.
[MUSIC] So,
[MUSIC]
this time let's do chord I, which is C.
For two it's D minor,
[MUSIC]
for three,
[MUSIC]
for another, for dominant chords.
[MUSIC]
And hear our strong chord back to A minor as our new tonic, and
that's something we can modulate to our relative minor.
So we'd have C, [SOUND] code one, [SOUND] if we turn that into dominant chords,
[SOUND] it wants to take us to the sub dominant.
[SOUND]. If we've got second key of C,
if we've got chord two, become [SOUND] a dominant seventh chord and
want to take us to, [SOUND] our dominant.
And C, [SOUND] if we've got chord three becoming an,
[SOUND] a dominant chord that wants to take us to a relative minor.
Now as I say, this is by no means an exhaustive or
thorough definition of Can demonstration of modulation,
but, hopefully it's a nicer way to set up what I'm going to
talk you about next in the video, and hopefully it will be a good way for
you to start spotting these things when you're looking at your own written music.
>> Some people at this point at this point might already have
grasped what we're trying to talk about or why we've got.
Some chords that don't belong to key that were in, the drawer that use the type
of different part of the scale or the different part of the key or
the drawing of different key or skill together.
I just showed you some common ways that Music can
modulate the different related areas of different or areas that are commonly moved
towards such as the subdominant and the dominant or the relative minor.
But, what I want to say is that this is no way an exhaustive or
thorough description or demonstration of modulation.
It's just a way for me to highlight a few things that I think are important.
Based on the information that we've learned in the course so
for, but also based on some of the things that you might need to look out for
when you're looking at printing music, and you're analyzing it, such as in your final
exam, or indeed in your own practice or your own kind of musical life.
So, I just really want to make that point that this isn't thorough.
This isn't exhaustive.
It is just an introduction, and
hopefully just a way to start pointing you in the direction of some things that will
be useful to you as you go through the rest of this course and beyond.
So, I want to just spend a wee bit of time, really pointing this out,
really looking it up on a stave, really showing what's happening,
what notes have been changed, how are these notes been changed and
why are they having the effect on our ears that they seem to.
And, before I do that, what I want to do is just really go, go back and look at it.
In the key of C.
'because really what we're, starting to see here,
is that this dominant, this five, seven chord in the middle is quite important,
because it does have a strong pull on our ears.
It does have a kind of psychological psycho-acoustic, but
also kind of, cultural impact on us.
It really makes us want to hear.
A particular chord afterwards.
So when we're in the key of C, as I started with in the video,
we've got a C major chord here as our chord one, in the key of C.
Then we've got our one, one chord here.
And then we're returning to our C major chord here.
So what I've done here is I've just built up a progression.
One, five, seven, one.
I'm going to play that to you.
You really heard that there was strong pull from the five to the one.
And it's actually, when, when we're thinking about modula,
modulating, this is one of the kind of the important things we draw on.
We draw on the fact that five, seven chord has such a strong pull.
That specific chord or that specific, pitch for our use.
That it's, it's a really good way to,
to make your ears go in a different direction.
You'll see what I mean here.
We're in the key of C, we've got our C-E-G.
Then we've got our G-B-D-F.
And then back to C-E-G.
And that's one, five, one.
And this chord, this five chord really wants to pull to X1 chord.
And when I say X1 chord, what I mean by that is dominant chords are always
called five, and it's wanting to pull us back to chord one in that same key.
Now, let's look at that, next example 'because what
dominant chords are always chord 5, and that's important because these are,
dominant to tonic two that were playing on here and making those modulations.
But how you describe it is a different example.
So, let's look at this example we've got the,
key signature for C major, and we've got the chord.
One in C is that chord, one [SOUND] in C.
And that shouldn't go in as much.
But what we've got in the next part is C, E, [SOUND] G and B-flat.
This is a major trap with a major seventh build.
So what we have is a C7.
Now clearly C7, C dominant seven is not the dominant of, and the key of C.
G7 would be.
Now in this case we've got C7, so
what we've done here, is we've brought in an accident B-flat to change.
Into a dominant chord.
And what we can see is because that C7 is there, that we can think of that as being
effect chord of something else, because dominant chords are always about 1 to 5.
In the fifth degree.
So, because of that, this C7 wants to pull to its, one chord.
Well, if C7 is five, what is one?
Work backward, C, B flat, A, G, F.
Okay. So, we've got, F.
This C7 wants to pull us, to this chord here, which is an F.
Now, as I said.
C7 wouldn't be in the key of C,
so this is what we describe as our secondary dominant.
It's a, or a dominant, if you want to use that terminology.
It's a dominant chord that is being used to make another,
to make our ears want to pull towards another key.
Another scale.
And in that sense we describe that as in an important chord because what it
does is it tonisizes F.
It makes F feel like the tonic.
[SOUND] And that might be temporary, [SOUND] and it might be short lived, and
what we might want to do, [SOUND] is describe this as five or four.
[SOUND] And
then you've got this chord here which is four, if we're still in the key of C.
And that's absolutely fine unless five or
four is calling, to have that slash in the middle.
Because what that's doing is it's saying it's a secondary dominant.
It's chord five of the scale or key that we can build on.
The fourth to be of our, original.
Key.
But, [SOUND] actually it's just happening for a very short period of time.
We come back to five and it makes sense to relate five but original tonic.
If this was happening for a longer period of time and
it was a bit of a feature in the music.
Be perfectly acceptable to say okay, this is five [SOUND] in F,
and what that's doing is stating that the music has, changed key.
And then obviously this, [SOUND] is our new one.
F is our new one.
If we were going to be describing this as a significant and long term key change.
When you're doing this in your analysis and when you're doing this in, your exams.
Or even when you're just doing this out in, out in the real world and
you try to understand what's happening with this piece of music,
you've got to make a decision as to,
whether these have changed key over a lot period time as per this notation or
if it was just a very short period of time you may want to use this notation.
[SOUND] Whereby we say this is one and C yes,
okay this is step out of the key of C but it doesn't make a great deal of sense to.
Don't rock the boat too much in our analysis.
So we're just going to say that this is actually called five of the fourth chord,
chord four, and then, that this is just returning to chord four.
Completely up to you, do what you feel is more suitable in,
the, any given context, but both ways are open to you.
And hopefully you're understanding that actually this is,
not the dominant chord that we would expect to see, and,
as a result, what that does, is it moves all the ears to a different place.
And actually, [SOUND] because it's a dominant chord it is 5 of something it
down sizes it's own one, [SOUND] okay so let's look at this next example I've
got for you so again here we've got again the key signature of C major.
So, that's no sharps or flats, and we've got a C major chord.
So, we can see that this is one in the key of C.
That shouldn't be too upsetting or too much of a, a shock to anybody.
[SOUND] Let's look at this next chord.
I've labelled that as (ii), lower case (ii) because it's a D, an F, and an A.
And then we've got other Ds in there, but D-F-A is it's individual notes.
That's a minor triad, built on the second degree, so that's chord (ii),
that's D minor.
So it's chord (ii) in the key of C.
Now what I've done to this chord here is I've changed it,
so that we've got a major third, and a minor seventh.
So again this is a dominant seventh.
So what we've got here just to show you on screen is a D7.
Now what we're saying there is D7, well D is the second degree of the scale, so
dominant chord built on the second degree.
We know that we don't get dominant chords built on the second degree if we're
in the same key, so, this signals that we have had a key change.
There's some sort of modulation, something's happened.
So, this D7, as we've said, dominant, is a dominant chord.
And dominant chords want to resolve to the one.
So if dominate chords are five, it wants to resolve to its own one.
Well, what is D7 the five of?
D7 is the 5, chord 5 of G.
Okay?
Okay what we've got here is one, two, three dominant.
Okay, so we've got a D7,
a seventh chord built on the second degree, resolve into G.
And I'll just put that in so you can see, what's going on.
Okay?
But, how do we go about analyzing this?
Well, yeah, this is one, this is two.
This, is a (v) chord.
And this actually.
The fifth chord of our own (v).
And by our own 5, I mean, 5 in the key that we initially started in.
So D7 is called 5, of G, which is the fifth of C.
So, what we can see here is that this is.
1, [SOUND] C major is 1.
The D minor is (ii) going to type it properly with the lower case
roman numerals because it's minor.
Then we've got (v/v).
This is our secondary dominant and then we've got (v).
Okay?
But, again, because strictly speaking, what's happened is we've changed key,
what we could see, if this was happening for
a longer period of time again as I say, if this was going to be a feature.
And if the significant portion of, of what was happening and the,
the rest of the music was going to be in this key, it may make.
It's more sense to state this as a key change.
And so okay well now I'm looking at these chords in terms of G because the,
the overall context has changed.
We're now in the key of G so what we can say is that this D7 is actually 5 and G.
And the, because we note signal to change in the way that we're writing it,
this is now in the key of G.
Okay? So
these are very short examples, very small examples and they're,
they really are a, microcosm because I've just boiled it down into a really basic.
Progression of sound waves here.
But again, you want to take that away,
you want to think about these ideas and really, decide what you think is best for
when you're noting your your scores, or when
you're thinking about music in, in your own practice, in your own musical world.
So, again, either of these would be absolutely fine.
Now what I'm going to do is hurry this along a little bit now.
Just because I think you're probably starting to get the point and
I don't want to labor it.
So this time, but in a different key we're Sorry.
This time I'm going to show you modulating into a different key.
So again, we've got the.
Key signature of C Major.
And, what I should say, obviously this will hopefully be obvious for most people,
is that, the same rules apply in any key.
I'm just showing you in C Major, here,
because we don't have other accidentals to worry about.
We don't have key signatures, sharps and flats in the key signature to worry about.
We just have to think about other sharps and flats that are creeping in.
And signal and key changes modulations.
So, we're again, we're thinking that we're in the key of C major, and
we've got a C chord to start with here.
So I'm going to say again, that this is 1 in [SOUND] C.
And this chord, really in every case is just here for context.
Of course, you don't need to start with that chord.
It's just to show you the, the context.
Then what we've got here is a E, G, B with a couple e's on the bottom here as well.
So we can say that this is chord [SOUND] (iii).
And again I'm using lower case Roman numerals because we've got
a minor triad here, it's a minor chord.
Chord (iii), we would expect to be minor in a major key.
Now, look what happens.
Again, still built on E.
But this time, what we've got is, we've got E, G-sharp, B and D.
E Sharp, B and D, is a major triad built on E, with a minor seventh.
And what that is, is a key, a chord of E7, which is our dominant seventh chord.
Again, just flying through this quickly.
We don't expect E7 to be the dominant of C.
G7 is the dominant of C.
So, this E7's important, because it's a secondary dominant.
It's a dominant chord.
Though on the third degree of the key that we believe ourselves to be in.
So, obviously something's happening, there's a modulation, there's a change.
Now, what is E7 the first of?
Because we know it's a dominant,
we know it's built on a fifth of whatever key it's actually signifying.
Well it's.
The fifth of, E, but in this case when we are in the key of C, [SOUND] and
we see our, E7, the dominant built on the, third degree.
What's happened is, as nine times out of then, nine and a half times out of ten.
Signalling the fact that actually removing to an E minor chord after that.
The reason being that what this is doing is it's trying to take us away from,
this original tonic of C to making our us hear.
Chord six as the tonic, so, what we're getting here is our A minor.
[SOUND] Now that's important because A minor is a relative minor of C major and
this is what we would describe as our modulation to, the relative minor.
And this is really common.
The standard way to modulate to the relative minor,
we make chord (iii) a dominate seventh chord, and that obviously,
then tonisizes makes A minor feel like the tonic.
And that's the way that we modulate our relative minor.
So, having to describe that well, we could say that this is (v) [SOUND] (vi).
And then that this is called vi.
Absolutely fine. And
if it's just a little short, step out of the key, to signify and,
and to suggest to our ears that we're moving towards A minor.
And this is absolutely fine to use this type of annotation.
If, as I see, that we're finding that this is, again, a more significant,
long-term shift, we might want to see this as a (v) in E minor,
and then, as such, this is one in E, in the new key of E minor.
And again, I reiterate, just for
the sake of being thorough, you decide when you're looking at this.
Obviously, this is just a little example on a page.
You decide what makes more sense, and you go with that based on what the context is
telling you, and what your common sense musical knowledge is telling you.
Okay, so that's looking at it in terms of the chords.
And that's fine, but some people that may be thinking okay, I understand that,
that's fine, I can see that there's other.
Chords and they're not expecting to see.
These chords are there to draw my attention away and to draw my ear
towards a different chord, towards a different center, a different tonic.
But when I'm looking at music, what am I looking at?
Well.
In the example that I gave you, where we're modulating to the sub dominant.
We were going from the chord of C to the chord of A, eventually to the chord of F.
What we can see actually more than that is that we're going from the key of C and
pulling towards the key of F via our secondary dominant, built on the tonic.
Now in order to build a secondary dominant on the tonic we needed to have a B-flat.
So.
That's in the key of C.
What we can do is see okay well what is B-flat in relation to C.
Well it's the flat seventh minor seventh of that key.
So if we are starting to see, the seventh degree of our key, whichever key that is.
When lowered, then we can see that there's a very,
very good chance, that we are moving towards our subdominant.
So if you've got a piece of music and you think you're in the key of G, and
then you're starting to see lots of F's being lowered,
there's a good chance we're moving to.
Or sub dominant, in this case, which would be C.
In the example that I've given you, C to C7, we need to bring in a B-flat,
which is, which means it's the seventh degree of the key being lowered, and
that builds us towards F, which is our sub dominant.
So, if you, are looking at a piece of music, [SOUND] and you see lots of
seventh degrees being lowered, if you see lots of naturals or fl-
Sorry, if you see lots of accidentals, lowering the seventh degree.
Of the key that you believe yourself to be in.
Then you, have a very good bet that you are going to want your sub dominant.
If you're in, a key, and what I was saying is that we're moving to the dominant.
In order for that to happen we needed our The,
the secondary dominant to be built on the second degree of the scale.
Now, when we were in the key of C, [SOUND] in order to build a secondary dominant on,
the second degree of the scale we needed to have an F-sharp.
[SOUND] Now, what is F-sharp in relation to the key of C?
Well, that's the fourth.
So again, I can say, if you're seeing that you've got the fourth degree of
whatever key you're in being raised.
There's a good chance that you are moving towards, the dominant.
[SOUND] And just to tie it with examples that I've given you.
If you're in the key of C, and you want to modulate to your relative minor.
To the A minor to the sixth.
We have to build our secondary dominant.
On the third degree.
Now in order to turn the chord about on the third degree into a second degree
dominant, we needed to have a G-sharp when we were in the key of C.
G-sharp, in relation to C, is what?
Well, it's C, D, E, F, G.
It's the fifth.
It has been raised.
So again, just as a little, kind of, cheat.
For you not a cheat a quicker way to look at things.
If you're in a key and you're starting to notice that, there's a lot of accidentals
raising the fifth degree of the key that you believe yourself to be in.
Then there's a very good chance that, that as you're moving to your relative minor.
Okay, so again this wasn't thorough, it wasn't exhaustive.
As a, as a lesson in modulation.
More than anything else it was a way to show you common things that can happen,
what they mean, why they're happening, and how you can spot them in written music.
Hopefully the first part of the video also give you a little idea of how you
can hear them.
Obviously that's not directly related to this course, although it is obviously.
An important work.
So.
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