11th chords In classical harmony, everything is tertian (built in thirds). Since 7th chords appear most often in the dominant function, it's become common to talk about them as 'sevenths' and specify everything else as 'major seventh', 'minor seventh', etc.
Building in thirds means each chord type contains (or can contain) all of the tones below it. Therefore a full 11th chord will be 1-3-5-b7-9-11.
Now it's true that such a chord gives you a cluster of tones 3-11-5 (E-F-G in a C11) that can be distracting. The 3rd and 11th create a b9 interval that's annoying in most contexts. So most of the time you'll see an 11th chord played without the third (and often without the fifth) - or you'll see it written as a minor 11th, which also removes the b9 interval.
If you play a C11 without the third and fifth, you have tones C-Bb-D-F - that's identical to a Bb/C chord. Niliov's contention was that this chord functions as a subdominant rather than a dominant - Bb/C leads to F in a IV-I; G11 leads to F in a V-I.
There's certainly something to that - but I don't like it. Here's why:
1) Common practice in writing slash chords is for the note after the slash to indicate the lowest note of the chord. If I see G11, I may play C-Bb-D-F, but I will put any of the four tones on the bottom - if I see Bb/C I'll only use C as the bass.
2) Other tones could be dropped besides the third and fifth. Third and ninth happens often too - if that's the composer's intent, it'll be written as G7/11... but if it's not the composer's intent, I am free to play a G7/11 when I see G11 on the page. That's not a substitution; it's a voicing.
3) Music theory is based on generic rules for naming things. These rules apply across the board, whether or not they're musically useful. I don't see the naming of 11th chords to be much different in that respect from the naming of the Locrian mode - neither is usually used as theorized. But the 'predictive theory' of what it should be doesn't change - even if most composers change it in use.
4) Music theory has a lot of 'except fors'. As you continue to study theory and harmony, you'll find that a lot of things you're taught early on (the top number in a time signature is the number of beats in a measure.... never use parallel fifths...etc) will have caveats attached to them. But we still teach the simple ways first, because it gives you a starting point. Knowing that chords can be extended to 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, or 13ths, and knowing that chords are built in thirds are starting points - knowing that 11ths will normally exclude certain tones if they're major, but not if they're minor is an 'except for' that can come later on.
5) The practical usage of labeling 11ths in charts dates back to at least the 1940s from the music I have here, and probably goes back further. As a result, there are tons of chord dictionaries (for every chordal instrument) that show 11th voicings. When you come across one, you can just look it up at first, and the voicing will have already dropped the 'bad' tone.
6) The whole purpose of labeling chords in the first place serves two major purposes: it allows us to analyze a harmony, and it allows chordal instruments to approximate that harmony. Two identical pieces of music may use the same chord in four voices (C-Bb-D-F) or five (C-G-Bb-D-F), and be identical in every other respect. I find G11 a much more flexible approach to either analysis or performance than labeling the first case Bb/C and the second Gm7/C - esepcially because using Gm7/C does not give you either an authentic or plagal cadence to the F chord that follows. And calling such a voicing Bb/G/C seems like overkill to me.
k, part 2:
sus chords As I said in the last post, classical harmony is
tertian - chords are built in thirds. You'll find that's true across the board... sixth chords are just minor sevenths played inverted (C-E-G-A=A-C-E-G), and we don't have any second, fourth, or eighth chords.
The way we name chords springs originally from the analysis of classical music, and orchestras rarely play block chords - the chords are created as several melodies, typically four, interact with each other. When those four voices sit on their tones for a space of time, or when three of them do while the fourth plays a melody over them, we figure out how those tones can be arranged and name it a chord. That gives us a view of how the harmony is moving - the chord progression of a piece.
But four voices don't always arrive at the same chord at the same time. Sometimes one or more voices comes in 'late' - as when three voices form a chord, the fourth is on a non-chord tone... and it then moves to a chord tone. Or maybe one voice gets there early, and the others then catch up. That sort of complex motion gives great variety to classical music, and it makes finding the chords a little harder. So classical theory gave names to those sorts of motions as a way of categorizing them, analyzing their effect, and having a 'named tool' in the tool box for composers.
When one voice arrives early and the others catch up, it's called an anticipation. So if three voices go C-E-G...C-E-A...D-F-A, the middle 'chord' can be analyzed as an Am, or it can be viewed as an anticipation of the Dm chord that's coming up. Which approach is used depends on how long it lasts - did it really give the effect of a full chord? If so, it's Am; if not, it's a non-harmonic tone (even though you can make a chord out of it, the harmony is C->Dm, and the A note is a non-harmonic tone with the C chord).
Guitarists as a rule have trouble with understanding non-harmonic tones. If you're playing notes C-E-A at the same time, you're calling it an A minor chord, whether it's actually a chord (in the harmony sense) or an anticipation. We confuse fingerings with chords. More on that in a bit.
A second type of delayed harmony is when the chord arrives before one of the voices. If the change is C-E-G...D-F-G...D-F-A, then two voices have arrived at the next chord together, and the third catches up. Theory calls this a 'suspension' - the odd voice is suspended in the previous chord, then resolves to the new chord. There can even be a finer distinction drawn - voices that move up to their new location (as in my example) are technically called '****ations', while voices that move down are 'suspensions'.
Now what if you have four voices, and two arrive late? F-A-E-G...Bb-E-A-C...Bb-Db-F-Bb. Here wer've got F9 (no fifth) moving to something... and then moving to Bbm. Calling the middle chord Am/b9 probably isn't appropriate, because we'd have V-vii-i in the key of Bbm. If the effect is a V-I cadence with a delay, the middle sound is called a 'suspended chord' - that's the classical defintion of a chord change: two or more notes held in suspension during a chord change. In this case they're E and A. (I'm not making this example up - its from a Brahms Intermezzo!)
Fast forward to popular music. Jazz and popular music has been using suspensions for a hundred years or so. Some pieces used it in the classical sense of delaying a note through a change (F-Csus-C, where F is held a bit longer); other songwriters liked the sound, and began using it when there wasn't a resolution. A good example of this is Herbie Hancock's Oliloqui Valley, which moves from F7sus to Eb7sus - the Bb suspended in the first chord becomes the fifth of the next chord (a classical ****ation), but the suspended Ab tone in the second chord won't resolve at all when the next chord appears. This is also known as quartal harmony - building chords in fourths.
So now we have chords that are 'suspended', but not in the classical sense. They all have one thing in common: the fourth is used instead of the third. They've become common enough in music that the name 'suspended chord' is accepted by guitarists, pianists, and composers alike.
Publishers started using 'sus' chords in sheet music, and some started using 'sus4' - to indicate a suspended fourth, even though the sus chords
always had a suspended fourth.
Now within the last ten years, 'sus2' and 'sus6' have come into use, particularly on the internet. The logic here is that the number after the 'sus' is whatever note replaces the third in a triad. There can only be two uses for these terms... either they give us some additional information about how the harmony moves, or they're just to remember the fingering.
So let's take a close look at these chords:
C-D-G (C 'sus2')
The tones are identical to a Gsus - G-C-D. So does using 'sus2' instead give us any harmonic information?
Look Incubus' "Are You In?": verse - Dsus2, F#m7; chorus Dsus2, A, F#m7; bridge Em, Asus2. Now let's plug in the inversions:
verse - Asus, F#m7 (F# is the relative minor of A); chorus - Asus, A, F#m7 (a true suspension resolving to A); bridge: E, Esus.
You get better harmonic information about the piece using the inversion name than you do using the 'right' one (could it be that they associated a 'chord' with a fingering, regradless of its meaning, as many guitarists do? And if so, aren't you better off learning 12 sus4 fingerings than 12 sus2 and 12 sus4, leaving you with 24 names - but just 12 fingerings?)
sus6 is even worse. Unlike the sus2 chord, there
is a third here. Although C sus6 (C-G-A) can sound major or minor in context - because it's missing a third - A and C form a third. Whether it sounds major or minor, the missing note is E! It's just a selective voicing of Am7 (A-C-E-G) or C6 (C-E-G-A).
Finally, some people argue that sus2 or sus6 can be the 'right' names based on the way the chord resolves. Nimiov gave a typical example of this logic - I think it was G->Gsus2->G. But that's not giving any harmonic information at all: the tonality is G major all the way through, because the 'suspended' note is also in the key of A. Any classical analysis would put the entire phrase under just one chord name, G, and recoginize the motion of the B-A-B voice as a simple melody laid over the chord. If you want to call that Gsus2 to remember the fingering, that's fine... just remember you're now giving a second meaningless name to Dsus.
THE Above was lifted from
THIS DISCUSSION
post edited by musicman100 - 2011/05/25 11:01:05