Barbershop Arranging — Part 4: Same Circle, More Chords
Analyzing the various seventh sonorities in “Heart of My Heart”
This is Part 4 of a 10-part series on barbershop arranging. The full guide is here.
In the last post, we arranged a simple melody, Mary Had a Little Lamb, in the barbershop style using only Dominant 7 chords progressing strictly according to the Circle of Fifths. This gave us an understanding of how barbershop chords fundamentally move. However, few melodies will actually allow for such straightforward chord choices!
In this post, we’ll arrange a trickier melody that isn’t obviously harmonizable with Dominant 7s alone, but a melody that is no less a classic in Barbershop culture: Heart of My Heart. Through this process, we’ll learn how to to apply several other types of seventh chords without abandoning our Circle of Fifths framework for harmonic progression.
Pre-Lesson: Other Seventh Chords
Recall our redesigned Circle of Fifths visualization from before:
Note the text toward the bottom of the inner circle, offering that we can replace any chord along the journey with any of its “seventh-chord variants.”
Let’s explore those. The seventh-chord variants you’re likely to use when you first start arranging Barbershop music are:
- Major 7: a Major Triad plus a major-7
- Major-Minor 7: a Major Triad plus a flat-7 (i.e., the Dominant 7)
- Minor 7: a Barbershop chord with a flat-3
- Half-Diminished 7: a Barbershop chord with a flat-3 and flat-5.
- Diminished 7: a Barbershop chord with a flat-3, flat-5, and flat-flat-7 (The flat-flat-7 looks like a major-6 and quacks like a major-6, but functionally, it needs to be described using scale degree 7 in order for the chord to qualify as a seventh chord.)
Here’s what each of them sounds like:
And here is the notation for each of them, which will come in handy as we start to include these chords in our chord analysis:
- Major 7: Append “M7” to the chord root (e.g., CM7, F#M7, EbM7). In Roman Numeral analysis, use upper-case numerals (e.g. IM7, #IVM7).
- Major-Minor 7: Append “7” to the chord root (e.g., C7, F#7, Eb7). In Roman Numeral analysis, use upper-case numerals (e.g. I7, #IV7).
- Minor 7: Append “m7” to the chord root (e.g. Cm7, F#m7, Ebm7). In Roman Numeral analysis, simply use lower-case numerals without the “m” (e.g. i7, #iv7).
- Half-Diminished 7: Append “ø7” to the chord root (e.g. Cø7, F#ø7, Ebø7). In Roman Numeral analysis, use lower-case numerals (e.g. iø7, #ivø7).
- Diminished 7: Append “○7” to the chord root (e.g., C○7, F#○7, Eb○7). In Roman Numeral analysis, use lower-case numerals (e.g. i○7, #iv○7).
Since we can hot-swap any of these seventh-chord variants at virtually any step along the Circle of Fifths, we suddenly have a huge explosion of possible paths from an arbitrary starting chord back “home” again. For instance, instead of going from II7 → V7 → I, we can now go ii7 → V7 → I, or iiø7 → v7 → I. This begs the question: How and when should an arranger use each seventh chord?
Review: Arranging “Heart of My Heart”
We’ll answer this question by working through an example. Let’s arrange a system of the Barbershop standard, Heart of My Heart. To jog your memory, we’ll list the main objective of each step as we go.
1. Notate the melody.
We’ll use just the first line of the song, and we’ll express it in C Major rather than the canonical Ab Major, for simplicity:
2. Write in the original chords.
In this case, the song is meant to be harmonized per the Circle of Fifths out of the box, so our job is easy. Since we can move from our home chord to any other to get things going, we move initially from C → D7, then progress around the Circle via D7 → G7 → C. The song lingers on G7 for several measures, which slows our harmonic rhythm almost to a crawl, but rest assured the progression is still valid.
2.5. Check for pitches that don’t fit.
We can see right away that we have some non-chord tones in our melody! Non-chord tones (NCTs) are pitches that don’t appear in the chord harmonizing them. See the B on “of” in Measure 1 and the A on “I” in Measure 2, both of which do not appear in a C Major chord; as well as the C# on “would” in Measure 5, which doesn’t appear in a G7 chord. In classical music theory, non-chord tones are permitted quite liberally as long as they’re quick events. In classic barbershop, this is not the case—we must harmonize all non-chord tones properly for fear of losing the lock-and-ring and characteristic chord flavors of the barbershop style.
We’ll avoid these non-chord tones for the moment, but they will be the primary focus of this lesson once we get the other melody pitches harmonized. Onward for now.
3. Add the Bass on roots and fifths.
The bass part is easily devised for this melody. Starting on octavized roots in Measure 1 (skipping the NCT on “of”), the bass moves to a D root for the D7 chord in Measure 3, then a G root in Measure 4. In fact, the only deviation from this pattern comes in Measure 6, when the Bass must sink to the fifth on “naught” due to the Lead’s existing claim to the G in the melody line.
4. Keep the Tenor slightly above the Lead whenever possible.
We allow the Tenor to float on the third, the acoustically ideal tenor scale degree, for Measures 1–3. In Measure 4, however, the Tenor must divert to F-natural, the flat-7 of the G7 chord, since the Lead is already singing the third. Shifting to the flat-7 also minimizes the Tenor’s jump as we move from D7 to G7, streamlining voice leading.
The Lead abandons the third on “Life” in Measure 5, but we quickly see that to have the Tenor sing the third (the B) would require either a huge leap to an extremely high, divorced voicing (with the Tenor exposed above the Treble clef and all other parts far lower), or it would require the Tenor to sink below the lead and shift vocal registers in the process. Neither of these choices is particularly appropriate here, so we have the Tenor keep it simple and remain on the otherwise unclaimed flat-7 for the duration of the G7 measures.
Looking ahead, an unexpected benefit of this choice is that the flat-7 relative to G Major is the 4 relative to C Major, and the tritone in the G7 chord will naturally pull the 4 down to 3. This is exactly what the Tenor gets to do moving into the final C Major chord.
5. Assign remaining notes to the Baritone, preferring fifths.
Finally, the Baritone gets the leftover notes. Occasionally, we might realize that our previous choices leave the Baritone with particularly unwieldy voice leading, such that we might have to move back a few steps and rethink. Fortunately, this is not the case here! The Baritone part falls quite effortlessly out of the remaining pitches.
In Measure 1, the Baritone is home on the fifth. In Measure 2, the Baritone jumps to the octavized C to backfill the Lead, who has sunk to the fifth the Baritone was just singing. We might have considered the low E, but recall that a low major-third interval above the Bass is an inefficient amplifier of harmonics. Additionally, the Tenor is already singing the third an octave higher, and doubled thirds make a chord far less stable than doubled roots or fifths, due to the relative dearth of harmonics thirds share with other pitches in a Major Triad.
In the G7 measures, the Baritone sings the third that the Tenor could not claim, which is scale degree 7 (the “leading tone”) in the upcoming C Major resolution. Because of the tritone in the G7 chord, the leading tone only ever wants to go to one place: the new tonic, C. Yet as we move into the final measure, the Baritone breaks with all classical-music tradition and resolves down to the fifth, resulting in what music theoreticians call a frustrated leading tone. Baritones must get used to such evils, as these slights are fairly characteristic in Baritones’ melody-opposing, middle-register lines.
With that, we have a workable first draft. Now, we return to the non-chord tones. Experienced Barbershoppers will notice a different spelling on the D7 chord and the absence of a few embellishments (swipes and echoes) from the original arrangement, but the structure is nevertheless the same. We’ll punt on the discussion of these embellishments until a future post.
Handling non-chord tones
We’ve now harmonized everything except the following three melody notes:
- m. 1: The B on “of”
- m. 2: The A on “I”
- m. 5: The C# on “would”
We’ll now figure out how to harmonize these non-chord tones, using the other seventh chords we presented at the beginning of this post.
m. 1: The B on “of”
In the previous post, we harmonized non-chord tones in Mary Had a Little Lamb (though we didn’t call them that yet) by moving to a V7 chord for one beat. Let’s try the same thing here. Here are two options:
- Option 1: a G7 in root position
- Option 2: a G7 in 2nd inversion
Either of these does the job, but not very elegantly. Option 1, which sufficed in our Mary Had a Little Lamb arrangement, suddenly feels kludgy. It requires fast-paced jumping in the Bass part, which will be difficult to sing accurately. Further, the switch to G7 within the second beat of the song doesn’t give the ear much time to get used to the tonic.
Option 2 has better voicing—the Baritone stays put, while the Bass moves only by whole steps—but it, too, races away from C Major slightly too quickly for the ear to settle into the key of the song. Both of these options are also a bit…standard. What if we could solve our problems while also adding more flavor?
🌟 Enter the Major 7 chord. 🌟
When scale degree 7 appears in the melody line, a more interesting harmonic choice is typically to use the Major 7 chord, with the melody providing the Major 7 scale degree. In this case, we can use C Major 7:
This C Major 7 chord allows us to stay in the same “chord area” as the surrounding triads, helping us better maintain the C-Major quality of the song out of the gate. It also adds harmonic variety to an arrangement otherwise chock-full of Dominant 7 chords.
Sung quickly, the Major 7 chord is helpful. Sung slowly, it can be deliciously devastating. For instance, the Major 7 is precisely the chord that made audiences worldwide shed ugly tears in the opening of Pixar’s 2009 film Up. Listen for it in the final 5 chords or so as Carl comes home from his wife’s funeral, now forever alone.
Such an opportunity for tear-jerking doesn’t present itself in the first line of Heart of My Heart, but it’s another tool to add to our arsenal for later.
m. 2: The A on “I”
Next, we move on to the A on “I” in m. 2:
A does not appear in the harmonizing C Major chord, but it does appear in the D7 chord that follows. Thus, one option to harmonize the A is simply to jump to D7 a beat early. That would sound like this:
This is a valid choice, but it confuses the harmonic rhythm by changing the harmony on a weak beat.
In music, the time signature tells us how many beats there are per measure, as well as which note value gets the beat. Heart of My Heart has a 3/4 time signature, meaning the quarter note gets the beat (per the 4 in the denominator), and there are three beats per measure (per the 3 in the numerator). More generally the time signature, or meter, tells us which beats to emphasize in a musical phrase. By default, the emphasized beats are the downbeats—that is, the notes falling on Beat 1 of each measure.
In 3/4, Beat 1 is the downbeat, and Beats 2 and 3 are the “weak” beats. Changing chords is a fairly major event, and given that the rest of the harmonic shifts in Heart of My Heart happen on downbeats, it would be a bit clumsy to execute only one chord change on a weak beat—particularly if it’s the first harmonic shift of the song. We can do better.
🌟 Enter the Minor 7 chord. 🌟
We want a chord that sounds like the C-Major triad, since we don’t want the harmony to change on a weak beat. What if we try a similar approach as with the CM7, and simply “tack on” the melody’s A to the C Major triad?
This yields a Minor 7 chord—composed of A, C, E, and G—that maintains the overall sonority of our C Major chord area, since the C, E, and G are unchanged from the previous C Major chord. In context, the A Minor 7 (notated as “Am7”) sounds like this:
This is a fine harmonic choice that, like CM7, handles the melody note without really changing the current chord all that much.
However, most barbershop arrangers would probably not use the true Minor 7 chord in this spot. The awkwardness now is in the Major-2nd rub between the Bari G and the Lead A. This rub is simply too low in the singers’ registers to lock well (especially considering that the real key for Heart of My Heart is Ab, a Major 3rd lower than in this guided exercise). Generally, arrangers try to avoid thirds and seconds between parts within the Bass clef, because they don’t ring as well.
The Minor 7 would be the correct choice if our chord spellings were expanded. Consider this example, which moves the Bass to the E, the Tenor to the G, and the Baritone to the C around the Lead’s A—before resolving down nicely to the D7 chord spelling. This has the added benefit of keeping the inner two pitches constant as we go into the D7 chord:
🌟 Enter the Sixth chord. 🌟
The strongest choice here turns out to be a variant of the Am7 chord called the sixth chord, notated as C6 and comprised of the pitches C, E, and A.
The C6 chord contains the same pitches as the A minor chord (A, C, E) but omits the G from the A Minor 7. Despite the similar structure, both the prior C Major chords and the placement of C at the bottom of this chord imply a different chord function than a minor chord. All we’re saying with a six chord is, “we’re still essentially in C Major, we’re just tossing in the 6th scale degree for a moment.”
The benefit of the C6 chord over the A Minor 7 chord is that the C6 removes the interior Major-2nd rub between the G and A, instead providing a nice spread of pitches amongst the four voice parts. It sounds like this:
In general, sixth chords are a common and recommended way to harmonize scale degree 6 in lower registers.
m. 5: The C# on “would”
Two NCTs down in this phrase, one to go. We now move to the C# on “would” in m. 5. This is a particularly squirrelly pitch; it doesn’t fit in the surrounding G7 tonality at all, but moving to a different chord for such a quick beat would be jarring to the ear.
🌟 Enter the Diminished 7 chord. 🌟
The Diminished 7 chord is the odd one from the Pre-Lesson, comprised of scale degrees 1, flat-3, flat-5, and flat-flat-7. Whereas the Dominant 7 is built from a Perfect 5th and a Tritone, the Diminished 7 is built from two overlapping Tritones, and we can thus resolve it in multiple ways. This chord is like a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, serving as the universal donor of harmonic progression. We’ll talk about the full range of progression possibilities in a future post.
In this case, the chord in question elapses so quickly that there’s no time for the tension in the Diminished 7 to establish itself. All we need is a quick filler chord that harmonizes the C# without departing from the G7 tonality. Leaving the Bass on the G, we can drop the Baritone, Lead, and Tenor by a half step each to achieve the Diminished 7 chord.*
* The pure spelling of the chord would be G, Bb, Db, F-flat-flat, but we often fudge the spelling in practice to make the music easier for singers to sight-read, hot-swapping flat notes for their sharp variants (e.g., Db = C#). This is called changing the enharmonic spelling of the chord.
Here is the result. If we’ve done our job properly, the G Diminished 7 chord (notated as G○7) shouldn’t draw any undue attention to itself:
We’ll explore the Diminished 7’s progressional properties later, but for now, note that the Diminished 7 chord can be useful for harmonizing funky accidentals without leaving your current chord area.
The finished product
With the C Major 7, the C6, and the G○7 in place, here’s what the final phrase sounds like:
Compare this to the actual arrangement, transposed to C Major for easier comparison:
Note that there are a few more bells and whistles in the penultimate measure yet to be discussed, as well as a higher chord spelling on the D7 chord in m. 3 that better emphases the word “love,” but our arrangement is no less valid!
Half-Diminished Chords
There’s one more common seventh chord to discuss: the Half-Diminished 7, comprised of scale degrees 1, flat-3, flat-5, and flat-7. This is a confounding chord that has a few different functions in Barbershop. We’ll introduce just one for now.
As Dominant 7 with suspended root
Perhaps the easiest of its functions to grasp first is as a Dominant 7 with a suspended root. A suspension in music is a means of creating dissonance by prolonging a pitch from a previous chord while the rest of the chord changes, before resolving the note by stepwise motion to fit into the new chord.
For instance, starting with a G7 chord as our reference, we can achieve a Half-Diminished 7 by simply lifting the G to an A. The root of this new Half-Diminished 7 chord (which itself must be comprised of a 1, 3, 5, and 7 relative to some key center) is the B, but since the Tritone didn’t change and the F is constant, we can squint and think of this new Bø7 as essentially a G7 chord — a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
The Bø7 chord and the G7 can be fraternal twins in our progressional toolbox: wherever you can use a G7 chord, you can probably also use a Bø7 chord as long as it includes the melody pitch, because its tension will want to resolve to the same place as the G7. However, to most effectively use a Half-Diminished 7 chord in this manner, you should follow it with the G7 to make sure the suspension resolves as the ear expects.
Here’s an example of a Circle of Fifths progression from D7 → G → C, but with the A from the D7 suspended to yield a Bø7 along the way:
A famous instance of the Half-Diminished 7 as “suspended root” is in the 1962 film The Music Man, when Tenor Vern Reed makes a comedic ascent from scale degree 8 to scale degree 9, before resolving back down to 8 again (at 1:45). The highest chord in this phrase is the Half-Diminished 7 in question:
Example in “Heart of My Heart”
If we progress ahead one more phrase in Heart of My Heart, we can find a spot where just such a function is welcome:
Assuming we still want to change harmonies on downbeats rather than weak beats (and we do), we seemingly have only one choice on the first syllable of “dar-ling”: to remain in the A7 tonality given the E-natural melody note, since the note doesn’t fit into D7. However, we now have a more compelling option available to us, should we choose to accept it.
🌟 Enter the Half-Diminished 7 chord. 🌟
The E is a holdover from the A7 chord and eventually resolves to a D: a suspension as clear as day. We can thus move the harmony parts to their D7 pitches a measure early and leave the Lead as is, creating a lovely Half-Diminished 7 chord that later resolves to its Dominant 7 equivalent.
Notating the suspension
Used in this way, the Half-Diminished 7’s function is so tightly bound to the following Dominant 7 that we can use the Dominant 7’s Roman Numeral notation for both chords, if we want. Doing so will clarify the harmonic progression of the overall phrase as unfailingly A7 → D7.
To notate this suspension, we use the decorated symbol D7⁹⁻⁸, indicating that scale degree 9 is suspended and resolves to scale degree 8. (Suspensions rarely happen in the bass part, so it’s customary to express root suspensions an octave up, using scale degrees 9 and 8 instead of 2 and 1.)
Reflection
Dominant 7 chords are not always sufficient for harmonizing every note in a melody. Fortunately, we have a variety of other seventh chords that enable us to stick to the Circle of Fifths, while adding harmonic variety to boot.
Below are the basic takeaways about each chord we’ve discussed:
- Major 7 chord (1, 3, 5, 7). Can harmonize scale degree 7. Sounds wistful if prolonged.
- Minor 7 chord (1, flat-3, 5, flat-7). Can harmonize scale degree 6 if the chord isn’t too low and the voice leading wouldn’t be clumsy.
- Sixth chord (1, 3, 6, 1). Can harmonize scale degree 6 if the chord is lower or the Minor 7 voicing would be clumsy.
- Half-Diminished 7 chord (1, flat-3, flat-5, flat-7). Can harmonize a melody 9→8 suspension as a Dominant 7th with a suspended root.
- Diminished 7 chord (1, flat-3, flat-5, flat-flat-7). Can harmonize funky accidentals without leaving the current chord area.
Now that we have a more thorough understanding of how the Circle of Fifths works in practice, we’ll next expand our horizons to cases when abandoning Circular motion might be a stronger choice—and explore why the science of sound still unfailingly allows for it.
Next: Part 5: Breaking the Circle
Full guide: Barbershop Arranging: A Modern Guide
