Chromaticism

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Chromaticism is a technique in Western music, and it starts with a mismatch. A standard piano keyboard has twelve notes in each octave. Diatonic music, built on major and minor scales, uses only seven of them. The other five notes do not vanish from the instrument. Composers reach for them anyway, weaving them between the expected notes and chords. That reaching is what chromaticism means in practice. Music theory describes chromatic elements as "elaborations of or substitutions for diatonic scale members." That framing sounds tidy, almost mathematical, as if the extra five notes were simple substitutes. Yet this documentary asks how a handful of borrowed notes came to be blamed for undoing the major-minor system that had organized music for centuries. It asks where this practice began, which composers pushed hardest against the diatonic scale, and what new kinds of chords resulted when they did. It asks why a repeated chromatic note could sound, to some listeners, like weeping, and why other listeners insisted the connection meant nothing at all. The answers begin decades before major and minor scales had even solidified into a working system.

• 2. The Long Crack in Tonality

  ›

  In the 1550s, during the late Renaissance, chromaticism took shape as part of a style called musica reservata. It appeared in the music of Cipriano de Rore, in Orlando Lasso's Prophetiae Sibyllarum, and in the theoretical writings of Nicola Vicentino.

  Between 1600 and 1750, during the Baroque period, composers developed the major and minor scale system that most listeners now take for granted. Music historians Benward and Saker describe this as the moment key consciousness emerged in Western music.

  From 1750 to 1825, the Classical period kept major and minor keys as the backbone of composition. Chromaticism during this era stayed mostly decorative, and shifting from one key to another was used chiefly to mark formal divisions within a piece.

  From 1825 to 1900, during the Romantic period, chromaticism increased until it threatened the major-minor key system itself. By the end of that period keys shifted so rapidly within a single piece that tonality itself began to break down. As tonality expanded across the last half of the nineteenth century, composers tried new combinations of chords, keys, and harmonies. Richard Wagner pushed this furthest, especially in the opera Tristan und Isolde, where increased chromaticism became one of the clearest signs of tonality's breakdown.

  Music theorist George Perle later proposed one such organization: a hierarchical arrangement of the entire chromatic set. Scholars cite that kind of framework, along with heavier use of mode mixture and leading tones, as evidence of tonality's breakdown. They also point to the tonicization of nearly every chromatic step and to an expanding modulatory space. Composers even began treating non-tonal chords, such as the Tristan chord, as though they were tonic keys in their own right.

  Between 1875 and 1920, as the major-minor system broke down further, impressionist composers began experimenting with other scales, particularly pentatonic, modal, and whole-tone scales.

  From 1920 onward, in what's called the Contemporary period, the chromatic scale has predominated across much of the music being written. As tonal harmony kept widening, it eventually broke down almost entirely. Out of that collapse came the twelve-tone technique, built on the full chromatic scale. In this method, a tone row orders the twelve notes of the scale into one specific series. Serialism followed, extending the same logic, though later styles often reincorporated tonal elements even while abandoning practices like modulation.

  In the same timeline compiled by Benward and Saker, jazz and popular music tell a different story. There, popular music is called "the last bastion of the major-minor key system." The blues scale, described there as "a chromatic variant of the major scale," turns up often in jazz and in popular music touched by blues.

• 3. Borrowed and Bent Chords

  ›

  Music theorist David Cope identifies three forms of chromaticism: modulation, chords borrowed from secondary keys, and chromatic chords such as augmented sixth chords. Swapping in a chromatic harmony where a diatonic one is expected works much like a deceptive cadence, where a different diatonic chord takes the expected chord's place. In the major mode, a substitute chromatic consonance often turns out to be a triad borrowed from the parallel minor mode, a process called mixture. Four consonant triads from the minor mode can replace their counterparts in the major mode, and theorists call the results chromatic triads by mixture.

  Writing in 1965, theorists Shir-Cliff, Jay, and Rauscher catalogued the chromatic chords that appear most often in practice. Their list includes dominant seventh chords of subsidiary keys, used to modulate through what's called a V7 to I cadence. It also includes augmented sixth chords, Neapolitan sixth chords functioning as chromatic subdominants, and diminished seventh chords functioning as a chromatic vii7. Altered chords and expanded chords round out their catalogue, alongside other chromatic devices such as pitch axis theory and parallel scales. Underlying all of it is what theorists call the total chromatic: all twelve equally tempered pitch classes of the chromatic scale, taken together.

  A chromatic note, by definition, is simply one that does not belong to the scale of whatever key is prevailing at the time. When one or both notes of an interval are chromatic, the whole interval counts as chromatic too. This happens when a diatonic interval gets raised or lowered by a half step, making it larger or smaller. A chromatic scale, by contrast, proceeds entirely by semitones, dividing the octave into twelve equal steps.

  In the key of C major, seven diatonic triads sit naturally on the seven scale degrees. The I chord is a C major triad made of C, E, and G. Between them sit ii, a D minor triad, and iii, an E minor triad. Then come IV, an F major triad, V, a G major triad, and vi, an A minor triad. At the far end sits vii, a B diminished triad made of B, D, and F.

  The Neapolitan sixth chord is built as the II chord in first inversion. In C major, it spells out F, A, and D, and it resolves to the V chord. The iv diminished chord, a sharpened subdominant built with a diminished seventh, spells out F, A, C, and E in the same key, also resolving to the V. It can also be understood as a tonicization of the V chord, functioning as what theorists write as vii7 of V. The augmented sixth chord, marked VI, spells A and F around a middle note. That middle note can be C, D, or E, and the chord resolves to the V.

  In major keys, III, VI, II, iv, vii, and VII can each host what theorists call chromatic modulation. In minor keys, the equivalent triads are iii, vi, II, iv, ii, and vii. Modulating to any of them counts as chromatic modulation, one of many places where a single altered note can pull an entire passage toward a different key.

• 4. The Chromatic Line

  ›

  Musicians call a chromatic bassline, ascending or descending, by a Latin name: passus duriusculus.

  Most line clichés run through the root, the fifth, or the seventh of a chord, though only two carry names. A line cliché, by definition, is any chromatic line that moves against a chord that otherwise stays still.

  The major line cliché moves from the fifth of a chord up to the sixth, then back down to the fifth. Starting from a tonic chord, its simplest form produces the progression I, I+, vi, I+.

  The minor line cliché moves the opposite direction, descending from the root down to the major seventh, then to the minor seventh. It can continue on down as far as the fifth of the chord.

  Similar to what happens in the bebop scale, jazz improvisers weave nonharmonic chromatic notes into almost every line they play. This can come from metric demands or simply a player's wish to use part of the chromatic scale.

• 5. Darkness Doubt and Grief

  ›

  In the 16th century, a repeated melodic semitone became linked to weeping, an association preserved in the lament bass and in what's called pianto.

  From the late 16th century onward, chromaticism came to symbolize intense emotional expression in music, Pierre Boulez wrote in 1986. He described a long-running "dualism" in Western European harmonic language. He said it pitted the diatonic against the chromatic, much as it had in the era of Monteverdi and Gesualdo, whose madrigals offer many examples. In his words, "the chromatic symbolizing darkness, doubt, and grief and the diatonic light, affirmation and joy, this imagery has hardly changed for three centuries."

  When an interviewer asked Igor Stravinsky, in 1959, whether he believed in an innate connection between "pathos" and chromaticism, he gave a blunt answer. "Of course not," Stravinsky replied, "the association is entirely due to convention." The convention has proven powerful anyway, and the emotional associations tied to chromaticism have only strengthened over the years.

  Writing in 1959, Cooke traced the shift to around 1850, when intellectual circles began casting doubt on personal happiness as a worthy goal. From that point on, chromaticism, in Cooke's words, "brought more and more painful tensions into our art-music." In his words, it "finally eroded the major system and with it the whole system of tonality." During the Romantic period, composers used chromatic harmony more freely, reaching for chords built on tones outside the prevailing scale. Those chords added color and motion, and dissonant, unstable chords were used more freely too. By deliberately delaying the resolution of a dissonant chord into a stable one, Romantic composers created feelings of yearning, tension, and mystery.

  In 1991, Susan McClary argued that chromaticism in opera and sonata-form narratives carries a meaning. Through a Marxist lens, she read it as racial, sexual, or class "Otherness" set against diatonicism's "male" self, whether through modulation or another means. Catherine Clément went further, calling the chromaticism in Wagner's Isolde a "feminine stink."

  Yet McClary also complicated her own argument. The same chromatic techniques used in opera to portray women's madness, she noted, were prized in avant-garde instrumental music. In the nineteenth-century symphony, she wrote, "Salome's chromatic daring is what distinguishes truly serious composition of the vanguard from mere cliche-ridden hack work."