DM Stith-- Issac's Song

Next up is a short but sweet song from the master puppeteer DM Stith. Brought into Asthmatic Kitty via artist Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond), he just finished summer tours through Europe, the United States, AND Canada. When he toured through the Midwest, I had the pleasure of seeing his live show in Lawrence, Kansas.

“Isaac’s Song” is the first track to his first full length album, Heavy Ghost.

Music can be purchased off the Asthmatic Kitty site, here.

Process Composition

Amidst the dark lighting and shady benches surrounding a small stage in Lawrence, I got the exquisite opportunity to talk to Stith himself. On my mind was a burning question: how did he write what he did, and what was going through his head as he did it? I found out from my interview that 1) he is an extremely nice person, 2) he comes from a classically trained family, and 3) he is self-taught in music. This was a big revelation. The clencher to my analysis is that he described his writing as a process—building itself from small improvisations on the piano or guitar.

Quick History Lesson: This “process” philosophy of composition is featured most emphatically with the minimalists, who would take small cells of music (maybe a bar) and repeat them for hours, slowly changing a note here, a rhythm there. To them, the focus of music isn’t in the melody, or the key, or anything directly related to the music itself. It’s the way that patterns change and shift that's important. And on a less cosmic scale, DM Stith is grooving on the same thing.

Mediant Relationships in Neo-Riemannian Analysis

Now if you recall standard music theory, Roman Numeral analysis of a piece will show you how the chords of the progression fit into the key, and provide you with a way of mapping out the flow of the piece. Generally speaking, most of the time it's a journey from tonic to dominant, ending with a cadence on tonic. However, this ideology of process composition no longer yearns for perfect authentic cadences. The focus is now on the relationships between each chord. Who cares what key they’re in! This will require a new way of looking at music theory: Neo-Riemannian Analysis.

In 1903, Hugo Riemann introduced the concept of purely mediant related harmonies. If you have access to JSTOR, check this out. His theories have only recently been revived in the 1990’s and 2000’s, and Modern Neo-Riemannian analysis is connected to the work of many other modern day theorists. One recent development has been applying these forms to pop music, which is what we're about to explore. For more information. I am indebted to my professor, Dr. David Castro, for the consolidation of quite a bit of this subject matter.

In Neo-Riemannian Theory (NRT), Progressions are classified by how many common tones are held between two chords. For instance, the transition from C major to E minor is a stable one, because two common tones are held between the two chords. C major to B minor, on the other hand, is a doubly chromatic transition, and is therefore much less stable.

Any complex relationship is made up of a combination of three simple functions:

P—Parallel motion. Moves C major to C minor. (major to its parallel minor)

R—Relative motion, Moves C major to A minor (major to its relative minor)

L—Leittonwechsel, Moves C major to E minor (major to the mediant relationship in the opposite direction of relative motion. Make sense?).

Back to “Isaac’s Song”

Here's a transcription of the basic elements of the piece (the song is an improvisation over these measures, with some repeats added). Most of the relations are parallel or relative, with the occasional chromatically related motion. Their stable relationships are cemented by the voicings—deep chords, many times in root position, squished together in the lower register of the piano.

The weirdness really comes in at measure 9—that chord was a tricky one to notate. From the recording, it sounds more like the percussive slam of a fist on the keys than actual notes. In the analysis, I treated it as an Eb minor chord, making it quite unrelated to the C that proceeds it and the Bb that follows. However, due to the fact that no real triad exists cleanly in that setting, it may relate closer (or less close) to the adjacent chords. Let me know what you think!

Closing Thoughts

You may or may not have noticed that this progression can be simplified down. The voicings are a little funky, but if you can attribute the extra chords to modal mixture, or flourishes, or something, then you can shrink the score down to four chords-- F, Am, C, and Bb. These chords make a beautiful I – iii – V – IV progression in F major. Is this piece tonal in disguise?

I would argue a 'no.' Do you hear Plagal cadences? Does the C sound like a V chord to you? No. The wash of majors and minors, back and forth, have thrown your ear away from the tonal system. We can only base chords on what they’re next to.

You may be thinking, “You know, this new analysis thingy doesn’t really seem all that weird. I mean, it looks weird on the page, but in the pop world who really thinks about key when they’re writing?” And you’d be right! There’s a large percentage of writers these days who aren’t trained classically. In many pop songs, progressions will make all sorts of nonsense in Roman Numeral analysis. Does that make it less valuable music? No, it just needs to be interpreted on a different plane than classical music. This piece demonstrates just a bit of the complexity (and beauty) that can come from improvisation and innovation. Take that to the bank the next time someone tries to tell you Chuck Berry is less complex than Beethoven.