Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to lesson three of the "Songs for a Better World" unit.

My name is Mr. Chapman, and in today's lesson, we're going to be taking a look at how artists' cover songs, as well as the texture, tonality and harmony that John Lennon used in his song "Imagine." As usual, we're going to be doing lots of performing, composing, listening and appraising.

So without further ado, let's take a look at what we are going to need to be successful in today's lesson.

In this lesson, you will need a piece of paper and pencil to take notes with.

You will also need your voice or instrument, or access to an online app or instrument, or digital audio workstation such as BandLab.

This lesson is better with headphones, it is not required.

If you need to pause the video to get any of the equipment you see on screen, or find a quiet space to work in, please do so now, and press play when you're ready.

Cover Versions.

You will hear two contrasting cover versions of "Imagine." List some of the ways each artist has achieved a different feel to the original.

The first extract is going to be by Eva Cassidy, and then we will hear an arrangement by Herbie Hancock and India.

Arie.

♪ Imagine there's no heaven ♪ ♪ It's easy if you try ♪ ♪ No hell below us ♪ ♪ Above us only sky ♪ ♪ Imagine all the people ♪ ♪ Living life in peace ♪ ♪ You may say I'm a dreamer ♪ ♪ But I'm not the only one ♪ ♪ I hope some day you'll join us ♪ ♪ And the world will be as one ♪ In you answer, you should refer to some of the musical elements.

Think about instrumentation, structure, texture, harmony, melody, rhythm, and dynamics.

If you need to hear the extracts again, feel free to rewind the video.

Pause the video and take five minutes to list three things per cover song.

Press resume when you're ready to continue.

Building chords.

A chord is when you play more than one note at the same time.

For example, there are many different types of chords used in music.

Some of the most common are major or minor chords.

Major chords sound like this, and minor chords like this.

To build a major chord you can start on any note, for example, C.

And then you can climb up four semitones.

One, two, three, four.

Hold that note and climb up further three semitones.

One, two, three.

Play all of those notes at the same time.

In this case it would be C, E, and G.

And I have a major chord.

For our minor chord you inverse those numbers.

So it would be three semitones first, and then four.

For example C, climb up three semitones, one, two three.

Hold the E flat and climb a further four semitones.

One, two, three, four.

And then I have G.

So I have C, E flat, and G.

An extended chord is when you add on notes to your standard triad.

For example, C7.

We play the note that is seven notes above C.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

You can do this for nine, and eleven as well.

Nine.

Eleven.

As you can tell, playing extended chords adds interest and colour to the music.

Can you notate the following chords? Either on manuscript paper if you have it, or you can simply list the notes that are in that chord.

For C major, A minor, and A minor 7.

After you've done that, try and play them on your instrument or on BandLab.

So for a really quick example, let's say that I wanted to play the notes in a G major chord.

So my first note is G.

and because it's major, I'm going to go up four semitones and then three.

So I've started on G, and I go one, two, three, four.

And I land on B, so I know that that's my second note.

So I've got G, and B so far.

And then I've got three more semitones.

One, two, three.

So my notes in the G major chord are G, B, and D.

If I wanted to make this minor, I would simply go G, and then one, two, three.

One, two three.

And I've got my B flat this time.

And then four semitones, one, two, three, four.

So I've got G, B flat, and D for my G minor chord.

To turn this into seventh, I would climb up seven notes from the G.

One, three, four, five, six, seven.

So I land on the F.

So my G7 chord would be G, B, D, my standard triad, plus F, which is seven notes from my root note.

That was a really quick demo, now over to you.

You can use any online instrument, your own instrument, a piano at home perhaps, or BandLab.

Let's jump over to the slides, and continue on with the lesson.

Texture.

Texture describes the way that the layers of the music interact with each other.

So for example, in the pre-chorus of "Imagine" by John Lennon, we have the voice part, which is the melody, and the accompaniment part on the piano.

The piano is just playing block chords.

So we call this homophonic, cause there's a melody and an accompaniment.

And the accompaniment usually in homophonic texture is block chords.

Now in a song like this, a song for a better world, why do you think the texture is homophonic, and not polyphonic or monophonic, for example? Write two sentences to answer that question, and click resume when you're ready to go.

Homophonic is a popular but also quite simple texture.

Perhaps John Lennon chose to do a homophonic song to make his quite powerful message a little bit more clear.

It's a lot easier to hear what he is saying and talking about when there are not many layers going on.

When there's just a very simple piano part, we can focus a lot more on his lyrics and his melody.

Can you try and play these chords on your instrument? Or you can use an online digital audio workstation or online keyboard.

The chords of the pre-chorus sound like this: If you just want to play the right hand, it would sound like this: and if you just wanted to play the bassline, it would sound like this: Feel free to practise separately if you want to, but if you want to have a little bit more of a challenge, then try and put them together.

Pause the video to complete this task, and click continue when you're ready to move on.

Textures task, 10 minutes.

Play the bassline and chords of the pre-chorus.

And for an extension task: How can you change the texture? What happens if you play the block chords in different patterns? Pause the video and click resume when you're ready to continue.

Tonality.

The character of a song is determined by the key the music is in.

Music often in a major or a minor key.

"Imagine" is in a major key.

Listen closely to the lyrics with the chords.

How does the song make you feel? ♪ Imagine there's no heaven ♪ ♪ It's easy if you try ♪ ♪ No hell below us ♪ ♪ Above us only sky ♪ Now I will play the song in a minor key.

How has the character of the song changed? ♪ Imagine there's no heaven ♪ ♪ It's easy if you try ♪ ♪ No hell below us ♪ ♪ Above us only sky ♪ Take two minutes to compare those two versions, and talk about how the song makes you feel, and how the character changes.

Click continue when you're ready to go.

Now we'll take a look at the harmony used in the song "Imagine" by John Lennon.

On the screen, I've put four bars from the verse.

And as we can see in the piano part, we actually only use two chords, we use the G chord and the C chord.

They're both major chords.

G is the key of the song, G major.

Which means we're using chord one and chord four, as the relationship between G and C is a fourth.

Now we talked about how a simple homophonic texture meant that the lyrics and the message could be more easily heard and you could say the same thing about a very simple harmonic progression.

Having one chord per bar and having two chords alternating in the verse means that the listener can really focus on John's lyrics and voice.

As we move into the pre-chorus, we get a little bit more complicated, but it's still fairly simple stuff.

The harmonic rhythm increases.

That means that we have more chords per bar, instead of having one chord per bar, now we have three chords every two bars, and you can see that bar 13 and bar 15 in this case, have two chords each.

You can see in bar 14, on the lyric "ple" of the word "people", that there is an A minor seven chord.

As we looked at earlier in the lesson, that seven means that there is also a G in that chord, so we have A, C, and E, for A minor, as you can see in the table at the bottom, but we've added an additional G to make it an extended chord.

You may also notice that some of these chords are slash chords.

So we have E minor slash B in that first bar.

We have C slash E, and D slash F sharp.

These are called chord inversions.

An inverted chord, the root note is not the lowest note.

The chord will still have all of the notes.

For example, a C chord that's inverted like C slash E will have the notes C, E, and G, in them, but E will be at the bottom.

So that means you have, you're playing a C chord, over an E in the bass line.

And you can see that we have the C chord in the right hand, and it's being played over an E in the left hand.

Can you write out the different inversions for a G major chord? If you don't have access to manuscript paper, you can simply write the order of the notes.

So the root chord would be G-B-D.

So what would the first and second inversion of those chords be? Feel free to pause the video and click play when you're ready to continue.

Now we have some questions on the harmony.

So, question one, does the pre-chorus use more or fewer chords than the verse? Two, one chord uses an additional note.

Which chord is that, and what is the name of that extra note? And three, does the harmonic rhythm change or stay the same? Are some of these chords inversions? And why do you think these have been used? If we look at the bass line, we might find a clue.

Feel free to pause the video and click continue when you're ready to hear the answers.

So, the answers for the question, does the pre-chorus use more or fewer chords than the verse? The answer is more.

As we said, there are two chords per bar every other bar.

And that kind of answers the third question there.

Does the harmonic rhythm change or stay the same? It increases to three chords every two bars.

So that middle question: one chord uses an additional note, which chord? It's the A minor seven.

And what is the name of that extra note? The additional note is G.

So well done if you got those right.

Feel free to go back over that portion of the video just to double check the information there if you got some of those questions wrong.

So, let's practise adding some sevenths to some chords.

So, can you write or list the notes that would be in a C seven chord? So you're writing a C chord, and adding an additional B flat.

The same for E minor seven.

You'd put the notes of E minor and then an additional D.

And for D seven, you'd write the notes for D major with an additional C.

Have a go at singing the pre-chorus melody over the C-G-C-G verse chord progression.

Does it fit? What effect does this have? Click pause, spend 10 minutes on these tasks, and click resume when you are finished.

So to wrap this lesson up, let's answer that question from the beginning.

How did John Lennon use texture, tonality and harmony in his protest song "Imagine"? Well, we discussed that the texture was homophonic.

That this was probably used to help the listener really really focus on the melody and the lyrics of the song.

The tonality was major, which really emphasised that sense of hope, and the harmony again, was very simple.

Probably used in the same reason the texture was very simple, to make sure that the listener is focusing.

Not on the complexity of the music, but more on the powerful message, and we can take this idea into our own protest songs when we compose them in future lessons.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson, and I'll see you in the next one!.