Chord Voicing

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This guide goes with my Life Tips Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 5. I mention a composition music theory use of the word Voicing. I initially tried to describe what that meant just using words, but I discovered that like most things in music theory, it really works better if you can see it in notation and hear it in audio to understand the concept. The point of that tip is to show how different kinds of people use the word Voicing to mean different things, so a detailed description of it isn’t really all that relevant to the broader point, which is just that it’s different in different contexts. But for those who are interested I decided to throw together a quick guide to the harmony music theory use of the term, because it’s an interesting concept if you haven’t run across it before (and really core to the study of harmony in the first place). Note that there are multiple chapters about this topic in most harmony textbooks, so this will be a broad overview rather than a comprehensive guide to everything you could do with voicing, but hopefully it will be useful.

So for the harmony theory use of the term, we’re talking about which particular notes you choose to use for any particular chord. If we just take a simple C Major triad, we know that it consists of the notes C, E, and G. But you’ll notice that with the instruments we have to work with, most of them have more than one C, E, and G available, so how do we decide which ones to use? When we show a “prototypical” C major triad, we usually show this:

You can see that we have middle C, and the E and the G above it. There are two dimensions on which we can vary the chord voicing. We have the chord inversion, and we have closed vs. open. Let’s start with the chord inversion. We have three options for a triad (“triad” just means that we have three pitches in our chord): root position, first inversion, and second inversion. The example above is in root position. On a broad level, root position means that the lowest note in the chord is the root, or the “one” note, in other words, the note the chord is named for. In this case, C is our “one note" (which I will now call the root from here on out).

This is not to be confused with the tonic, which is the first scale degree in the key we are in. We don’t know what key we are in here - this C major chord could be the I chord (“one chord”) in C major (as the key), or it could be the IV chord (“four chord”) in G Major, or the V chord (“five chord”) in F major. For that matter, it could even be the VI chord (“six chord”, sometimes the bVI or “flat six chord”) in E minor, and so on. We don’t actually care about that for our voicing discussion.

We have a root for our chord, and we also have two more pitches - the third and the fifth, which are determined when you see a chord in this configuration. In any other voicing, the E will still be the third, and the G would still be the fifth - the basic rule is when you take the pitches in the chord and arrange them in the tightest possible configuration (get rid of octave doublings and any other gaps in the chord, then arrange them so they are in stacked thirds), then the bottom note is the root, and above that you have the third, the fifth, etc.

The other way to build a chord to determine the note designations is to start with the note the chord is named for (C in this case), then stack thirds from there (skip every other note in the scale). So C, skip D and pick E, skip F and pick G, etc. C is 1 (root), E is the third (D would be second), G is fifth, B is seventh, and then you can continue into the next octave, so skip the next C and pick the upper D which is now 9th, F would be 11th, and A would be 13th. You would give them the sharp or flat (or natural) from the key you are in at the time, or modify that for chromatic harmony of some sort.

Back to voicing, the root position chord means the root is on the bottom. We could take the same chord we had above and move the root up an octave, in which case we’d get this:

This one has the 3rd of the chord on the bottom, and is called “first inversion”. In theory analysis, it’s denoted with a superscript 6 next to the roman numeral, which is from a system called thoroughbass or “figured bass”. I’m not going to get into that here, but here’s a guide to that if you want to pursue that some more. It’s a fascinating system if you dive deep into the history of thoroughbass that gets well beyond anything I’m talking about right now. But for our purposes, you will sometimes hear the first inversion referred to as a 6 or 6th chord (see Life Tips Philosophy of Theory Tip No. 4 where I discuss Neapolitan 6th chords). It just means that the 3rd of the chord is on the bottom, or “in the bass” (the lowest voice of our chord). This is not to be confused with the VI or vi chord, by the way!

The other inversion of a triad is “second inversion”, which would have the fifth of the chord on the bottom. It’s indicated with a superscript 6/4 (6 over the 4 normally, no slash). We would get this by starting in first inversion and raising the 3rd up an octave, and it would look like this:

There are specific ways that the second inversion chord is used in tonal harmony, but that’s beyond the scope of this guide.

All of these examples we’ve looked at are different voicings of the same chord - C major. They have also all been in close position, which is the other dimension that we can vary for our voicing. We can shift them to open position if we’d like. Close position means that if you look at the voicing we are using, there are no places you could find a chord tone that we don’t have one between the highest and lowest notes. In other words, in our case, there are no Cs or Es or Gs that we could have chosen between any of the notes that we did choose. If we go back to our root position chord and we raise the 3rd by an octave from there, we move it to open position:

Here you can see that between the C and G that we have, there is an E that we don’t. That itself is sufficient to make this open position, but you’ll also notice that between the G and E that we have, there’s a C that we don’t. We just need either one of these to be true to be in open position - it just means that somewhere in the chord is a gap between chord tones. For good measure, here are the other two examples we looked at earlier (first inversion and second inversion), made into open position chords the same way, by raising the middle tone up an octave from those earlier examples:

Before we move on to another related topic, here are a couple of well known real world piano examples demonstrating close vs. open position in actual pieces. First, for close position, I’ve chosen Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Major K. 545, 1st movement. This is one of the most well-known examples of a keyboard figuration known as the “Alberti Bass”. This gets us briefly into elements of texture, but we usually want to have movement in our pieces, and also some amount of lightness. We could just pound out repeated chords as solid block chords (and actually here’s a Beethoven sonata that does just that), but we often want the texture to be lighter so we play notes in succession rather than all together all the time. They are still considered one harmony for analysis purposes even if they don’t all sound simultaneously. The Alberti Bass in particular is the low voice, the high voice, the middle voice, and the high voice again, often using “finger pedaling” to hold the low voice while the other notes are not held out to help blend the harmony a little more. Here’s the Mozart example:

There are lots of examples in the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven that make use of the Alberti Bass, but here’s another Beethoven example that does that in a really rapid and energetic example: the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The first Alberti bass part starts at 0:39, cued in the link.

For our open position example, I’m turning to Frederic Chopin and his nocturnes, which frequently exemplify an open position version of the Alberti Bass (kind of - a similar idea though the particular sequence of notes is different. Maybe just saying “arpeggiated chords” is better than calling it an open Alberti Bass). The sustain pedal had developed sufficiently by the time Chopin was writing a few decades after Mozart that Chopin could expect that you could hold the pedal to keep notes ringing after your fingers let them go. Mozart had a sustain rail that you played with the knee, and it would be used more for effect that for harmonic blending because holding up your knee for a whole piece would be tiring (even if you could drop it between chords, it would still be up way more often that it would be down). A foot pedal is much easier to use like that.

For this example, I’ve chosen Chopin Nocturne Op. 27 No. 1 in C# minor as one of my favorites that I’ve listened to so far that does this pattern. He actually starts with an open position open chord, meaning there’s no 3rd, only roots and fifths. He did this so that when the tune comes in he can dance between the minor and major 3rd and you don’t really know what mode you are in (actually you know it’s minor because every time he uses the major third it’s on a dominant 7th chord acting as V7/iv, but it still gives a modally wandering sound compared to if he just used the minor 3rd the whole time). He will then use this to shift into Op. 27 No. 2 in Db major (the parallel enharmonic major of C# minor), which is clearly in major and makes a very nice pair because of that.

By the way, note the use of a Neapolitan chord extensively throughout this piece. It’s not usually a Neapolitan 6th, but the bII chord appears as a significant part of the theme, almost giving this piece a Phrygian modal sound in certain places, though he does make use of the major V chord so that it really sounds more like tonal Neapolitan rather than straight Phrygian. Here is Op. 27 No. 1:

Now we can turn to one more topic, which will let us explore the orchestral world a little bit and show some orchestrational uses of voicing. When I was at Berklee, we had a concept called “Lower Interval Limits”. These were ranges below which you should not go if you wanted to maintain the clarity of your harmony. But that’s a big “if”, and sometimes, you want a special effect where you do something different for sonic effect rather than for the clearest possible harmony. I should also note that timbre of instrument plays a role here. These limits are useful on the piano, but for other instruments you may be able to get away with lower (or have to stop at higher) ranges to avoid harmonic problems.

I’ve chosen highly contrasting orchestral examples to demonstrate two versions of this. On the low side, we have the opening of the Firebird by Igor Stravinsky. I’ve chosen the Suite version here, but the ballet version starts the same way. You can see in the score in the video that the trombones are playing close position 3rds below the limits of thirds in the Berklee Lower Interval Limit system, which would put thirds no lower than the middle of the bass staff. One of my professors at Berklee said he had a student once who was astonished that as skilled a composer as Stravinsky had made such an “elementary” mistake as violating Lower Interval Limits, but of course that’s not what happened here. He was going for a very thick and muddy sound here, and that is what he gets. It’s not really as muddy as it would be on a piano, but it is still very dark and muddy. This is enhanced by the low basses and cellos opening the piece, and the low side of the violas joining them, with everyone playing muted, and very softly. The trombones enter at about 0:30. Here’s the example:

My other example is on the high end, where the composer was going for a very ethereal sound, and so he used only the high instruments in their high range. This is the Prelude to Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, and you can hear quite a difference to the Stravinsky example.

All of these are examples of what you can do with various voicing techniques in harmony. There are other things you can think about for voicing as well, but that should get you started!

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