Albers

Josef Albers “Interaction of Color” shaped my ideas about the perception of musical color. It talks about the interaction of non-musical colors and the psychological effect of shifting from one color to another. The concepts apply beautifully to music. Below are two slides I am using in my Berklee Jazz Comp class today to discuss how voice leading can affect the listeners perception of tension and resolution. The drama of music comes from the sinuous shifts from a state of tension to resolution. Titrating the tension correctly for the moment is the whole game!

The second slide shows how you can use subdominant voice leading to articulate a dominant function chord. The combination of the root motion of V to I6 adds considerable gravitation to the subdominant voice leading. In this case I chose V7 to I6 (in the key of Eb) because it is the most clear example, but you can think of any dominant function chord in the same way.

Each chord in the list (left to right) creates more gravitation towards the target because it is progressively more non-diatonic (it is getting darker on the color spectrum for that kind of function). The dominant function chords are an increase in tension over the subdominant chords but have considerably less gravitation to I6 than they would if they were not suspended (sus4).