In our last two posts, we've been discussing various methods of coming up with new chord voicings to spice up our rhythm and lead playing. For this month's lesson, we'll be taking tonality to its very edges and coming up with chords that tend to imply particular sounds more than chord function. So, revisit the last two posts if you need to brush up on any of the concepts of chord voicing we've talked about thus far and let's get right to the new voicings.

Up until now, we've been talking about harmony that's build on stacked thirds. This sort of traditional tertian harmony has been the basis of Western music from the mid-1500s until around the turn of the 20^th century. It's hard to argue that the sounds that it provides are endlessly complex and fascinating. The sheer force of the tonic and dominant chords are massive. However, it's exactly because of substantial weight that tertian harmony can be so limiting. If, while improvising, I were to play a Cmaj7 arpeggio over a G7 chord it would outline the tones 11,13,1, and 3. While that only had one foreign tone- the 11th- that tone clashes so much with the 3^rd of the G7 chord that it simply sounds wrong in most traditional settings. So what's the answer to this? How can we break out of this notion of “avoid notes”? The solution is quartal harmony. It's such a simple solution that it's almost incredible that it wasn't brought to light sooner: simply make chords out of stacked fourths instead of thirds. In doing this, the sound of a particular scale is implied instead of a particular chord.

The first example shows the C major scale harmonized in stacked fourths with chord symbols showing an approximation of what chord that voicing would be used for in a traditional setting.

Now here's the cool thing about these quartal voicings: any of them can be used over any of the modes of C major. Here's that same diagram but with the chord symbols showing extensions over a single bass note:

As you see, all of these voicings fit nicely over a D minor sound. They work just as well over F lydian or E phyrgian.

With a small amount of reworking, these voicings can be used in a few more abstract ways. For instance, let's see what happens when we start putting just one of the voicings over a few random bass notes:

As you can see, the possibilities for these kinds of voicings are endless. Of course, there's no reason to stop at stacked fourths. Stacked fifths offer just as many options in terms of alternate voicings to traditional chords.

It was something of a playful jab at the Western composers when I asked why someone didn't think of the quartal system sooner. In truth, the quartal system has been around for much longer than what we think of as traditional harmony; this system of composition and thinking of chords simply fell out of fashion with popular music until the middle 1950s or so when Miles Davis and other experimental musicians began looking for ways of freeing themselves from chord changes. In thinking about harmony in these more abstract ways, see what you can glean from the past and how you can make those lessons more accessible to future generations. This concludes our three part series on chord voicing. Next month we'll tackle a completely different angle and look at some new and interesting uses for pentatonic scales.