Was studying a vocal arrangement to get how its harmony works, felt like I was following, then—bam! Are there good frameworks for understanding tone clusters like these? Like: why every diatonic *except* G# on the first cluster? Should we see the second as an elaborate V of ii?
Conversation
i fucking love this arrangement of 715 - CRΣΣKS so one sec i'm gonna try to answer this question despite not knowing anything about harmony really
1
2
okay so played around with this on piano a bit and i think the bare chord progression here with no embellishment is D - A - E, so IV - I - V. so in the first cluster, aside from the B you could argue in terms of voice leading that it’s just notes held from the D
2
1
that’s looking at the treble clef tho i guess. the bass clef suggests Bm - C#m - DM7 - E which is very similar, third down and third up respectively, makes sense of the B, and then the DM7 is arguably passing tones?
2
not sure it’s gonna be clear what’s going on with the second tone cluster w/o seeing where it voice leads to. jacob collier says in a video that (my paraphrase) thinking in terms of chords is misleading and voice leading is actually the real thing and i’ve been chewing on that
Replying to
Right, I saw that too! That would seem to go doubly true in a vocal arrangement. That bass part really wants to walk up, and that may be the main thing, rather than the chord structure.
1