Los Doggies

Anyway, there’s a Chord I’d like to give you. It’s called a Major Seventh Augmented Fourth. It sounds like the name they’d give an astronomical object, but really, you just gotta get to know some of these letter-named noteheads. If you spend some time with them, they will be like friends, the kind of friends that can drive you mad. A rose called by any alphanumeric string would smell as sweet. A Maj.7th (add #4): A pretty name for a pretty ruby red chord.

This chord is found in the A Lydian Mode (A B C# D# E F# G#), a major key with an augmented 4th. The five notes (A C# D# E G#) of the chord are themselves a Pentatonic Scale known as Japanese Insen, found in the popular “Cherry Blossom Song”.

There is emotion here too, intrinsic to tonal relationships. Allow me to personify.

The low A3 on the bottom of the chord, would be called the Root, or Tonic, and acts as King of the Chord. The Root is the selfy self, inside you and I, and establishes relationships with all other notes on top of her, her so-called friends. The high E5 on top is a strong personality in the score of your life, but also a jealous frenemy, for the E is Perfect Fifth and Dominant, ever seeking to usurp you, especially considering the Dominant’s tonal equivalence to the Lydian Mode (E Major = A Lydian). She’s you.

The C# is also a good friend, she makes you happy with her harmony, but considering her relative minorness (C# Minor = E Major = A Lydian), she can’t be trusted, as she also seeks to usurp your key and kingship, only to make things sad, as minor friends are wont to.

Next we have the G#―the Major Seventh. This friend is so close to you, she’s right on top of you, always. She longs to be near you, to become you, to resolve to you (at least it sounds like she does), and yet she stays right where she is. Perhaps you love her for her dissonance. If she was in charge of this tonality of yours, she’d make everything dark and evil with her freaky Phrygian mode, and nobody wants that. The Major 7th is the love-lorn loser tone. (For more, read this article.)

Lastly, there is the augmented fourth, the devilish D# Tritone. This tone is so awful that babies cringe in their cribs when played for them, and the church even tried to banish this hellish harmony from the face of the Earth. In a certain context the tritone can be a lusty angel―a real succubus of a friend who will suck you dry. Just as the G# longs to resolve to the A in the example above, the D# longs to resolve to the E, creating a double dissonant suspension that evokes the feeling of longing, languishing, lost in love. At the same time, the mystical forces of so many powerful tones hanging overhead, makes you oblivious to Key. Every antecedent is forgotten, and progression is no longer anticipated. The A and E, and the G# and D#, form Perfect Fifth intervals respectively, highly stable relationships, except the two sets of Fifths are but a semitone away (the smallest interval) from each other, far too close to be harmonious, the two couples are ever fighting. Combine the two fifths with the happy Major 3rd and the wistful Major 7th, and you get a desperate beautiful heartbroken chord who is somehow stable amidst the musical drama of her rocky tonal relationships.

The Major Seventh Augmented Fourth Chord is originally found in the Frank Zappa song “Zoot Allures”, and he probably took it from some modern composer no one knows any more. The Chord is also used in the Los Doggies’ song “Onebody”. Considering the amount of love songs out there, you’d think that this chord would be all over human music, but these days you’re lucky if you hear a Major 7th, let alone a Major 7th Sharp 4th.

I’m telling you, if you heard this little chord on the radio, in a fancy pop song, a Diatonic Heterosexual Song in 4/4, you’d absolutely fall in love with her. She’s the Devil.