In 1967, Billy Strayhorn passed away from cancer of the esophagus at the age of 51. Two years later, Billy’s closest friend and mentor Duke Ellington sat quietly at the piano to play Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” on the last bit of tape that was left over from the sessions for “… And His Mother Called Him Bill”. On the last track of the LP, members of the band can be heard talking in the background, packing up, walking out the door. In his own world, Duke can be heard playing his favorite piece by his close friend- now gone.
It’s raw. There are mistakes. There’s background noise. The recording clips slightly. But that means everything to Duke in that moment- it’s human. Billy may not be around, but he’s left behind pieces of himself for his friends to have. That’s exactly how Strayhorn’s work feels- human- with push and pull, tension and release baked into it. He left behind something that was both unique to him and yet something that everyone can understand.
The whole album is worth your time, and I know that we’ve all got plenty of time on our hands nowadays, but for now here’s a link to Duke’s rendition of Lotus Blossom.
How Strayhorn did this is a mystery to me. How any composer is able to do this is a mystery, from Mozart to A Tribe Called Quest. That something as intangible as music – as art – could move people is a gift with no origin. More than just a stroke of luck, it’s also deeply fascinating to me that the study of music and art is based on the principle of reverse engineering a process by studying the effect, and not its causes. What makes someone feel something and why?
To tackle that question is an infinite task. However, in the case of Billy Strayhorn, there seems to be a practice that is cemented within his work: Chromatic harmony. This is nothing short of a really broad topic, but that’s kind of the point. In traditional European music, we’re only afforded 12 notes, and so due to this obstacle, people had to get creative. Chromatic harmony, in a broad sense, describes harmonic motion that doesn’t always adhere to the diatonic limitations of a given key center, but rather to the chromatic scale & spectrum. This manifests itself as chords built on the minor third in a major key, sequences that follow chromatic motion rather than diatonic motion, or chords that don’t resolve, but merely exist within dissonance.
In the case of Billy Strayhorn, many of these practices are quite evident. However, they didn’t just appear out of nowhere. The Billy Strayhorn’s of the world owe the inception and development of their harmonic content largely to the Romantic period. This is where a lot of Chromatic harmony first began to evolve. To me, a fantastic way to judge just how much changed for music during the Romantic period (roughly the duration of the 19th century) is to look at two of the figures who lived and worked on either end of it: Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf.
Let’s start with our pal Franz. His use of Chromatic techniques is fairly subtle, but when you hear it, it serves its purpose with grace. Schubert’s use of Chromatic harmony is more functional than not; more times than not his use of Chromatic tones or motion accents an existing diatonic framework- something characteristic of the early stage of this period. Part of the reason for this is that Schubert’s often was written in service of text. Below is a link to Schubert’s setting of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” from 1814.
To me, this early work of Schubert’s displays two characteristics of early Chromaticism. The first is the use of the diminished chord around the end of the development, before the recap of the “spinster” motif (the rolling ostinato in the bassline). There are two chords that, while built on traditional diatonic chord tones for the key of D minor, and they serve the role of the dominant, their spelling implies a sort of loose interpretation of “functional” (this example can be heard here from the video above). This technique is a trend; as is pointed out by Professor David Damschroder in his analysis of Schubert’s work “Minona”, Schubert favors diminished qualities of this kind (in this instance, it’s a french augmented 6th). Damschroder’s analysis also highlights the second characteristic mentioned above; his analysis of “Minona” reads “The fateful moment of truth occurs at the downbeat of m. 7. Were the sequential momentum to carry the day, Schubert would have proceeded to a D# major chord at this point. Instead, the preceding E chord is understood in retrospect to be prolonged through m.7 and beyond, marking the arrival of V#” Here, Damschroder mentions sequential movement to a D# major chord; this would be a resolution to #IV of the key of A minor, clearly indicating the abandonment of strict diatonic resolutions, and broadening the scope of musical writing to include more rich, non-traditional, and- in the case of the A-D# tritone- potentially dissonant chromatic practices.
This is where it gets weird. Wolf’s music takes diatonic evasion to a whole new level. By the time of his career, which spanned from about 1880-1900, he had bent the diatonic framework in which he operated into something almost unrecognizable. As far as the evolution of Chromatic harmony goes, I consider Schubert to be the sapling and Wolf to be the tree (and, in keeping with the tree metaphor, Beethoven to be the acorn). A piece that I feel reflects this reality is Wolf’s “Nachtzauber” from his “Eichendorff-Lieder” (linked below).
In this, Wolf begins in a non-diatonic mode (b minor (iv) for F# major(I)), and the primary melodic motif includes a flat-9 in iv which also functions as a sharp-11 in F# major. This hits on not only the use of non-diatonic harmonic function and sonorities, but also on the use of extensions and non-chord tones. This can be found at the beginning of the recording above (0:00-0:35) as well as throughout, and can be seen on on Page 28 of the score, found here.
Dr. Timothy McKinney writes in his dissertation “Like most nineteenth-century composers, Wolf often adds ninths, elevenths, or thirteenths to the dominant seventh chord. These added tones are usually nonessential, and resolve before the other members of the dominant chord move. On other occasions, they do not resolve prematurely and thus achieve the status of essential chord tones” McKinney highlights not just the use of extensions, but he speaks to another concept that exists in direct contrast to the Chromatic practices used by Schubert: functionality. In Schubert’s music, most tension that is created is treated to a release. However, such is not always the case in Wolf. Often, major 7ths, 9ths, and 13ths become not just a transitional sonority, but exist in the limelight.
While Schubert was a major figure in the early development of Chromaticism, and Hugo Wolf took up the mantle of Chromatic harmony and brought it into a new modern era, Chromatic harmony certainly didn’t end with them. Their work and the evolution that they underwent through trial, error, and risk taking, opened the door for composers like Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington during the inception of the Jazz era. With Strayhorn’s music in particular, examples of these practices can be found left and right in his music. Chromatic sequences in Upper Manhattan Medical Group, modal starting points with the accentuation of altered extensions in A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing, and the absence of resolution (in more ways than one) in Lotus Blossom (link above). These are practices from far before Billy Strayhorn’s time, but are characteristic of his music.
Here is another recording of U.M.M.G on one of Duke’s albums “Jazz Party”
Strayhorn’s unique presence- characterized by this blend of colorful harmonic techniques- left a clear mark on the work of Duke; the Strayhorn era can be clearly heard as the transition from swing or dance music and into more modern writing (the best example in my mind of this transition is Duke and Strayhorn’s “Far East Suite“). Despite this, Strayhorn’s extensive contributions went largely unnoticed by the public eye. Strayhorn was a naturally shy and soft-spoken man, and was very admiring of Duke. He also was an openly gay man during the 1950’s and 60’s. It seems to me that despite his lack of critical acclaim and altered public perception given his sexuality and race, he developed a distinctive, rich, heavily chromatic voice through which he could be honest and real about himself. No hiding. His work is the flower that pushes up through the concrete.
When I was writing this I was asking myself what the point of this blog post was. Was it just to prove that Chromaticism is cool? Or did I actually think that Chromaticism in music served some kind of purpose. I’d prefer to think that it’s the latter. Not everything in life tastes good. Sometimes there is no resolution. Things come out of nowhere, and ambush our entire lifestyle. Our lives can be upended in a very serious way in the matter of months, weeks, days, hours, or moments. Chromatic practices in music give us away to demonstrate that rub. Discomfort. Unconventionality. Spontaneity. Things that are essentially human. It’s how Schubert is able to tell the tale of a heartbroken spinster, how Wolf is able to paint for the listener a picture of a mystical night, and how Billy Strayhorn is able to say goodbye to his good friend Duke, as he uses up the last of his tape.
Sources and media referenced:
Rich, Alan. “Chromaticism in Harmony.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 9 May 2019, www.britannica.com/art/harmony-music/Chromaticism-in-harmony.
Rich, Alan. “Dissonance in Harmony.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 9 May 2019, www.britannica.com/art/harmony-music/Chromaticism-in-harmony#ref64533.
Damschroder, David. “Schubert, Chromaticism, and the Ascending 5-6 Sequence.” Journal of Music Theory, vol. 50, no. 2, 2006, pp. 253–275. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40283100.
McKinney, Timothy R. “Harmony in the Songs of Hugo Wolf.” University of North Texas, University of North Texas, 1989.
Lisa Barg. “Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 66, no. 3, 2013, pp. 771–824. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2013.66.3.771.
https://ks.imslp.net/files/imglnks/usimg/0/03/IMSLP23172-PMLP52930-Wolf_-_Eichendorff_Lieder.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LQgXtDOaYU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyTb2fKUGzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jug5mGd_J7Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL2rORisKJ0&list=PLFc7_JS3cjtv39LXT3J4w174MqdTrs1qn&index=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGKlEY3UdJg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elo63IXDGjM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeeOYCq36Zo
Not a whole lot is know about the life of Billy Strayhorn, but here are some good resources that can give a good introduction to him and his work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Strayhorn
Hajdu, David (1996). Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.