Playing/Composing From The Heart -Part 2 Learning to tap into the music that's inside you.
	PLAYING FROM THE HEART -Part 2 Whenever I teach a song writing class for Native American flute players one of the biggest frustrations I hear from my students is that they have a real difficult time not ending everything on the bottom note of the flute. This is a common complaint and in this article we'll give you some ideas about how to deal with this. Untimely many songs do end on the bottom note, the trick is to delay this so that when you finally do it land on the bottom note it will have a stronger sense of closure. Delaying an ending on the root note can set up some nice tension in your musical ideas and gives your songs a sense of progression and resolution. Like taking a little musical journey and then returning safely home. Here is what we're going to look at: Why All Notes Lead to the Root The Weight and Gravity of the Notes of the NAF Scale A Look at Each Note How to Apply This: Some Simple Exersises As I teach in my classes, one of the best ways to Play from the Heart is to really understand the NAF pentatonic minor scale and the implied harmonies that can be found in the notes. Each note in the scale has it's own weight, or gravity, relative to the other notes in the scale. Those with less weight tend to move to those with more. Knowing and understanding these relationships will allow you to exploit this natural phenomenon and will help give your tunes an implied harmonic motion. Normally an instrument that can produce chords plays harmonies, but you can create the illusion of harmony by the notes you choose for your melodies, especially at the ends of phrases. The information below has been set up to use only finger charts to make it as easy to understand as possible. I've done this so that even though we're looking at the basic elements of music theory, no theory or music is actually shown. I highly recommend that you have a Native American flute near by when reading this and play each of the very easy finger chart examples and exercises below. Ultimately music is an art for the ears rather than the eyes or the mind. Playing each of the examples and exercises will help reinforce what your reading. Hearing is believing. Don't think you have to learn any musical notes or tones, it's far easier to start with just knowing the finger positions. Using finger positions is one of the great things about the Native American flute. All standard NAFs are fingered the same and you only have to learn something once for it to work on all your flutes. Regardless of which key you choose to play in! WHY ALL NOTES LEAD TO THE ROOT The bottom note of any standard pentatonic minor NAF flute is called the root note. I don't know the origin of the name "root" as it applies to music, but it makes perfect sense. It is the bottom or root note of most scales, keys and standard tuned Native American flutes. Harmonically and melodically it has the most weight or gravity of all the other notes in the scale which is why it is so easy to end all your musical ideas, cells, phrases and melodies on it. Let's take the idea of gravity one step farther. For this example let's use our solar system and pretend that the notes of the pentatonic scale, the NAF scale, are planets in our solar system. (I know there are more planets than notes, this is not an exact comparison.) In this example the sun is like the root note. It has the most gravity and everything revolves around it. As most people know the planet that has the next highest amount of gravity after the sun is not the second planet in the solar system, Mercury, but is instead Jupiter. The same is true with our the scale. The second note in the scale does not follow the root in terms of harmonic and melodic gravity and weight and we'll learn which note that is in the next section This is true of all scales. And as we will learn, the same ideas of weight and gravity apply to how musical keys work also. So why is this important? If you tend to end your musical ideas, phrases or songs on the root frequently and you want to get away from doing that the best place to start, or in this case end your ideas, is with the note that come second in weight or gravity. The "Jupiter" of the pentatonic scale if you will. And that note, as we are about to see, is the 5th. THE WEIGHT AND GRAVITY OF THE NOTES OF THE NAF SCALE THE 5th The note that follows the root in harmonic/melodic weight and gravity is called the 5th and looks like this on a finger chart for every standard tuned NAF: How important is the 5th? Well numerous songs for the NAF start with two notes: the root and then the 5th. Go pick up a flute and play this. You'll hear and recognize this instantly. “Heart of the Sky”, from New Fire, “Distant Thunder” and “Visions” from Distant Spirits, “Song for the Morning Star” and “Inward Journey” from Canyon Trilogy, and “Breath of the Mountain” from Spiritlands just to name a few. This happens too many times to list each example. Like wise many pieces of music end with the reverse movement: the 5th to the root. Melodically the movement between the 5th and the root is very strong and harmonically it is the strongest movement there is in Western music. A chord built on the 5th of the scale has a very strong desire to move, or resolve, to a chord built on the root. The tension between these two chords is the basis for 95% harmony in Western music. Listen to the final few minutes of any Beethoven symphony and you'll hear what I mean. Finally the space between the root and the 5th is decisive in establishing a key. (The space between any two notes is called an interval. See Appendix A below for a more detailed view.) While scales come in many forms: major, minor, augmented, diminished, whole tone and the so called "church" modes, the majority have a note an their scale a 5th above the root note. More specifically the 5th that is named "perfect". The pentatonic minor is no exception, having a "perfect" 5th. The chord built on the root note is called the tonic chord always has the root note and the note a perfect 5th above it, regardless of whether the chord is major or minor. Scales vs. Keys It might interest you to know that understanding the weight of each note in a scale is also the way you describe a musical key. While a scale is just an ordered set of notes, a key tells you how those notes function harmonically as determined by their order of weight and center of gravity. We'll take a close look at keys another time. Let go back to our solar system. We've seen that the Sun has the most weight and gravity and that Jupiter is next in line. The planet that follows in our list of weight and gravity is Saturn. In the minor pentatonic scale the next note after the 5th in weight and gravity is the 4th. (Don't get hung up on the fact that Saturn is farther from the Sun than Jupiter is, while the 4th is closer to the root than the 5th is. This is not a perfect example.) THE 4th After the root and the 5th the 4th is the note with the most weight and gravity of the NAF pentatonic scale. We saw how the 5th tends to move to the root. The 4th tends to move in two ways melodically and harmonically. One is a movement to the Root. The harmonic movement of chords built on the 4th to a chord built on the root is found at the end of many hymns and is even nicknamed the "Amen" cadence, as that's what's usually sung at the end of a hymn. (A cadence is a group of notes at the end of a song, tune or phrase and we'll talk about them in more detail later.) Playing from the root to the 4th is also the beginning two notes of "Amazing Grace", a standard of the NAF repertory piece. The other way the fourth functions is by moving to the fifth. The movement from the fourth to the fifth is only second to the movement of the fifth to the root in "pull". Hopefully you'll see a direction being laid out here moving like so: 4th - 5th - root. As will see next this is a very common thing in music. Three chord songs or IV-V-I If you take all three of these notes (the 4th, the 5th and the root) and build chords on them you have the basic harmonic movement of many, many songs. These songs are sometimes called three chord songs, the most common of which is the twelve bar blues progression used in both blues and rock and folk songs. Three chord songs are also found all over pop music as they are easy to remember -for both the musicians as well as the audience. Some of the most famous are "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen and "Wild Thing" by The Troggs. In addition to rock, folk and blues this harmonic progression can be found in all Western musical styles and is one of the first things you learn in a music theory class along with it's symbols IV-V-I. Here how it looks as a melody in TAB Without the chords accompanying them these notes seem a little bland, but trust me this progression of notes and their chords is extremely prevalent in music. The minor 3rd There are only two more notes left in the pentatonic scale and by far the stronger of the two is the minor 3rd. If I had to choose a planet from our solar system example to compare it to I would pick earth. The minor 3rd The minor 3rd has many things going for it. First off it is the note that makes the minor pentatonic scale minor! Of all the note in the pentatonic minor scale the minor 3rd gives the NAF it's haunting quality. (I'm only taking about the scale, not the basic sound which is itself haunting, so all you NAF makers out there don't worry that the minor 3rd is trying to steal your thunder.) The chord built on the third of the scale is also used as a substitution for the chord built on the fifth and we've already seen that the fifth is second only to the root in weight. Melodically the minor 3rd moves easily to the root, the fourth and the fifth. It's a pretty versatile note. The minor 7th Finally we get to the minor 7th. There are many planets left to pick from for our example but I'm going to pick Venus for a couple non-musical reasons. In Western culture Venus is the Bringer of Peace. In many Native and Meso American cultures Venus is both the morning and evening star and in those roles is the Sun's escort through the sky. Venus' function as morning and evening star also embodied the Twins War gods found in many native cultures including the Hopi and the Mayans. Lastly Venus' path through the sky was first accurately tracked by the Mayans long before anyone in Europe figured out it's retrograde movement. The minor 7th Like the minor 3rd this note adds a lot of color to the scale. Melodically it tends to move to the 5th or the octave. (Not unlike the retrograde movement of the real Venus) So that's all the notes of the basic pentatonic minor NAF scale. Here is everything laid out in a chart that you can use to review quickly. SO HOW DO WE USE THIS KNOWLEDGE? In Part 1 of Playing from the Heart we learned that melodies are usually made up of smaller parts called phrases or cells. A very simple and effective trick to give your melodies a strong movement is to end each cell on a different note. By ending earlier cells on notes with less weight and later cells on notes with more weight your over all tune will have a stronger sense of movement and implied harmony. Keep in mind: The idea of ending earler cells on notes with less weight and later cells on notes with more weight is a very simplifed example of music both in terms of melody and harmony. As I've tried to stress in earlier posts there are NO rules. The suggestions and the exersises that follow are just that, suggestions and should be viewed as a "jumping off place" for your own ideas. Remember, exersises are not an end in themselves, but are to prepare you for greater things. EXERCISE #1 As a very simple exercise come up with a tune that is made up of four phrases, or cells. For this exercise begin each phrase/cell on the root but end each one using the following suggestions: Phrase 1 end on the 3rd, Phrase 2 end on the 4th, Phrase 3 end on the 5th Phrase 4 end on the root. See if you can hear the implied harmonies that this will produce and how your tune has strong sense of motion. Try ending on other notes and listening to hear if the movement of your tune feels stronger or weaker. EXERCISE #2 Like exercise 1 this exercise works to make you more comfortable with ending the inner parts of your tunes on different notes other than the root so that when you finally end on the root it will have a greater sense of closure. In this exercise once again let's use the basic group of four phrases, or cells. Try to make the lenght of each phrase the same. You'll have some more freedom with this one except for the ending. Phrase 1: Start on the root and end on any note of your choice except the root. Phrase 2: Start on any note, including the root, end on any note of your choice except the root. Phrase 3: Start on any note, including the root, end on any note of your choice except the root. Phrase 4: Start this phrase on the 5th end the phrase on the root. Try experimenting with different notes for the end of Phrase 3 to see which one "leads" better into Phase 4 which starts on the 5th. You'll find that some notes make this transition better than others to your ear. There is no right or wrong, so don't worry about which note you think is the best. Plus everything this related to everything else. What comes before a note will influence your choices as well as where you're melody is heading. TIP: Sometime a weaker movement is a refreshing change, don't always think you have to move from weaker to stronger notes. Notes and harmonies tend to move from weaker to stronger in theory but not so much in practise. I've said this before: There are no rules! Make up your own exercsies or even songs using the formula in the exercises above, a four phrase melody. Start using the suggestions above and then move away to your own ideas. Moving farther If you're feeling adventurous trying playing a secondary melody that starts on another note. Make that note function like a root, as if you scale was built on that note momentarily. The 5th would be good choice to start due to being second in weight, but you could use any note. Take this melody through it's own cycle of ending on different notes -Try to avoid ending on the temporary "root" note while practicing secondary melodies until the last phrase. We'll talk more about secondary melodies, or themes, when we look at forms later on. Remember these are just suggestions and starting points. You should try your own ideas after you've done these and feel comfortable with the concepts presented here. APPENDIX A: How the notes get their names and more about intervals This is for those that want to know more about this. Be warned this is starting to delve into music theory and can get a little complicated. Let's review the NAF minor pentatonic scale: THE NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE PENTATONIC MINOR SCALE Starting from the left in the example above we can see that with all the finger holes covered the flute plays the root note. Lifting the bottom finger gives us the minor 3rd of the scale. From there we get the 4th, the 5th and the minor 7th, ending with the octave. The names of these notes come from their relationship to the root note as expressed by the space between them, called an interval. This is a separate concept from weight and gravity so there is no need to try and merge the two concepts. Remember: Most scales have seven notes, plus the octave. The pentatonic minor scale, as we have learned in earlier posts, has only five notes. Missing are the 2nd and 6th notes that most scales have. How to find intervals: You can find out what the basic interval is between any two notes by counting the number of lines and spaces in the staff between the two notes. Be sure to include the lines or spaces that each of your notes are sitting on. For example if you count the number of lines and spaces from the Root to the 5th in the illustration above you will end up with the number five. This is how that note of the scale comes to be called a fifth. If you are familiar with Nakai TAB this will be easier but anyone can count lines and spaces so it not necessary to know his system for this. If you don't know Nakai TAB don't worry, we will take a closer look at it later posts. Warning: Just as scales can be minor or major, some intervals can also be major or minor too. Some can also be perfect, augmented or diminished, like 5th’s and 4ths. So while you can count the basic interval quite easily, knowing the finer detail is a little trickier. But don't worry about this, odds are you'll never need to know any of this. Check back for more articles on the Native American flute, including more in the "Composing from the Heart"TM series, my technique for teaching song writting. If you're interested in attending one of my "Composing from the Heart"TM workshops the next schedule one will be at the Zion Canyon Art and Flute Festival on October 13, 14, 15, 2006 in Springdale, UT, just outside of Zion National Park. OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES How to Buy a NAF, part 1 How to Buy a NAF, part 2 How to care for your NAF Playing your first NAF scale Strengthening your Fingers Playing from the Heart Part-1 You can also find all the articles HERE DO YOU NEED A FLUTE? Visit the Cedar Mesa Music Store. You can also find a list of makers who's flutes I play on my web site. MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE NAF History and Construction Please support these posts by purchasing copies my recordings of Native American flutes. Distant Spirits Nominee: Native American Music Award Sacred Dreams Winner: Native American Music Award New Fire Nominee: Native American Music Award, Nominee: Indian Summer Music Award. You can listen to samples from all three and purchase them online. Members of my E-Mailing list get an extra 10% off all online purchases. © 2006 Cedar Mesa Music. All rights reserved. Top Home | Mailing List
About Recordings Purchase Reviews News Photos More Stuff Appearances Mailing List Contact Blog   Recordings by Scott August