F#dim7(b5)

I discovered the reason my room is freezing fucking cold every single day. The window well is improperly sealed. There is a 20 degree gust blowing on my hands right now. I am freezing. I'll chaulk it tomorrow.

This evening I went to my gym for only the second time. It's a quick four block walk in the 20 degree wind to a brand new gym where they hand out apples. The treadmills are brand new and have television screens, so I schlupped my buns for thirty enjoyable minutes while enjoying an episode of 30 Rock. I love the year 2008.

After coming home from the gym, I turned on my keyboard. I've been paralyzed with this one big band-y song that I have in my head but not within my musical skills, so I haven't tried recording anything recently. "New York in Springtime" is my Chinese Democracy. To develop my skills, I pulled out my Scott Joplin piano rags book. That shit is fucking impossible but so fun to attempt. 

And to understand. Joplin wrote a primer called "School of Ragtime" that has seven very basic etudes that a beginning ragtime piano player can practice with. They're each four measures long. They are syncopation exercises, but I was more interested in the chord progressions than in the rhythm. Ragtime is distinctive for those two reasons: (1) rhythm, where you essentially play only eighth notes with the left hand (hopping between the tonic note and the rest of the chord) and play syncopated eighth note dissonant chords with the right hand, and (2) chord progressions, because you get all sorts of weird diminished chords and minor sevenths and stepwise chord movements that sound really pleasing but are sort of hard to understand musically. 

I got hung up for about twenty minutes just trying to figure out the chords for one of those four measure etudes. The chords are:

F / F#dim7 / C / A7 / F#dim7(b5) or Am6 / G6 with a passing tone or G7(13) / G7 / C

Let's just look at one small example of why ragtime is such complex and appealing music to listen to. Now, I don't know if you know any music theory. I don't know too much myself. You don't really need to know music theory to know that F#dim7 is a ridiculous chord as written out. But it is not a ridiculous chord to play, because it's just four minor thirds stacked on top of one another! It has three dissonant notes and two tritones - but get this - they all resolve on the C chord. The F# resolves up to G, the A resolves down to G, and the D# resolves to E. What this means is you have incredible tension (a feeling that two notes really should not be played together, like the first notes of "Chopsticks") followed by a perfect resolution to the root C chord. Maybe this means nothing to you in writing, but if you listen to it, you'll feel as WOWZA as I do. It's very relieving, like sneezing or coming. 

And for crying out loud, this is only one chord change! This four-measure turnaround has seven distinct chords, each of which build or resolve tension in a unique way! Your average rock song has three or four chords, and those chords are probably A, E, and D. All the rock songs I write end in with boring-as-shit perfect cadences, which is the musical equivalent of eating gruel every single day of the week. It is boring-as-shit and fails to move your bowels. A more challenging form of music, like ragtime, is the musical equivalent of Song of Solomon 5:4:

My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

I will take a photo of the etude I'm talking about because I want to share it with all of you. I hope this post was not horribly boring to read, or that you stopped reading at "apples." But isn't it awesome that humans have the capacity to make and understand such unlikely things? Tomorrow: an exploration of epoxy. Night.