Greg Spero Composition for the Modern Instrumentalist
Foundations · 20 lessonsThe Composer's Path · 37 lessons
Lesson 23 of 57 · The Ear

The Composer's Path → Module 1: The Ear → Lesson 23 of 57

The interval as expressive force

After this lesson you can name the character of all twelve intervals from sound alone, write down the interval profile of any melody or riff you hear, and say what a piece's favored intervals are doing to it.

2 weeks · 3 videos · 6 exercises · checkpoint with Greg

The interval as expressive force illustration

The idea

You know interval names already. You told Greg you can say minor second, major second, minor third. That is not the skill this lesson trains.

Source course, Lesson 2 states the premise: the interval is the atom of music, because a single pitch in isolation has no musical meaning. What follows from that is a working method, borrowed from Stefan Wolpe, who would spend weeks on one interval, transposing it to every register and every dynamic, singing it, having students sing it back, until intervals were known as sonic experiences with weight and direction rather than as measurements.

The course also gives you the diagnostic that makes this practical for a composer. The intervals you favor "define your melodic personality as surely as the words you use most often define your literary voice." You have an interval signature already, in the EP you wrote in 2016, and you have never looked at it.

Watch

The Basis of All Music: The Tritone, explained

  • The physical claim at [03:53]: every major scale contains exactly one tritone, between the 4 and the 7. "It's the most dissonant that you can have except for a minor second, and it's called a tritone because it's three whole steps."
  • The resolution at [04:44]: the 4 down to the 3, the 7 up to the 1, arriving at a consonant minor sixth. Those two notes are the two most defining chord tones of the scale, and over the V chord they are its 3 and its 7.
  • The memory claim at [06:30] and [08:12], which is the compositional payoff: land on the 4, wander for eight notes, and the ear still hears the eventual E as the resolution. "Your ear remembers that you played this seven, and your ear and brain resolves it with the one."
  • At [08:26] he attributes the device to Bach's long-form melodies, and at [09:25] to Keith Jarrett's improvisations. Same interval, same mechanism, three hundred years apart.

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Understanding Tritones

  • Fifty-five minutes, and worth the whole hour later in the module. For now watch to [05:00] and then [22:00] to [27:30].
  • At [01:50] the distinction that matters here: the tritone is tension that resolves, while the minor second "doesn't go anywhere." Two dissonances, opposite behaviors.
  • At [04:06], the generalization to composition: "you have a tension point and then you diverge. You either go to its release, which is boring, or you diverge further and then go back to the release."
  • At [22:22] and [26:44], one tritone held fixed while the bass moves, so the same two notes resolve into four different keys. "It's the fulcrum, and it can be the fulcrum in eight different directions."

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Ear training: Exercise for recognizing triads

  • Sixteen items, answer spoken a beat after each chord. "You should just be listening to this, don't watch me because you'll obviously see it."
  • His pass mark: "get it 100% right."

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Listen

The interval bath. Before any repertoire, do the Wolpe pass at the piano. Source course, Exercise 2.1 sets it out: play each of the twelve intervals from the same starting note, ascending and descending, in the lowest register you can reach and the highest, loud and soft, short and sustained, singing each one after you play it. At least two minutes per interval. You are not identifying them. You are collecting their characters.

Death, "The Flesh and the Power It Holds" (Individual Thought Patterns, 1993). Five passes on the guitar harmonization only.

Sánchez Vinueza's thesis on this track finds the harmonization is predominantly perfect fifths, octaves, and unisons, with major and minor thirds rare. Ocaklı's corpus study of Death adds the structural claim: in this music the perfect fifth "provides melodic direction" and, unlike the power chord, has become "a structural element that defines the character of riffs."

Pass 1: the top line only. Pass 2: the interval between the two guitars, fifth or octave or third. Pass 5: count how many thirds you heard in the whole track.

The result should be a number, and the number should be small. That is what a repertoire built on one interval sounds like.

Meshuggah, "Rational Gaze" (Nothing, 2002), main riff. Pieslak analyzes this riff for its attack-point structure, and the pitch content is close to a single cell. Listen for the smallest interval in the riff and sing it. In this repertoire the minor second and the tritone are doing the work that thirds and sixths do elsewhere.

Coltrane, "Giant Steps." Source course, Lesson 2 gives the analysis: the tune is built on major-third root movement, and the cycle divides the octave into three equal parts, producing a sense of tonal free fall. One interval, applied to roots instead of to melody, generating a whole harmonic scheme.

McCoy Tyner, "Passion Dance." The course names Tyner's quartal voicings as the redefinition of jazz piano harmony through the fourth's combination of power and ambiguity. Listen for stacks of fourths and notice that they do not tell you a key.

The comparison

The parallel. In both worlds a composer picks a small set of intervals and lets it define the sound. Coltrane's major third on "Giant Steps," Tyner's fourth, Schuldiner's fifth, Meshuggah's minor second and tritone. Source course, Lesson 2 calls this an interval signature, and the term applies unchanged to a metal band. This is the "same ear" thesis in its cleanest form: the technique is interval selection, and it does not care what the guitars are tuned to.

Where it breaks, in two places.

First, the fifth means something different. In common-practice writing the perfect fifth is the frame of a triad, and the course notes its limitation directly: "in its very stability lies its limitation, a bare fifth is harmonically empty." That emptiness is a defect there and a resource here. Sánchez Vinueza and Ocaklı both find the fifth carrying structural weight in Death, precisely because it refuses to state a mode. A fifth that will not commit to major or minor is useless inside functional harmony and load-bearing outside it.

Second, and more important for your writing: this repertoire has no harmonic common practice to inherit. Boddington Jordan and Herbst studied one hundred tracks released since 2000, twenty each across five metal subgenres. Their finding on progressive metal is explicit. It had "a varied approach to harmony, not as uniform as the other subgenres," it was the least consistent subgenre studied, and it had no defining harmonic feature. When a progressive band is tied to a secondary subgenre, its harmony conforms to that subgenre's norms instead.

Read the consequence carefully, because it shapes the next nine months. In progressive metal the rhythmic and formal technique is systematic and can be taught. The harmony is idiosyncratic per band. So the intervals you choose are a genuine compositional decision rather than a stylistic default, and nobody will hand you the answer.

A related caveat on Radiohead and chord color. The serious analytical tool for rock progressions that lack dominant function is Capuzzo's neo-Riemannian work, which explicitly suits progressions "that lack structural dominant harmonies, and that lack leading tones that might carry dominant function," typically with modal mixture and root motion by third. His analyzed repertoire includes Radiohead. Any specific claim about a specific Radiohead chord change belongs to that article or to your own transcription, and until you have one of the two, mark it "to verify."

A caveat on wide-interval lead playing. Fredrik Thordendal's legato style is consistently described as descending from Allan Holdsworth, using symmetrical diminished scales with chromatic passing tones and grouping notes in fives and sevens per string. No peer-reviewed analysis of his lead playing was located. Teach and learn this from interviews and published transcriptions, and label it that way when you say it out loud.

At the piano

The interval bath, physically. Sit properly for it. Chest open, chin down, weight through the arm and back rather than the fingers. Two minutes per interval is twenty-four minutes, so split the twelve across two days.

The tritone system. There are only six tritones. Take one, say B and F, and find its four resolutions: as the 4 and 7 of C major, from C's relative minor, transposed a tritone away to F sharp major, and F sharp's relative minor. Greg's practice system in the long tritone video is exactly this, and it converts a piece of theory into a hand.

The one-note change. Play F7. Play B flat 7. Find the single note that differs, which is A against A flat. Now play C7 and locate that same note in it, where it is the 13, "just an upper extension that doesn't really pull in one direction or another, it's just a color." Chord tone, directional extension, and pure color are three different things, and this is the drill that separates them.

Quartal stacks. Build a stack of three perfect fourths from C, then chromatically through all twelve. Left hand alone, since that is the weak one. Slowly, and shake the hand out whenever you feel tension.

Exercises

1. The interval bath

Do. All twelve intervals from one root, ascending and descending, lowest register and highest, loud and soft, short and sustained. Sing each after playing it. Two minutes each, then play each as a simultaneity and note how the character changes.

Done when: You can write a one-sentence character description for all twelve from memory, without a piano.

2. Interval profile of a melody

Do. Sing a melody you know well, slowly. Write down the interval between each pair of successive notes. Then answer: which intervals predominate, which are rare, does it favor steps or leaps, and when it leaps does it compensate by stepping back the other way.

Done when: You have the full interval sequence written out and can state the profile in two sentences.

3. Your own interval signature

Do. Take one melodic line from your 2016 EP "Cloud Speak." Transcribe it. Write out its interval sequence and profile it the same way.

Done when: You can name the two intervals you overuse and the two you never use.

4. The tritone fulcrum

Do. Play a 7-to-1 figure in C. Hold the same two top notes and put C sharp in the bass so the figure becomes 4-to-3 in F sharp. Then return. Do this with three different bass notes under one fixed tritone.

Done when: A listener hears the ground shift while the notes on top do not change.

5. The delayed resolution

Do. In C, land on F. Play at least eight notes elsewhere before resolving to E. Then the same with B resolving up to C, extending the delay each time.

Done when: You can hold an unresolved 7 across a whole phrase and still land it so that a listener hears it as an arrival.

6. Triad ear drill

Do. Take Greg's triad drill with the screen covered, writing major or minor for each item.

Done when: You score 100 percent twice in a row, which is his stated pass mark.

Compose

No composing. The output is a transcription, and this one is about intervals.

The assignment. Transcribe the main riff of Meshuggah's "Rational Gaze" (Nothing, 2002), pitches only.

Constraints:

  • Pitch content only. Ignore the rhythm; you will do rhythm properly in Module 2. Write the pitches as a bare succession.
  • Work at 50 percent in Transcribe.
  • Then write out the interval sequence, exactly as in Exercise 2.
  • Then answer in writing: how many distinct pitch classes does the riff use, and what is its largest interval?

Second deliverable. Four bars of the guitar harmonization in Death's "The Flesh and the Power It Holds," with the interval between the two parts labeled on every attack. Sánchez Vinueza's finding predicts fifths, octaves, and unisons with few thirds. Your job is to check that against your own ear, on this passage.

Checkpoint

Before L3:

  • Character descriptions for all twelve intervals, written from memory.
  • Interval profiles for one known melody and for one line of your own from "Cloud Speak," with your two overused intervals named.
  • One tritone recontextualized under three different bass notes, at tempo, heard by someone else.
  • Delayed resolution held across a full phrase, on both the 4 and the 7.
  • 100 percent twice running on the triad drill.
  • "Rational Gaze" riff pitches transcribed with the interval sequence written out, plus four labeled bars of the Death harmonization.

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