Tonic minor to submediant major--sometimes with a leading tone & sometimes without--is more overused, even, than I-V-vi-IV, when it comes to chord progressions in current music, including movie & TV sound tracks. I get annoyed when I hear it too much in a piece.
Same with the key of D-minor--usually with the employment of a droning D pedal-point--it's the most overused in movie & TV music. So when I hear a sound-track that's neither in D-minor nor over-relying on tonic minor to submediant major, it's like a breath of fresh air.
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Yeah, but the rest of the world loves it. lol
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Well I don't spend a lot of time analyzing my chords other than when I write lead sheets for jazz ensembles. So check this out - I decided to use the first minute as a backing for a 'preview video' for my wedding videography business. I wrote this track some years back while I was waiting for a film to lock for me to score.
I'm more of a melody person than a chordal person for all my musical tracks - film, songwriting, jazz creation, etc. Often time, I can create multiple chord progressions from the same melodic structure and what I use could depend on the type of story I want to tell and the mood I want to create.
The track: https://soundcloud.com/joelirwin/mosaic-suite-alternate-version
The preview: https://youtu.be/paNsg3cRrWk
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Nice, Joel!
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You do hear that Major third root movement a lot and pedal tones. Both are good devices. In either direction you only have 6 choices. Half step, whole step, minor third, Major third, fourth, and tri tone. That Major third movement voice leads nicely though, doesn’t it?
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Interesting … my new underscore starts with D minor chord, though I think it’s not I V vi Iv.
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My one underscore starts in D Min.
https://on.soundcloud.com/BUfPdU59Sq3NuzrUA
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Just getting back to this. Joel: That's a pretty piece--it sounds better than Pachelbel's canon and has hints of Schumann. A-Major is a joyous key, perfect for wedding music.
Kerry: Your piece opened sounding like so many others I've heard, but it then goes in an unexpected direction, the way it modulates, some 15 seconds in--it's my favorite part of the piece.
Linwood: It's a very limiting approach to harmony, thinking you only have 6 choices. In reality, you have a far greater number of choices, especially when factoring in modulations/key changes and other possible approaches. Earlier (and some current) composers of movie & TV scores have made use of polytonality and 12-tone as effective compositional devices. The influences of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who spent much of their lives in L.A., can be heard in many classic movies & TV shows from the 1940s to the '80s.
Ultimately, I understand it's a matter of personal preference and philosophy. If there's to be a sound-track, I'd rather it function as a Greek chorus than as audio window dressing, an afterthought sounding no different from a temp-track. I prefer the likes of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and Miklós Rózsa over Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL--though I do like Zimmer's sonorities, just not his apparent aversion to dissonance. (The most dissonance I've heard in a Zimmer score was in Nolan's movie, Dunkirk.)
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Colin Hussey 6 in either way is 12 tones. It's all of it. Not limiting at all if you can see it. Look again from the center out in both directions.
That's not my understanding of 12-tone. Wikipedia has a good, basic definition of the technique:
"The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique
Side note: The most famous tone row was written by Leonard Bernstein for the musical, West Side Story, in the song, "Cool." It's the fugal theme that kicks off the dance sequence in the middle of the number. It captures the angst of the teenage gang perfectly.
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I didn't mention 12 tone. I said...in either direction you only have six choices as we were talking intervals or root movement. That would be m2, 2, m3, M3, 4th, and tritone. And that's if you're looking from the center out in both directions...not bottom to top or top to bottom. lol. There's so many ways to see music. That's what so fascinating about it.
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Colin, thanks for the compliment. It originally started out with piano only before all the other additions. Pardon beginning like others, I was only adding since it originally had too sharp a beginning for me. I recently heard it needs to be longer since it’s barely over a minute.
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Quick example of why I like to look from the center out as well as bottom to top or top to bottom. Seeing it in different ways helps me to transpose any where quickly. Also I dig the sound/balance for some things.