Bartok's Cinematic Polychords

[00:00:00]Check out these two chords from Bartok.

[00:00:03]>> [music] >> Welcome back to >> Rick Beato's [music] chord of the week.

[00:00:15]>> As you may already know, I am crazy about the Bartok string quartets and I have a special place in my heart for the fourth and the fifth.

[00:00:24]Love you guys.

[00:00:27]The fifth quartet written in 1934 has five movements, the second and fourth of which are examples of Bartok's night music. Listen to these two chords from the second movement.

[00:00:43]>> [music] >> The first one is this.

[00:00:53]It's just two major triads a major seventh apart. C major C sharp major.

[00:01:02]Very simple concept.

[00:01:04]>> [music] >> And this chord reminds me of a couple film score chords that I had covered before, one of which is Thomas Newman's turtle lope chord >> [music] >> from Finding Nemo.

[00:01:15]Let's have a quick listen to that.

[00:01:31]This chord is B flat major in second inversion over B major in second inversion.

[00:01:38]>> [music] >> Same exact concept except this time it's inverted, two major triads a major seventh apart. And the other chord this reminds me of is probably the most famous polycord in all of film music.

[00:01:50]It's this one.

[00:01:54]Every main title of a Star Wars movie ends with this chord as it transitions into the body of the story. I think of this, I call this the Star Wars transition chord, which is the exact same chord as this Bartok.

[00:02:07]>> [music] >> But instead of closed voicings with C major and C sharp major, in this case it's D flat major, it's re-spelled, it's open >> [music] >> D flat and open C major.

[00:02:21]Exactly the same two chords as Bartok.

[00:02:24]>> [music] >> And the second chord from Bartok is this.

[00:02:30]Which happens to have that exact same open C sharp or D flat >> [music] >> as the John Williams chord, but we have an E minor >> [music] >> upper structure you could call it. And you'll notice that this gives us a D flat 7.

[00:02:47]>> [music] >> With a lowered ninth, or sorry, with a raised ninth and a lowered fifth.

[00:02:52]Right? You can see sort of this jazzy upper structure kind of sound in it.

[00:02:57]>> [music] >> Of course, it's not jazz, but you can't help but notice that it gives that sound.

[00:03:06]So you could think of it as a D flat 7 sharp 9 flat 5 or raised ninth lowered fifth.

[00:03:14]Or I like to think of it as another poly chord, just E minor over D flat or C sharp.

[00:03:21]>> [music] >> And this chord also reminds me of another film score chord from John Williams, from Star Wars again. This time it's Qui-Gon's funeral from The Phantom Menace.

[00:03:32]Listen to that.

[00:03:33]>> Apprentice. But which was destroyed, the master or the apprentice?

[00:03:44]>> This time it's again open D flat major with A [music] minor added to the top.

[00:03:54]So if we look at this closely, it gives us >> [music] >> sort of a flat six added, a lowered ninth, and a major seventh.

[00:04:04]So, you could think of it a few different ways. I'll leave it up to you how you want to label that chord. I'm curious what you would call it actually because there's more than one way to think of that one. But, notice the similarity between the Bartok E minor added to the top [music] and The Phantom Menace A minor added to the top.

[00:04:26]Of course, they're two completely different chords, but I can't help noticing that the approach is the same.

[00:04:33]The minor triad and again, >> [music] >> with a minor triad.

[00:04:38]Bartok's music has a seemingly unlimited number of interesting chord structures, and I've been doing a lot of mining through those chords in Bartok's music lately, so stay tuned. And if you have anything specific you want me to focus on, let me know in the comments.

[00:04:51]I thank you for your thoughts. I thank you for your attention.

[00:04:55]Thanks for watching.

[00:04:57]>> Yeah.

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