Chords

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's one way to think about chords.

They're groups of notes that create a unified "something-else" when played together. For guitar players, chords are often the starting point of a lifelong musical journey. Once you learn an "A" chord, you're off and running. Just by itself, an A chord sounds like Something Important. And it's pretty easy to play too, by playing the notes E, A and C# together, as you arrange your fingers into a little ladder in the middle of the neck of the guitar. (I'm naming the notes here just for fun, but you don't have to know what the notes are called to play them.) Once you've learned "A" ("Square Ladder in Middle of 2nd Fret") you put your fingers in a different shape to make another chord ("Ascending Hill Shape on 3 Frets"...that's a "C")...and so on, and so on.

Chords have solidity and weight and presence. Played under a melody, they create a foundation that supports the whole piece.

I like to think of my family as a chord, each note complementing the other and forming a unit. My family of origin is another chord; related, but distinct. Other groups come to mind too: my husband's group of buddies from university, my friend's consistent group of exercisers at her fitness class. They both talk about these groups with a sense of pride and comfort. They know that they're balanced and complimentary groups that will endure and support them as their lives proceed.

When one note is out-of-tune, the whole chord suffers. Guitars often go out-of-tune, and sometimes you find yourself realizing in the middle of a song that something's not quite right about a certain note. You can play the chord anyway, and it might sound "close enough", but really it's not. That out-of-tune note makes a big difference. To correct the tuning, we compare it to the others, to bring the relationships into balance with each other. Sometimes a note is a little too close to another...other times it's too far apart. Chords are created by the distance between notes.

Sometimes the note doesn't belong in the chord at all, much like the Sesame Street song "One of these things is not like the others". How unlike can we be from each other to still fit within a group? When is it necessary to adjust ourselves to bring our relationships into harmony, and when do we say, this note just isn't right for this chord?

Yesterday I was fooling around on the guitar when I found a new note combination that at first sounded too weird, too dissonant to my ear. But I remembered what our children's music teacher said the other day: sometimes when you insert a wrong-sounding note into a chord, just hang out with it awhile. Play it several times and experiment with new notes around it. After several minutes of playing with the new "ugly" chord, I found that it sounded pleasing. The new chord isn't exactly pretty, but it's useful and intriguing, and it's strong enough to become the heart of a new song.