There is a song. It’s the opening theme to the second series of “Sound! Euphonium”. It’s called “Soundscape”. And it hits me hard, emotionally.

And I wasn’t sure why, until today.

In the beginning it has a very interesting progression, one that I didn’t know was possible. It’s a V7 to V/vi to vi progression. To those of you who aren’t musical, that doesn’t mean anything, I guess. So let me try to explain.

Western music is oriented towards two things: leading tones and dominants. A leading tone is a half step, like from a B to a C. A dominant is a V chord of a key. So, for example, in the key of C, C major is the root chord, and G is the dominant.

You can have a dominant seventh chord, which is basically the dominant chord with a minor seventh tacked on. All you really need to know is that the seventh chord wants to resolve very strongly to the root chord This is because every single note in the seventh chord has a leading tone that wants to pull you back to the root. That’s pretty much its reason for being. You have a seventh chord, and typically, it will resolve to root. I say typically, because there are exceptions, but that’s the case most of the time.

“Soundscape” contains an exception.

What they did was take the seventh chord, and resolve it to a secondary dominant. This doesn’t pull quite as strongly as the V7 to I progression, but it does pull. There is one common note, and two leading tones. That’s more than sufficient to make it a valid resolution.

Music theory is a really interesting thing, in that you really don’t come up with any groundbreaking hypothesis or whatever when it comes to music theory. You take what sounds good and then you try to make up theories and rules so that you can reproduce what sounds good. But the theory comes out of empiricism, not the other way around.

So one thing you can do is take any chord in a key, and then take the dominant of that chord. So you end up with a chord that actually sounds really good in the key, that doesn’t fit in the key. But when you resolve it, it resolves to a chord that does fit in the key, so you have a way back. You’ve basically taken a short excursion out of the key and then need to find your way back quickly. It doesn’t sound like it works, but it really, really works. It’s a jolt of something that sounds really good but also doesn’t quite fit and isn’t really expected.

That’s what V7 to V/vi does. It’s unexpected. It resolves a seventh chord in a way that works, but it’s entirely unexpected. It’s supposed to resolve to I, and doesn’t.

What these kinds of things do is give music motion. It’s harmonic motion.

I love that progression. I mean, I really, really love that progression. It almost hard to describe what it feels like.

But I don’t have to. The point is that it feels like something.

I love music. I’ve always loved music, and I think one reason I love music is that there are so many things you can do with it that make you feel things. You can come up with a harmonic and melodic, etc., structure that makes you feel happy, makes you feel sad, and… in this case, makes you feel a jolt of something that hits you right in the very core of your being. Just that one A sharp major chord, and it jostles something loose that… kind of hurts, actually. But in a good way.

That’s what music is for. That’s really what music is for. And I wonder if… no, I know. We wouldn’t be human without it.

I love music theory. Because I love a puzzle, but I also love knowing how these things work. But at the end of the day… music theory doesn’t make me feel things. Chords do, melodies do, harmonic motion does.

And that’s why I study music. You get to feel, and you get to make others feel, too.