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November 26

Songs that end on a subdominant chord

In the key of C major, the national anthem of India appears to end as follows:

C-C-D-D-E-E-D-E-F (8 eighth notes and a whole note at the end.)

This sounds like 2 final measures that can be accompanied by the C and F chords; it sounds kind of surprising to end a song in C major with these notes. Georgia guy (talk) 21:49, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ending a song on a subdominant chord has been described as a "musical cliffhanger" as discussed here: "Theory - Ending a song with a dominant chord". Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange. — Btw, Wikipedia has an article on everything, including the national anthem of India. —2606:A000:1126:28D:9417:2118:29F3:6E25 (talk) 22:23, 26 November 2019 (UTC) ... P.s.: "Mo Li Hua" is mentioned as an example.[reply]

That discussion looks to be about ending a song on a dominant chord (the V) which would be the G chord in the key of C. Ending on a subdominant chord is ending in the IV chord, which is what the OP is talking about. The way in which a song or section of a song resolves is called a cadence in music theory, and ending on a IV chord, or subdominant is so rare, traditional music theory doesn't even have a name for it. this discussion can't turn up much of anything. It mentions a few songs, but when I checked them out, they actually don't resolve to the IV chord. Which is not to say it's never been done, but I can't personally think of an example. Most songs end on either a I or V. Songs that don't are said to have a "deceptive" cadence, so I guess you might call it that.--Jayron 32 04:37, 27 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That is because ending on a chord that is not I is by definition not a real resolution. From the viewpoint of traditional tonality it creates a fragment. But I would hesitate to say that we should be interpreting the national anthem of India in terms of traditional tonality. AFAIK, Indian traditional music is not based on Western-style harmony with harmonic motion. It would therefore stand to reason that attempting to harmonise a traditional Indian melody in Western terms is going to produce something that does not make sense from the viewpoint of functional harmony in about the same way attempting to harmonise a melody of Schoenberg tonally makes nonsense: both cases are fitting a square peg into a round hole (naturally, this is not a criticism, but just a recognition that functional harmony is the wrong framework for analysing such melodies as they do not imply functional harmonic progressions within themselves). And indeed, this is what happens in Herbert Murrill's harmonisation (which is on the article National anthem of India), with its nonfunctional harmonic progressions (that end on ii, rather than IV).

I reckon the same thing is going on with "Mo Li Hua" (a traditional Chinese melody). It's possible to harmonise it in Western fashion vaguely grammatically, but the result just doesn't go anywhere, as usually happens when harmonising pentatonic melodies: it ends up pretty much stuck on the tonic, and certainly not ending on the subdominant. (And anyway this sort of thing is straitjacketing the melodies into a harmonic framework they were never meant for in the first place.) Double sharp (talk) 11:48, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]