Some thoughts on music, and a couple of songs

There are three components of music - melody, harmony and rhythm. Melody is of course, the main tune, and is the first thing we tend to pay attention to. Rhythm is achieved usually through percussive instruments, though even a guitar strumming pattern could establish the rhythm in a song. Harmony is what contributes greatly to establishing the mood, and often gets a lot less credit than it deserves. Harmony can be achieved through a variety of ways - through chords, counterpoint.. etc.

When you play three or more notes at once, and have the end result sound good, we call it a chord. Different chords are associated with different moods. For eg - Majors are 'happy' chords, minors are 'sad' chords, dimished chords leave a sense of incompleteness, and so on. There are exceptions to the rule of course, since the transitions between chords also contribute to the mood ! So, playing an out-of-scale major chord can convey a profound sense of ennui, and playing a minor chord after an even 'sadder' one can convey a sense of relief !

Counterpoint is just as interesting ! When you have a second set of notes playing in parallel and complementing the main tune, it opens a whole new world of possibilities. Often, in a song, you can't separate out out the melody, rhythm, and harmony parts- Chords could be played in a certain rhythmic pattern; the melody and counter point could exchange roles, and so on !

I picked a couple of songs here - 'What a wonderful world", by Louis Armstrong, and "My heart will go on", since I like playing both these in the F major scale :-). I've played the Kenny G version of the 'Wonderful world' here. Its not on the Sax though since you can't play chords on a saxaphone! I have very fond memories of playing this song with a  few friends of mine (Shrivardhan, Adwait, Ananth, and Chintan ) many many years back! I think there are all in different continents now! Anyway, you can find it here .

Customary disclaimer - I've adapted these to my playing style, so don't blame me ( at least not too much:-) if they doesn't sound like the originals :-)