"destroy minor chords"

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blissblogger

Well-known member
"Sometimes my contribution [as a record producer] might have been as minimal as just saying, 'Shall we stop for a few minutes?... And then of course, other times I work like a normal musician. I say, 'Why don’t we have a G major instead of that B minor' or whatever. In fact, I nearly always say that, 'Why don’t we have a major instead of a minor?' It’s part of my destroy-minor-chords crusade that has been going on for 50 years or so" - Brian Eno, in the LA Times.

Curious if any music-makers here want to take a guess at the thinking behind Eno's provocation here?

Presumably he's saying that the idea that minor chords are more subtle, emotionally complex, etc is a middlebrow viewpoint.

The only other time I have seen anything like this voiced is from this NYC group Band of Susans who had a wall of guitars sound - three or four guitars playing simple parts at top volume. Everything they did was major chords and unlike their contemporaries like Sonic Youth, they favored consonance as opposed to dissonance. So everything they did was noisy but uplifting, as can be seen from the title of their defining song "Hope Against Hope". Robert Poss the leader (and possibly one of the other guitarists) had been in Rhys Chatham's ensemble (many, many guitarists repetitively playing the same chords at deafening volume). Which came out of the downtown New York experimental scene (Chatham had been the director of The Kitchen at one point).

So I'm wondering if this anti-minor chord thing is a hallmark of minimalism - i.e. the kind of composers who Eno was influenced by, in fact.

Does Eno tend to avoid minor chords in his work?
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
DoesEno tend to avoid minor chords in his work?
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I... dont think he does. Certainly not always. Id have to check the charts, but off the top of my head, Apollo is in C, and is kinda obviously major, Dunwich beach is Am, Unfamiliar Wind is Ab, Lantern Marsh is in D... might be interesting to take a closer look. I reckon most of his classic ambient sound is in major, but Id say there's a fair few flats and minors mixed in. It certainly is true that the 70s/80s era of ambient music tends to veer towards the diatonic, but the composers he would have drawn from would have been all over the place melodically.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
william_kent said:
Augustus Pablo:

We play music by feeling it. We call it the Far East Sound. 'Cause we play in minor chords. When you play those chords it's like a story without words

edit: hinting Eno has no soul, etc
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yep. major cords are too superficial, jangle pop is in love with them to start and resolve. Eno's passionless Englishness is really apparent here.
 
G

germaphobian

Well-known member
Are we talking about MINOR CHORDS or songs written in MINOR KEY? That's a big difference. For exmaple, power chord, which is rock music's bread and butter, is neither minor nor major, because it only contains two notes. In such a case the minor or major quality of each particular power chord is given by the scale which is being used, because it isn't contained in the chord itself.
Otherwise it dosen't make much sense, if you take simple C major key, for example, you have C - Dm - Em - F - G - Am - B(dim). Ok, if you only want to use major chords you can, of course, then play C - F - G or you can substitute some of the minor chords for major (like Em to E), uses some SUS chords and so on, but that would just sort of sound like crap, because at some point it would be nearly impossible to avoid a minor chord. Same goes for minor keys where you have major chords as an integral part.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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mixed_biscuits said:
Rave used lots of major 7ths and gradually minor 7ths took over.
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I think there must have been some function on the keyboards that could play a chosen chord given a root note.

Pacific State used minor 7ths

Techno would use minor triads a lot eg. C, E flat, G

This goes from major to minor:


Mark Ryder could have kept the whole hardcore continuum going single-handedly - what a production powerhouse
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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One thing that rave music used to do a fair amount was be out of tune with itself but this would usually be mitigated by the clash taking place between sounds with distinct textures or separated by a few octaves e.g the bassline might be in a different key to the chords or melodic line. This often lent the composition a sense of more depth or added to the typical out of kilter feel of that style.
 
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