The Chord Wheel
David Rintoul
ingenious. It's called The Chord Wheel and it was invented by Jim Fleser.
It's kinda like a slide rule....if you tell young people about a slide rule
today they won't believe you...anyway, you turn the wheel to the key you
want to write a song in and it gives you all the diatonic chords in the key.
Or, if you make up a song and you find out you can't sing in that key,
(which I know never happens to folksingers, who all have three octave ranges
as a rule), you just turn the wheel and you have it all transposed.
There's a website for it that explains it better than I can here at:
Or, here are the details from the publisher,
The Chord Wheel, Jim Fleser, Hal Leonard Corporation, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
ISBN 0-634-03047-7
Try it, you'll like it!
--
David Rintoul
david....@sympatico.ca
http://www3.sympatico.ca/david.rintoul
"In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends."
J. Churton Collins
Gary Myers
> ingenious. It's called The Chord Wheel and it was invented by Jim Fleser
>
I can't resist the opportunity to plug my book, "Understanding and Using
Chords and Chord Progressions." For those who really want to understand the
material, I believe this is for you. It is for any instrument, and it
contains more explanation than I've seen in any other chord book. For more
into, please email me at gem...@earthlink.net
Gary Myers
bogus address
> I just came across a new song writing contraption that I think is quite
> ingenious. It's called The Chord Wheel and it was invented by Jim Fleser.
> It's kinda like a slide rule....if you tell young people about a slide rule
> today they won't believe you...anyway, you turn the wheel to the key you
> want to write a song in and it gives you all the diatonic chords in the key.
From your description it sounds exactly like the auto-harmonization
device developed by Athanasius Kircher and described in his "Musurgia
Universalis". I posted about it on the ABC list a while back. It did
more than just find chords; it helped you write four-part harmonizations.
It used a set of rods like Napier's bones. For each mode/tonal centre,
you selected a bunch of rods with the chords I - VII within the mode in
their various inversions and matched them as if playing dominoes; there
were extra marks which I think did stuff like directing cadences and
enforcing rules like "no consecutive fifths". The description is long
and complicated with pages and pages of tables, I could work out the
Latin given enough time but it wouldn't be easy. Here's an example of
what the procedure could do, starting with an Armenian hymn:
X:1
T:Tristrophon hendecasyllabum Armenicum
T:Melothesia Armenica secundi toni
S:Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (1650), lib.VIII p.136
Z:Jack Campin 2002
N:If I understand the Latin correctly he got this from the
N:Jesuits and harmonized it using his mechanical rules.
N:The second G in voice 3 bar 1 is E natural in my notes;
N:dunno if I transcribed it wrong or Kircher had a typo.
N:This is in the multi-voice syntax used by BarFly for the
N:Mac; multiple voices haven't been standardized in ABC yet.
M:8/2 % C|
L:1/4
Q:1/2=60 % guess
W: Garrachat parraz nuruche smidaz luhs
W: Ansdieziet ariechagan luhs dzachia huchus
W: Pirchieziet puguriz sesa puta pirchel.
%
W: Splendor gloriae renovat mentis lumen
W: Increati itaque solis lux orire huic animae
W: O Redemptor Universi hanc festina redimere.
V:1
V:2
V:3 transpose -12 % that means down an octave
V:4 transpose -12 % that means down an octave
K:G dorian
V:1 d2 dd B2 d d2 cAG c2d2 |B2dc B2c B2A AB A2 A2|G2GG A2A B2B GG ^F2G2
||
V:2 G2^FG G2=F F2_EDG F2F2 |D2DE G2A G2F EG E2^F2|D2DD F2F G2F _ED D2D2
||
V:3 B2 AB G2 A D2 GFB A2B2 |d2Bc d2f d2d ^cd2 ^cd2|B2BB c2c _e2d cB A2G2
||
V:4 G,2DG _E2 D B,2CDE F2B,2|B2BA G2F G2D A,G, A,2D2|G2GG F2F _E2B, CG,
D2G,2||
That effect at the end of bar 2 says the method must have been quite
subtle. He doesn't describe his working for each individual tune.
This is also the earliest example I know of "world music" in Europe -
Kircher used liturgical tunes brought back by the Jesuits from all over
the Middle East and North Africa. All together it must be the most
mind-blowingly thorough (if somewhat wacky) book on music ever written
by a single human being. No there isn't an English translation, nor
even a reprint as far as I know.
What does the Chord Wheel do with that tune?
I thought a bit about trying to do a computer implementation of Kircher's
procedure and then figured there was enough work involved to make it a
postgraduate dissertation.
Henrik Norbeck's Windows ABC player ABCMus has an auto-chording utility
which I presume must work in a similar way.
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