Why Every Piece of Music Has a Hierarchy

Information

When playing and learning the piano, it can be easy to assume that all of the notes are just as integral as each other. Why would we have notes in a piece of music at all if they’re not important? Well, in a story, for there to be a main character, there also have to be supporting characters for the main character to interact with and to progress the story. Music kind of works in the same way. Some notes are very important, and other notes are there in order to show how important those notes are.

Music is made up of chords and melodies, and even between these two elements, there is a hierarchy. Chords are more structural, and they form the foundations of the music. They tell us how to feel and give the music its form, very much like the background of a painting. Whereas melodies are the narrator’s unique characters, and they’re in the foreground of the painting, drawing our attention. This doesn’t necessarily mean that one is more important than the other, but notes that form part of the chord and part of the melody are going to carry more importance than those that are simply decorative.

How we know which notes are more important and which ones are less important is determined by many hierarchies acting at the same time.

Hierarchy

Some of the most common hierarchies in music are within the melody, the rhythm and the chords.

Melody

Within a melody itself, not all of the notes are equally as important. To understand which notes are important in a melody, you first have to understand that melodies are subordinate to chords. Chords are foundational to the music, and the melody operates around the chord notes. Let me give you an example; let’s say we have the chord C major underpinning the music, which is the notes C, E and G. Well, at the time, our melody might be C, D, E, F, G. The melody is outlining the notes from the chord, but it’s also using other notes in between to get us from one to another. Those harmonic notes, the ones that belong to the chord, tend to feel very stable because they work with the chord that’s underneath.

The notes in between (the D and the F) are something called “passing notes”. These are moments of slight tension that take us from one to the other. If we lingered on one of those passing notes for too long, it would clash against the chord and sound odd. This is why harmonic notes feel structural to the music, whereas passing notes feel more decorative. There are, of course, other ways besides passing notes for melodies to weave around the structural notes. However, this is one demonstration of how structural notes feel more integral to the music.

Pulse

When we count in music, we’re counting a series of beats, and these form a constant pulse. However, not all beats are equal. At the beginning of a piece of music, we are given something called a “time signature”, which is two numbers on top of each other. These two numbers tell us how to count and how many beats to expect in each bar of the music. If the time signature is 6/8, for example, this means that there are six eighth notes in each bar. However, each of those six eighth notes is not equally as important. Each time signature also carries with it information about which beats are strong beats and which beats are weak beats. In 6/8, beats 1 and 4 are strong, and beats 2, 3, 5 and 6 are weak. This is because 6/8 is broken up into two groups of three eighth notes (123 456).

These moments in the pulse are typically where chords might change and where melodies might lead to. Those strong beats are what are most commonly referred to as "downbeats", and the weaker ones are referred to as "upbeats".

Harmony

As well as there being important melody notes and less important melody notes depending on their role in the chord, and there being strong and weak beats in a bar, there are also more important and less important chords. Not all chords in music have the same strength.

In a scale, chord 1, the chord that starts on note number 1 of the scale, feels like home, and this feels very secure and structural. Chords 4 and 5 have a very strong relationship to chord 1 and also feel very secure. Whereas other chords are often there to add colour and prolong our return back to chord 1.

Particular chord sequences also form the punctuation in music (Chord 5-1 is a period/full stop, Chord 1-5 is an example of a comma). These moments where structural chords are being used to show us where the sentences are within the music are integral to the piece itself rather than decorative. Whereas other chords may be there just to create a particular feeling which is not integral to the structure of the piece.

Playing

So with all that being said, what do you actually do with this information?

Well, the way that we shape a piece of music when we are playing it is dictated by these very things. We lean towards important notes in the melody and use passing notes to travel. We taper off when we feel structural chords ending a phrase. We feel a sense of rest on downbeats and movement on upbeats.

Understanding where these things happen allows you to emphasise and highlight what’s important. That’s not to say that the other elements aren’t important. In fact, those are the things that make pieces of music unique. However, without a sense of hierarchy in a piece, the music will sound robotic. Even when a listener doesn’t understand anything about music, they feel where the harmony arrives and the melody lands. It’s our job as players to show them where this happens. A piece of music is never trying to arrive on every note, but it is often travelling towards one.

Matt