- Hi, I'm Gareth, and in this
video, we're going to have
a little think about this musical matter,
the false relation.
Now, if you've never come
across one of these before,
it's tempting to think it
might be some family relative
who you don't quite get
on with or something.
But let me be assuring you,
nothing to do with that at all.
What is a false relation?
Well, in music, it's when we
have some kind of contradiction
that is associated with one note.
So let me give you an
example of a false relation,
and then you'll see
what I'm talking about.
Say I had this chord, okay?
And you can immediately
see that in that chord,
I've got F-natural in the soprano part
and F-sharp in the tenor part.
So you're probably immediately thinking,
well, that's not going to work very well.
Well, let's have a listen to it.
Well, it could be a cool chord
in certain circles, actually,
and certainly, in jazz,
sometimes the false relation
becomes a little bit of a feature
of some of the chord-work.
But you can hear, there's a clash.
I've got F-natural,
I've got F-sharp, so it's
the same letter name,
but with two conflicting accidentals.
In this case, one's a
natural, one's a sharp,
and it's happening simultaneously.
So that sounds quite dissonant,
because of that contradiction.
So that's one kind of false relation.
I'm not saying that
they shouldn't be used.
What I am saying is we
need to be aware of them.
If you were going to try
and write a piece of music
in the style of Haydn or
Mozart or Bach or Handel
or something, it's unlikely
you're going to be wanting
to write false relations
in quite that sort of
bold sort of way.
But there's another
kind of false relation,
which we might just consider as well.
So let me put this chord out there.
And let's follow it with this chord.
So I'm trying to do one that uses
F-natural and F-sharp again.
So this time, what's
happening is that, actually,
I haven't got a clash within this chord,
because I've got two
F-naturals in this chord.
In this chord, I've got one
F-sharp, as it turns out.
So the first chord is a chord of F major.
And the second chord
is a chord of D major.
So we don't hear that conflict,
that we heard in the first chord,
with the F-natural and the
F-sharp sounding simultaneously.
What we do have in this case, though,
is another kind of
contradiction which comes under
the heading of a false
relation, and it's this.
You can see in this part,
in the bass part here,
I've got an F-natural in the first chord.
But in a different part,
in the following chord,
I've got an F-sharp.
Okay, now, it's one thing to
do what I've done in the alto,
to start with an F-natural
that becomes and F-sharp,
it's a kind of chromatic movement
that we often here between
one chord and the next.
So that doesn't strike you with any
particular difficulty, and
it's feasible to do that.
The thing that's going to
strike us when we hear these
two chords together, much
more so, is the F-natural
in one part in a different
octave compared with
the F-sharp in a chord
that immediately follows on
in a different octave,
in a different part.
So this F to F-sharp there
doesn't make too much
of an impact, but this F to
F-sharp makes more of an impact.
So have a listen to this.
I've got my chord progression.
Does it sound wrong?
Doesn't sound bad.
It might be fine in certain
contexts, and again,
this is not to say don't
use them, but it is to say,
be aware of what a false relation
is, and be careful you've
considered its impact,
so that if you use it,
you know why you're doing it.
So if we listen to that first chord again,
we hear this F-natural
in the bass, and then we
hear F-sharp up there.
So we've got this F-natural,
F-sharp, so you can feel
there's the contradiction
between the F-natural and the
F-sharp, but you can also hear
that because it's between
this chord and the next chord,
and this is some distance
apart, it just somehow slightly
grates on the ear, doesn't it?
To have those two in close proximity.
Now, if you go back to the
16th century, actually,
you'll find that false
relations are used quite a bit
by composers, which is
interesting, because back then,
they were essentially
still writing in modes,
rather than in major and minor keys,
but they'd already started
to corrupt the modes a bit
by using something we call musica ficta.
So, musica ficta.
And what musica ficta was
was this notion that, well,
you might just insert an accidental.
So you might be working
through a piece of music
in the Dorian mode.
D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D.
But you decide to stick
a B-flat in somewhere,
that sounds a bit more like
D minor to the modern ear.
Or a C-sharp, which also
make it sound a bit more like
D minor, maybe not all the
time, but some of the time.
So those accidentals
that corrupted the modes
were this whole area of musica ficta.
And when composers started
to write musica ficta
into their scores, they quite
often generated some of these
false relations, and it didn't
really bother them too much,
but as time went by, it
became more of an issue.
So by the time we get
into the Baroque period,
composers are much more
tuned into this notion
of the false relation,
and generally speaking,
try to avoid the false relation,
either as this simultanious
sounding of the contradiction,
which, in this case,
is F and F-sharp, or the
subsequent movement between
one chord and the next,
in this case, F, F-sharp,
going between different
parts at different pitches.
So if you want to write
harmony that progresses
really smoothly and doesn't
have that little jar in,
well, the false relation is
one thing to watch out for.
If, having heard some of
these and thought about it,
you think, "Hey, I really
like the false relation",
well, that could be something
that could be a feature
in your own work.
So there we have it, the false relation.
