The Descending 7-6: Deciphering Loney Dear’s Love for a Baroque Sequence
Emil’s face playfully lights up after being challenged to play the first Goldberg Variation a half step lower than its original key, prompting a choppy but impressive rendition in Gb major. A little earlier, he told his viewers that he has been studying the 32 Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach in every key, simultaneously reaching for his head with both hands as if struck by the sudden realization of its monumental task. Viewers of his impromptu live streams on Instagram are regularly presented with off-the-cuff renderings of his songs, fragments of new material and more often than not, him just horsing around on his piano.
Through this fooling around, Loney Dear’s Emil Svanängen shows his knack for 18th century musical esthetics perhaps most clearly. By use of 4-part hymnal harmonies that seem to modulate forever, contrapuntal left-hand flourishes, and a slightly detached portato touch (an essential articulation in Baroque music), it’s hard to miss Emil’s musical appetite. And although his musical language and use of harmonic- and melodic sequences have always hinted at the Baroque beneath its many layers, it seems to show its face more directly on last year’s album A Lantern and A Bell.
‘‘These songs carry an undiluted sense of urgent truth, and as a whole, A Lantern and a Bell is an unparalleled triumph of artistic reinvention in Emil’s oeuvre.’’
A Lantern and a Bell seems to be a pivotal album for Emil. Foreshadowed by 2017’s Loney Dear in its sonic approach, the fluff of excessive orchestral layering and grandiose Chamber pop codas have now definitely gone out the window. In some ways, this new-found musical concision draws comparison to Dogme 95, the filmmaking movement started by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, focussing on storytelling and performance over extraneous esthetics. Like watching a Dogme 95 movie, the experience of listening to A Lantern and a Bell could potentially be an uncomfortable one at first. Using little more than his piano and barely processed voice, Emil conveys his message in a sonic world that’s not too far off from that of a demo recording. And at times, he seems to just barely hold his carefully crafted songs together, as if their exposed frameworks could collapse at any moment. At their best however, these songs carry an undiluted sense of urgent truth, and as a whole, A Lantern and a Bell is an unparalleled triumph of artistic reinvention in Emil’s oeuvre.
The Descending 7-6
An album highlight, the original coda to Interval / Repeat (that unfortunately didn’t make the cut on the album) makes use of a Descending 7-6 sequence in its most basic form. As John Mortensen explains in The Guide to Historic Improvisation: “The “7-6’’ refers to the dissonant-consonant pairs of intervals that make this sequence work (...) They represent tension and release’’. Also described by Emil as an analog counterpart to a Shepard Tone (a famous auditory illusion where a tone seems to continually descend in pitch), he alternates between these intervals of 7ths and 6ths in the right hand, forming a textbook Descending 7-6 sequence of tension and release.
Piano reduction of an unreleased coda to Interval / Repeat (2:15–2:39)
Being in the same key, we find a Descending 7-6 sequence in the coda to Mute / All things pass that would fit right in with Brahms’s 51 exercises as a finger buster. Here, our sequence is mirrored and found in the outer intervals of each hand.
Excerpt from Mute / All things pass (2:43–2:59)
Going back further in time, the “7-6” can also be found as a background vocal sequence in Everything Turns To You, from 2009’s Dear John. Here, the sequence acts as an independent suspension chain, at times disregarding its melodic relation to a harmonic root, as illustrated by mm. 5–8 (the outer intervals of the right hand form a “7-6”, whereas its melody on top (Ab and Gb) forms a “4-3” in relation to its root, Ebm).
Piano reduction of Everything Turns To You (0:48–1:36)
Disregarding chord inversions and an interruption in mm. 5–6, the “7-6” can also be heard throughout the coda to I Lose It All, from 2006’s Sologne. Hiding away in its left-hand accompaniment, this suspension chain acts less strict, supplying a sense of harmonic motion underneath its melodic sequence.
Piano reduction of I Lose It All (2:24–3:40)