Anyone who was watching the coronation of King Charles III would have likely been impressed by Handel's "Zadok The Priest" when the anointing of the King behind the screens happened.
For those of us who have watched football for the last 30 years, Zadok The Priest sounds very very familiar because Benjamin Britten blatently stole the chord structure and rising tag lines for the European Champions League Theme.
If you will allow me to take the magic out of the music, then the underlying chord structure looks like this:
G C D Em C
G C D G
And to really strip this of any kind of fun whatsoever, this resolves to this:
I-IV-V-vi-IV
I-IV-V-I
Where G is acting as the tonic centre.
What all of this means is that Zadok The Priest and the European Champions League Theme, could very likely be played by a 1950s doo-wop band or a blues trio. My mother died on a Monday, I became King on a Tuesday; then I went to the football...
Of course the stealing of phrases and chord structure has likely been happening ever since people made any kind of music at all. Music is meme filled to a point ab surd ad nausuem ad infinitum. Even one of the most famous songbooks in the Psalms, has hits that have been pilfered; as evidenced by "Do Not Destroy" which I can only assume to have been a banger on Crazy Dan Deuteronomy's Weekly Top 40.
As someone who can not leave well enough alone and who should not be given scissors or a screwdriver lest the world be taken apart, I could not leave well enough alone and had to take apart every song in the world. In today's episode of my nephew Max's favourite game show "How Many?", I had to find out how many songs there actually are in the world.
Let's build all the songs. We're going to need some chords. How many chords are there? A chord is basically three or more tones played together. I shan't go into the reason why two tones together is not a chord but bear with me.
The number of 3 tone chords is:
12! / (3!x9!) = 290
The number of 4 tone chords is:
12! / (4!x8!) = 495
You can use this method to describe the number of all of the possible chords:
12! / (5!x7!) = 792
12! / (6!x6!) = 924
12! / (7!x5!) = 792
12! / (8!x4!) = 495
12! / (9!x3!) = 220
12! / (10!x2!) = 66
12! / (11!x1!) = 12
12! / (12!x0!) = 1
If you then sum all of the chords, then there are 4017 of them.
I realise that this is going to horrify music theorists but a 9ths, 13ths, add chords et cetera, are actually philosophically no different from chords that we've already described. I can absolutely say that 9ths, 13ths, add chords, all of the inversions and all of the diminished chords are included in the above list because in describing every single stacked chord, those things are already included.
Also for reasons that I shan't go into, a song is basically functionally described by 4 chords. Anything beyond that and what you are in fact doing is just building phrases and motifs, into bigger things which are strings of variations on a theme. To that end, the total number of logical chord structures which form a song are:
1 x 8 x 8 x 8 = 512
The upper bound for the total number of songs in the world is:
4017 x 512 = 2,056,704.
Now we can get pruning.
Once we acquiesce to the fact that every song has a tonal centre and if they do not then we can assign one, and that chords have functions, and are mostly trying to resolve to some logical point which is usually a I chord, then the actual number of logical songs in the world is actually way way way smaller than 2 and a bit million.
The number of sensible songs in the world is closer to:
(12! / (3!x9!) = 290) x (1 x 8 x 5 x 4) = 46,400
Songs have a logical start point, some kind of chord which wants to head out somewhere, and then some kind of resolution; which is highly likely to be resolved back to a I chord. It should come as a surprise to no-one that humans who are pattern seeking machines, like to hear the same sensible chord structures over and over again; which is why there have been periods defined by entire sets of chord structures, such as 1950s doo-wop, the Blues; because as pattern seeking machines, we like to hear things which are familiar and sensible and that includes music structures which head out and back.
Is it little wonder then, that people who have been around for a while, have likely heard all of the sensible sets of chord structures or variations on a theme; which is why they consistently think that music sounds the same to them? Is it also little wonder that musicians beg, borrow and steal from each other?
Familiar chord patterns also explains why things fall into cliché so readily. When I think of "dna-dna waaah", I am immediately brought back to the chors pattern of "I Am A Man" by Bo Diddley. This is so ubiquitous that it may as well define a whole genre.
I-IV-V-vi-IV and I-IV-V-I in both Zadok The Priest and the European Champions' League Theme, employ a root, a heading out chord looking for a resolution, the biggest, boldest, strongest one they can find with the V chord; before returning home to I. It makes sense that the structure should sound big, bold, and strong; which is also why it works so excellently for the Coronation of a King, or the Coronation of the Champions of Europe.
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