Some 027s in NPR's Music

If you have listened to National Public Radio, then you have probably heard many 027 chords. A 027 chord is a group of three notes that can be arranged to form a stack of two perfect fourths or two perfect fifths. These chords can be called 027 chords, because it is possible to assign those three numbers of 0, 2, and 7 to each of the notes in some register, and any two notes will differ by the same number of semitones as their corresponding numbers differ by. For example, as shown below, the group of notes B, E, and F# make a 027 because 1) they can be stacked in perfect fourths (F#-B-E), or 2) they can be stacked in perfect fifths (E-B-F#), or 3) if some E is assigned to 0, then some F# is 2 semitones higher than this E, and some B is 7 semitones higher than this E.

The chords F#-B-E, B-E-A, and E-A-D are all 027 chords. You can find all three of these chords in this passage from around the middle of Wycliffe Gordon’s arrangement of Don Voegeli’s theme for NPR’s program All Things Considered, which I’ve transcribed below. This is the arrangement that NPR is currently using for All Things Considered. The first three loud measures are typically heard uncontested in the mix, and then the remaining soft measures (which continue beyond my transcription) underlie the spoken word. The F#-B-E chord is in the muted trumpets throughout, and the B-E-A and E-A-D chords are played by the piano.

Even though this underscore is quite repetitive, it is also quite rich. The bass unfolds more unusual augmented fourths (F#-C) instead of the more standard perfect fourths (e.g. F#-C#). The return of the eight-note theme (marked "(theme)") in A major creates a clash between C# in the theme and the bass’s C natural. These two pitches reside at the two ends of a line of perfect fourths C#-F#-B-E-A-D-G-C. However, of these eight notes, the G is never sounded, even though it is the tonic of the theme in the transcription’s first two measures. The three 027 chords mentioned earlier are exactly those that fit on this line and avoid both the C and C# ends and the missing G. Moreover, just as each 027 chord is composed of three notes set in a line by a fixed unit distance of a perfect fourth, the three 027 chords of this music are also set in a line by a fixed unit distance of a perfect fourth. The diagram below, in which the double-tipped arrow represents a perfect-fourth span, shows these relationships.

Moreover, the divisions of time are quite varied and progressive: the bass line changes notes every three beats (seen easily in the page layout of my transcription), the piano chords occur every four beats, and the beat itself is divided into five parts.

NPR’s Morning Edition turns 38 today. The final moments of the NPR Morning Edition theme music, written by BJ Leidermann and arranged by Jim Pugh, express the 027 sound in a strikingly systematic and symmetrical way. An “origin story” for this music could be told using the examples below.

1: Three voices start on the same G above middle C. One leaps up by perfect fifth to D, one leaps down by perfect fifth to C, and one stays on the G to make a 027 chord, which I will mark *3.

2: These two perfect-fifths leaps are filled in with stepwise motion, but the outer voices move at slightly different rates—the top gets moving sooner, the bottom catches up later—producing an idiomatic tonal-harmonic progression: V7/IV (G7) resolving to IV (C).

3: Or, the outer voices move at the same time as they fill in their perfect fifths, producing two different three-note harmonies marked as †1 and †2. (A 027 chord stacked in fourths then precedes the same 027 chord stacked in fifths.)

4 and 5: Or, the outer voices move at very different, but still coordinated, rates to produce different 027 chords on their way to the final 027 chord. These contrasting 027 chords are marked with *1 and *2.

6: All three different 027 chords can be included in a similar progression, but this would require one of the two outer voices to give up its beeline and “dogleg” twice before getting to its final destination. In Example 6, it is the top voice that doglegs: G up to C, then down to A, then up to D.

7: The top voice’s gap between C and A could be filled in, smoothing out the top voice.

8: A transcription of the end of the Morning Edition theme. This music adds more top-voice activity to Example 7 that enables the utterance of every one of the three-note chords labeled in Examples 1-6, but in such a way that the progressions from these earlier examples are embedded within one another, as shown with the nested and overlapping slurs.

Lastly, the three 027 chords in the Morning Edition ending have the same relationships among them as the three 027 chords in the All Things Considered music: laid out in a line of perfect fourths, with the one in the middle of the line at the end of the music: