What If...A Single Note Were Different? One Change Could Destroy the Entire Tonality

Marvel's "What If...Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?" was released on Disney+ eighteen days ago. (Warning: spoilers soon ahead.) Laura Karpman composes the music for the series. In scoring this episode, Karpman explains that she "started with these four really soft piano chords." This four-chord progression can first be heard at 7:22, during a montage in which Strange tries over and over again to stop Christine from dying. It is also heard at the end of the episode, when Strange's desperation leads to the end of his world, and the Watcher's voice-over concludes: "One life, one choice, one moment, can destroy the entire universe." The progression is shown on the first staff below; it is juxtaposed against one transposition of what Mark Richards calls the Axis-a progression, which I have shown to be an important signifier of the heroic and epic in scoring for recent film, film trailers, and television. 

These progressions differ by only a single note in a single chord: the F sharp in the last chord of the one-sharp version of Axis-a is an F natural in the last chord of Karpman's four. Not even the root changes: the D-major chord becomes a D-minor chord. And yet this smallest of changes transforms the music into something very different, like a negative image of Axis-a. 

Within a seven-note diatonic scale, there is a single tritone. For example, among the seven pitches of the one-sharp collection—like a G-major scale—the tritone is between F# and C. There are six consonant triads in any diatonic collection, but only two of them—one major, one minor—are "tritone-free," that is, they do not overlap with the tritone at all. For example, in the one-sharp collection, those two triads are G major and E minor. Diatonic and "classically" tonal music tends to favor these triads, using them more often than other triads, putting them at beginnings and endings of phrases, and placing them in more prominent metric locations.

The Axis-a progression, which presents all seven pitches of a diatonic scale, puts these two privileged triads in the first and third positions, which are the most metrically weighted in the four-chord loop. But Karpman's seemingly minute alteration shifts the diatonic scale, which then passes the twin mantles of "Privileged Chord" to two other triads. The second chord in Karpman's four-chord loop is one of these triads, which is arguably in the weakest metric position of the four, and the other triad is not in this progression at all. To attempt to hear the second chord as a privileged chord feels contrived, forced, even useless, like Strange's attempts to cheat death.