[Music] hey folks welcome back i'm seth monahan a guy who eats sleeps and even breeds music theory and today i'm here to teach you all about the neapolitan sixth chord and as usual i want to dive right in with some music here are the first eight bars of schubert's song demula under bach and the text reads where a true heart dies of love the lilies will wilt in their beds and the music is not surprisingly pretty gloomy it's in g minor and it starts with a bunch of ones and fives over a tonic drone and the second phrase is built over the familiar 1451 baseline which we know is going to be a full functional cycle but schubert does something special here with the predominant when you listen to bar six compare it to bar two and notice the breathtakingly creepy color change right as the singer names the flowers that are dying [Music] again here's the second bar just five over tonic and here is bar 6. now you may be asking yourself what is that incredible sound well it's an a flat major chord in first inversion which means that roman numeral wise it's flat 2 6. that's a predominant we have not seen before but it does what predominance do which is lead into 5 and then 1. and as you might have guessed that flat26 has a special name it's the neapolitan sixth and it's what we're talking about today so let's get to know it a little better the neapolitan sixth as i just said is a first inversion major triad whose root is lowered scale degree two so if you think about it that means it always has scale degree four in the and if you're wondering what the sixth here means don't get confused it's just an old-fashioned way of saying six three chord which really just means first inversion which we already know so anyway to help us really home in on the neapolitan's distinctive sound let's start with a sort of vanilla functional progression in c minor nothing we haven't heard a million times before but if we want to spice it up with a neapolitan sixth we simply take that d natural and move it down to d flat but think about it since d was the root of the chord that means we've changed the roman numeral as well two diminished six becomes flat two major six and now the progression as a whole sounds like this and it's a really different sound a lot of people think of the neapolitan as the darkest sounding major chord there is in this music and one reason we're able to hear its special character so clearly is that we've put the chromatically altered root of the chord in the melody that's how the chord is normally voiced lowered scale degree two on top which tends then to go down to the leading tone over the dominant and when that happens we hear a melodic interval that doesn't turn up in many other contexts it's a diminished third [Music] and one way that composers tend to soften that sort of angular interval is to put scale degree one in between so that this becomes this [Music] and in fact we saw that already in the schubert song the a flat over the neapolitan lowered scale degree two walks down through two half steps to the leading tone over the dominant that sound is the thumbprint of the neapolitan so listen for it when i play the whole passage again [Music] so back to the stuff you need to know like the fact that the neapolitan is spelled the same way in major and minor keys i'm showing it here in c minor but if we cancel out that key signature the only thing we have to do is add a flat to scale degree 6 so we don't accidentally make an augmented triad now it sounds like this [Music] it's a pretty striking sound but the neapolitan sticks out like a sore thumb in major and that's probably why it's used more often in minor where it's a little bit less of a curveball so let's put those flats back and move on to our next point which is that the melodic scale degree one that we often hear between lowered scale degree two and the leading tone [Music] it often has chordal support by which i mean it gets harmonized with its own chord so let's take out those last two chords and replace them with seven seven of five going to five now the falling melodic line flat 2 1 and 7 is matched with a rising chromatic bass line going in the other direction so here's the whole thing much smoother an even more common option is just to put a cadential 6'4 under that tonic in the melody this is a slightly longer progression and i made the melody entirely out of half steps and now with chords listen for that cadential 6'4 in bar 3. and if we wanted to use both harmonizations of that passing tone the applied 7 of 5 and the cadential six four we'd have a progression like this here i wrote a more varied melody one that mixes regular and lowered scale degree two [Music] now with the chords and that is everything you have to know so what's next well i've got six pieces lined up each of which highlights the neapolitan in a different way and i'm gonna end the video by addressing a question that's on everybody's minds these days is the neapolitan a stupid name for this chord but first the examples this is the achingly beautiful anus day from box b minor mass and we want to notice a few things up front about rhythm first this little half bar intro ends up pushing everything else out of place so that all four sub-phrases start on the pickup to beat three but that might be part of the plan because all the cadences end up on downbeats here and here the other thing to notice is the really expressive use of syncopation in the main motive three times the melody lands on these long tones that come completely off the beat marking them in our hearing and two of them are actually non-chordal anticipations when we land on that first middle c it's not part of the g minor tonic we just heard it's part of the next chord which is a four six five with raised scale degree six in the bass the melodic minor note [Music] now the last syncopated node is chromatically altered it's a flat which is lowered scale degree 2 and it's a sign that we might be about to land on the neapolitan and of course we do the next base note is c natural which is scale degree 4 and it rises to scale degree 5 in the next bar [Music] and don't miss the fact that the flat two in the melody does exactly the thing we talked about it goes down by half step twice landing on the leading tone over the v chord at the half cadence now what's amazing here is that when the neapolitan arrives it seems to warp the entire melodic universe around it notice that the melody starts out totally unconstrained it leaps freely around the space of an octave but the neapolitan is like a black hole as we get closer its gravitational field is so intense that the melody can barely move at all now it's only creeping along in half steps filling in the space of a diminished fourth chromatically even as the second phrase moves away from the neapolitan it can only limp along in disconnected semitones it's only at the cadence that the melody finally moves freely again so when i play it with the chords notice how bach uses the original tonic g minor as a pivot to flow really seamlessly into the minor dominant d here's the whole thing on historical instruments [Music] okay next up is the opening of mozart's e minor violin sonata the one he wrote as a teenager just after his mother died and it's a two-part excerpt the first part is a pretty simple eight bar theme using mainly just ones and fives [Music] it's actually in the aftermath of that theme that we find our neapolitan here's our cadence again for reference [Music] and after that is a four-bar post-cadential idea that leads to another pac now if we're in e minor and we're looking for the neapolitan we should start by trying to find lowered scale degree two in the melody and obviously it's right there in the violin and that f natural does exactly what we'd expect it moves downward through tonic to the leading tone [Music] but now the passing tonic note has the harmonic support of a cadential 6-4 [Music] the other thing worth noticing here is that the neapolitan is only the tail end of a long predominant region right after the cadence mozart leads the base through raised scale degree three [Music] which usually means five six five of four then it's four six all the way to the neapolitan and i should say we could debate what's going on on this downbeat i'm calling these b naturals non-chordal neighbors but we could hear it other ways as well doesn't matter for now and here is an actual performance where we hear that post cadential field twice [Music] so [Music] all right next is a piece we first saw in video 18 it's chopin's f minor nocturn opus 55 number one the theme itself is an eight bar sentence two plus two plus four and the basic idea almost made it into video number 33 because it uses three and five of three without modulating chopin then repeats that more or less exactly and the continuation starts with that same material a third time but now now instead of dropping down to the leading tone the base keeps rising landing on the neapolitan and from there it's on to the cadence now you might be interested to notice that chopin does not have lowered scale degree 2 in the melody here above the neapolitan he's got scale degree 4 instead and if you're wondering why we actually have to look at the melody as a whole notice that the basic idea starts on the high f steps down to c and then stops then that happens again but the third time something has to change obviously so he finally lets the melody break through that barrier and step all the way down to tonic right at the cadence [Music] here's what it sounds like with the chords and here's the whole thing [Music] the next example is from my favorite beethoven piano sonata the apocanada this is the main theme from the finale and it has a few things in common with the chopin we just heard it's not just an f minor sentence it's an f minor sentence whose basic idea repeats exactly and whose continuation features the neapolitan but if you know this piece it's a very different animal beethoven is using the piano more like a gatling gun here it's about force and energy and damage per second rather than finely chiseled harmony and counterpoint now since i can't play it even close to beethoven's tempo i'll slow it down deliberately and let the bass notes ring so you can really take the harmonies in and they are brutally simple the basic idea has one chord tonic listen for that exact repetition and listen to the harmony at the start of the continuation [Music] there is our neapolitan and from there it's on to the cadential dominant which starts here and gets prolonged for two full bars right up to the tonic downbeat and if you want to know how the prolongation works beethoven writes a double neighbor figure around that low c in the bass and then he gives each of those notes its own chord [Music] so here's the whole thing at my modest tempo [Music] and here's how it's supposed to sound and i'll let you hear the theme twice first the version on screen and then a second slightly modified version you might want to buckle up and that's why i make videos instead of playing the piano we're going to move on now to the opening of schubert's c minor quartet zots where the neapolitan plays against type pretty dramatically so far all of our examples have been subdued minor mode pieces where the neapolitan added a slightly gloomier or more sinister tint well this theme is in minor and it does start out subdued but now schubert uses the neapolitan for an explosive climax but let me show you how the theme is built first because it's a bit tough to untangle at site the first eight bars are grounded in a lament base pattern but this is not like any lament you've ever heard before imagine a four note diatonic lament in c minor now i want you to add lower chromatic neighbors to each of those first three notes then subdivide those eights into sixteenths and you get this figure [Music] every two bars one of the string instruments enters with that motive first violin then second violin then viola and then cello down an octave now when the second violin enters the first violin takes up a counter subject in this same perpetual motion idiom but now moving in contrary motion and though there are definitely harmonies sort of implied here i don't want to get bogged down in analyzing them instead let's just notice that the counter subject appears over every entrance of the theme except the first and then finally when the violins run out of things to do they just start sawing away at notes of the tonic triad so the whole buildup sounds like this [Music] clearly it's building towards something and that something is the neapolitan which comes crashing down in a three-octave arpeggio and that's where the wave breaks dynamically from there the music slips back into the gloomy quiet of the opening and when i play it listen carefully to the fade out you're going to hear the opening motive repurposed as closing material over a tonic petal [Music] okay our last example is from an early mozart piano sonata and i like it because it shows a different way of building a descending bass line until now we've usually thought about descending bass lines in two overlapping segments the first one takes you from the tonic chord down to the dominant in an earlier video i called that space the upper tier and then a second one that takes you from five down to tonic through the so-called bottom tier notice above all how little predominant there is in there it's mostly tonics and dominance and the point of division itself suggests a kind of journey away from tonic to dominant and then back again mozart's baseline also descends by step diatonically but its purpose is to connect the tonic to an extended predominant region let's start by blocking in the downbeat chords we've got tonic then down a third to four six then down another third to the neapolitan and everything that comes in between is connecting material above lowered scale degree seven [Music] we get seven four three of four which resolves with two gorgeous suspensions [Music] and then a new chord the passing 164 connects 4-6 to the neapolitan incidentally passing 164 is the topic of the next video which is going to be very short because the chord only does one thing it connects predominance anyway the point here is that we've got a descending bass line whose job is to walk down from tonic to scale degree 4 rather than scale degree 5. in this case the first scale degree 5 is just a connecting note the scale degree 5 in the bass that matters comes at the end of the phrase at the cadence and mozart sets that up with the familiar four sharp four five bass line which has seven seven of five over raised scale degree four and finally before we listen not only does the melody do the thing at the cadence those descending steps are again part of a long structural line that starts with the very first note of the theme and here it is played by a real musician [Music] okay as promised i want to wrap up by addressing an urgent question for our troubled times is the neapolitan a silly name for this chord it certainly wouldn't be the only chromatic predominant named after some part of europe for no particularly good reason if you watched video 35 you might remember me calling the nationalities of the augmented sixth chords what was it oh yeah dumb and arbitrary in fact they're so much worse than that they were based on lame old-school nationalistic stereotyping all thanks to this guy who thought that the german sixth was strong like german music that the italian sixth was elegant like italian music and that the poor french sixth was feeble like you know apparently all french music a loser anyway i'm not sure who named today's chord the neapolitan the earliest record i could find in any language was a book written in 1812 by the mildly esteemed british composer mr william mr william crotch but his reasoning isn't dumb or arbitrary at all in fact it's echoed by scholars even today the cord we call the neapolitan was first brought to prominence by composers of the so-called neapolitan school who worked in and around naples in the late 1600s and early 1700s their figurehead is the elder scarletti and i was interested to learn that the lowered scale degree 2 as a melodic note might have been an import from one or more regional folk music traditions i'm going to get back to that in a minute but first i want to play you some of these early notated neapolitans this is the climax of the oratorio yepta by giacomo carissimi and karissimi was from rome not naples and he wrote this before scarletti was even born but it's loaded with what we might call proto-neapolitan harmonies look how naked the score is it's just voice and unfigured continuo and like a lot of music from this era it sounds to modern ears like it changes keys a lot here are the four key areas and in each of them karisimi uses a proto-neapolitan with lowered scale degree 2 in the melody shortly before a cadence [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] isn't that gorgeous here's a much more modern sounding passage from the big guy himself alessandro scarletti and it's from the opera griselda which look it just needs to be said would be so much cooler if it had been called the legend of griselda well i'm just saying missed opportunity anyway you're going to hear a flash of d major at the beginning but the rest is in b minor and the neapolitan c major in first inversion turns up here now i'm not going to analyze this chord by chord we'd get bogged down too easily in the little quirks of pre-classical harmony instead i want you to kind of squint your ears and hear the second system in broad chunks with a prolonged neapolitan an extended stalling passage that mostly emphasizes the predominant 4-6 and then a proper cadence [Music] is [Music] so as i said earlier i read in several places that lowered scale degree 2 was an import from folk music but the writers i read didn't agree on exactly which folk music some said it was a neapolitan thing others said it was a specifically sicilian thing now i need to make clear that i don't know a thing about italian folk music but after extensive field research i can say that flat 2 does seem to be way more common in sicilian folk music of the last century that may have nothing to do with folk music 400 years ago but i did come across some really interesting sounds that i wanted to share and yet those sounds are not the thing we call the neapolitan sixth chord they're all root position neapolitans flat twos that go straight to tonic it's maybe more of a phrygian mode progression if you're into that sort of thing now if you happen to know francis ford coppola is the godfather part 2 you might recognize this sound in some of the source music written by his father carmine coppola in fact the second shot of the entire three-hour film has a provincial sicilian band at the turn of the century playing a funeral progression that has a flat major going to g minor that's flat two going right to one and a similar progression turns up later in the same key during a street festival in a new york immigrant neighborhood in the 1920s hold up [Applause] so with my curiosity peaked i started poking around on spotify and i found that same sound in specifically sicilian music it turns up in historical field recordings like the ones on this album now unfortunately i know almost nothing about the music you're about to hear google is just a dead end but i can tell you that it's in e minor [Music] and it cadences with a root position flat two with the leading tone added making a kind of flat 2 7 chord [Music] [Music] and we hear the same progression in slightly kitschy recordings of quote unquote old sicilian songs like this one [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well would you look at the time uh i seem to have gotten a bit off track here folks so it's probably time to close up shop the flat 2 chords got me excited and i'm taking it out on you my dear viewers i will make it a top priority to keep the next video short it'll be on the passing tonic 6-4 and nothing else i'll see you then you