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0:00 Japanese anime and video game music has harmony that can't always be explained with traditional music theory. For example, this passage from Spirited Away that casually slips from A minor to C minor and then back again. Kayano Chino thinks they have the answer, and in the book Japanese Music Harmony they explain the concept of multipolar tonality or key fluctuation. In this video I'll explain what multipolar tonality is, what makes it different from other explanations of non-diatonic chords, try to explain the somewhat complicated analysis method, and then finally get into how this can actually be useful with an overview of the three different kinds of key fluctuations.
0:48 This is not for the music theory faint of heart so make sure you've had your coffee and then let's dive in. Tonal music gravitates around a focal point or pole. The pitches and chords of C major all revolve around the pitch C, which is the most resolved and stable feeling note in the key. The term "multipolar tonality" suggests that you can have more than one gravitational center. It's not the same thing as polytonality, which is when you hear two different tonalities at the same time. This is about having different tonal centers in succession, one after the other. It's also not the same thing as modulation. When music modulates it settles into a new key or finds a different home, but with multi-polar tonality the original key is still present. So if you're in C major, even if you spend some time in G minor,
1:35 the overall container is still in C major. So according to the author, modulations tend to mark distinct sections or ideas while multi-polar tonality will happen within a section or within an idea. Kayano invented a whole method for analyzing key fluctuations. I'll warn you that it's a bit convoluted seeming at first, but bear with me because you need to understand how it works before I can explain the three different flavors of key fluctuation and how you can use them in your own music. Kayano analyzes a passage by taking an 8 bar section and labeling it a sentence, which if you've seen my videos before you probably know "sentence" is not a term I would use quite so freely. But anyway, the sentence breaks into two four bar phrases and then each phrase breaks into a two bar motif. In our Spirited Away example the form is actually a little more complex. It's 12 bars so instead of four plus four we'll break it into four plus eight.
2:23 You then determine the main key by using the first chord of the first motif. So if your first chord is F major your main key is F major. They're pretty strict about this, so yes you use the first chord even if you start with a G7 going to a C, which looks like a pretty clear V-I in C major. But Kayano insists that you consider G major to be the main key and C major to be a secondary key. They say "It may be uncomfortable to treat G7 as the tonic for a sentence that begins with a dominant 7th chord." And that's true, it definitely makes me uncomfortable to think that you should always call your first chord I, but it's not my theory so let's move on. With our Spirited Away example the first chord is A minor so our main key is A minor. Next you look for the polar keys by looking for accidentals that are from outside your main key, and if you find any you have a key fluctuation.
3:09 In this case you don't take the first chord of two and decide that's the key. You actually look at them as a whole and decide what key makes the most sense. So here we have an Eb and the motif also has an Ab. I think it's reasonable to consider this motif C minor. From here the theme gets a bit more complicated, moving into F minor and F major, so for now let's just focus on these first four bars. Kayano came up with a system for notating these key fluctuations. You write your main key at the top and then in brackets you list your polar keys in the order that they appear. So here we'll write A minor and then in brackets put C minor. But instead of writing C minor you actually use the roman numeral relationship to your main key. So C is a minor third or flat three above A, so here we would write flat three minor. There's actually even more symbols she uses for how to label this as a parallel minor against C major, but we really don't need to get into that.
3:57 It doesn't really change anything. We've worked out our keys, now we go through and do a roman numeral analysis of our chords based on how they relate to their local key. So in the first motif we're gonna look at how these chords fit in the key of A minor. So we have one minor, five minor, flat six major, flat three major. And in the second motif we're looking at how the chords relate to C minor. So we have one minor, two diminished seven, flat three major, and five sus2. I'm ignoring the inversions because I just wanna keep this simple. Next to each roman numeral in brackets you put the number of the key according to our list at the top, starting with zero for the main key. So our A minor chords will get a zero and our C minor chords will get a 1. All right, so that's the analysis, which I promise gets easier with a little practice and reading through the book a few times. But so what? You're probably wondering how can you actually use this.
4:43 In the book Kayano outlines three different kinds of key fluctuations. They each allow for different relationships between the main key and the polar keys and they each have a different sound and different effects. The three types are relative multipolar tonality, dominant multipolar tonality, and parallel multipolar tonality. I'll give a summary of each here and then I plan on making a separate video for each one where I can go into a bit more depth, so make sure you subscribe so you know when those are out. Relative multipolar tonality or RMT is when you use chords from the relative major or minor of your main key. Remember that the relative minor is the minor key that uses the same key signature as your major key. So if you have G major the relative minor is E minor. If you have F minor the relative major is Ab major
5:28 The only real difference between relative keys is the V chord in minor which has that raised leading tone. In the key of A minor that would be the G#. For the most part they share all the same chords so the multipolar effect is pretty subtle. In RMT there's a lot of emphasis on major and minor chords a third apart, for example going from a C major chord to an E minor chord. So for music where you want to get a whimsical or bittersweet or melancholy sound, RMT is a good device to use. Here's an example where the first phrase is in C major, the second phrase is in the polar key of A minor. and then it loops back around to C major.
6:15 Notice how the transition from C major to A minor is pretty much seamless, but then we do get this kind of interesting E7 to C progression. Dominant multipolar tonality or DMT is where the polar keys come from the subdominant and dominant relationships of your main key. In other words, one step away on either side on the circle of 5ths. So if C major is our home key we can use the keys of F major and G major, and we can use the relative minor from all three of those major keys. So DMT gives us a main key and then five polar keys to work with. In a normal standard chord progression you move through subdominant, dominant, tonic functions. For example the chord progression CFGC is tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic. Or the progression FGFC is subdominant, dominant, subdominant, tonic.
7:02 The interesting thing about DMT is that you can do the same thing with your key relationships. So you kind of zoom out on a wider level and still use this subdominant to dominant function. So in this example my tonic key is D minor but I'm gonna move through the subdominant key of G minor and the dominant key of A minor. Before you listen I want to draw your attention to three accidentals that don't belong in the key of D minor. In bar four we have this E7 chord which is the V chord from the key of A minor, so we have a B natural instead of a Bb. We also have this G# which is totally out of place in a D minor context. I especially like this line cliche where we have a nice chromatic line descending A to G# into the G of the C minor in the next bar. In bar five I'm using the subdominant polar key of G minor, so we have an Eb instead of E natural.
7:51 I really like it in this passing tone here where I think in a traditional context an Eb might be an unexpected choice. I think this works as a good example of a few things that make multi-polar tonality different.
8:37 The first is that this whole section still has this overriding feeling of D minor. B the end of bar 8 we would be very satisfied to end on a D minor chord and call it a day. So calling any of these key diversions "modulations" seems inappropriate. The other thing is that normally I would probably try to argue these chords away as borrowed chords from different modes. So yeah, I could argue that this C minor 7 is the flat minor 7 chord borrowed from D Phrygian, but that feels a bit forced. Saying that these two chords come from the subdominant key of G minor feels like a much smoother explanation. Finally we have parallel multipolar tonality or PMT. Parallel major and minor keys are those that have the same pitch as their tonic. So C major and C minor or Db major and Db minor. In order to get to the parallel minor key you have to move three steps away on the circle of fifths.
9:28 So PMT uses all of the major and minor keys on our way there, giving us seven polar choices outside of our main key. But Kayano takes it a step further and uses the subdominant and dominant relationships on either side of that, so we end up actually with 11 polar keys against our main key. PMT has this film score magic quality to it. If you've seen my video on chromatic mediant chords, or chords a third apart from different keys, this is the kind of sound you're going to get with PMT. If you want to create a sense of magic or other worldliness, PMT is the way to go. Look at this chart and you can see we have A minor and C minor, which paired together might look a little familiar. PMT is the method being used in our Spirited Away example, and if you know the movie it makes perfect sense to want to have a magical, spiritual, otherworldly feeling.
10:28 So that's the gist of the book. Like I said, I'll go into more detail on those three different types in future videos. If you want to read the book yourself I'll put a link to it in the description below. And if you're interested in Japanese music harmony you definitely want to check out Gavin Leeper's channel. I'm collaborating with Gavin on a video about how to turn C major into anime harmony, so make sure you subscribe so you know when that one comes out. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one!
