Stevie Wonder Taught Me Harmony

A teenage obsession became a foundation for how I hear music

When I was a teenager, one of the things that drew me toward composing my own music was my love of harmony. I spent countless hours studying chord changes and complex voicings in jazz, as well as the harmonic motion in classical music from composers like Liszt and Wagner. But much of that theory still felt abstract until I studied Stevie Wonder.

To say I was obsessed with Stevie Wonder as a high schooler is an understatement. I would spend nights listening and analyzing the harmonic motion in his music until well past midnight. My first song was a Stevie Wonder pastiche and my first nocturnes were Stevie Wonder tunes in the guise of Chopin. My entire understanding of harmonic motion, how a song moves from chord to chord is filtered through Stevie Wonder. To understand why Stevie’s harmonic world feels so emotionally powerful, we have to look at the main tools he deployed: mode mixture and parsimonious voice leading.

Mode Mixture: The Soul Food of Harmony

A technical explanation of mode mixture would be the borrowing of a chord from the parallel major or minor of a key. A clear example of mode mixture would be this moment in Prince’s song "Dirty Mind”. After an entire section within the world of C major: a G major chord over a repeated C bass note, we suddenly get this surprising series of chords: E flat major, A flat major, F major, B flat major, G major.

With the exception of F major and G major, these chords do not exist within the C major scale. They were borrowed from C minor where these chords exist naturally:

A technical explanation doesn’t quite do justice as to what mode mixture actually is though. Mode mixture is the distinguishing feature of R&B music. It’s the musical seasoning, the saccharine sweetness that makes the genre so pleasing to listen to. R&B songs are saturated with these “surprising” moments. Whereas other genres like rock and pop will save mode mixture for important key moments, R&B uses it as a main feature, like the musical equivalent of soul food.

“Knocks Me Off My Feet” is the first Stevie Wonder song that comes to my mind when I think of mode mixture. The opening phrase alone is packed full sweet and surprising harmonies.

Parsimonious Voice Leading

Parsimonious voice leading is another term that sounds more intimidating than it actually is. If you take the definition of parsimonious from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary “frugal to the point of stinginess”, you can understand parsimonious voice leading to mean that the “voice leading” or movement of voices between chords is minimal and restrained. This is a distinguishing feature of classical music. Bass movement is the most important element within classical harmony. The bass doesn’t function the way it does within popular music, as simply the root of a chord. The bass is a melodic line with fluid motion like any melody. Bass motion by small steps may seemingly limit the chords you can use, but it opens up surprising possibilities within those chords and allows for tension to be built up making larger jumps such as basic V - I resolutions seem like the Earth has just jumped.

“They Won’t Go When I Go” is one of Stevie’s most “parsimonious” songs. Stepwise movement isn’t just reserved for the bass line. All of the voices and instruments employ it. The harmony of this song is reminiscent of the theme from Beethoven’s C minor variations.

Stevie Wonder’s Harmony in Practice

The way Stevie Wonder utilizes these two elements of mode mixture and parsimonious voice leading elevates his music from just popular songs, into the realm of masterworks. I will propose a general harmonic rule or logic that Stevie Wonder’s songs follow and then will examine a couple of my favorite songs of his to demonstrate how he utilizes both of these elements.

Stevie Wonder’s songs tend to follow rather typical and generic base chord progressions as they begin, but there’s usually a point in the song, either near the pre-chorus or chorus where he slows down the harmonic motion and allows for tension to build up to a surprising moment that reframes the song. Think of any song from “My Cherie Amour” to “The Secret Life of Plants” and you will find this general structure.

The first Stevie Wonder song that I truly fell in love with was a bit of an atypical first love for his music. It didn’t come from the album Songs in the Key of Life or Innervisions. Two albums that were on heavy rotation in my household. Rather it was a small song about the slow revelation of heartbreak and betrayal called “Lately” from the album Hotter than July. During my freshman year of high school, I used to sit up late nights at my keyboard trying to figure out the chord progressions from this song. What I was trying to understand wasn’t how to play the song, but why did this song inspire in me such depths of sadness that I had never felt before at that point in life?

“Lately” is a slow march toward an exalted sorrow that starts with humble roots. The song begins in D flat major with one of the most cliché progressions one can use. The 1950s progression that pervaded doo-wop music: I–vi–IV–V.

Stevie’s use of this kind of progression demonstrates his evolution from his writing style as the boy genius, “Little Stevie Wonder” during this era of doo-wop, which was foundational to the sound of Motown as a whole. But being the master of R&B he was by this point he did something clever with this progression. He substitutes the IV chord, which would be G flat, for its relative minor chord, E flat minor. Similar chords with different root.

That small change in flavor, gives the song a feeling of being more in B flat minor than D flat major. This feeling is important. It imbues the verse with a little tinge of melancholy.

The answer phrase, “Yet the thought of losing you has been hanging…” begins on that E flat minor, which still lingers around for more than half the phrase before the phrase resolves back home to D flat major. So far we have been hanging out more around E flat minor and B flat minor than around D flat major.

The real magic of the song begins in the pre-chorus: “Well I’m a man of many wishes/Hope my premonition misses”. Stevie leads into this line by using a D flat dominant 7 chord on the lyric “never know” which has the expectation of resolving to G flat major. This instance of mode mixture, changing to root or “home” chord into a dominant V7 chord, whose job it is to resolve to the root chord of a different key, sets the tone of our expectations that things are about to change.

The expectation:

And we get an immediate surprise. Instead of resolving to G flat as we are expected, Stevie returns back to that E flat minor substitution, once again betraying our expectations.

As the phrase continues we arrive to the moment of truth, in the lyric “Because they always start to cry”. Just as in classical music, Stevie leads upward one step at a time. This upward progression is also a symbolic rising tide of emotion. Stevie’s voice swells as he sings, “Because they always…” drawing out this phrase across the whole progression. But unlike classical music, there are no inversions or clever tricks. It’s just a blocky series of minor 7 chords.

The same chord rising up by step, E flat minor 7, F minor 7, G flat minor 7, “al-ways start…”. Every step, yet the sorrow is still the same.

The G flat minor 7 chord on the lyric “start” is the point where this sorrow is transfigured into something special and it occurs at the same point where the lyrics pivot, on the phrase “…start to cry”. Suddenly this nagging emotion is transforming as tears well up. This G flat minor 7 chord moves to an A flat dominant 7 chord which the V which resolves to the I, back home in D flat major. And this D flat major is the most surprising moment of the song for me.

Even though it is the root of the key, even though we all know it’s coming back to this chord, Stevie makes the obvious and inevitable come across as a revelation.

“Why is this?”

This is what my teenage self wondered all those nights playing through this song at a loss. Remember back to when I noted that the verse had little tinges of melancholy? The mode mixture within that section, substituting the standard G flat major chord, in the doo-wop progression, for an E flat minor chord did a lot of heavy lifting for our expectations. It created an ambiguity between major and minor. Our ear was subconsciously tricked to associate the home key with being in the relative minor, B flat minor. Within the whole verse, every time this E flat minor chord appears our ear is telling us, “this is in B flat minor”. Even as it resolves home to D flat major at the end of the each set of phrases in the verse, our ear is tricked into seeing this resolution as a deception.

When we get to the pre-chorus, “Well I’m a man of many wishes” and that expectation of getting a G flat major chord is betrayed again with an E flat minor chord ambiguity persists between G flat major and E flat minor, we are still expecting there to be an eventual resolution to B flat minor, fulfilling this pull toward minor that our ear so desperately wants to hear. But this is what great composers do. They know what we as listeners will expect and intentionally set us up to be subverted.

As the series of minor seven chords rise in step motion, we are gradually faced with the revelation, that this song is definitively and heartbreakingly in D flat major. To hammer this home we get the most basic resolution in music IV-V-I, with, of course a little mode mixture twist of a minor four, iv-V-I. We have been confronted by this truth that we have been trying to ignore the whole song. At the same time, the narrator, has this same realization that his eyes won’t let him hide the fact that he is heartbroken, trapped in a loveless relationship.

This is the power of Stevie Wonder: A self evident truth, a V-I resolution, is a revelation. There’s no need for overly complex chords. The most simple of progressions can be life changing in the hands of a master.