Ever listen to a melody where one note pulls on your heart strings with such intensity that it hurts, but at the same time feels so good that you just have to envy any songwriter who could perform such a magic feat?

These emotion-laden notes often come from the family of “non-chord tones,” which is to say, “tones that do not belong to the chord of the moment.” At least that’s what they’re called in music theory class. But this term always seemed unsatisfactory to me because it downplays and distracts from what’s most significant about them, so I’ve decided to rewrite the book on non-chord tones, starting with the July/August 2014 column.

The first step is to give them a new name. “Power tones” will do until something better comes along, because it puts the focus on the emotional punch they wield. Now I could talk until I was blue in the face about non-chord tones, but unless you hear them, particularly as they live and breathe in hit songs, you will not appreciate how different they are from the other tones in a melody. Recognizing this difference is the first step in learning to employ them in your own songwriting, even if you already know the dictionary definition of a “non-chord tone.”

So, with that in mind, I’m working on one or more videos to introduce power tones in sound as well as spirit. Links to the videos will appear here. They will also be posted on the SongwritingABCs channel on YouTube along with instructional videos for the excerpts from my book, Compose Yourself, which is being serialized here at americansongwriter.com (just email [email protected] and type “Request ‘Compose Yourself’ Excerpts’ in the Subject line if you haven’t already gotten excerpts 1 and 2).

Incidentally, feedback has led me to change the title format for the videos. In the future, the subject will come first, and the video tagline will be reduced from, say, “Songwriting ABCs – Video 1.30” to just “Lesson 30.”

Since I don’t want to repeat too much information here that will also appear in the videos, I would like to close with a quotation from Frederick Schlieder. Now not too many of you will recognize the name. He wasn’t a pop star or a guitar hero. He was an early-twentieth-century piano instructor whose aims were much the same as mine, that is, to teach music as a passionately meaningful language, not just a collection of abstract rules and formulas.

Schlieder’s textbook, long out of print, was called Lyric Composition Through Improvisation. When I ran across it in Portland, Oregon’s beautiful Multnomah County Library in 1975, I thought I’d discovered the Holy Grail, as he was the first music teacher I’d ever encountered who came to grips with musical meaning. While his style is dated and the text isn’t about songwriting per se, his thoughts are relevant and inspiring. The following passage, written in 1927, is about non-chord tones, which he calls “inharmonic points” (I still prefer “power tones”):

“As light has its opposite in darkness, as heat is opposed to cold, as day is followed by night, and summer by winter, so is harmony counterbalanced by inharmony. The word inharmony denotes a force, a feeling, a movement in which there is sensed an urge to resolve, to merge, to seek a point of balance… Every longing and hope [represented by inharmony, or ‘power tones’] is intent upon the release found in the harmonic center of the feelings.”

To put it another way, chord tones rest easy within the harmony of the moment. They belong. Power tones introduce the element of conflict—desire, dissonance, restlessness, rebellion, urging, lust, resistance, or sorrow—which is essential to drama. The goal of a power tone is to discharge this conflict by merging with a nearby chord tone. Within this definition lies a staggering spectrum of subtle emotional hues.

These words will take on added significance as you hear power tones exampled in hit songs by composers who understood how to use them artfully, even if they did not know the theory behind them.