I wasn\u2019t surprised by his answer. When you turn on the radio today, it\u2019s easy to get the impression that most of the songs are just trying to replicate the success of last week\u2019s hits, a self-exhausting cycle of musical carbon decay. But that doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t examples of creative sophistication, if not necessarily originality, to be found. The Beatles were great pop innovators, and wrote with incredible compositional complexity. But repetition isn\u2019t always a process of diminishing returns; sometimes, the simplest ideas are the most powerful.<\/span><\/p>\n And sure enough, the top tone moves back to its original place, and harmony is restored. This little riff, rocking between harmony and dissonance, loops continuously throughout \u201cTeenage Dream.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n A sparse synth beat enters at the same time as Perry\u2019s vocals, sung delicately in her upper range. After one verse the bass line sneaks in, quietly at first. It\u2019s just three long, low tones, but it fills out the chords outlined in the melody and the riff, establishing the song\u2019s primary chordal motif. And like the passing tonal dissonances that loop throughout the song, that motif is simple, yet tension-filled. It relies on two chords: the four and the five. But never once does it resolve to the one chord.<\/span><\/p>\n Non-musicians may be lost at this point, so let me give you some context. \u201cOne, four, five\u201d is the rock musician\u2019s mantra, and the basis of Western music. The one chord is the same as the song\u2019s key\u2014in the key of A, the one chord is A\u2014and it is the chord that a typical progression inevitably finds its way back to. One leads to four, four leads to five, and you can\u2019t hear a five chord without feeling, instinctively, how much it yearns to return to one. Like dissonance, chords bring movement to music. In \u201cTeenage Dream,\u201d that movement bounces back and forth between four and five, with the one chord implied at times in the melody but never fully expressed. (Music nerds might notice, among other things, that there is a quick six chord implied on the way from four to five.) This imbues the song with a propulsive, growing tension that circles around itself, reaching towards resolution but never truly achieving it. It\u2019s a fiendishly simple concept, and in \u201cTeenage Dream\u201d it\u2019s milked for all it\u2019s worth.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.ameliamason.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/Screen_shot_2012-04-29_at_9.34.13_PM.png\" "\\"Screen_shot_2012-04-29_at_9.34.13_PM\\"")
<\/a>The current fad of dance-oriented pop is, I think, epitomized in Katy Perry<\/a>\u2019s \u201cTeenage Dream.\u201d (I can\u2019t believe I just wrote that sentence. But it\u2019s TRUE.) \u201cTeenage Dream\u201d is a candy-coated celebration of young love that tosses off lines like \u201cWe will be young forever\u201d with unironic flare. The song starts innocuously enough: two electronic notes, a major third apart, marking a quick, steady beat. (For those of you unfamiliar with music theory, a major third is a nice, harmonious interval: in this case, \u201cdo\u201d and \u201cmi\u201d on the major scale.) Then the top tone jumps down one scale step, and suddenly you have two notes, one whole step apart, ticking in unison. You don\u2019t have to know any music theory to understand dissonance: out of context, it sounds ugly, unharmonious. Employed strategically, it creates a feeling of tension, a sense that the music needs to move<\/em>, lest we be stranded forever between two mismatched notes.<\/span><\/p>\n