On February 23, 2016, Celine Dion gave a performance of her classic power ballad, All by Myself, to a packed room at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. She sang the climactic high e flat on the word anymore when the key changes up a diminished fourth from g major to c flat major and the crowd went wild. But, there is something, there's something in the music that was just too much. And Celine had to stop singing. This moment, I feel perfectly encapsulates music's narrative role. Its ability to tell a story in a way that makes you feel it on a physical level, and the way that All by Myself does this is through a very clever key change. It's an example of modal mixture, common tone and harmonic double chromatic mediant modulation. And don't worry, we're gonna spend today parsing that jargon dump.

But just because western music theory can throw a lot of words at a moment doesn't mean that we really get into the emotional resonance of it. So if we're going to understand what happened on that stage in February of 2016, we're going to need to go a little deeper. We're gonna need to go deeper if we're gonna understand the greatest key change in pop music. This video is brought to you by Curiosity Stream and Nebula, where you can watch the extended version of this video. The song All by Myself was written and composed by the former front man of the Raspberries, the singer Eric Carmen, who wrote the song's verses based on the second movement of Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto. He wrote the verses this way thinking that Rachmaninoff's music was in the public domain, but turns out it wasn't. So he was forced to give Rachmaninoff's estate writing credit on the song, which technically means that All by Myself is the Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff's best selling hit single. When Celine Dion sings All by Myself live, she generally sings it in the key of g major, which is a fairly bright sound all things considered.

However, there is harmony in the song which is borrowed from the parallel minor, g minor, which is a fairly dark sound. When you go back and forth between major and minor, light and dark, you call that modal mixture, which is the first part of the jargon that we mentioned earlier. Now there's one note in particular that does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to modal mixture and that is this bad boy right here. The flat 6 e flat. When you take harmony from dark g minor that features the e flat, like a minor 7 flat 5 and c minor, and you resolve those dark sounds to a bright g major, you get a chord progression which has this powerfully wistful quality to it. The harmony seems to be culturally coded to feelings of bittersweetness and the past. Likely because of its use and cadences from American musical theater and Tin Pan Alley songs from the early half of 20th century. Since these popular songs have primarily lived on in popular culture through Christmas music, this harmony has a certain meme connotation, but for right now we're going to call it the nostalgia note.

The flat 6 is the nostalgia note. Nostalgia. Now if we take a look at the verses lyrics, we see that they pair very nicely with this bittersweet affect that we have come to associate with these kinds of chords in major keys. The phrasing of these lyrics is a little unusual though, and that they are paired with an asymmetrical 5 bar verse pattern. The first of these phrases is a short statement on the note B, the 3rd note of G major. The second phrase is a slight elaboration also ending on the note B, but now paired with one of those bittersweet chords an Em7flat5 over G, which features the E flat. The 3rd phrase is a variation on the second phrase, except this time we end on the note a. It's also been displaced by a beat giving the melody more of a conversational bent.

This leads to the final phrase, which, ends on the note g. The target tones of each phrase spell out b a g. 321. 3 blind mice. It's a very Schenkerian melody if that's your thing, but I think it's more important to note the asymmetrical conversational phrasing of the rhythm and also the fact that it's all paired with this nostalgic harmony. Nostalgia. The end of every verse has this fantastic piano counter melody, which is like a secondary melody that supports the main melody, which Carmen borrowed directly from the second movement of Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto.