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.

This counter melody ends on just, like, the most delightful retardando, like a a slowdown of the tempo, which makes the drum fill into the chorus feel just that much more epic.

God. I love that effect. More bands should do that. I know I know it can be kind of cheesy, but, it's such a it's such a vibe. Such a vibe.

Now this chorus of All by Myself is loosely inspired by another one of Eric Carmen's songs, Let's Pretend from the band of the raspberries. Let's pretend was a nice melody. That song didn't go quite as far as I thought it should have. I'll go back and steal for myself for this. This stolen chorus starts on a g major chord, the one chord. We then go up to a 3 minor, a b minor chord, followed by a very dramatic motion down a tritone to a d minor over f, which resolves very nicely to an e 7 sus 4 to an e 7 chord. The 5 7 of 2 chord, it points to the 2 chord. It wants to resolve to the coup.

The q chord the q chord the q chord. Coo chord. Coo chord. The 2 chord. We then get a minor, the 2 chord, followed by c minor over e flat, which is that nostalgia note, which is the 4 minor chord in the key of g, followed by our d 7, our 5 7 chord. This harmony is borrowed directly from Rachmaninoff's 2nd piano concerto with the second movement and is a fantastic example of a chord sequence. It's the same chord progression twice, it's just that the second time that we hear the chord progression it's been moved down a step. It's the same chord progression twice, it's just that the second time we hear the chord progression it's been moved down a step, and this is a great way of telling a story through a musical arrangement.

We're expecting some kind of resolution, we're like going towards a destination. The destination of the sequence is at the end of the chorus with the completion of the lyric don't want to be by myself anymore. It's a very matter of fact sentiment. It's just the narrator stating their desires, but in this case the simplicity of it is by design. Eric Carmen would write, the lyrics are as simple as I could possibly make them. Sometimes my melodies are so dramatic that if the lyric is that dramatic, it's overkill. Carmen's original song doesn't feature a climactic modulation on the last chorus, although there is this very nice piano interlude that changes keys quite frequently. But the real secret sauce to the song and the thing that many people associate with it is that climactic key change.

Now this is where the song changes key, what we call a modulation.

Changing key at an emotional climax has been a big part of popular song. So much, in fact, that if done unartfully, it can feel cheesy and unearned and overly sentimental, but there are many great examples of it being done right. Beyonce's Love on Top, Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You, Jon Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer, and many many others that people suggested in a great Twitter thread on modulation. There are many kinds of modulation, but All by Myself features a common tone modulation. Next piece of the jargon puzzle. A single sustained tone bridges the gap between the two keys. In this case the common tone is e flat. That flat 6 nostalgia note in the key of g that we've been talking about this whole time.

Nostalgia. This is actually the first time that we've heard the note in the melody, but we've heard this resolution of the flat 6 down to the 5, and that wistful nostalgic progression in the harmony many times before in the verses and the choruses. But in this case, on an a minor 7 flat 5, the nostalgia note does not resolve nostalgically. Instead, it transforms into the major third of the key of c flat major. Now looking at the piano, you you might be thinking, like, well why aren't we calling it B major? C flat seems unnecessarily pretentious. Well, e flat is the third of the key of C flat. D sharp is the third of the key of B, and yes they sound the same. D sharp and e flat are the same thing on our equal tempered keyboard, but they're very different kinds of associations and feelings and affects that are associated with D sharp in the key of G.

D sharp, the sharp five goes up. E flat, the flat 6, the nostalgia note goes down. So we call the key that we're changing to c flat major and not b major because the note that sustained between the two keys is an e flat. An e flat is the 3rd note of the key of c flat. This seems like splitting hairs right now, but there are a lot of associations that we feel when we call a note e flat versus d sharp, and if we don't make these clarifications now the modulation won't make sense in the future. Also the just intonation police will come after me if I don't make this clarification, so please please don't come after me. The decision to modulate on the last chorus to that high E flat can be traced to David Foster, Celine Dion's producer and oft pianist.

David Foster calls me.

I produced a song for Celine a few years ago that I I really am proud of this song, the way it it turned out and the way we we kinda changed it around.

I arrived to the studio, said wait at the bridge. I did a little something, and I was like, is that the final the the key that finishes is the key that we chose. Right? No. He says it's a key and a half higher.

Oh my god.

But I said, David, how could you do that?

Right. She really got annoyed with me because there's a particularly high note in this song, which is ridiculously high.

But he said, if you can't do it, there's other singers next door that can't. Yeah.

The high note at the climax of All By Myself has been a preoccupation for many singers and singing fans. There are compilations of Celine singing it throughout the years on YouTube. There are many TikToks of young singers attempting the high note. So since this is an episode that features a lot of singing, I thought I would ask my voice teacher mom to shed some light on some of the technique that goes into singing one of these climactic high notes. There. Kitty. There's Echo. Cass.

Well, I listened to 3 of her recordings. I listened to 1996 made for MTV or something. I listened to 2,000 8 live and 2020 live. What I found so very interesting about the live videos is that she sets herself up for what she's about to do. She gets very firmly on her thighs. She spreads her legs. She plants her feet, and she gets ready to anchor her body as she goes up. Now, anchoring, I just want to say it's not like gripping.

It's actually a balanced and coordinated muscular engagement of the body that allows the spine to say stay flexible through the back wall of the throat, or she'll go. No. Literally. That's not just theatrics. There is, a method of tapping the body to stimulate energy and then the power stance. The point is the body has to be really, really primed to contain that kind of energy and express it.

The energy on these dramatic high note key changes can seem over the top, but it's just part of a tradition of similar over the top drama lovers, film composers, and romantic era composers.

A lot of

them were fans of the next piece of the jargon puzzle, the double chromatic mediant modulation. Alright. So when we say mediant, that's just a very old school way of saying the 3rd note of a major scale. In the key of g, the mediant is b. The chord built off of b is a b minor chord, and so when we modulate from g major to b minor, that is a mediant modulation. If you change the quality of this chord and key to b major, you'd have yourselves a chromatic mediant modulation. G major to b major. You also change the quality of the first key because remember that nostalgic note e flat is coming from the key of g minor.

So when you have g minor to b major, that is a double chromatic mediant modulation. But remember, I made a big fuss of not calling it b major, I called it c flat major, and in that case c flat major is enharmonic to B major. So when you go from the key of g minor to c flat major, you have an enharmonic double chromatic mediant modulation. Mediant modulation. Chromatic mediant modulation. Double chromatic mediant modulation. And harmonic double chromatic mediant modulation. Jargon sure is fun.

All these kinds of modulations are too distant keys on the circle of 5ths. There just aren't that many common tones shared between them, so the effect is dramatic. This is probably why traditionally they have been used so frequently in film and earlier romantic era music. In fact, in the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, in his second piano concerto in the second movement, we get a double chromatic mediant modulation. It starts in C Minor, and over the course of 4 bars modulates to the key of E Major. I can't say if this was a conscious choice on the part of David Foster to use the same key change technique that Rachmaninoff did, but it does serve to highlight the spirit of Rachmaninoff in the arrangement of Celine Dion's All by Myself. So so far we have defined what the key change is, but we haven't really gotten into the emotional meat of the matter. Like, why is this key change so affecting? Let's talk metaphor and meaning.

Somewhere

over the Somewhere over the rainbow way up high.

Yip Harburg was the lyricist for Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The classic song about yearning for something more in life. Harburg has this great quote on songwriting, which I originally got from my buddy Ben Levin, who mentions it in a recent David Bruce video.

Music makes you feel feelings, lyrics make you think thoughts, songs make you feel thoughts, and that's what's going on today, baby.

Songs make you feel thoughts. Wow. I love this sentiment so much. There's this empathy between the narrator of the story and the audience. It's a way of making an audience feel a thought. In live orchestrations of the song, the band drops out entirely before the modulation. It's just Celine singing there alone. Then a big drum fill happens and then everybody in the band and orchestra joins in with the modulation.

In other words, she's alone, and then she's not. That's like a pretty literal example of storytelling using the orchestra and the band kind of as like a rumble pack. There's more sound hitting your body at that moment, but it is a pretty effective way of telling a musical story. Arrangement decisions and key changes can go a long way in how we feel the same lyric over the course of a song. Scott Hanenburg writes about this in his article rock modulation and narrative. Changes of key are influential in shaping our sonic experiences of these songs. Experiences that in turn contribute to our understanding of their lyrical content. Musical features like modulation can clarify an ambiguous lyric, reinforce a song central theme, or subvert a singer's message.

The first several times that we hear the chorus lyric don't want to be by myself anymore. It's in the key of g, and it comes across as kind of a resigned pleading. However, when we get to the chorus before the modulation, when the melody is altered to hit that high e flat, the nostalgia note, the lyric comes across more as, like, the narrator is demanding to not be by herself anymore. And, as we cross the threshold from g major to c major, the e flat becomes a major third. A point of triumphant resolution. And so we feel like the narrator will in fact not be by herself anymore. You get a sense of the strength of the narrator in this moment, and I I literally mean the physical strength of Celine Dion because it requires a lot of breath support and a lot of control to be able to produce this e flat that transforms g major to c flat major in this way. Because music is acting as a rumble pack here, we're literally feeling it, It's a way of turning the bodily sensation into some kind of metaphorical meaning.

Now there are other keys we could travel to in this moment of great transformation, like the key of a flat for example is a good resting point for that e flat. Maybe. Or maybe the key of e flat for example, that also might work. No one feels a bit too literal for my taste, and I I really think that c flat was the right call, and I think there's a good reason for that too. One second. This is one of my favorite books. Harmonic experience by W. A.

Matthew. Matthew is a composer who brought some of the ideas that he learned as a student of North Indian singing into the western harmonic practice, and this book is it's so awesome that John Coltrane blurbs it, like, on the back. Matthew is consistently proving himself to be one of the best in music theory, like John Coltrane. This this book is awesome. One idea offered by the book is that notes have a reciprocal energy to them based on the harmonic relationship back to a fundamental. Now if you need a primer on the harmonic series, Andrew Huang's got you covered, but basically around every fundamental note there are other pitches which are vibrating alongside it based upon mathematical multiples of that fundamental. Some of these extra pitches include the perfect 5th and the major 3rd. Now in the key of g, we would call d the overtonal 5th.

It's a perfect fit up from g. It is an overtone of g. C on the other hand would be the reciprocal 5th. It is a perfect 5th down from g. So if we were to sing the overtonal 5th d, note that I'm singing is a harmonic of the root g. However, if we were to sing the reciprocal 5th, the c, the root of the key, the g is a harmonic of my own singing voice. My own singing voice is the fundamental frequency, and then that root, that home feeling that everybody feels when they listen to the song is a harmonic of me. Like the physical energy and, like, the responsibility of reciprocal intervals is just very different from overtonal intervals if you're trying to sing them in tune with the rest of the band.

If you take for example, an overtonal third, b in the key of g and compare it to a reciprocal third, the nostalgia note, e flat in the key of g, and kind of see what I mean. You might be able to get a sense of where we're going with this. The idea here is that when Celine Dion is singing this high e flat, this reciprocal 3rd, the rest of the band in the key center is a harmonic of her singing voice. And then when the key changes, the polarity shifts and everything has to be recalibrated physically and how the waveforms interact with one another. Recalibrated physically and how the waveforms interact with one another, so that she is now singing a

harmonic to the

rest of the band. There's a pretty profound energy shift here. 4 against 5 becomes 5 against 4. We have crossed the streams, as it were.

Matthew offers a map of emotional affects that traces this emotional energy through the overtonal and reciprocal thirds and 5ths. Pa, the overtonal 5th, is sun energy. Ma the reciprocal 5th is moon energy. Ga the overtonal third is compassion and komu da the reciprocal third is passion. There is one combination of tones that is almost bizarre in its affect. The alternation between ga and komo da. The overtonal and reciprocal thirds. 3rds have a drama in them.

A kind of grain or current. Almost as if you could detect the 5 against 4 working itself out in the fluids and membranes of the ear. When you flip that energy, you are flipping your inner life.

You were talking about the high belted note as being this pinnacle of expression, which is why people belt. If you're belting just to show off, I mean, you'll get the applause because people don't know any better. But but if you want it to ring true, like Dionne's, there is a whole body involvement in it that comes from knowing what that emotion feels like, but then also having an instrument prepared to express it so that the instrument doesn't express the actual angst you feel because then everything closes.

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. You, what is it? You express emotions. You don't feel emotions.

That's a that's a

Well, you have to know how they feel, but you can't feel them in that moment. I know it's young.

On January 14, 2016, Celine Dion's long time husband and manager, Rene Angelil, died of throat cancer. 2 days later, on January 16, 2016, 16, her brother Daniel Dion also died of cancer. February 23rd was the first time that Dion returned to performing at her Las Vegas residency after these dual tragedies in her life. She sang All by Myself, a song whose structure is specifically designed to feel the thought of not being alone. Imagine living this catharsis night after night on that stage for years. Living the story of ritualistically calling out to the heavens and demanding to not be alone anymore. And through the sheer physical power of your voice and the technique that you have developed on your instrument and a clever key changer too. The world around you acquiesces and bends to your will.

Until one night, it doesn't.

Pine,

Now this is where the song changes key. What we call a modulation.

Part of the craft of musicianship is mediating the immediate physical shock of moments of emotional resonance, which is very similar to what stage actors do. You have to embody the emotion in order to convey it authentically without letting it take over. Now unlike stage acting, music is largely a metaphorical language and as such it's a more direct line to experience. If you're telling a story through music, it lets people feel the story immediately. Provided that you share the same cultural and personal references as the storyteller. Things like the nostalgia note, the flat 6 Nostalgia. Go a long way in helping us feel the story of not wanting to be alone. There is even more that we can say about this from the perspective of embodied cognition and singing technique.

That's another thing I found fascinating about Dion's live videos because I've seen my students do this. I certainly did this when I performed as a class musician.

So if you'd like to hear some more of the conversation that I had with my mom on all of this, you can watch the extended version of this video essay exclusively on Nebula. Nebula is a creator owned streaming service where you can watch extended versions of many of my videos ad free. As well as extended versions of many of your favorite YouTube creators including Lindsay Ellis, Legal Eagle, 12 Tone, Mary Spender, Charles Cornell and many many others. Others. It's a great place to watch and discover quality content ad free as well as support your favorite creators. Nebula and this video is supported in part by Curiosity stream, the go to source for the very best documentaries on the internet with thousands of titles to choose from, including the very excellent documentary about the idiosyncratic pianist Glenn Gould. Genius Within. The inner life of Glenn Gould.

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Please.