Songs without Words

When classical music enthusiasts bring up the popularity of the Pachelbel’s Canon chord progression in pop music, they usually would point to songs like Vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)” or Green Day’s “Basket Case.”  But there are also more subtle derivatives which involve slight substitutions, and I wanted to illustrate such an example here using PSY’s 어땠을까 (What Should Have Been), a song from the same album as the more well-known Gangnam Style.

Listen to the demos

We begin with the classic Pachelbel (simplified slightly), in the original key of D:

Next, we simply transpose to Eb major (now played by an electric piano):

Changing the Bb to B natural in measure 2 and D to Db in measure 4 create secondary dominants (with appropriate bassline adjustments to accommodate).  As the Eb bass already appears in m. 4 now, we switch m. 6 to first inversion.  Finally, we change the predominant chord from IV to the related ii.

Now, application of melodic ornamentation and delay of the predominant to dominant chord change in the last measure yields the harmonic component of the beat to “What Should Have Been.”  The hook, as sung by Lena Park in the recording (or Park Bom if you find the live performance on Youtube), is simply a melodic variation of the top line.