What is a Chinese Seventh Chord?

Often a quartet will be working on tuning a particularly difficult chord and someone will say, “That’s probably a Chinese Seventh or something.” Nobody really knows what Chinese sevenths are but everybody knows it’s hard to make them sound right, so this could be one, couldn’t it? Actually, it probably isn’t, but the good news is that for most chords you don’t even need to be able to read music to be confident that they’re NOT Chinese sevenths. Let’s see why.

The most-compact barbershop seventh chord consists of the primary note or root, whose position on the musical staff we'll call the first position, the third (two positions up from the root), the fifth (another two positions up), and the seventh (another two positions up.) The first figure shows a G seventh (G7) chord containing the major triad G, B, and D along with the seventh tone, F.

These notes are all displayed on the staff in the same octave but they don't have to be contained within a single octave to still be a barbershop seventh chord. The four notes of a barbershop seventh chord can be set by an arranger in any order desired across the range of the four voices; typically the four-note chords of our barbershop music are spread over about 1½ octaves.

Arranging the four notes in this example – G, B, D, and F – in a different way can dramatically change the way the chord sounds to a listener. For example, if the notes are arranged as shown at left, with G being the highest, then F, then B, then D as the lowest, the chord has an odd, slightly dissonant sound because of the closeness of the F and G. (We're using the usual barbershop grand staff with the small “8” that requires the lead and tenor notes to be sung an octave lower than the music.) Even though the chord has the same notes as the chord in the first figure, rearranging them on the staff in different octaves results in a different sound from that of the first chord. This particular arrangement of the notes is what is called a Chinese seventh.

In general, the notes of a Chinese seventh chord are, from the top: the root, the minor seventh, the third, and the fifth. (You don’t need to understand these names to understand what follows.) The presence or absence of accidentals (i.e., sharps, flats, or naturals attached to a note) isn't related to whether a chord is a Chinese seventh. What makes a seventh chord Chinese is the particular note progression that gives the chord the configuration illustrated in the figure.

It’s not certain how this chord configuration got its name. It may be based on the idea that if you dig straight through the earth you’ll come out in China, where of course everything will be upside-down. Since this chord has its root as the highest note rather than the lowest, it might be considered upside-down, giving rise to the name.

Identifying Chinese sevenths

To identify a chord as a Chinese seventh with certainty you have to be able to recognize what the chord's root note is and that it's a seventh chord, both of which are beyond the scope of this simplified explanation. But because of the Chinese seventh's distinctive appearance in musical notation it's easy to identify candidate chords in our printed music that might be Chinese sevenths and eliminate all the other chords. For example, the top two notes in the chord (regardless of who sings them) have to be on adjacent staff positions. And the bottom two notes have to be five staff positions apart. The vast majority of chords in our barbershop songs do not look like that and therefore can't be Chinese sevenths.

Chinese sevenths are rare

If you’re in a chorus and you look through your music notebook you won’t find many Chinese sevenths. There aren't any in The Old Songs or Keep the Whole World Singing. Only two Barberpole Cat songs contain Chinese sevenths – there’s one F7 in Honey/Little 'Lize (measure 15) and another in Sweet Roses of Morn (measure 24, repeated in 40), as shown below. (Both are in the key of B♭.)

Here are some other occurrences of Chinese sevenths in commonly sung barbershop arrangements:
•    God Bless America: a D7 in measure 41
•    It's a Good Day: E♭7's in measure 8 (repeated in 24 and 56) and an F7 in measure 58
•    Love Letters Straight From Your Heart: a D7 in measure 6
•    Star-Spangled Banner: an E7 in measure 20 ("gave proof")

Chinese sevenths in tags

Chinese sevenths may be rare in the barbershop repertoire but for some reason they appear much more frequently in barbershop “tags.” (Tags are the showy last few measures of songs that barbershoppers sing for the enjoyment of the beautiful harmonies and transitions they contain.) For example, the 116 tags in David Wright’s compilation Classic Tags for Men’s Voices contain 38 Chinese seventh chords! Considering that most of these tags are only about six measures long, this is an extraordinarily high frequency of Chinese sevenths. There must be something about the chord’s sound that makes arrangers want to include it in the most important parts of their songs.

The champion tag for Chinese sevenths has to be one that’s not in David’s book – Aura Lee, arranged by Buzz Haeger. As can be seen below, in the last three measures there are four Chinese seventh chords with three different root notes.

Where can we sing Chinese sevenths?

The Chinese seventh chord is notoriously difficult to balance, in large part because of the potentially dissonant sound of the tenor and lead on adjacent root and seventh tones. In the few occurrences of Chinese sevenths in the barbershop repertoire we're mostly on and off the chord fairly quickly with little opportunity to make the chord sound right. The one song that all barbershoppers know that offers opportunities to try to really balance and ring the chord is the resolution of the word "gleam" in Sweet Roses of Morn (shown above), where twice it’s held for three beats at the end of a phrase. Perhaps the next time we sing this song from our common repertoire we can pause to savor the sound of this rare but peculiarly barbershop chord.

Our Barbershop Brotherhood

I got an email today from Dave Luck, the Music VP and Assistant Director of the Low Country Chorus, the Grand Strand (SC) chapter of the Carolinas District. It started out:  It is with great sorrow that I inform you of the death of Bob Young at 8 a.m. this morning. I had met Bob last summer when, with six months of barbershop experience under my belt, I sang with the chorus for six or seven weeks during our beach vacation.

I went into the living room and started to tell my wife Sylvia that someone from the Low Country Chorus had died but my voice started to waver. I apologized and said that I didn’t know why it had affected me that way – Bob was very welcoming to me and seemed like a good man but I didn’t really know him at all beyond barbershop. Sylvia replied, “But he was still a brother.” And that’s true – he was.

Other men may join in groups because of shared interests in a profession, or in antique cars, or woodworking. We have joined together because of the joy we get (and engender in others) by making our wonderful music together. For some reason this creates a special kind of brotherhood, one that even encompasses our families, and when one of us is lost we all feel that loss.

In our own chorus family we’ve lost both Sam Frankhouser and Nancy Martin in the last few months. We can’t bring our brothers or their wives back. We can’t stop them from continuing to leave us. But we can rejoice that we live our lives in such a way that we’re surrounded by good people like Bob and Sam and Nancy and so many others.

Seventh Chords and "those minor chords"

Barbershoppers start every chorus practice and board meeting by singing The Old Songs, and in the second line we sing about how we "love to hear those minor chords." Yet there aren't any minor chords in the song, and in fact, most barbershop music contains mostly the happy sounds of major chords and few of the sadder sounds of minor chords. So why does this song call out the sound of minor chords when it doesn't have any? The answer requires that we know something about a chord that's characteristic of barbershop music – the seventh chord.

Seventh chords

Seventh chords are named for one particular note they contain – the seventh note. Think of the place on the musical staff where a chord starts as position 1 or the primary note or root or the chord. If you count up the lines and spaces on the staff to position 8 the note there is an octave higher than the primary note. If you only go up to position 7 on the staff that note is called the seventh, and the presence of that note in a chord is what gives it the name seventh chord.

  A simple seventh chord contains the notes in the first, third, and fifth staff positions (called a major triad) plus the note in the seventh position. The first figure shows a C-seventh (C7) chord on a music staff with the key signature of F. It contains the major triad middle-C, E, and G and the seventh note B♭. Of course a B♮ is also on the seventh staff position, and a chord containing that note would have a different sound from the one with the B♭. The interval from the primary C up to B♮ is slightly larger than the interval from the C to the B♭, and consequently the larger interval is called the major seventh and the chord containing it is a major seventh chord. The smaller interval to the B♭ is called the minor seventh.

A major seventh chord has a dissonant, unpleasing sound and is seldom used in barbershop music. (The second figure shows an example of a C major seventh chord containing a B♮.)  A good example of a major seventh chord in popular music occurs in Burt Bacharach's Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. In the first phrase the word "head" is accompanied by an F major seventh chord that is held for a full measure. It provides a transition to a more-usual F dominant seventh chord (see below) that accompanies the entire next measure starting with the word "just."

The chord containing the minor seventh – the B♭ in this example – is called the major-minor seventh or dominant seventh. Unlike the major seventh, the dominant seventh chord is used constantly in barbershop – so much so that it has acquired the name barbershop seventh. (When skillful singers sing a barbershop seventh they tune the chord to slightly different notes from those on a piano or pitch pipe to get the sweetest sound. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this short article.) The seventh chord is so important to the barbershop style that there are strict contest requirements about how much of a song's duration must be comprised of seventh chords.

So what about the "minor chords" in The Old Songs?

Musicians today understand clearly what a minor chord is but a century ago barbershop singers understood it in a different way. As pointed out by Gage Averill in Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony (Oxford University Press, 2003) the minor chords referred to in songs such as Mr. Jefferson, Lord Play that Barbershop Chord (1910) were the dominant seventh chords containing the minor seventh interval that we now call barbershop sevenths.

Now we can understand the words in The Old Songs, which was written in 1921. The "minor chords" it refers to aren't minor chords in the music-theory sense – they're the barbershop sevenths that are in all our songs. So if The Old Songs doesn't have any minor chords in the modern sense, how many minor chords in the old barbershop sense (i.e., barbershop sevenths) does it have?

In the music below for The Old Songs I've marked all the seventh chords. It can be seen that of the 23 chords in the song, 12 are the "minor" (i.e., seventh) chords that the lyrics speak about. In addition, they are comprised of seventh chords based on seven different notes – a veritable banquet of seventh chords in a song about seventh chords!