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.