The Haunting of Figure 8

Schoolhouse Rock was always great. But the music from one particular episode has haunted us down the years.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
This is how music does that.I'm Dale McGowan. When I was a
kid in the nineteen seventies, Iloved interstitial programming. A lot of us
did. Well, didn't know that'swhat it was called, but my brothers
and I would be watching Saturday morningcartoons. One would end, and before
the next one started, you'd geta three minute mini cartoon about math.

(00:24):
Three is a magic moove, Yesit is. It's a magic move.
Somewhere in the ententistic trinity you getthree as a magic move. It was
called Schoolhouse Rock. They were likeSuper Bowl commercials for kids. You're there

(00:49):
for the full cartoons, but nobodyleft the room when Schoolhouse Rock came up
three, six, ninety, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty one,
twenty seven. Eventually they just calledthe math shorts multiplication rock and added grammar

(01:10):
rock, conjunction, junction, what'syour function? Hooking up words and phrases
and clauses conjunction and science rock,computer rock, money rock, Earth Rock,
and America Rock. I'm just abill. Yes, I'm only a

(01:33):
bill, and I'm sitting here onCapitol here. Well, ninety percent of
what gen X knows about how governmentworks is from I'm just a bill,
but I know I'll be a lowsome dast all fan praise that I will.
But to day I am skill justa bill. Jazz composer and pianist
Bob Dura wrote most of the musicand lyrics for Schoolhouse Rock and There's just

(01:57):
a lot of gold there. Buttucked in among the bluesy and jazzy numbers,
it was a melancholy treasure called figureeight figure eight, a double four,

(02:37):
figure four as half of eight.If you skated, you would be
great if you could make I'll figureeight. That's a circle that turns round
upon itself. One time's eight.Figure eight haunted me, mesmerized me from

(03:04):
the beginning. It still does,and I'm not the only one. If
you ski nice, you'd be wiseif you thought twice before you made another
single. Mentioned Schoolhouse Rock to almostanyone between age twenty and sixty, and

(03:27):
they'll start singing I'm just a billor conjunction junction. But ask if they
remember figure eight and nine times outof ten they will gasp and say,
oh, I love that one.Why is that? How could one simple
tune about math wrap itself around ourhearts that way? Now? Because these
are cartoon shorts. The visual isimportant. This animation starts with a school

(03:53):
bus pulling up in front of aschoolhouse in winter. Eight kids, of
course, get out and walk insideas a pensive minor introduction plays on a
Fender Roads electric piano. As thekids enter, a cello comes in.
And that's where things get special.Follow the cello line here, Oh that's

(04:26):
gorgeous. Okay. Now they're inmath class. Everybody's diligently writing, except
for one girl who's daydreaming about four'sand eight's and the relationship between them.
Make you eight this double phone,and then suddenly in her mind she's skating

(04:47):
a figure eight. If you skate, you would be great if you could
make I'll figure The cello, thedaydreaming, the minor key that all contributes
to the emotion, but one thingis mostly responsible for the melancholy feeling.

(05:12):
It's one chord, the second chordin each phrase. Here. That chord,
the second in each phrase, isnot in the key of this piece.
Each key is like a house withseven rooms, seven chords that make
up the key. Each room hasa place in the home, a role

(05:33):
like the kitchen and the bathroom inthe bedroom, and the composer takes you
through these interconnected rooms to create anemotional landscape, telling a story and a
language you don't even know. Youknow, yes, I'm halfway through an
episode about that seven room house,but for now we're in the house of
C minor. The second chord inC minor, the second room in the

(05:54):
house is a D chord D diminished. It sounds like this. This song
could have stayed entirely in the keyof C minor. Most pieces do that.
They draw on the seven chords thatare in the key. That would
have sounded like this. The actualsong did this. You hear that extra

(06:42):
darkness. If we stay in thekey, it still has the minor sadness,
but it's different because it's using onlythe expected chords. It's running through
the rooms of the house of Cminor. But the actual song jumps the
tracks with a D flat major chord. Not only is that chord out of
our key, it's way out ofthe key. It's like dropping a Chinese
word into an English sentence. It'slike coming across a meatball in your ice

(07:04):
cream. Both the Chinese word andthe meatball are lovely in context, but
a little what surprising in the Englishand the ice cream and in the emotional
language of music harmony. This outof place chord, this borrowed chord,
is what it's called borrowed from anotherkey. This chord leaves a quiet mark
on you. You can feel thedarkness of that moment. This one is

(07:30):
called the Neapolitan chord, the onethat's just a half step above the tonic.
And that chord, my friends,is what has haunted us down the
years. And what happens when you'rerunning downstairs and land halfway between two steps
exactly, the difference between landing ona step and landing between steps is everything.
That's what happens to your ear andyour heart in this song. That

(07:55):
chord from another planet, a halfstep above the tonic is called the Neapolitan
chord. And after you've been onthat planet for a bar and you drop
back down to Earth on a Gchord, listen, recognize that relationship.
It's a tritone, the devil inmusic. The harmony has to cross this

(08:15):
very dissonant bridge to get back toEarth, back to C minor, and
that leaves a dark footprint on yourlittle elementary school heart. Longtime listeners might
remember an episode called The Jabberwocky ofHarry Potter very similar idea. Here,
John Williams inserts a couple of completelyalien chords into the main theme of Harry
Potter, and it has the samehaunting quality, even more so in that

(08:39):
case because he has gone really deepin the harmonic well. The key of
Headwick's theme is E minor. That'sthe repeated note at the beginning and E
and all the pitches you're hearing arefrom the E minor scale until right there
you get a B flat followed byan F. Neither of those notes is

(09:01):
in the key of E minor.Not only that they are seriously not in
E minor B flat and f ris harmonically distant from E minor as you
can possibly get. In the commentson the YouTube video for figure eight,
the same two words come up overand over, haunting and melancholy. Dozens

(09:22):
of people say figure eight nearly bringsthem to tears, and some try to
figure out why. Sometimes they creditthe minor key, that's definitely part of
it. Some credit the slow temple, but it's actually not that slow.
It's about one hundred beats per minutewith an active rhythm. In the left
hand. Some ascribe it to nostalgia, but a lot of them recognize that

(09:43):
it hit them just as hard.Back then, nobody ever mentions the harmony
ever now. Schoolhouse Rock was notthe first to discover the melancholy power of
the Neapolitan chord. There was actuallya group of composers in the eighteenth century
called the Neapolitan School, so namedfor the three colors of ice cream in

(10:05):
the school's cafeteria. But it wasan early nineteenth century piano sonata that really
put the Neapolitan on the map.It's Beethoven's haunting melancholy Piano Sonata number fourteen,

(10:37):
Moonlight Sonata. Moonlight Sonata was writtenin eighteen oh one. He's thirty
years old, just breaking out ofclassical style and developing this new, more
adventurous harmonic language that would kickstart Romanticism. So it makes sense that the Neapolitan
cored this haunting, melancholy thing wouldappeal to him, especially for a piece
like this one. I asked chatgpt to find ten adjectives commonly used to

(11:01):
describe Moonlight Sonata. Guess what numberfive was melancholy and number two haunting.
The chord comes back several times inMoonlight Sonata, but it's a place we
gradually drift to, not always rightup against the tonic like it is in

(11:22):
figure eight. But if I playthat intro again and cut out a couple
of bars in the middle, wecan get those two knock and boots still
not hearing it? Okay, howabout this Moonlight is in C sharp minor.
Figure eight is in C minor,so let me drop Moonlight down a

(11:43):
half step. Okay, cut outone chord and stretch another one. Voila.

(12:09):
A couple of generations later, whenWagner wanted to foreshadow the end of
the world in the opera Dos Rheinegold, he took the motif of Erda the
Earth goddess the world turned it upsidedown and put it on the Neapolitan.
That's the World turned upside down.The Neapolitan continues to be a go to
for melancholy for a couple of hundredyears, and not just in classical music.

(12:33):
The Greatest Beatles song of all TimeIf you are a harmony person like
me, also features the Neapolitan.It is God, I love that song.

(13:15):
John made up a weird story aboutthe origin of because that actually ties
it to Moonlight Sonata. One evening, the story goes, the boys were
sitting around and Yoko was playing thepiano and she was playing that first movement
of Moonlight Sonata. And John,so the story goes, said, Yoku
play those golds backwards. Yoko oblige, and John wrote it down the Moonlight

(13:37):
Sonata chords backwards, and it becamebecause except the chords, and because are
not the Moonlight Sonata chords backwards,not in any way, He just made
that up inspired by Sure, thereare definite similarities. They're both in C
sharp minor, they both have aneighth note left hand breaking up the chords.

(14:03):
They both have a neapoltan. Butbecause is if anything more interesting,
more harmonically adventurous than Moonlight Sonata,No surprise there. They had an extra
one hundred and sixty years to thinkabout it. But seriously, listen to

(14:24):
this mind blowing progression in because itsbecause is we're in C sharp minor and

(15:30):
the core they enter on is theneapoton, and the neapolthon hits keep on
coming. The brooding haunting House ofCards theme has a prominent neapoton there and

(15:54):
in the Princess Bride. Whenever wedescend into the pit of despair, you
get a chilling slide from Neapolitan totonic. The Neapolitan chord isn't haunting because
Beethoven and Wagner and the Beatles andBob Dura used it in haunting ways.

(16:17):
They used it because in the emotionallanguage of Western harmony, it is intrinsically
haunting, because it steps momentarily outof the key and into another world.
It can be really hard to hearthe Neapolitan to pick out what it is
that I'm talking about. Don't worryabout that. It takes a lot of
practice to actually hear that alien chorda half step above the tonic. The

(16:41):
much more important thing is that youcan feel it, that it actually has
an emotional impact on you, andknowing that it's there in the toolkit of
the composer, ready to haunt ormesmerize you when the time is right.
It is double fun fig half thething. If you skate, you would

(17:06):
be great if you could make thethink you eamed, that's see you next
time, whenever that may be.For how music does that place it on
inside And it's a symbol meaning Infinity