I Ching: The Book of Chord Changes?

By Ezra Sandzer-Bell

The I Ching is a Chinese method of divination that draws upon the elemental forces of nature as keys to understanding human experience. Techniques vary for deriving a hexagram, but the information is always charted in the same binary system of broken and unbroken lines.

The binary quality of these lines implies masculine and feminine polarities. When three lines are placed together in sequence, a trigram is formed. There are eight possible trigrams derived from broken and unbroken lines. Each trigram is said to represent an archetypal force: Sky, Ground, Water, Fire, wind/wood, mountain, thunder, and lake.

A musical interpretation of the I Ching is easiest in the context of Tonal Harmony. By allowing each line to represent the common interval of a third, with broken as minor and unbroken as major, then a trigram can be interpreted as a 7th chord. The lowest line represents the relationship between tonic and third, the middle line between third and fifth, the top line between fifth and seventh.

Hexagrams are composed of two trigrams, one stacked upon the other. The I Ching is commonly called “The Book of Changes” because the diviner interprets the change of quality between two hexagrams. Within a single hexagram, a study of the relationship between upper and lower trigrams reveals a similar kind of change, as the upper trigram is said to relate and harmonize with the lower.

Continuing with the musical analogy, any of the Seventh Chord trigrams above could be stacked linearly, so that the preceding chord occupies the upper section of a hexagram, and the following chord occupies the lower section.

In sequence, we could say that in 4/4 time, each 2 beat segment of the measure represents one Trigram. Drawing upon “The Nearness of You”, we would say that the first measure is represented by the hexagram Li (Fire/Fire | Maj7/Maj7). Li is followed by the hexagram Chun (Water/Thunder | -7/7).

This opens up new possibilities for musical divination. Like the Rastafarian tradition of Bible Dipping, one could open up a musical score or chord sheet at random and choose their daily meditation.

Just for fun, let’s take a look at the hexagram K’un (Earth/Earth | dim7/dim7). This is an anomalous but fascinating example of crossovers between eastern and western thought, present at the very building blocks of tonality and archetypal thought.

The Diminished 7 chord is composed of three minor thirds, stacked upon each other, which produce two juxtaposed intervals called the Diminished Fifth. In western tonality, the diminished fifth interval is traditionally called “Diabolos en Musica” for its long-time reputation as the devil in music. The church actually made regular efforts to ban this interval from music because of its perceived dissonant, devilish qualities.

So, a study of the I Ching reveals the elemental quality of the Diminished 7th chord to be one of EARTH. We can now study this chord in the context of other non-diminished chords as a process of integrating the Earth element into our holistic understanding of the full-spectrum Tonal System.

Io Pan!