"
The Lost Chord
"The Lost Chord" is a song composed by Arthur Sullivan in 1877 at the bedside of his brother Fred during Fred's last illness. The manuscript is dated 13 January 1877; Fred Sullivan died five days later. The lyric was written as a poem by Adelai ...
" is the title of an 1877 song composed by
Arthur Sullivan
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (13 May 1842 – 22 November 1900) was an English composer. He is best known for 14 comic opera, operatic Gilbert and Sullivan, collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including ''H.M.S. Pinaf ...
.
The phrase arises from musical sounds, in particular purely
harmonic
A harmonic is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the ''fundamental frequency'', the frequency of the original periodic signal, such as a sinusoidal wave. The original signal is also called the ''1st harmonic'', the ...
or nearly harmonic chords that were
"lost" to music with the change to
twelve-tone equal tempered tuning, not yet completed at the time that
Sullivan wrote the song. Modern
microtonal music
Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones—intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of tw ...
ians may use the phrase "lost chord" most often to refers to the
harmonic seventh (a or 7:4 chord) now replaced with a
dissonant
In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive Sound, sounds. Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness ...
equal tempered
minor seventh; a much closer pitch to was formerly available via an
augmented sixth
In classical music from Western culture, an augmented sixth () is an interval produced by widening a major sixth by a chromatic semitone.Benward & Saker (2003). ''Music: In Theory and Practice, Vol. I'', p.54. . Specific example of an A6 not g ...
in
meantone temperament; there are many other "lost chords", such as those from the eleventh () and thirteenth harmonics ().
The Lost Chord may also refer to:
*
''The Lost Chord'' (1917 film), a British film by Wilfred Noy
*
''The Lost Chord'' (1911 film), an Australian film by W. J. Lincoln
*
''The Lost Chord'' (1925 film), a lost American film by Wilfred Noy
*
''The Lost Chord'' (1933 film), a British film by Maurice Elvey
*
"The Lost Chord" (''The Worst Witch''), a 2001 episode of ''The Worst Witch''
* "The Lost Chord", a
2020 episode of the web series ''Song Machine'' by Gorillaz featuring Leee John
* ''
In Search of the Lost Chord'', an album by The Moody Blues, released in 1968
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