“Chords of Inquiry”: Alternate Guitar Tunings, Harmony, and Text-Music Relations in Joni Mitchell’s Early Songs

Abstract In the 2003 documentary Woman of Heart and Mind, Joni Mitchell states, “Chords are depictions of emotions. These chords that I was getting by twisting the knobs on the guitar until I could get these chords that I heard inside that suited me, they feel like my feelings. You know, I called them, not knowing, chords of inquiry.” In investigating Mitchell’s music, we address the integration of guitar, harmony, and expression of feeling exemplified by “chords of inquiry.” We take as a corpus her early songs from 1968 to 1972 in which she accompanies herself on guitar. Our study extends prior scholarly research and practical guitar lore by first offering a systematic, affordance-based integrative approach to Mitchell’s use of alternate guitar tunings and their attendant chord shapes. We then show how her approach to the guitar influences text-music relationships in selected songs. Central to our analysis is “expressive opposition,” that is, her creation of analogs between oppositions in her lyrics and oppositions manifested in her performed chord shapes and fretboard.