IMPORTANT: There is only one way to read this document! Download the PDF above. The following text is a very minor taste of the scope of the 30-page document.

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.

Since her surprise appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 2022, Joni Mitchell seems to be doing everything, everywhere, all at once. Her winning the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2023, the Grammy for best folk album in 2024, and performing in concert with guest musicians including Brandi Carlile, re- present some of the most obvious signs of a new phase in her artistic life. To critics and fans alike, Mitchell ranks among the most important, creative, and lauded North American singer-songwriters of the past sixty years. Given her stature and the vast cornucopia of books, articles, inter- views, and performance videos centered on her and her work, why does Mitchell's music remain under-investigated in so many ways?

Our response to this question inspires the central aim of this article: her approach to the guitar. Indeed, there has been surprisingly little scholarship devoted to her guitar playing. Moreover, the extant research has largely related a consistent and tightly wound narrative, beginning with her contracting polio as a child; then the consequent weakening of her hands and its impact on her guitar technique, especially, her left-hand limitation to playing simple chord shapes; then her deployment and expanded use of non-standard alternate - ling her to play more complex chords with simple fingerings; and finally the evolutionary progression of her alternate tunings from simple open-string major triads to more complex tuning configurations.

This narrative is not inaccurate, as far as it goes. Its limitations stem from the relatively narrow focus on exclusively musical parameters, especially harmony and tunings, and on the physical constraints imposed on Mitchell's guitar technique. The fact that these concerns are inseparable from the expressivity of her music has received relatively little attention. In virtu- ally all interviews in which Mitchell discusses her guitar playing, musical and expressive elements are interwoven. In order to investigate Mitchell's early songs and their depth of poetic and musical expression, we need to account for the interactive net- work of relationships grounding her approach to the guitar, as well as their expressive ramifications. Our approach extends prior scholarship by (1) bridging the gulf between practical and scholarly approaches to Mitchell's guitar playing, (2) referencing a sufficient corpus of songs to enable a systematic approach to her alternate guitar tunings and their attendant features, and (3) developing conceptual frameworks to better understand how Mitchell's relatively simple technical means can produce complex musical and expressive outcomes.

Example 1 shows three broad interrelated concepts that help address Mitchell's guitar craft and her musical expressivity: "chords of inquiry" (a term she coined), affordance, and expressive opposition. The concept of chords of inquiry is central to Mitchell's integration of harmony and feeling. The concept of affordance may be considered as the hub for three important components of her guitar playing - alternate guitar tunings, their resultant chord shapes, and the movement of these shapes on the fretboard. Expressive opposition in Mitchell's poetic themes and their musical correlates represents the core principle informing our analysis of text-music relations in her songs. We shall discuss affordance and expressive opposition in setting forth our methodology in Part 1. We begin with chords of inquiry, which, since it is Mitchell's own concept and term, sup- ports our aim to use her musical commentary, where possible, as a point of departure.

Mitchell has described chords of inquiry on multiple occasions throughout her career. In a retrospective documentary, she notes:

For years, everyone said, "Joni's weird chords, Joni's weird chords." And I thought, How can there be weird chords? 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. They had a question mark in them. There were so many unresolved things in me that those chords suited me. You know, I'd stay in unresolved emotionality for days and days.

Here she articulates important elements of her creative process and her general concept of harmony in relation to the guitar: the use of alternate tunings as a conduit through which these sonorities are expressed; the inseparability of harmony and feeling; and the linkage between unresolved emotions and unresolved chords. In an earlier interview, she offers a more detailed description:

Chaka Khan once told me my chords were like questions, and in fact, I've always thought of them as chords of inquiry [...]. For instance, a minor chord is pure tragedy; in order to infuse it with a thread of optimism you add an odd string to the chord to carry the voice of hope. Then perhaps you add a dissonant [sic] because in the stressful society we live in dissonance is aggressing against us at every moment.

In this statement, Mitchell hints at how chords can convey emotions in a more nuanced way than minor/major depicting sad/happy, specifically through the addition of harmonic extensions ("an odd string") and/or dissonance. Implicit in both statements is the role of opposition in defining an expressive context: e.g., chords of inquiry necessarily stand out in relation to more normative chords of non-inquiry.

How did Mitchell come to these insights in creating her guitar parts? While we cannot fully address this issue here, her guitar "origin story" provides some clues. As documented on the Joni Mitchell Archives, Volume 1: The Early Years (1963‒1967) (hereafter JMA1), Mitchell began her career as a professional musician by accompanying herself on baritone ukulele. Sometime between 1963 and early to mid-1965, she bought her first guitar and taught herself to play from The Folksinger's Guitar Guide: An Instruction Record by Pete Seeger, released in 1955 by Folkways Records, and its accompanying manual.4 Judging by her early guitar performances on JMA1, Mitchell took away from Seeger's guide three important foundational guitar techniques: playing common folk-guitar chords and progressions in standard guitar tuning (SGT); using basic finger- picking patterns; and, significantly, playing in common alternate guitar tunings (AGTs) used in traditional blues and folk music. For the latter, Seeger begins with "Drop D," minimally altering SGT by lowering the bass 6th string from E to D. He then lowers the 5th and 1st strings for "Open G," where the open strings play a G-major chord (DGDGBD). Seeger encouraged guitarists to experiment with AGTs besides the ones he demonstrated: "Now the student can easily experiment with other tunings. The advantage of using them is the special effects you can gain thereby."

Despite Mitchell's downplaying of Seeger's role in her development as a guitarist, clearly she extended his instruction in creative ways. Besides her significant expansion of the number of alternate tunings, even her earliest songs in Open G far exceed Seeger's simple demonstration in their exploitation of harmonic, melodic, and timbral affordances of the tuning.6 Equally important is her discovery that simple fingerings or chord shapes for triads and seventh chords from standard tuning (a.k.a. "cowboy chords") could be exported to alternate tunings to create a wide array of harmonic ex- tensions and dissonances, thereby enabling chords of inquiry.

Our article addresses salient technical and expressive aspects of Mitchell's guitar playing and their integration in her early songs. Part 1 of this article builds on prior scholarship that dis- cusses her approach to the guitar, as well as on her own trenchant observations. For the presentation of our conceptual framework, we begin with a short exposition of James J. Gibson's concept of affordance and its musical adaptation by Jonathan De Souza; we then briefly review poetic and musical concepts relevant to our methodology that are found in the work of Lloyd Whitesell, Daniel Sonenberg, Timothy Koozin, and Matthew Jones. In engaging the technical side of Mitchell's guitar craft, we focus on three interactive pillars: AGTs, chord shapes, and fretboard movement. Taking as a corpus her thirty-four guitar-based songs from the period 1968 - 1972 (during which she recorded her first five studio al- bums), we offer a model for organizing all of the AGTs Mitchell employs into tuning families based on her own criteria. We then provide a consistent classification system for chord shapes connected with her AGTs and introduce the concept of chord-shape types; our system thereby moves beyond the common generic description of Mitchell's "simple chord shapes." Finally, we turn to fretboard routines, our term for her efficient motion along the fretboard. Each of these pillars is illustrated by a short musical example. Part 2 explores selected aspects of two songs: "I Don't Know Where I Stand" (1969/©1967) and "Just Like This Train" (1974/©1973).7 Here we employ the ideas previously introduced, including chords of inquiry, affordance, and guitar-based opposition, to investigate the stunning range and depth of expression in the combined lyrics and music. We should note that the example of "Just Like This Train" slightly extends our timeframe for what count as Mitchell's early songs. Because it employs the same AGT as three earlier songs dating back to 1968, its inclusion enables us to compare Mitchell's treatment of the tuning as her style changes. Our analysis will demonstrate that "Train" moves be- yond her early songs, including "I Don't Know Where I Stand," both musically and expressively, signaling a more ambitious and sophisticated stage in her songwriting.

PART 1. A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO MITCHELL'S ALTERNATE TUNINGS, CHORD SHAPES, AND FRETBOARD ROUTINES Why is it important to study Mitchell's tunings, affordances, chord shapes, and fretboard motion in analyzing her early songs?

What does examining her music from this perspective do that other approaches don't? These are pertinent questions in under- taking a systematic approach to Mitchell's guitar performance and its structural and expressive function in her songs. To answer them, we develop five theoretical strands from prior scholarship: affordance and its musical adaptation for analytical purposes; Mitchell's "polarity of freedom" as poetic theme; the analytical salience of Mitchell's guitar performance; expressive opposition in guitar voicings; and Mitchell's guitar-tuning families.9 Ecological psychologist Gibson formulated the concept of affordance in researching visual perception, offering an alternative to prevailing cognitivist approaches:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the ani- mal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment... .

An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective- objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.

Gibson's reconsideration of perception as a dynamic and complementary relationship has proven attractive to music the- orists.11 It involves modeling the interaction of a sentient subject with an environment and its relevant features, e.g., performing musicians and their instruments.

In his groundbreaking 2017 book Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, Jonathan De Souza brings together a wide range of disciplines in applying Gibson's affordance theory to the relationship between musician and instrument. He presents the musician as an expert perceiver and executor, interacting with an instrument amenable to a wide range of techniques and sonic possibilities; he stresses the inseparability of musician and instrument, and the complementarity of their interactions.

De Souza extends Gibson's idea of affordance by adding two concepts relevant to Mitchell's approach to the guitar, namely, enactive landscape and idiomaticity. The term "enactive land- scape" comes from cognitive scientist David Kirsh. De Souza uses it to address a difficult issue for affordance theory - why some affordances are exploited and others are not, and what fac- tors determine their selection (or rejection):

An object's affordances are potentially endless. A chair never forces me to sit in it. I could stand on the chair in- stead. I could hide behind it. I could use it as a doorstop, an end table, a clothes horse, or a music stand [...].

If affordances are theoretically innumerable, why are certain uses of an object preferred over others? [...] To this end, David Kirsh offers the idea of the "enactive land- scape," a set of affordances that are activated for an agent. In other words, an enactive landscape is a space of possibilities, in which technology and technique coevolve.

The notion of an enactive landscape conceives affordance as a space where uses of an environmental object may or may not be activated by a human actor. However, it does not adequately address the factors underlying the selection of afforded uses within a musical context. Enter "idiomaticity":

From an ecological standpoint, idiom must involve both instrumental affordances and players' habits [...]. The instrument itself does not give rise to an idiom. The idiom is realized in players' overlearned actions, in the ways they typically move through an instrumental space, revealing some affordances and concealing others.

While De Souza does not provide a concrete definition of the term "idiomaticity," we understand it as the interaction between an instrument's sound production capabilities and a performer's attributes - physical strengths and limitations, musical back- ground, influences, and so forth - in choosing which affordances to activate. Idiomaticity represents the process through which these elements coalesce in creating a distinctive musical profile.

We propose that the concept of affordance helps illuminate Mitchell's idiomatic employment of AGTs. In addressing her unique and complex relationship to the guitar, we extend De Souza's approach to affordance in three ways. First, we include Mitchell's childhood polio and its aftereffects under the umbrella of her individual enactive guitar landscape. In so doing, we choose affordance theory, as opposed to disability studies or other disciplines, as a perspective through which to address her guitar craft.14 Second, we consider her AGTs within an affordance framework by conceiving of them - both as a group and individually - as a kind of environment that both enables and is influenced by a tuning's associated chord shapes and motion on the fretboard. Third, we add chords of inquiry to the investigation of affordances within a given tuning. This too is inspired by De Souza, who writes in his introduction that his "analyses - which compare various styles of harmonica playing - suggest that idioms emerge at the nexus of instrumental 'sweet spots' and players' embodied habits."15 Our inclusion of chords of inquiry in that nexus adds another dimension to the concept of affordance: Mitchell's lyrics and their representation of feelings. That is, as is suggested by her commentary quoted above, Mitchell's experimentation with AGTs becomes inter- twined with their potential for expressing emotion.

Lloyd Whitesell's 2008 book The Music of Joni Mitchell re- mains a foundational source for its deep insight into her lyrics and music. Whitesell identifies Mitchell's complex and conflicted perspective on personal freedom as a central thematic concern:

The pull of freedom in its multiple guises forms a grand theme running through Mitchell's songwriting. Right from the beginning, however, we feel the tug of a counterweight. Imagery of weaving, dancing, dreaming, and flying is tangled up with imagery of entrapment, stone (hardening, sinking), hollowness, and illusion. Musical gestures play with contrapuntal possibilities of constraint and release, elation and deflation. Following a dialectical way of thinking that remains characteristic, Mitchell expresses the urge to be free as a tension between love and solitude, idealism and worldliness, abstract yearnings and concrete realities. It is this skeptical turn of mind, her attraction to polarity and contradiction, that enables Mitchell to explore such rich sources of significance in her chosen thematic domains.16

Here, Whitesell states two key ideas, one poetic, the other musical. The first is the grand theme of the polarity of freedom, which is really a set of themes that have this core notion as a common element. The second is Mitchell's employment of musical gestures that express this theme. Subsequently, in his chapter titled "Harmonic Palette," Whitesell specifies these musical gestures, focusing on modes - specifically, the "mixture" of diatonic modes and polymodality - as fundamental to Mitchell's musical practice. Modality, chromaticism, polyto nality, and tonic pedal points are the categories of harmonic organization through which he filters her songs.17

In an otherwise glowing review of Whitesell's book, composer-theorist-guitarist Daniel Sonenberg raises two related issues: (1) the debatable salience of modality for explicating Mitchell's harmony and (2) Whitesell's insufficient consideration of her guitar performance and alternate tunings.

Regarding the necessity of a performance-based perspective, Sonenberg writes:

Though Mitchell's modal practices are eye-raising [sic] in the context of traditional Western tonal practice, Whitesell does not comparatively situate them in the con- text of rock, where adherence to a small body of standard guitar chord fingerings has made so-called polymodality more the rule than the exception. It may indeed be true that Mitchell's modal wanderings are more prolonged or extreme than those of her contemporaries, but without comparison it is difficult to know how to weigh the category. Additionally, Mitchell is perhaps most famous - musically speaking - for her own approach to the guitar, in which she retunes the instrument for nearly every one of her compositions. The harmonic and timbral implications of such "twiddling," as Mitchell calls the practice, would seem to be equally important as Whitesell's categories, but goes largely untreated.18

In his 2003 dissertation on Mitchell's early music, Sonenberg takes a critical preliminary step in discussing her approach to the guitar. Though he limits his investigation to one chapter and one analysis (of the 1968 song "I Had a King"), he touches on several important topics: the structural potential of the song's unusual tuning; the linkage between tuning and chosen chord fingerings; the correlation of the guitar part, formal structure, and vocal line (melody and register); text-music relations (though this is somewhat underemphasized); and Mitchell's use of both traditional and more exotic alternate tunings on her debut album, Song to a Seagull.19 In short, Sonenberg regards Mitchell's approach to the guitar as equal in importance to Whitesell's abstract (non-guitar- based) structural features. Our conceptual framework and analytical application take Sonenberg's study as a jumping-off point.

At first glance, Timothy Koozin's 2011 article "Guitar Voicing in Pop-Rock Music" seems to have little connection to Mitchell's early music: There are no examples from her songs, and his focus on pop-rock genres, standard tuning, and electric guitar performance would not be appropriate for the songs we discuss. Nonetheless, he offers a concept that is relevant to our linking of Mitchell's poetic themes and the performative gestures that animate her guitar playing: expressive opposition. Writing from the perspective of theorist and performing guitarist, Koozin explores the physical and aural distinction between open chords and barre chords and how this distinction has important expressive implications.

Much more in the PDF...