A particular chord has appeared in my music with remarkable consistency for over twenty years. I first used it deliberately in the summer of 2005 as the opening sonority in my children’s anthem Teach Me Your Way (Choristers Guild, 2006), written for my son. Since then, the chord has appeared across my choral music, piano and instrumental hymn settings, hymn tunes, and hymn accompaniments, often at moments associated with love, grace, faithfulness, peace, divine presence, or profound wonder. Recently, I have come to think of it as the “Love” chord.
The sonority is a first-inversion major chord with an added second. Think of a C(add2) chord: I most often voice it E-C-D-G, placing the added second directly beside the root within the chord rather than above it as a decorative extension. The voicing is deliberate. The third in the bass softens the stability of the triad, while the close placement of the root and second creates an intrinsic warmth within the harmony itself. Though the chord may appear in different registers, I almost always preserve this basic relationship between the notes.
I do not generally think of the chord in functional terms. (This is a topic for another essay, but a quick inventory of its harmonic uses would include: I, IV, V, and ♭VII.) Its significance for me lies in the sonority itself rather than in its role within harmonic progression. I hear it as luminous. Even within larger harmonic movement, it creates a localized sense of stillness and inwardness. Most often it occurs in quieter passages, though not exclusively. In recent years I have found it appearing in brighter and more rhythmic passages, suggesting that its expressive possibilities may be broader than I first understood.
What interests me most now is not simply the chord itself, but how its recurrence has begun to shape compositional decisions at a deeper level of musical continuity. Composers often discover recurring elements in their music before fully recognizing them. Certain melodic turns, textures, spacings, patterns, or harmonic colors return instinctively over many years, eventually becoming part of what contributes to the sense of coherence in a composer’s work. These habits are rarely planned. More often, they emerge through repetition and only later become consciously understood.
In my own writing, this has become increasingly evident not only in isolated instances, but in the way the chord functions as a recurring point of expressive focus. When I wrote Teach Me Your Way, I was not trying to establish a signature sonority. I simply felt that the chord carried a tenderness appropriate to both the text and the dedication. Looking back, it is striking that it first appeared in music written for my son. Even then, the sonority carried associations of affection, warmth, and nearness that I would come to understand only later.
Over time, the sonority began to surface in contexts with striking expressive similarities, often underscoring important words or phrases from the text. One early occurrence of this is at the climactic moment of my SATB choral anthem More Love to Thee (Beckenhorst, 2015). Here the sonority appears simultaneously in both voices and accompaniment within a fortissimo climax that culminates in the text, “More love to Thee, O Christ, to Thee!” before the anthem’s closing Amen.
In 2016, I wrote an instrumental setting of the devotional hymn, “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go” (Shaw Music, 2016). The sonority is heard in the accompaniment near the close of the first and final stanzas, at a clear culminating midpoint of the final textual line (“And from the ground there blossoms red / life that shall endless be”). Situated within a progression of root-position chords, the sonority brings a heightened beauty and expressive intensity to the cadence.
Sometime in 2021, it appeared prominently in my piano arrangement of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” published in the collection Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing: 12 Hymn Settings for Piano (MorningStar Music, 2021). There the chord occurs near the close of the refrain on the word “faithfulness,” where the repetition of the phrase allows the sonority to linger. The harmony does not function as dramatic tension requiring resolution; instead, it operates as a stabilizing arrival point, deepening the sense of assurance, trust, and repose already present in the hymn.
In 2022, Concordia Publishing House commissioned me to write an original hymn tune (GOD WITH US), with accompanying 2-part anthem, for Jaroslav J. Vajda’s Christmas text, “Peace Came to Earth,” released as part of a digital resource for churches in 2023. I later expanded the 2-part choral setting into an SATB anthem, Peace Came to Earth (Concordia, 2026).
The “Love” chord is found several times throughout both the hymn tune and the choral anthem. Perhaps the clearest examples are on the words “love” in the opening stanza (“And God embodied love and sheathed His might”) and “embrace” in the final stanza (“How else could I embrace You, O my God”). Because the hymn text repeatedly invokes the name “Immanuel,” meaning “God with us,” I have sometimes wondered whether the sonority’s close spacing contributes to its suitability here, with the added second placed directly beside the chord’s root creating a sense of musical nearness.
Most recently, the chord appears in a hymn accompaniment for “Crown Him with Many Crowns” included in Easy Hymn Accompaniments for Piano, Book 3 (Shaw Music, 2026). There it underscores “Lamb” in the opening phrase, “Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon His throne,” and later returns in a far brighter and more celebratory context on the word “hail” in the verse’s final line. This setting helped me realize that the sonority is not limited to solemn passages, but participates in both contemplative and celebratory moments. Even within grand, triumphant passages, though, the chord retains something unmistakably familiar to me.
Looking back across these works, I realize that this sonority is one of the quiet constants in my music. I never meant to build a compositional identity around a particular chord, but across decades of writing, the “Love” chord gradually gathered meaning through repeated association. It became linked with ideas of love, grace, faithfulness, presence, and peace. At the same time, it also became part of the sound world I most naturally inhabit as a composer.
Perhaps that is how many personal musical languages are formed—not through deliberate invention, but through the slow recognition of the sounds to which a composer continually returns. Over time, certain harmonies, certain movements cease to function merely as materials and begin to carry memory, association, and expressive meaning. For me, this small four-note sonority has gradually become all of those things.
© 2026 Timothy Shaw. All rights reserved.