The second song in Hamilton, “Aaron Burr, Sir,” very conveniently features a chord progression that represents Aaron Burr throughout the show. As I’ve shown with the narrative chord progression associated with the opening number, it is possible for a chord progression to represent ideas. In the case of Aaron Burr, the chord progression represents a person, and that person represents an idea.

Burr’s motto is captured brilliantly in the title of his song “Wait For It.” He hopes to be cautious and slow to action in order to assess the perfect course of action. However, as the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of the good. While Burr is busy not being busy, Hamilton is running circles around him, accomplishing things that make Burr jealous.

How do you make inaction interesting? Appropriately, Miranda composes the Aaron Burr chord progression to maximize a feeling of being stuck. If there is a chord progression that lacks teleology, it’s this one. The chord progression in “Aaron Burr, Sir” is C major, A minor, and E minor. How does a simple chord progression mark him as a man who is stuck and unable to act?

Let’s start with the first chord, C major. “Aaron Burr, Sir” is in the key of C major, so this is what we might call the home chord. C major consists of the notes C, E, and G. It’s standard for a song to start on the home chord, which has no tensions to resolve. And for a person like Burr, this is the right place to begin, at a place of safety and caution.

Then we get to the second chord, A minor. A minor is as close as you can be to C major in feeling at home while still being in a different chord. In fact, A minor is so closely related to C major, it’s called the relative minor, as if A minor is merely the slightly darker shadow of C major. It only has one note different from C major—an A instead of a G. So if you wanted to convey a character that is afraid to leave the home key of C major, the place you’d send him next is A minor.

Finally we get to the third chord, E minor. Now we’re moving away from C major, right? Well, not exactly. Like A minor, E minor is just one note away from C major. E minor consists of E, G, and B. The only note that is different from C major is the B. Of all the basic chords the Aaron Burr chord progression could’ve gone to, Miranda chose the three chords that stayed closest to the home chord and sound the most like it.

The chords C major, A minor, and E minor might sound like a normal chord progression, but I assure you this is strange. According to Hooktheory.com’s database of over 50,000 song chord progressions, there are no Top 10 singles with the Aaron Burr chord progression (and if there are any in the future, I’d have to wonder if they took inspiration from “Aaron Burr, Sir”).

The Aaron Burr progression is made even more strange by the way the chords are unevenly distributed. Typically, a satisfying chord progression would be four chords in total. It’s the reason why the four-chord song is such a cliché in pop. However, the Burr progression is a three-chord progression, even though structurally we still expect four chords. It’s an uneasy feeling that feeds into Miranda’s intent to make Burr’s music “asymmetrical.” This means that that third chord, E minor, is forced to linger twice as long as the other chords in the song to make up for the absent fourth chord. The Burr progression is quite literally making us wait for a chord that never arrives, the perfect musical metaphor for Burr’s mindset.

The absence of that fourth chord is something that eventually gets filled in with a bassline melody. We hear it for the first time when Hamilton says, “He looked at me like I was stupid. I’m not stupid.” Underneath this lyric, the bass walks stepwise E-D-E-F-E-D-C. When you add in the entire bassline from the preceding measure, the Burr bassline basically walks down the entire major scale from C to C. To see what I mean, imagine the upward scale from The Sound of Music (“do re mi fa so la ti do”) but backwards going down (“do ti la so fa mi re do”), and you get the picture. The downward scale acts as a descending bassline, which is an important concept in the show and in music history to convey a sense of grief or despair. Burr’s trajectory, if he has one, is downward.

This is mirrored in the way Burr’s chords travel from a positive-sounding major chord (C major) to negative-sounding minor chords (A minor and E minor). The idea that a major chord is positive and a minor chord is negative is a relatively simplistic way to view this in music theory. In some contexts, a major chord might seem sad or a minor chord happy. But the value of a composer using a specific type of chord is that they can draw upon the shared associations we all have with those chords. Miranda is cognizant of both how these chords make us feel and how he can use them to accentuate the drama. In the Burr progression, Miranda is playing into our expectations: Downward is generally perceived as more negative than upward. Minor is generally perceived as more negative than major. And the Burr progression is aligned with both, which makes sense, because Burr is an antihero. He says right in the opening number, “I’m the damn fool that shot him.”

Miranda knows that in order to tell this story in the most impactful way, Burr can’t just be somewhat different from Hamilton. He must be diametrically different. This is sometimes known in storytelling as a foil, a character whose purpose is to highlight or contrast the protagonist. In other words, the dialectic works best if the two sides are presented as being flip sides of the same coin. Burr talks less, but Hamilton has to holler to be heard. Burr waits, but Hamilton is working nonstop. Burr is a privileged and rich American, but Hamilton is a bastard immigrant. The list goes on. What this amounts to musically is that casting Burr in a minor chord trajectory will make Burr sonically distinct, while giving Hamilton the opportunity to create contrast when he has his very positive-sounding upward-bound “I want” song, “My Shot.”

Howard Ho is a playwright and composer based in New York City. His published plays include Reset, End of the Line, and Beethoven’s Third. He is also the YouTuber behind the popular series “How Hamilton Works,” featured on his channel Howard Ho Music, where his many video essays analyzing musical theatre songwriting have garnered him more than 130,000 subscribers.