Day Eleven: Harmonic Reduction

Beethoven's Sixth. The larger structures of tonal music have at its core a much simpler and more basic harmonic skeleton.

This post is part of 14 Days of Harmony, a free course for musicians who want to deepen their understanding of harmony, and learn how to develop their connection with sound as a result. You can view the entire course here.

Hearing the big within the small. 

The purpose of this lesson is to start putting to use everything that we've learned and apply it to bigger sections of pieces. I think you'll start to see that there are very basic patterns of interconnectedness within any tonal piece of music. 

Just to recap the story so far, we first saw how elemental tones can come together in us to form the smallest level of music: the interval. Then, we built chords and diatonic chord progressions from those 12 tones based on how they all related to one another. We then learned about the expression of a stable tonality with the cadence. Recently, we connected cadences of many different keys through modulation. 

With the exercises, we learned how to build and smoothly connect chords, and discovered…