Day Thirteen: Hearing and Analysis

Through analysis, you learn the way to hear a piece of music. Musical example is transition harmony of first movement of Beethoven’s 7th.

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.

The purpose of this lesson is to teach you how to analyze any tonal piece of music, and in doing so, understand the possibility of writing or performing one yourself. 

The work of re-familiarizing yourself with the inner feeling of the intervals and diatonic chord progressions can now be put to use when analyzing a piece of music with the goal of finding out how it articulates, how it breathes. For example, you know how an interval of a fourth feels like, and how the movement from the tonic to its subdominant feels like. 

In musical analysis these feelings that emerge from foundations are the most important aspects to pay attention to. These feelings are what give life to the piece, and you'll see that these are the most permanent structures that we take with us. Very often we don't "remember" the notes of a piece after we hear it, but we remember how the tonal relations made us feel.

We've already considered why and how those feelings arise by considering the elemental and striking nature of stable tones, which is itself a contrast from the sounds we normally hear. Then as we delved deeper into the notion of musical contrasts we built chord progressions, cadences, and modulations, all while finding the origin of musical tension in the intervals. The smallest musical structures will continue to provide you with experiential information into how the larger musical forms and structures are built. 

In practice, what are some different types of musical analysis and how can you apply it to become more creative and musical?

Reduction is just one type of harmonic analysis. 

1. There is the popular harmonic analysis with Roman numerals, which expresses the relationship through diatonic chord progressions. We mainly used this approach in the Bach chorales since it is music in one key that relies on diatonic chords. The usefulness with this approach is limited in different kinds of music though. As an example, certain chords sound ambiguous and aren't necessarily "attached" to a stable key, so expressing that with a scale degree number wouldn't have an advantage.

2. Harmonic analysis with chord names is probably a much better and more useful type of analysis. Simply labeling the name of the chord by finding the root of the chord is one of the best ways to find the stable notes of a composition. You can then find out how the stable points themselves are related in other parts of the piece. With this you can analyze music from Bach all the way to Bartok and beyond by calling the chord by what the ear hears as the most stable note. It's the most flexible way of harmonic analysis and still allows you the freedom of expressing the chord relations with the chord names. 

How do you find the root and name of any chord?

Conventionally we're taught to organize the notes being analyzed into stacked thirds and inverting the pitches to find the root. This way is limited because even if you've found the "root" in this way, the root can be subject to various interpretations.

What's better musically is to find the perfect fifths and fourths in the chord. As you know from the harmonic series (and from the experience of hearing a single tone) the fifth is the first new tone above the fundamental that supports it. If there is a fifth in the chord, then the lower tone of the fifth is the root of the chord. Conversely, if there is a fourth in the chord, then the upper tone is the root of the chord. This is highly useful. If there are two fifths in a chord (D-A-E), then the lowest root is the root of the entire chord. If there is no fifth, then use another consonant interval like a third and apply the same principle to find the more stable tone. Usually what I do is skip ahead in the piece to the next chord where there is a fifth. Then, I work backward and find out the harmonic impacts and resolutions that guide the ear the stability of that particular fifth.

3. Phrase analysis is probably one of the most important ways of musical analysis that relies on underlying harmony, because it's the most useful to us. It is not theory for theory's own sake. It is for the active listener, the performer, the composer. It is using a firm understanding of music theory to understand how it was possible for the composer to hear the sound relations and live the structured sound, with all of its disparate elements, as a unified experience. The essential question being asked with this type of analysis is, "For me, where does the new phrase begin?"