Day Six: Internalizing Chords

Build beautiful chord progressions, and then sing them.

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.

Some Perspective on the Tradition of Harmony

We've experienced that a single tone is only useful in a musical context when it forms an interval with another tone. Similarly, a chord is only useful musically when it forms a chord-connection with another group of tones. We see yet again that musical tension is created by juxtaposing two units. During a chord connection, three forces are brought to life within us: the rhythm, melody, and harmony.

Rhythmic. Rhythm, this "all-pervading" element of music, is active each time you sing an interval or play a series of chords. It is impossible to ignore harmonic rhythm. The first sound, and the movement that it creates within us, is connected to each consequent sound as they unfold in time. This fact is part of the life of embodied music. 

Melodic. The intervals between the notes of each voice of a chord connection can be heard as intervals in the horizontal direction. This dimension will be looked at in greater detail during the lesson on cadences and counterpoint. The purpose of learning counterpoint is to be able to think of solutions to musical problems, i.e., to write an interesting cadence.

Harmonic. This is where we're focusing our discussion. Some chords are more stable than others, and each chord connection activates a certain degree of harmonic energy in the ear.

First an important bit of history. The harmony that we're covering is really a style of composition known as the Common Practice Period which covers the late Baroque from about 1650 until the late Romanticism of 1900. This is the era of tonal music. Since the end of the last century we've seen a return to tonal music with contemporary musicians rediscovering new possibilities outside of the style we all study in harmony class. But it is an excellent ground to build on since there is a great amount of inspiration and tradition to draw from. What better way to learn music than directly from the music masters themselves?

All conventional theories of harmony are derived from the major and minor scales, and any chromatic harmony is forced into that rigid system. For composers who wish to dive deeper into vistas not previously seen or heard, keep this perspective in mind. We (western composers) should free ourselves from the diatonic scales, and seek to understand harmony from the point of view of the singular tones offered by the chromatic scale and not major or minor (or even the modal) scales. As I mentioned the best way to do this is by returning to the laws of sound (by listening) and deriving the rules of music from there. As always it depends on your goals, but starting with diatonic fundamental harmony is the way most composers today begin. 

As a conductor, most of the repertoire I studied used the harmonic language of the common practice period. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Earlier music (Renaissance and Medieval) does not fall into that style—that music uses consciousness of the “pure” intervals in a different way. Similarly, chords written by composers after Wagner and Schoenberg can be more easily understood based on their intervals. It seems like those composers thought compositionally was more of the older way, by focusing on pure intervals rather than thinking chordal. The harmony of Debussy marks a significant turn in musical history because of his depth of harmonic understanding, which allowed him to reimagine a new relationship between chords and musical intervals. We can follow his example and liberate ourselves from the cottage of diatonicism and start to hear music based on what we live as stable, as the contrasts and goes against that stability, and as the forces of harmony that build from there.