Day Ten: Modulation Practice

Modulations are central to the art of tonal music. This article can get you started.

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.

This lesson builds upon the first lesson which you can find here: Modulation

Hearing and writing modulations

A modulation guides the ear smoothly from one tonality to another.

The exercise is where you progress from one tonic to a different tonic without any jumps or gaps in-between. It’s a bit like the 12 tone exercise in the sense that you're guiding the ear with the tones and working with the fifths at a deep and creative level.

A modulation is not necessarily a key-change. In a composition, modulations could take place before a key change, or during the development of a form, and writing a modulation is more than a way to replace one key with another. The practice is almost elemental in the way that it connects us to how music could be heard, built, expressed.

When li…