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 listening, find the stable chords. Circle them, if you want. Each chord has a purpose to guide the ear. Look for the big structures in the modulation first. The beginning and end are stable points; try to find how the points of stability are connected in the middle. Ask yourself, where does each phrase end and begin? 

Eventually, and with the help of looking at the scores, you'll start to hear that each of the notes are constantly changing depending on their relation to so many things: the roots of the chord, tension and dissonance, on where each voice in the chord is leading. 

The modulations will activate every musical parameter, and writing one will first require your knowledge of cadences and chord progressions. 

Here are 6 modulations—5 new and 1 old—that all try to achieve the same goal: a smooth progression of chords from one established tonality to another. 

The function of the pivot chord 'turns' from being past-oriented to future-oriented once it is in the past. The Bb-F fifth in the IV6 chord reorients the ear to F, bringing the D minor along with it long after it is heard.

C major to F major via D minor.

This is the modulation we built in our last lesson (which you can check out again by clicking here).

It’s the same modulation as the one above.

Figure 1. The three moments of the modulation: opening tonality, neutral field, and final tonality. Two main moments of tension: the A major (yellow) and the G minor 7 (blue). The G minor is relatively less of a harmonic contrast than the A major.

Listen to the D minor. Can you hear the same chord in two keys at different times? Can you hear it switch from being heard as the ii of C, to then connecting to F? The revolution happens with only three chords.

Explode to the open position with intervals

Even though the modulation is written in the closed position, I usually think of it in the open position, with each voice singing a horizontal line, and only when sung together can they articulate the full harmony. 

Figure 2. The same modulation in the open position. All chord roots are labeled red, and the interval of the other voices to the root is indicated on some of the notes. Try hearing harmony in this way. 

Part of the reason why the A major chord (V/ii) is relatively unstable compared to everything that came before it is because the root is in an upper voice, no longer in the bass. 

Similarly, the soprano sings three F's in a row, but each F changes its function based on the root of the harmony underneath. Try and hear those changes in the quality of the soprano voice as it moves from an unstable seventh to resolving down to F functioning as a more stable third in the chord, to an open sounding fifth attached to the Bb, and finally to the root of the new central tonality. This is the key to understanding how to properly phrase and play a modulation.

The pivot is where the function of the chord changes inside the note. Nothing changes in the vibration itself, and yet the sound of the chord, from relating to C to relating to F happens after the chord connection from the D minor to the ii65 of F. It's as if the musical time of the D minor in the moment of the ii65 goes from flowing to the future, to flowing to the past.

The Renaissance Connection

The moments of tension and release articulates similar to how Lasso treated dissonances and consonances in his cadences. The dissonant chords are approached by consonant chords, and the resolutions are placed in descending order leading to stability. 

With this analysis, I hope you approach the remaining modulations in the same way. And further, you can begin to see all written music with this degree of living interconnectedness which can always be found rooted in our very experience.