Music Theory &
Harmony: The Key To Understanding How Music Works!
It's a sad fact that most people, including piano
players, regard music theory and harmony as some abstract concept that has very
little to do with the songs they play on their pianos. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Knowing music theory and harmony is the key to opening a whole
new world of exciting insights into the songs we play, and enable us to do
things on the piano we never dreamed we could do, to say nothing of enjoying the
process a hundred times more.
What is music theory, and how
can I benefit?
Here are just a few of the wonderful skills and
insights a person benefits from by learning music theory:
- How notation works -- a huge advantage in sight-reading.
- The hierarchy of rhythm -- solving rhythm problems before they begin.
- All kinds of scales -- the "ladders of notes" every song is composed of.
Major scales, 3 types of minor scales, chromatic scales, whole tone scales,
modal scales.
- How transposition and modulation works -- playing songs in different keys,
and getting from one key to another smoothly.
- Complex time signatures, and what they tell you.
- Perfect, major & minor intervals -- helps ear training greatly.
- Two-part and four-part harmony.
- Figured bass such as IV, V7, ii6, I6/4, etc. and how it relates to chord
symbols such as Fm7, F6, Dmaj7, etc.
- Harmonizing melodies with all these chords.
- Open & close voicing, inversions, secondary chords, form, cadences,
non-harmonic tones, arranging for voices, arranging for brass, arranging for
strings, transposing instruments, key relationships and many other exciting
insights into the inner workings of music!
But what is harmony?
H
armony is a sub-set of music theory. It is a
series of notes in combination, played simultaneously. Listen to your favorite
songs, and pay close attention to the back-up vocals when they're being sung
along with the lead. Can you hear how the two vocal melodies differ in pitch?
That's harmony, and it's highly possible that those back-up vocalists were
chosen because of their strong ability to harmonize.
Singing a harmony, or rather picking one out on your
own without written sheet music, is an almost inherent musical skill that many
singers would die to possess. But harmony isn't just the province of singers;
it's found in every single area of music. Any time a sound is layered on top of
another sound and those sounds match each other in rhythm and melody (but not
pitch), a harmony is created.
Harmony is made of intervals, and as such, it
can be considered dissonant (scratchy, uncomfortable, like playing an E and an F
at the same time) or consonant (pleasing or smooth). What makes a harmony
pleasing or unpleasing, however, is extremely relative. In medieval times, only
octaves and perfect fifths were considered harmonious, and any harmony that
deviated from that was generally frowned upon. In modern western music, though,
nearly everything is considered to be harmonious by someone. Fifths are still
very popular in modern harmony but are now used in the most unlikely of places;
heavy metal music, for example, frequently uses perfect fifths in the vocal
harmony to create an eerie effect when layered on top of the more dissonant
instrumentation
.
Harmony, in addition to being consonant or
dissonant, can also be subordinate or coordinate. Subordinate harmony, the tonal
harmony used most frequently today, is a series of harmonies that are based on
each other. The harmony moves in such a way that a resolution is somewhat
predictable; you can hear this type of harmony in modern pop music, musical
parts that flow very easily into each other and don't leave the listener baffled
as to the turn the song has taken. On the other hand, coordinate harmony is a
series of harmonies that operate independently of each other. They do have some
common relation, of course, but don't typically move toward a goal, or
predictable resolution. Renaissance musicians often used this type of harmony,
and it's capable of producing rich and moving textures within a piece of music.
Learning music theory and harmony is not just an
option you can take or leave: it is part and parcel of the "stuff of music". No
surgeon would ever say "I don't want to learn all that stuff about the nervous
system & the skeletal system and blood vessels and how the lungs and heart works
and all that stuff -- I just want to operate".
And yet the majority of piano players ignore the
very thing that would take them to the next level in their playing and knowledge
-- music theory & harmony.
Click
here or on the image below to learn how you
can quickly get up to speed on
music theory & harmony.
