“Music is the arithmetic of sound as optics is the geometry of light…” – Claude Debussy

This section on harmonic practice concern the combination of notes into chords of three or more tones and how they move both relative to one another in a process known as voice leading, forming chord progressions in coherent musical phrases.

As with the earlier section on counterpoint, an emphasis is placed on “try it yourself” exercises to build both knowledge and experience.

Prerequisites

This section assumes you are familiar with the fundamentals of music notation and fundamental concepts of music theory as learned in any music fundamentals course (such at the RWU course, Basic Musicianship [MUSIC 110]). A review of this material may be found in Appendix A: Fundamentals. This section also assumes you have successfully reviewed and completed the work found in the section on Modal Counterpoint.

Organization

This ground up, hands-on approach to learning harmony and harmonic progression is loosely modeled on Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 treatise, A Theory of Harmony. This section covers the basics of voicing diatonic chords, first in the major mode using only root position chord progressions, voice leading them from one to another in short tonal musical phrases. This is followed by an introduction of inversions, dissonance handling with the diminished triad and seventh chords, and then on to the voice leading peculiarities of the minor mode. The section is rounded out with a discussion of root motion as a way of evaluating harmonic progressions over larger spans of time, closes and cadential formulas, and then a short introduction of the basic phrase model in tonal music.