Here are the highlights from the above replay: Part 1 — Simple Harmonization 0:00: Essentials of chords — Blocked, Broken/Arpeggiated, Inverted, Embellished Arpeggiations, and Embellished Blocks 6:55: How (nearly) all tonal melodies embellish the tonic chord, with “If I Listen With My Heart” as a specific example (audio on YouTube) 10:50: The “quick and dirty” method […]
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Why Should Anyone Care about Tonality?
Tonality is a musicological debate about style disguised as a theoretical debate about pitch organization. Whether it’s Schenker’s arrogant, narrow nationalism or Tymoczko’s generous, imaginative catholicism, the debate around what defines “tonality” is, at its core, a question of repertoire. No one would argue that the music of Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms is not tonal. […]
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A Few Observations on Suspensions
Classical dissonance begins with a consonant preparation, continues to the dissonance in question, and finishes with a consonant resolution. Wikipedia says as much. But as I was falling asleep I started wondering about the topology of suspensions — which suspensions work in which situation. There are three basic suspensions: 9-8, 7-6, and 4-3. In the […]
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How to Make an Easter Hymn from Pachelbel’s Canon
“I don’t know how you could possibly write music!” It’s a refrain I hear often, even from talented musicians. And I can understand why they say that. Writing music might seem like organizing thousands of isolated pitches and rhythms. For example, my latest arrangement included 2320 notes, 1273 rhythms, and 281 rests. That’s daunting. But there is another way, and […]
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Why are Alto and Tenor Parts so Boring?
Why do altos and tenors often get saddled with parts like this? Don’t composers know that singing the same two notes over and over again is boring? To understand what composers are possibly thinking, let’s dive into some music theory . . .
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Why the “California Girls” Chorus Won’t Get Out of Your Ears
Some tunes won’t get out of your ears. The chorus from the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” is one of them
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Harmony in “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe,” Part 2
In my last blog post, I identified the gestures that compose the Latter-Day Saint hymn “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe.” Today I’ll show how these gestures are elaborated and how all these elements work in concert to make the arrival on “we receive” so striking.
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Harmony in “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe,” Part 1
I recently explained how Classical musicians understood harmony in terms of characteristic gestures. For my first demonstration of this gestural approach to harmony, I present the Latter-Day Saint hymn “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe.”
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Learning Harmony as Gestures
Lately I’ve been studying how the Italian and French masters taught harmony and counterpoint. It’s fascinating. They didn’t analyze chords or study Byzantine diagrams. They learned to perform complete textures from a single musical line.
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