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Traditional Harmony Reconsidered
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
Extract
The author questions conventional attitudes to harmony teaching and describes his own approach based upon a careful observation of harmonic usage in masterworks. In particular he seeks to establish a view of chords as musical entities in their own right, not ‘group-related’ by principles such as ‘inversion’ but possessing a variety of possible functions arising from musical context rather than from established and immutable harmonic theory.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986
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Notes
1 I say ‘theory’, because the old practical instructions for voice-leading, doublings, spacing, resolution of discords, etc., which had served a certain living style of composing, were subsequently elevated to the venerable status of ‘The Theory of Harmony’, and the old guiding rules for beginners acquired, explicitly or implicitly, the prestige of almost eternal laws.
2 These are platitudes, but it is amazing how little insight and understanding most students show in these matters. Many would hesitate to tell a perfect from an imperfect cadence, or to know whether a certain bass note functioned as a tonic or as a dominant. I am continually surprised at the confusion shown by quite advanced students in these matters.
3 There is still a widely held belief in the efficacy of four-part written exercises for the upbringing of young composers. It is maintained that chorale harmonisation or a four-part realisation of a figured or unfigured bass has some mysterious and benign influence upon the quality of a young composer's productions, be it computer-generated electronic music, stochastic music or body language. I cannot subscribe to these superstitions; this is not what I have in mind here.
4 Zarlino, Rameau, Kimberger and others splendidly formulated their respective contemporary musical practices and offered young musicians precious insights and hints pertaining to their craft. Their theoretical speculations reflected the spirit of their own times. Thus, Rameau's Nouveau système was obviously inspired by the recent advances in the physical sciences; he set out to discover in music the same mechanical simplicity and clockwork precision which he believed existed in the universe. Since then, however, science and philosophy have undergone some evolution.
5 At its best, the method results in a poor imitation of J. S. Bach's choral idiom. In most cases the outcome is an arid and insipid product, not corresponding to any living idiom, leading a ghost-like imitation-life within the walls of conservatoires. The same pedantry that annoyed the young Debussy more than a hundred years ago still reigns supreme in many of our Colleges of Music.
6 In spite of some similarity, this has nothing to do with the practical shorthand of Figured Bass, which had served admirably past generations of musicians. Normally a symbol such as, say, V2 does not call to our students' mind any vivid mental image of a certain combination of intervals over a bass note, occurring in a typical context, but just the arid theoretical notion of ‘third inversion of the dominant-seventh chord’. The marking of ‘degrees’ and ‘inversions’ is typically done beneath the bass line.
7 A careful scrutiny of various theories of music, each criticising its forerunners and claiming to embody the ultimate truth, tends to make us sceptical of the very process, the very possibility of a comprehensive, flawless, theory.
8 I am fully aware of my argument's basic weakness in a civilisation that tends more and more to organise education within rigid, uniform frameworks, in some cases enforced nationwide and supervised centrally with standard textbooks, exercises, examination sheets, modular kits and systems for testing and grading, eventually fully computerised. Such extensive, modular frameworks may be convenient when dealing with great masses of students (and teachers), but they have their obvious drawbacks and dangers. After all, can musicians be mass-produced?
9 Infinitely more fruitful than statements like ‘it has a sonata form’, or ‘it shows a development from tonic to dominant and back, hence it proves once more the correctness of our theory’!
10 We undergo this process, often subconsciously, while actually making music, or just listening to it, or reproducing it mentally from a score or from memory. The term ‘dialogue’, used here, should be understood in its Buberian sense; our contemplation of a piece of music, qua music-lovers (which I assume we all are), is not an act of detached observation, but rather what Martin Buber called Innewerden. See his Zwiesprache, Berlin 1934, pp. 20–23.Google Scholar
11 The very notion of a harmonic dimension in music is an abstraction, as are concepts like triad, leading note, tonality and a host of other such ‘household’ terms.
12 This can be best done by showing two different harmonisations of the same melody – to be found among the J. S. Bach chorales – and by inventing different melodies above the same chord progression. Finally, that chord progression may be represented with minimum movement in the upper voice, as the best approximation to ‘pure harmony’ with no melody.
13 Which is not always obvious; sometimes it must be extracted from a complex texture, as with certain left-hand figurations for a keyboard, or a Bach movement for unaccompanied violin.
14 I mean bass, i.e. the actually sounding lowest tone of any aggregate perceived as ‘chord’, simultaneous or ‘broken’. The concept of ‘root’ has a very minor role to play, if at all, in the approach offered here.
15 Position of the octave or of the fifth at the perfect or half cadence respectively.
16 For instance, the ‘dominant seventh’ may prove to be a ‘German sixth’; a limited use may be made of linguistic parallels, carefully chosen, in order to elucidate the concept of function as, e.g. homophones – words sounding identical but spelled differently and having different significance – as analogous to enharmony. One must, however, beware of the pitfalls of considering music as some kind of language with ‘meaning’. The few parallels between music and language exist only on the purely structural level.
17 The same 
-chord may stand on a different relative pitch, leading on, e.g. to another -chord by an ascending whole step, as in the progression IV-V-I (or VI6) in melodic minor, thus acquiring a completely different significance. One may multiply examples of similar nature.
18 A minor triad on, say, A, then an augmented sixth on A flat, then a major triad on G, establishing the last chord unequivocally as dominant, thus expressing tonality without even sounding the tonic triad.
19 I am unhappy with the apparently audacious position I take against so venerable and long established doctrines as those of Traditional Harmony, but I can't help it, because it is an inevitable consequence of my empirical–descriptive approach, which I strongly believe to be urgently necessary to counterbalance the excesses of theorising and abstractions.