Music Theory: Harmonic Progression & Harmonizing Melodies

[00:00:00]today we're talking about harmonic progression what that means is what cords go to what chords every time you your you're home based and this is the the essence of tonality when you're at your one chord this is your place of rest of stability of continence anytime you go away from one some amount of tension is produced once you go away from one the way you get back to one is like a prescribed pattern a flow chart so the the one chord it can go to any chord it wants it's the place of stability so it could go to three you know 2 3 4 5 6 or seven it could go to any of the other dionic cords however once you go to one of those other chords your options become more limited so for example if you were to go from one to a two chord your two chord has the option to go to this area this is called the dominant area the five chord is the dominant and the leading tone Triad is part of the dominant function it functions what we call as a dominant function so two can go to either five or seven Dimension you have an option there once you get to your dominant function five or seven if you're at five you he your options you can go to one you could go to seven to minished or you could go deceptively to six if you happen to be at seven diminished you have only one option you go to one so it's kind of you have to follow this flowchart this is something worth memorizing this is our subdominant function or pre-dominant which is our four chord and our two chord so this is our dominant predominant a four chord can go to a two chord this entire function could go to this function the circle of fifths is in a critical component of this chart this chart is not a random selection it's it's like these are are planets and the one chord is the sun of your solar system your tonal solar system and each one of these chords rotates around that in a certain way circle of fifths is the fundamental part of that three down a fifth to six down a fifth to two down a fifth to five down a fifth to one one of the most powerful harmonic progressions and one you will see very often very frequently in the music of many many many composers why because it deals with the fundamental acoustical nature of sound the overtone series is part of that and something we've talked about and after you have the first overtone which is an octave then you have a perfect fifth above that so that movement of down the overtone series is a has a psychologically on human beings has a sense of relaxation and resolution since music at its core the way you get emotions is that interplay between tension and resolution when you go down that fifth that's a sense of resolution and that's why it it functions that way so 36251 super common progression very satisfying there's other options your three chord could go to a four chord it can it can leap FR all that is an option it can't leap all the way to the five that wouldn't sound right it wouldn't sound like the forward motion and a resolution that is satisfying but Dr relock composers sometimes do that yes sometimes composers play with our expectations sometimes they deny us the expected resolution that's again some of the interplay of tension and resolu illusion but what I'm getting you here is the most common and there's a few exceptions the five going to six is is an exception that's against our expectations but it's like the next closest thing to our expectations so here's our chart circle of fifths this is why it's best to call it the circle of fifths and not the circle of fourths because when you go down the overtone series it's down and fifths that's the powerful thing up and forth yes it's the same pitch and it's an inversion but it's the fifth is what you want to conceive of as your fundamental harmonic motion in a minor key things change just a little bit obviously the sorties of many of the tribe change you'll notice that of course your dominant function does not change and this is where you're going to have your accidentals in a minor key you're going to need to raise the leading toone for this dominant function why do they do that in minor to intensify the resolution of 5 to one it's part of that thing we were just saying if we had the natural minor we could have a minor lowercase Roman numeral 5 the resolution would not be as strong and we're all about progression this is one of the things that sets western music apart from other other kinds of music is that it's about progression it's about motion forward it's about going somewhere it's go directed other styles of music are not go directed they just sit in a place they're more meditative western music tends to be goal oriented goal directed and because of that you raise the leading tone in a minor key you'll see that all everything functions the exact same way I'm going to use the word function how a cord functions within a specific key you do have one more option the subtonic chord which is where you don't raise the leading tone and you build a major Trad on scale degree 7 from the natural minor scale and the reason that works is that it just extends the circle of fifths this is also just down a perfect fifth down a perfect fifth down perfect fifth down and perfect fifth down and perfect fifth and since that is our fundamental progression of course that's going to work just fine now how do you use that knowledge cuz this right here you should all like send me money because this is the most clearly written [Music] concise you can spend years understanding and working with this information you're going to use it to harmonize melodies first and foremost it's one of the best ways as well as to compose so let's say you write yourself a melody and then you want to put Harmony to it or let's say someone has a melody and they want you to put Harmony to it how do you do that well this chart is going to help you do that and have it make sense and have it sound good your number one principle one once you have a Melody is you want to start and end with a one chord whenever possible you want to start from your place of rest and you want to get there so you start from home base and you get back to home base that's the whole idea of a progression a journey your pen ultimate chord what is that word pen ultimate well ultimate is your final chord so pen ultimate is the chord before the second to last chord your penultimate chord should be five if possible right there that 51 as the most satisfying resolution ever then number three write all other chord Options under other Melody notes what do I mean by that well let's take a look at this example right here let's move here our key is E flat major this is our Melody let's do step one can we put a one chord to harmonize this G natural the answer is yes because the one cord in E Flat is E flat G B flat so yes I can put a one chord there the final note is E flat can I put a one chord there yes because E flat is the root of the one chord I've now completed step one step two penultimate chord five can I harmonize this F with a five chord well the five chord is B flat DF so the answer is yes I can I'm only I'm all these mellody notes have to be within the chord so the rules of right now are everything you everything you every note in the melody gets its own chord there are no non- chord tones you are not authorized for those yet that will be coming up I promise you and it's exciting so hang with hang in there but right now it's only core tones that you're allowed to use so now we can go back to step three and we'll say well here's an F what are my other chord possibilities what could I possibly do could I use a two chord and this is where knowing all your chords is really really really helpful right so a two chord would be f a flat C well that's an F so a two chord is possible a three chord is not we're also a couple other rules I want to mention we're not going to use seventh chords and we're not going to use seven dimin so let me add that here no seven diminished and 7th chords what we're trying to do right now is limit our options limit our resources and see how well we can understand and get a grasp of these fundamentals so this could be a two chord three is not an option four is not an option five is an option cu the five chord B flat DF six is not an option and we know we're not using seven so right here I wrote down both options I could harmonize this F with either a two chord or a five chord I don't make a decision yet I move on to my next it's still an F so I still have the option of two or five and then go to E flat well I know a one chord is an option I did it here at the end what other chords are an option well the answer is the four chord and the six chord the four chord is a flat E sorry a flat c e flat and the six chord is C E flat G here's another way you could kind of think of that um I'm going to write it here any every note so if you pick any note uh let's say E flat it can either be the root the third or the fifth of a chord any note could be the root the third or the fifth of a chord so if I say E flat if it's the root of the chord it's a one chord if it's the third of a cord I just go down a third from there right so I can say here's my E flat down a third would be a c that would be a six chord a third down from there would be an A flat that's my four chord so that's another way that you can very quickly find out let me say that again because that's going to be helpful any pitch could either be the root third or fifth of a chord so you start take that note and say well if that's the root what is it in my key then you go down a third in in your key and you say well that could be now that now that's the root of my chord and my melody note is the third of the chord then you can go down another third say well now that Melody note is the fifth of the chord you can analyze each in that fashion so when we get to the D if the D was the root of the chord it would be a seven diminish but we're not using seven diminished at this point not an option we're limiting our resources well if we go down a third from D we go to a B flat B flat is five so it could be a five chord there if we go down another third so D B flat g g is the three chord in our key all right so you see how you can do that with each note erase that we go back to our E flat and I'm going to write our options here which is one four and six we have a g here we didn't have to write our options here because we wanted to start with a one chord let's go through that method if G is the root of the chord it is a three chord we go down a third E flat would be a one chord down another third goes to a c that would be a six chord then we have an A flat if a flat is the root of our chord is is a four chord we go down a third from a flat that's an f f is a two chord in the key of E flat we go down another third from F to d d is a seven chord in E Flat but we don't use seven C so we stop right there you have now completed step three that's a pretty involved step but if you go in the order that I just described you will come up with the right answers now now you check harmonic progression to decide which one you're going to use right so do I go to two or five well you have no no way of knowing that unless you say well what do I going to go to next if you went to five then your choice would be either to stay on five or go to two well here we need to double check with rule five or method guide five you want to change chords for Every Melody note so you do not want to repeat five five you want to go to a different chord you do not want to repeat chords so 5 to five is not an option five to two well here we look at our chart is here we're at our five can we go to two is that one of our options on the chart of harmonic of good harmonic progression the answer is no it is not five doesn't want to go to two so just by that we know that going to five is going to be the wrong choice we want to go to two now once we're at two guideline five says don't repeat so we're not going to stay on two we're going to go to five now that we're at five we're going to look and we're going to say okay what are our options five can go to one so that's an option five can't go to four so that's not an option it can go to six so we know our option is either one or six here we know we've eliminated the four so I'm going to erase that but before I make that determination I want to look forward if I go to one one can go to Every anything so if I want to play it safe one chord can't go wrong one can go anywhere but what if I wanted to go to six if I went to six six can go to four or two those neither one of my choices here I only can go to five or three so I know that I don't have an option here I can't go to six either I'll have to go to the one chord now one chord we know can go to either one of these but we need to look look forward to determine whether we can do that so if we chose our three chord again it can go to four or it can go to six so we do have options here if I chose my five Court I could go to the one I could go to six I've got some options here I've got a I've got more than one option here so what will become challenging as you start to learn at this stage is sometimes there going there's going to be more than one right answer that's when things get way more complicated so we're just going to pick some and what I like to do sometimes is when I get to this point where there's there's not just one right answer sometimes I want to go and I jump to the end and this is what I recommend you do as well when there's only one choice you know you you don't have any option you just move forward but when there's choices you could be like I'm going to choose this this path this path and then all of a sudden five steps later you can't you have no option and then you have to go all the way back and backtrack let's not try to do that so what you can do is since you know this is 51 well 2 4 we we know that either one of those can precede the five so we're fine there it does look like we have a lot of options so let's just pick something that's going to be interesting for us let's get let's have a have a three chord because that's going to be interesting we haven't had one of those yet we've already had a five chord so let's go for variety now three can either go to six or four if I go to six I don't have an option here six doesn't go to three one or stay on six so the only option would be go to four here I'd have to go to four four can leap frog to one that is possible and then we can go 2 5 one now that said 4: one does bear a little more explanation 4 to1 is most oftenly found most often found at a Cadence this is not a Cadence so I'm a little bit concerned with that the 41 Cadence let me play it for you is if you were to [Music] hear very common in Sacred Music in the church you hear one 41 it's called a playable Cadence this is not a Cadence point so you know I'm I'm just not going to risk it right now I'm going to say you know what let me let me change my mind on this one instead of getting in that three chord let me just play it safe 51 uh and here if I do that then I can't repeat the one chord I can go to the six chord here and the reason I decided not to go with that 4 to1 Cadence was you 4: one progression was simply because I I just don't want to cause myself too much possible trouble when I do my part R so I've now made my choice I've harmonized My Melody it is and I'm going to write it out we're going to go um let's see so let me write it clearly for you all so this we chose the two chord we chose the five chord we chose going back to our one chord we then decided to go to five again and back to one and then here we went to six and you know what I'm actually going to change my mind again instead of going to two cuz I've already had one let me go to four let me get that four chord in there either one would be correct but I'm also going to go for a little variety when I can get it in now you then part right and this is something we've done before so you start by putting in the B Baseline because you have no option there these are all root position Triads we are not authorized you are not authorized to use inversions yet that's coming up so I put in my E flat I chose this one right in the middle because it's going to be easier gives me room to go up or down I then go to my two Chord my five chord I put my my V flat down here as opposed to up here just because this is the Basse voice and I want to use the lower part of the Basse voice more often than not so B flat back to E flat back to the B flat back to the E flat to a c to an A flat and I went down because I want to keep I'm kind of outlining a Triad I'm providing contrary motion with my melody these are all the things that I'm considering as I'm doing this and then I go to my B flat and finally end on my E flat not a half note so let's let just listen to the outer voices this is a good time to play your outer voices on the piano if you see any direct fifths direct octaves parallels this is a good time to catch it before you get further so we have [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's going to work just fine now let's part right let's say we'll put an E flat here and a B flat here we've completed our chord then we'll move this to our third of the chord this to the fifth of our chord this will go to the third of our chord this will double our root this will provide our third this will give us our fifth what I am doing and you can see the speed of which I'm doing this it's pretty quick I've done this a lot what I'm looking for is common tones stepwise motion and I and I look and I see and I can see what what notes I need I'm always doubling the root which is the same thing as the base in this case because these are all root position trials I maintain a common tone move to the fifth here I maintain the common tone put in the third of the chord here I want to let's see here I don't want to maintain the common tone so here I'm going to jump up to the C and jump up to the E flat uh actually that's that actually creates overlapping so I don't want to do that aha so if you remember one of the things we talked about very briefly earlier was this concept of overlap and here's what I initially thought I would do what what happens here is that the the tenor in this chord is higher than the alpha was in the previous chord and I don't want that I want every voice to kind of have its own space and I don't want to have things jump really high or jumping really low so so that creates a little bit of a problem for me um and I think I'm going to solve it let's see what if I invert those two right so if I put the C here and the E flat here that that certainly is fine that's a a perfectly good voice leading option feels a little strange having the 10 are quite that low but it's okay and it works and so sometimes what you'll do is when you write something your first instinct maintaining a common tone might create a part writing error which you want to be able to catch and correct so let's keep going we then want to we have two a Flats so we need a c and an E flat we could maintain common tones so that's that would be pretty convenient here we have B flat F we need a B flat and a D if we put the B flat here that's a big jump but I think that will be fine we don't have any overlapping with the alto because the B flat is still lower than the alto was in this chord so that is not overlapping this is a fifth going to an octave that's okay it's not parallel they're going they're different intervals then we would resolve by going like that there we go we've now successfully harmonized it all right let's move forward and look at this next example here and this is going to be the other component there's two things you want to be able to use theory for one is to compose write arrange the other is to analyze to look at what is in see how it's working and that's valuable as a performer to understand oh for example this is a five chord it should feel like tension versus oh this is a one chord or a four chord these these things what we're learning about will influence how things should be performed sometimes you can tell by just using your ear but sometimes things are a little more complicated than that and using your theory to understand how it's working will be very valuable the other reason to to make sure your analytical skills are strong is that's how you're going to discover new information we're going to look here at this example that I wrote out and this is part of um this should be familiar to some of you as a piece by boach so if we study what Bach did and do the same thing you're probably going to be in good shape good place to start so the first thing I want to do is have a Roman numeral analysis actually let me rephrase that first thing I want you to do is lead Chet symbols so so looking at this a e a c that is an a major Triad so I write a capital A that's my lead sheet symbol here I have d d f a notice I always go bottom to top that's with Harmony is built so d d f a that is a D major Triad this note in parenthesis this is a non- chord tone I know you guys aren't I told you guys you're not allowed to do that B has clearance he's been authorized he's allowed to use some of those things he knows how to break the rules you don't just break rules randomly you break them with a certain methodology and we'll talk about that later going to our next SC b d g Shar B that is not a root position Triad that is gsh BD that is a seven it's a g Shar diminished Triad I'm not going to put the slashes to indicate inversion I'm just going to put actually I will to indicate inversion a e a c that's an a major Triad again root position G Shar e b e that is not a root position Triad that is an E gsh B that is an E major Triad with G Shar in the base so first inversion f f a d That's A D major Triad DF a but with f in the base gsh e b d that is not a Triad that is a seventh chord E gsh B D that is a 57 or E7 with gsh in the base a e a c that is our root position a major Triad again c e a e is again an a major Triad but no longer in root position but in first inversion so a major tribe C Shar at the base d f a d d major Triad e non portone to a e a c sh that is our a major Triad d f a b that is not a seventh chord and do take note of how you write a second you write it so that the stems line up one stem goes up one stem goes down you offset the note heads the root would be b d f a b is our two chord we talk about that in a minute but it's a B minor 7 with d in the base e e g Shar e that is an E major Triad a e a c that is an a major Triad we indicate our key by writing a capital A with a colon underneath the key signature that way we indicate we're in the key of a major a major Triad and key of A is a one chord D is a four chord g sharp is a seven diminished and it's in first inversion so we put a six to indicate first inversion a is a one chord E e is a five chord g Shar indicates first inversion D is a four chord this one is in first inversion this is a seventh chord in first inversion so we put 5 65 one chord one chord in first inversion four chord one chord B is a two chord first inversion means 65 5 one and that is how you complete your lead sheet symbols and Roman numeral analysis of this excerpt you then say to yourself well following our harmonic progression chart one can go anywhere so four is fine four can go to seven that's fine we know that you're not authorized to write sevens yet but seven can go to one one can go anywhere five can't go to four what are you doing Bach this does not follow our chart he's figured out a a way to make it work so so often you will analyze things that are beyond what you're authorized to write this is one of them we'll talk about why he made this work but let's for now just skip it and say five 565 that's great to one six here we repeat a chord remember how we said we didn't want to do that but he changes the inversion you're not allowed to use inversions yet so well now we're finding how why you can repeat a chord to four four goes to one that's allowed one goes to anywhere so 2 5 1 so the only in all of these chords the only time Bach breaks the expectations is once so just think about again what we're trying to do now is master the fundamentals of what's expected and even B Mr super creativity genius only did something different once in terms of harmonic progression so don't feel bad that I'm limiting you right now to just using that you can still be super creative with just those CS thank you