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0:01
- Hi, in this session we're going to be looking at the triads that form the basis of harmony and then we're going to work out how we work with the triads to look at a melody that we might want to harmonise. In other words, a melody that we want to choose chords for so the whole thing sounds good. We've done a bit of this in earlier grades and if you've come to this afresh you might want to look back at some of the grades one to five material just to work out what's going on with chords.
0:34
But I'm going to start with a brief kind of refresher and we'll move on fairly quickly to see how we're going to do this conversion from working with the triads to actually writing some harmony which is where music starts to get very exciting. So let's work in the key of C major and here's a stave. And in order to find the triads for the key of C major, I'm going to begin by writing the scale of C major. So C, D, E, F G A B. Now I could write C at the top in order
1:16
to complete the scale but from the point of view of triads I'll end up with the same triad of the C at the top as I've got at the C at the bottom. So I don't particularly need that top note to work out the triads. Now what I do in order to have the triads is to put the third note and the fifth note above each of these notes. So if C is the first note, here's C. Well obviously E is a third above C and the fifth above C is G. So that's the first triad. Above D I'm going to do the same thing.
1:56
So a third above D is F and a fifth above D is A. So I've got what I call a root, a third and a fifth. On to the next note which is E, a third above is G and a fifth above E is B. So I have a root which is E, a third which is G and a fifth which is B. Let's carry on. So the next one's F, A, C. Then I have G, B, D and then we have A, C, E and B, D, F. And as I said before if I had C at the top of the scale I'd have C, E, G which is just the same as C, E, G down here
2:49
which is why I don't need to repeat it. When it comes to labelling these triads, the convention is to do this using Roman numerals. So if you see Roman numerals, you know you're talking about triads or chords. First degree of the scale, number one. Second degree of the scale, number two. The third one, number three and number four, number five, number six and number seven. So now we've got the triads on each degree of the scale.
3:30
Now we're going to make a pretty big step fairly quickly because underneath these triads I've written a melody in the key of C major and we're going to try to work out how we can use these triads to give us some harmony, some chords that fit with that melody. Now obviously you can do this by a kind of trial and error. You could fiddle about at the piano or a keyboard and try and find a chord that you think you like the sound of that fits these notes.
4:03
But you'll see that there's a clear system behind this. Let's begin straightaway with the first note of the melody. Now the first note of this melody is C. So what we've got to do is to find a chord that contains C. And you'll find that there'll always be three chords with any given note in them. How does that work? Well C is the root of chord I. C is the third of chord VI. And C is the fifth of chord IV. So that's telling me that if I'm trying to harmonise the note C, I could use chord I
4:52
or I could use chord IV or I could use chord VI. They'll always sound good. They'll always sound what we call consonant because C is a member of those three chords. But C is not in these other chords. So if you wanted to choose chord VII, for example, it wouldn't sound so good because there is no C in chord VII. So let's have a think about this. If I've got this first note C, that's the C in the melody. Let me just take this triad an octave lower for the time being.
5:24
It doesn't matter which octave we hear them in. If I play the triad for chord I with this C in the melody, you can hear that that sounds fine doesn't it. Because C is at the bottom of that triad for chord I. If I decided to go for a chord IV, here's the triad for IV, F, A and C and I've got C in the melody you can also hear that that sounds good. So I sounds good. IV sounds good and we also said that C appears in chord VI. Well there's chord VI, A, C and E
6:04
and you can hear that that sounds good too. So I, IV, VI, those three chords all fit. However let's go for chord VII. If I put chord VII down, B, D, F, then I put C on the top, you can immediately hear that that is a dissonant sound because C is not a member of chord VII. I'm not saying you should never use it, you may like the sound of that but in conventional harmony we wouldn't really do that because C doesn't belong to any of those notes in chord VII. So whenever you're harmonising a note,
6:45
you'll always find three chords that will fit it and you have to make your choice. Now you'll notice certain other things like, for example, chords I, IV and V in a major key are always major chords. Chords II, III and VI are minor chords. Chord VII is slightly unusual because it's a diminished chord. So you may think, "Well actually, "at this particular point in the piece "I'd like to use a major chord," or "I'd like to use a minor chord." In the case of I, IV and VI that fit this first note.
7:26
I and IV are major chords, VI is a minor chord. So you may decide that the mood dictates that you want to have a major chord or a minor chord that might be one of the issues. The reason why I'm going to select chord I for this first note is because it's the first note of a piece of music in C major. So it's the clearest thing to do. If I use chord I, I'm really making it very clear that my piece of music is in the key of C major. If I use chord IV, F, A, C
8:02
and I begin my piece of music with a chord IV, it may sound like a chord IV in C major but it might also sound like a chord I in F major because if you think about it the first degree of the scale of F major is F. And if I build chord I I'd have F, A and C. So if it was the very first sound I heard in this piece, I might be tempted to think that I'm listening to a piece of music in F major. Or if I use chord VI, A, C and E is obviously chord VI in C major. But it's also chord I in A minor.
8:40
So if this was the first thing I heard I might be tempted to think that I'm hearing a piece of music in A minor. So I want to make the key as clear as possible. And that's why I've decided to go for a chord I in C major for my first chord. So here it is. There's the first note C and here's the chord C, E and G. Now what we're going to do in the case of this particular piece is we're going to write four-part harmony. In other words, we've taught in earlier lessons
9:14
in grades one to five about having four-parts, soprano alto tenor bass. So we're going to think in those terms. And the first thing you might decide is, "Well, how do we write in four-parts "when we've only got three notes?" No harm in using one of those notes more than once as long as we using those notes C, E and G. So for example, in the first chord I could decide I'm going to have C in the bass, G in the tenor and E in the alto part. So I've used these note C, E and G,
9:53
C top and bottom, E in the alto, G in the tenor. So I've taken this basic triad chord I, C, E, G and I've used those three notes and I've just spread them out a bit. So that's the first chord that I've written but there's no reason to say that you couldn't organise that chord in some other way. I can take the notes of chord I and I can organise them like this or like this or like this or like this or like this. They're all different versions of the same thing.
10:30
I'm still using those notes C, E and G. So that's given us an option on the first chord which there isn't too much discussion about really because it's the first chord in a piece of music in the key of C major. So chord I makes sense. Okay, let's move on now to the next chord because we have a G in the melody and we can play the same little trick again. We can look at which three chords contain the note G. Well G is obviously the root of a chord V, G's also the middle of chord III
11:11
and G is also the top of chord I. Now I might at this point mention that there's a kind of hierarchy of chords. Chords I, IV and V are what we call the primary triads. They're the ones that are most likely to be used. Chords II, III and VI are what we call the secondary triads. In the case of a major key you'll notice the primary triads are the major chords, I, IV and V. The secondary triads are the minor chords II, III and VI. Chord VII is a diminished chord
11:51
which some people think just sounds a little bit ugly. It's certainly a little bit uncomfortable, so generally speaking, at the moment at least, VII is probably worth avoiding. The next least likely chord that gets used in the hierarchy of things is chord III. There's nothing wrong with poor old chord III, it's just an it's rather unusual. So VII is perhaps the least likely chord to be used and III is the next chord that's least likely to be used. I'm not dismissing it at all
12:23
and there's some wonderful opportunities to use the chord III. But it's not going to be your first port of call. So we're looking at a note now which has got G in it and G is in chord III so maybe for the time being we'll forget chord III. But we could decide that we're either going to go for a chord V or a chord I. Well what would that sound like? Here's a G. If I put chord V under it, sounds pretty good doesn't it? If I put chord I under it, that sounds pretty good as well.
12:54
So I could say, well, I've already had chord I here, so do I want to use another chord I straight after it or might it be a better idea to use a chord V? That would be perfectly logical. Another solution, just to point this out, is that we could use chord I again but we could use it in a different inversion. Now let me explain what I mean by that. Just for argument's sake we'll do this so we can explore this possibility. I'm going to choose for the second chord, chord Ib.
13:34
Now what this means is I'm going to use the notes of chord I, C, E and G. If C is the lowest sounding note, in other words, it's the note that's in the bass part, then I say I'm using chord I in root position and I call that chord Ia. If I just call it I, I assume I'm talking about Ia. If I use the note C, E, G but E is the lowest note, E is in the bass then I say I'm using chord I in first inversion and I call that Ib. If I use chord I and I put G in the bass
14:19
then I say I'm using chord I in second inversion and I call it Ic. I have to say that second inversion is the least likely thing you're going to meet. You will meet it but it's not terribly common. So you're much more likely to live in a world of root position chords, "a" chords and first inversion chords, "b" chords. So for argument's sake here let's use Ib and just work out what that might look like. Well it's going to have an E in the bass
14:53
otherwise it's not going to be the first inversion chord. Let's maybe repeat the G in the tenor and drop down to a C in the alto part. So you can see I've used the same chord again but I've gone into first inversion, a Ib chord and I've just kind of reorganised things a bit. So the first chord sounds like this and the second chord sounds like this and you can hear there's a progression. It's the same chord, it's still chord I, but because it's gone into first inversion there's a progression.
15:32
Okay let's move on to the next one. Here's an A. Now remember how this works. A is going to be the root of one chord, it's going to be the third of another chord, and it's going to be the fifth of another chord. Let's see if we can work out what's going on. A, you'll notice, is the root of chord VI. A is also the third of chord IV and A is also the fifth of chord II. You might be already establishing that there's a pattern here. Do you see if it's the root of this chord
16:07
it will be the third of the chord that's two behind it and it will be the fifth of the chord that's two behind that. So if it's the root of VI, you know it's going to be the third of IV and it's going to be the fifth of II. If it's the root of VII it will be the third of V and it will be the fifth of III. You just go back two chords each time to find the next chord. It just speeds up the process. So this could be chord VI, it could be chord IV or it could be chord II.
16:43
And really, within reason, it doesn't matter which you use and you may just decide to play with the sound of those chords to see what you fancy. I've got A at the top there. if I put chord VI it sounds like this. VI of course is a minor chord. If I use chord IV, that's going to give me a major chord. If I use chord II, that's going to give me a minor chord. So you've got three different sounds, VI, IV and II and you have to try and work out, not only what that sounds like,
17:17
but what it sounds like as a progression from the previous chord. And again you can just sit and experiment with that. For argument's sake, I'm going to choose chord IV. It's not the only option but I'm going to go for a chord IV. So here's chord IV, F, A and C. I think at the moment I'm going to use it in its root position. So it's a IVa chord and I'm going to have to have F in the bass if I'm going to use it in root position. So there's an F and let's just see
17:53
what we're going to do with the other part. So say we have an F in the alto part and a C in the tenor part then we've used these notes F, A, C and we've spread that into a four-part chord. Well it's getting quite exciting now. We're beginning to put this piece together. How do the first three chords progress? Here's chord I, followed by Ib, followed by chord IV. It sounds quite good doesn't it? Now let's move on to the fourth beat. I've purposely just made this a little bit more complicated
18:27
by putting these two quavers in. One temptation is to say, well, I need to have one chord for the G and then I'll need to have another chord for the F but that would make the rate of chord change rather quick. If we have one chord on this quaver then another chord on the next quaver, the chords are going to change very quick and that could actually sound a little bit kind of agitated in the music. It's possible that the note in the melody belongs
18:56
to a chord, it's also possible that some notes are what we call inessential notes and we talked about those when we did some work on grade five theory. We talked about passing notes, notes that pass by step between two notes that have chords. So in other words the G could have a chord and this E could have a chord and this F just passes by, step between the G and the E. So we could just call that a passing note. We could also have other forms of what we call inessential notes, auxiliary notes.
19:31
A lower auxiliary note is simply when I have a note that has a chord and then I go down a note and come back to the previous note again. So this could have a chord that could just be a lower auxiliary note and this could come back to the chord. Or I could go C, D, C and in that case the D would be an upper auxiliary note so the C would have a chord, the D would just go up one and we come back to C with the chord again so that would be an auxiliary note.
20:01
I can also have things like anticipatory notes. Where say I have a D followed by a C, the D has a chord, could be this chord, and the C has a chord, it could be this chord. But then if I do this, you can hear that this C anticipates the next C. So the first C is an anticipatory note. So these notes could be harmony notes because they have a chord that belongs to them or some of them might be inessential notes, passing notes, auxiliary notes or anticipatory notes.
20:47
I'm going to suggest for a moment that this G has a chord and that the F is a passing note, it's just passing between the G and the E. So let's find a chord that fits the G. Let's play that little trick again that we did a few moments ago. G is the root of chord V. Go back two chords, then you find G is the third of chord III. Go back two chords and you find that G is the fifth of chord I. So the options for this G are V or III or I. Well, we've had two chord I's,
21:25
so maybe we don't want to go there again. We said that chord III is the least likely chord to be used after chord VII. So maybe the most obvious thing to do is to go for a chord V. So let's do that. Let's put G in the bass because that's the root of V. So I'm going to use chord V and I'm going to call it a Va, V in root position. And then let's just get some other notes that belong to the chords because if the chord is G, B, D, I've got G in the bass and at the top B in the tenor
21:58
and D in the alto. Okay, now then let's go on to the next one. Here's an E. So E is what's at the root of chord III. E is the middle of chord I, it's the third of chord I. And E is the fifth of chord VI. It's possible that I'm coming towards the end of my first phrase. Maybe this piece of music has got a couple of two-bar phrases. Which means I also need to think about something called a cadence. Remember we talked about cadences again in grade five theory.
22:37
A perfect cadence is where you have chord V, followed by chord I. A plagal cadence is chord IV followed by chord I. An imperfect cadence is any chord followed by V. It's normally, I to V, II to V or IV to V. And an interrupted cadence, which you didn't need to know for grade five, goes chord V followed by chord VI. Let's just do those again. Perfect cadence is V to I. V-I, you can hear it, it's the end of something, that progression. A plagal cadence is IV to I, IV to I.
23:15
An imperfect cadence is something to V and it's normally I to V. Here it comes, I to V. Or it's IV to V or it's II to V. And an interrupted cadence is V to VI. V-VI. And previously we suggested that the perfect cadence and the plagal cadence might be cadences that you regard as full stop cadences. They're the end of something. Perfect cadence, feels as if we're home and dry. Plagal cadence, we've been brought to the end of something. An imperfect cadence feels more like a kind
24:00
of musical question mark. We've finished something but we're not kind of there. No, sorry, I said a question mark more like a musical comma. So in other words we're at the end of something that we're not completely at the end. So I to V, or IV to V or II to V. They feel more like musical commas. Now the question mark is the interrupted cadence. You get a chord V and then you think it might be followed by a chord I, in which case it would be perfect.
24:35
But when you get V and it's followed by chord VI, oh, that's a little bit of a surprise isn't it. So that feels more like a sort of musical question mark if you like. But when we come to the end of a phrase we're trying to use these cadence formulas. We've had chord V there so if we have chord I here then we're going to make a perfect cadence. Is that going to work? Oh yes, E belongs to chord I and actually so does G. So there's no reason because we're at a cadence point
25:09
why we couldn't now decide that instead of having to have a chord on every single beat of the bar we're going to have a moment of repose for the cadence and just have a chord I. C, E and G, E is in that chord, G is in that chord. So that's actually rather useful isn't it? So I could do something like this, for example, maybe have a a semibreve in the bass part there and I could arrange the chord like this. So I've got a C, another C in the alto, E at the top, G in the tenor.
25:46
And then I could just move to a slightly different arrangement of the same chord by doing something like this. I could repeat the C in the bass or just leave it as it is. So I've now got a first phrase that sounds like this.
26:11
So let's now move on to the second phrase and see if we can continue in the same vein. Now the first thing you might notice about the beginning of this second phrase is that we've got another pair of quavers and we had some quavers back here, didn't we. And we said that we didn't really want to have a chord on each quaver. It's always perfectly possible but if I have a chord on each quaver, it's going to sound a little bit hassled. If I'd done a chord on each of these quavers,
26:42
I'd have got something like this. It's very fast moving for the harmony. Much smoother to do what we did because you just hear this passing note glide between these two melody notes. But the chords are not moving too quickly. So sometimes that's the answer when you see quavers in a melodic line to wonder if each of those quavers really needs a new chord or really whether you might be dealing with one of these inessential notes. So if you see quavers
27:16
or even something more complicated, semiquavers, triplets, you might just consider the possibility that something is an inessential note. Now if we look at this little corner at the beginning of the second phrase we have a note, it goes down one and then it comes back to the same note again. Now that suggests that this G could be what we call a lower auxiliary note. And the important thing is that the inessential notes, the passing notes, the auxiliary notes, the anticipatory notes,
27:53
those notes do not need to belong to the chord because they're inessential. They're not essential to the chord. That's why we call them inessential notes. So I could find a chord that fits with the A and a chord that fits with this A it could be the same chord or I could have one chord for this A and a different chord for this A. That doesn't matter. But I can treat this G as a lower auxiliary note. So let's go about it in that sort of way and see where we get to.
28:26
So we're looking for a chord that's got A in it. Now A is the root of chord VI. Let's play the trick we played earlier, skip back two chords, we find that A is the middle of chord IV, it's the third of chord IV. Slip back two chords again and we discover that A is at the top of chord II, it's the fifth of chord II. So we could go for a VI or a IV or for a II. Now just to make life interesting, instead of using the same chord twice, maybe we could use two of those chords.
29:04
So out of the VI or the IV or the II, well, we could use any of those, couldn't we? For that for the moment let's make a choice and start with a chord IV and move on to a chord II. Okay, so that's going to give me an F in the bass here and it's going to give me a D in the bass for the next chord. Then I just need to work out some other notes that belong to those chords to fill in the missing parts. So if I've got chord IV, F, A, C, I've got an F in the bass, I've got an A at the top
29:46
but I'm going to need a C somewhere, aren't I? So maybe I could put that in the tenor part and maybe I'll just double up the F in the alto part for now. So that's given me a chord IV to fit with that A at the top. And I'm going to go onto a chord II. So what do I need in chord II? D, F and A. Well, we have a D at the bottom, we've got an A at the top, so let's put an F in the alto part, then we've taken care of that missing note and, well, maybe just double up the D in the tenor part.
30:28
Now have a little listen to that progression going from IV to II with the lower auxiliary note.
30:37
See how that works?
30:41
And you can see, you can hear that the G is an inessential note. That G doesn't actually belong to that chord IV, doesn't belong to the chord II either but the to A's are harmony notes. This A belongs to this chord IV, this A belongs to that chord II. So it's just quite interesting to treat the G as a lower auxiliary note.
31:09
Now say I decided to harmonise this G with a chord of its own. So I could treat this as a harmony note, I could have done something like, I could have gone IV-V-II. But can you hear that it all sounds a bit of a dash? To use that as opposed to. Which just kind of glides through the phrase a little bit more comfortably. Okay, let's go on and see what we're going to do next. And just to show you other possibilities, let's look at this G and I've got an idea in mind for it already.
31:45
There's G, G is the root of chord V, so therefore it must be the third of chord III and it must be the fifth of chord I. Well I'm going to suggest we use chord I. We've had a I and we've had a Ib, I'm going to suggest we actually use the chord Ic. Now then, if we're going to use Ic, that means we're going to use these notes C, E, G, but we have to put G in the bass. Let's just do that for a moment.
32:25
And I should say at this point that second inversion chords, these "c" chords are quite rare. They tend to belong to certain progressions and if you have a Ic chord it's usually followed by a chord V. Now you'll hear why this is a minute. If I play a chord Ic. There's a chord Ic you can hear it's using these notes, C, E and G from chord I but it's got the fifth in the bass. So there's my Ic. You might be able to hear that that chord is not quite as stable as a chord Ia, I in root position,
33:07
C, E, G, with C in the bass. It's not quite as stable as a Ib chord where you have C, E, G but with the E in the bass, the third in the bass. Here's the Ic chord, slightly less stable, and can you feel that it's kind of pulling in a particular direction. So when I have a Ic chord it sort of pulls me onto this. You can feel that, can't you. There's a kind of tension about the Ic chord and it pulls me onto a chord V. So quite often you'll find when you have a chord Ic,
33:45
it will be followed by a chord V. Here's Ic followed by V. It might then stop there, it might be some kind of imperfect cadence. It just goes Ic to V and that might be the end of the phrase or it might go Ic, resolve on to V and then it might finish on a chord Ia.
34:09
So those are possibilities for a Ic, that we go Ic to V or we go step further, go Ic, to V to I. And the other most common second inversion chord, this "c" chord is a IVc. When you have something like this. Here's IVc in C major, chord IV is F, A and C. So if I organise that with the C in the bass, I'll have a IVc chord, that's what IVc sounds like. And that has a pull on to this. So when you write a chord IVc, IVc quite often pulls you onto chord I, because I've now got the note C, E and G.
34:56
Can you hear how that works? Here's the IVc and it's pulling me towards chord I. And those to be honest are the most common uses of second inversion chords. Ic that's followed by V or IVc that's followed by I. I'm not saying you won't meet other second inversion chords because you may well. But they'll be far less common than those particular uses. So I just wanted to use a Ic chord at this point to show the possibility of dealing with a second inversion chord.
35:35
There's no reason why you couldn't have used a chord V or a chord III. Remember we said that chord III is not terribly common. So that might have been a less likely option than a chord V. But a chord Ic is another distinct possibility. Now you may be asking, "Well, okay, "well you've used a chord Ic, "but you didn't use Ic back here. "You used I there, I there, Ib there. "So why use Ic at this point?" Well, because we are approaching the final cadence and remember what I said a moment ago
36:10
that Ic is often followed by V and that sometimes it goes Ic to V and then it goes on to I. Well, if it's possible for this piece to finish by going Ic, V, I, that would give us that progression. so if you're ever looking at the last three chords of something and you think well actually it could finish by going V followed by I, then it's possible that it might go Ic followed by V followed by I. That will not work in every case but sometimes it does. So I've just gone for the Ic there
36:45
and I'm rather hoping that we're going to be able to finish by going Ic to V at least and then possibly onto chord I. Let's see if we've got any chance of making that work. Well, if we're going to use chord V next then V is G, B and D. Well you might think we're a bit snookered now because actually the note we're dealing with is A. Well A does not belong to chord V does it. G, B and D there's no A in there at all. So maybe the theory that I've just suggested is really a bit flawed.
37:21
But all is not lost because it's possible that this A is a passing note. Can you see it's passing by step between G and the B that follows it. So this could be a passing note. In which case I'm looking for a chord that harmonises with a B. Let's just go back to chord V for a moment, G, B and D, aha. So all is well because I can use a chord V here and I can treat the A as a passing note. Let's just do that. And then I want to say one more thing about it. If we're going to have a chord V
38:03
then we need G in the bass. We had this G in the bass, so we could simply repeat that G or just to make life a bit more interesting, I could drop the G to an octave below. So let's just do that for now, just to make life a little bit more interesting. We better just put some notes in to finish up this Ic chord that came previously. So there it goes. Chord I remember is C, E, G. So I've got a C in the tenor, I've got an E in the alto and I've got two G's with the soprano and the bass part.
38:41
So that's used up all of those quite happily, isn't it? Now let's move on and do this chord V for a moment and I'm going to suggest another little thought, as well.
39:00
That maybe we do this. Now you might be thinking, that's a bit strange because chord V is G, B and D and we've just used an F in the alto. So what have I done there? I've added an F on the top of chord V. What the his means is I now have a root, a third, a fifth and I have a seventh. And we'll come back and say a little bit more about seventh chords in the not-too-distant future. But it's perfectly possible to do that to a chord. You take the basic triad with its root,
39:36
its third and its fifth and you add a seventh. And I have to say, that's most likely to happen when you're dealing with a chord V. It's also very possible that you're going to have that situation when you deal with the chord II that you might have D, F, A with C at the top to make number II into a seventh chord. But V7 is the most common and the next most common is II7. You can have a seventh on any other chord but it's rather less likely. So just so we can see how this might work out,
40:11
let's instead of just using a chord V use a chord V7. You see how I managed to notate that I used the V in Roman numerals and then I just put a little 7 alongside it just to make sure we know why this F is in the alto because this F is the seventh of a V7. Okay, now you'll notice as well in this chord you might now be looking at it saying, "Well, that's all very well "but you've got two G's in the chord, "you've got the B here, now you've put this F here "but where's the D? "There's no D."
40:45
Well, actually it's possible in some situations to leave out the fifth of a triad. Most of the time it will be there but it's not absolutely essential, especially when you get into dealing with seventh chords, you definitely need a root, you definitely need a third and you definitely need a seventh otherwise it won't be a seventh chord but the fifth is the note that's sometimes optional. So just to show that that's possible, I've done that here. So you can begin to see how this
41:17
all but now belongs to chord V7. There's the G, the B is here, remember, I decided I'm not going to use the fifth in this case and I've got the F, the seventh in the alto part. Just before we move on to the last bar, another quick word about this passing note. We've now used a passing note here and we also used a passing note back here. Now you might be reflecting on that and thinking, well, isn't there a slight difference. At one level there isn't a difference. This is going by step isn't it?
41:53
I had a G here, the A is just going up a note on to the B so that A is just going by step between the G and the B. Back here I had a situation where I had a G, the F moves by step on to the E, so it's the passing note between G and F. But there is one difference. Back here the G is on the beat where this chord V occurs and the F gets tucked in on the quaver after the beat. It's on the last half beat of the bar, isn't it? So the G is a harmony note, the F is an inessential note, the passing note,
42:37
the G comes on the beat and the F comes after the beat. Whereas here it's the other way around. The A comes on the beat followed by the B on the half beat later. So the B is the harmony note and the A is the inessential note. Now we have to just define passing note a step further. When this harmony note here comes on the beat and the F comes in as a passing note just after the beat, we can say it's an unaccented passing note. It's not accented, it just comes after, it's tucked in after.
43:21
But if the passing note comes on the beat then we have to say it's an accented passing note and it's always stronger. Accented passing notes are always stronger than unaccented passing notes. So listen to this one again. Here's the unaccented passing note and this is the accented passing note. You can hear that that's quite strong. The accented passing note. So going from the previous chord, as opposed to this one from the previous chord, the unaccented passing note is a bit gentler.
44:09
The later one.
44:16
So an accented passing note will always be stronger but it does give you that option to consider if things are moving by step maybe you've got a quaver somewhere in the mix that one of those quavers might be a passing note. It's then just a question of deciding whether it's an accented passing note or an unaccented passing note. Okay let's see if we can finish the last bar. Well, we said that we know about this progression that goes Ic to V to I. In this case it might be Ic, V7 to I.
44:51
So we could now simply go on and write a chord I in the last bar.
45:01
That would be fine, wouldn't it? Could we do anything a little bit more interesting than that? Well how about this other second inversion that I was talking about a moment ago. I said that the other one that's most likely to be used is a IVc. So maybe we could use a IVc and follow that with a I. Let's see if that works. I've got two C's in the melody. Well, C is the fifth of a chord IV and C is obviously the root of a chord I so it's possible, isn't it, that I could do this
45:41
where we end up with a C in the bass. Either I can have a semibreve C or I can write two minims, that's okay. And then maybe I could put an F in the alto and an A in the tenor and then we could just use an E there and G there. So all these notes belong to chord IV, I've got F, A and two C's. But because I've put the C in the bass, the fifth in the bass, this is now chord IVc and then on the next C here I'm using a chord I, C, E and G. I've got C in the bass and C at the top in the soprano.
46:22
I've got an E in the alto and a G in the tenor. So what does that sound like? Let's think about the IVc followed by the I. Here's the IVc followed by the I. Now let's look at this progression Ic-V7-IVc-I, goes like this. Ic, V7, IVc and then chord I.
46:52
So really what I'm trying to do here is just unpack how we would go from forming the triads in the key of the piece of music in which we want to work and then how do we convert those triads into chords that are going to fit that melody. And we've seen that we've a range of possible options. We've always got three chords that will fit any given note and at first you may just want to try and sit at a keyboard or another instrument where you could find those chords
47:23
and just work out the sound of the chords and think which one sounds better than another one. You might think about this business of major chords and minor chords. You might certainly think about trying to avoid chord VII for the time being because that's a slightly awkward customer and we'll come back to that later because it's diminished. You might just think about avoiding chord III at the moment because it's less likely to be used but after that you're going to live in a world
47:54
that's basically root position chords with an occasional first inversion chord like we had here. And you might just think about some of these little tricks, like the Ic-V or the Ic-V-I or in this case we've just complicated it a bit further by going Ic and instead of using V we've used V7 and then we slipped in a IVc to a I at the end. I mean that's quite a combination of events but it's just there to show you the possibility. Now what does this thing actually sound like now we've written it.
48:26
Here it is.
48:43
So it sounds quite conventional, doesn't it? But you can see how those melody notes fit these chords. You can also see that we've got a kind of expectation in the rate of chord change. And the frequency of chord change is what we call the harmonic rhythm. And basically in this piece of music you can see that most of the harmonic rhythm goes in crotchets. We have a chord on the first crotchet, another on the second crotchet, another on the third crotchet, another on the fourth crotchet.
49:15
We've got the same thing here. There's one chord for every crotchet beat of the bar. This bar the harmonic rhythm slows down as it often does for cadences and in fact here we've just got one chord that fills up the whole bar. So the harmonic rhythm there's gone from crotchets to a semibreve. In the last bar the harmonic rhythm is turned into two minims so you might expect the harmonic rhythm to slow down at cadence points a little bit. That's one thing that quite often happens.
49:48
Then after that you can see we've got a kind of balance of chords. We might expect to have more primary chords than anything else, I, IV, and V, I I IV V I IV. Well, there's our first secondary chord, a chord II, back to I, back to V, back to IV, back to I. So all but one chord are primary chords. And to make it less boring, we've had the odd inversion using primary chords so Ib there, a Ic there, a IVc there. So we're not always in root position.
50:23
And then we've just got that one secondary chord there. We could go a bit further, we could spruce this thing up by saying is there any opportunity for any other inessential notes. For example, when you look at the bass at the beginning we go from C to E. Well, we could slip in a passing note, so it goes. ♪ C, D, E ♪ Or we could even put one on the alto. ♪ E, D, C ♪ Could be like that, couldn't it, but just to make life a bit more interesting let's slip a passing note into the bass.
51:00
And you can see it's an unaccented passing note, it's coming between the beats. It's coming after this beat. But it just gives us a little bit of movement there instead of just having this. We've now got.
51:16
So whenever you've got a part that's moving by a third, you might think is there an opportunity to slip in a passing note? If you've got a note that's repeated, you might consider the possibility of an upper or lower auxiliary note. So for example, the next opportunity is this. The alto here, how about I slip in a passing note there between the F and the D. That would make life a bit more interesting, wouldn't it?
51:43
I could decide I'm going to do something like a passing note in the alto there. Sometimes these things work better than others, you'll have to decide in the context of the moment.
51:56
In this case I could even have a passing note in the bass here at the same time as I've got a lower auxiliary note going on in the soprano part. So that's another possibility, isn't it? So just by adding those few inessential notes, I've now got this.
52:27
And it just spruces things up a little bit. So I hope you can see how we got from there to here as a first step in writing your own harmony. Good luck as you set about taking on that challenge. It's great fun and deeply rewarding stuff to do.
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