I never developed a good ear for harmony, and it makes me an insecure improvisor in jazz. I tried to make up for that weakness by taking 3 years of musicology courses at the Hebrew University several years ago. I actually did pretty well in the counterpoint classes, but I was a weak student of harmony. The final year in the harmony series was a class in analysis of music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker, whose approach reduces music of the classical period to a descent from the dominant to the tonic, to simplify a complex, sophisticated, and valuable approach.
I didn't enjoy learning the Schenker system, mainly because it didn't seem to me to speak to what is original and creative in music (or the other arts). But I have found that my studies of harmony have helped me understand what's going on in the jazz standards that I try to learn and improvise on. If I look at the chord progressions and see how they work, I can also hear them a bit better.
It's interesting to me that Western classical music more or less broke with classical harmony in the 2nd half of the 19th century, but Western popular music, the songs that so much jazz is based on, continued in the tradition and developed it. They continue to speak in the language of Western harmony, which, I think is what Schenker is really about.
To take an analogy, if you study English literature, you'll find that it's based on sentences, almost all of which have subjects, verbs, and indirect or direct objects. Clearly this isn't something that writers made up. So if Western music in the harmonic tradition moves from the dominant to the tonic, as Schenker and his followers among the musicologists showed in their analyses, maybe that isn't a matter of the composer's choice, but rather of the grammar of harmonic music.
Take a look at the chord progression in the A part of John Lewis' "Afternoon in Paris": CM7 | C-7 - F7 | Bb M7 | Bb-7 - Eb7 | Ab M7 | D-7- G7b9 | CM7 - A-7 | D-7 - G7.
Mainly it's the cycle of fifths, from C down to Ab, but then, instead of continuing to Db, the Ab becomes the flat two of G, leading to G7, and back to C, with a turnaround bringing us back to the starting point.
This was a clever move on Lewis' part, and there are a lot of other very clever things about this piece, one of which being that the melody moves from high G to an octave below it, although it's in the key of C (Schenker would say that it should resolve on a C, but Lewis wanted the off-balance feeling of ending on the dominant).
If I hadn't taken the classes in harmony, I wouldn't have been able to understand what Lewis did. The next step is to sit at the piano, play the chords, see how the voice-leading brings them from one to another, and learn how to hear them. Will I have the patience to do that? Tune in next week.
I didn't enjoy learning the Schenker system, mainly because it didn't seem to me to speak to what is original and creative in music (or the other arts). But I have found that my studies of harmony have helped me understand what's going on in the jazz standards that I try to learn and improvise on. If I look at the chord progressions and see how they work, I can also hear them a bit better.
It's interesting to me that Western classical music more or less broke with classical harmony in the 2nd half of the 19th century, but Western popular music, the songs that so much jazz is based on, continued in the tradition and developed it. They continue to speak in the language of Western harmony, which, I think is what Schenker is really about.
To take an analogy, if you study English literature, you'll find that it's based on sentences, almost all of which have subjects, verbs, and indirect or direct objects. Clearly this isn't something that writers made up. So if Western music in the harmonic tradition moves from the dominant to the tonic, as Schenker and his followers among the musicologists showed in their analyses, maybe that isn't a matter of the composer's choice, but rather of the grammar of harmonic music.
Take a look at the chord progression in the A part of John Lewis' "Afternoon in Paris": CM7 | C-7 - F7 | Bb M7 | Bb-7 - Eb7 | Ab M7 | D-7- G7b9 | CM7 - A-7 | D-7 - G7.
Mainly it's the cycle of fifths, from C down to Ab, but then, instead of continuing to Db, the Ab becomes the flat two of G, leading to G7, and back to C, with a turnaround bringing us back to the starting point.
This was a clever move on Lewis' part, and there are a lot of other very clever things about this piece, one of which being that the melody moves from high G to an octave below it, although it's in the key of C (Schenker would say that it should resolve on a C, but Lewis wanted the off-balance feeling of ending on the dominant).
If I hadn't taken the classes in harmony, I wouldn't have been able to understand what Lewis did. The next step is to sit at the piano, play the chords, see how the voice-leading brings them from one to another, and learn how to hear them. Will I have the patience to do that? Tune in next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment