Idiot's Guides - Music Theory

by Michael Miller

Thanks to modern computer technology, you may be able to avoid manual transposition completely. Almost all computerized music notation programs, such as Finale and Sibelius, let you enter your music in concert key; all you have to do is click a button or select a menu item to automatically transpose one or more staves to another key.

  For example, the Finale program has a drop-down menu option that lets you determine whether a given part is noted in concert key or the instrument’s native key. Depending on the option you select, your score can show all instruments in concert key, or the specific keys for each instrument. The nice thing about this option is that you can do your original composing in concert key and then automatically transpose the parts to their own keys when you’re done writing—which is easier than trying to manually transpose all the parts while you’re composing.

  Finale also lets you transpose a part from any one key to any other key, just by selecting a few options in a dialog box. When you want to change keys, you can instruct the program to transpose the original notes up or down, as appropriate, or hold to their original pitches. It’s a lot easier than trying to transpose each part on your own! (Learn more about music notation programs in Chapter 21.)

  Finale’s Key Signature dialog box; the Transposition Options section lets you choose between transposing the notes when you change keys and holding the notes to their original pitches.

  Exercises

  Exercise 14-1

  Use the step-based method to transpose this melody from the key of F to the key of G. (Watch the change from flats to sharps!)

  Exercise 14-2

  Use the degree-based method to transpose this chord progression from the key of A♭ to the key of E.

  Exercise 14-3

  Use the interval-based method to transpose this melody from the key of B♭ to the key of A.

  Exercise 14-4

  Use whatever method you like to transpose the following chords and melody from the key of C to the key of E.

  The Least You Need to Know

  Transposition is the art of moving notes and chords from one key to another.

  You need to learn transposition for those times when a singer requests a song in a different key, you or other musicians can’t play in the original key, or you’re composing or arranging for instruments that don’t play in concert key.

  You can transpose a melody by counting the half steps from one key to another, noting the scale degrees of the original melody and chords, or using the intervals between the notes of the melody.

  Many computerized music notation programs will automatically transpose your music for you with the click of a mouse.

  PART

  5

  Embellishing

  Part 5 teaches you how to fill out your music with lush harmonies and interesting counterpoint as well as how to jazz up a tune with fancy chord substitutions. As a bonus, I share a chapter with more fiddly notation marks!

  CHAPTER

  15

  Harmony and Counterpoint

  In This Chapter

  Understanding the differences—and similarities—between harmony and counterpoint

  Creating pleasing background harmonies

  Using different chord voicings

  Composing interesting two-part counterpoint

  Learning effective voice-leading technique

  A song doesn’t have to be anything more than a melody and chords. Think of a folk singer and her guitar, or a solo violinist accompanied by piano. Melody and chords are all you need. However, when you turn on the radio you don’t hear a lot of solo folk singers. What you typically hear is a full arrangement, complete with keyboards and bass and drums, background vocals, and other types of instrumental backing.

  Of course, these background vocals and instruments are doing nothing more than playing the notes in the song’s chord progression. But they also help to fill out the sound and make the piece of music more interesting.

  To fill out your songs, you need to add harmony parts. These harmony parts can be either vocal or instrumental, and there can be any number of them. What they do is simple: they follow separate lines within the underlying chord progression, thus buttressing the harmonic structure of the song.

  If you want to get really fancy, your backing parts can represent new and contrasting melodies when played against your original melody. When you create this type of complex harmony, it’s called counterpoint; it’s widely used in many forms of classical music.

  NOTE

  This chapter presents harmony and counterpoint from a popular music perspective. Classical musicians have a much different—and more formal—take on these concepts.

  Two Ways to Enhance a Melody

  Two notes sounded together make a harmonic interval; three or more notes sounded together make a chord; and two or more melodies sounded together make counterpoint. Intervals and chords are used to construct harmony; counterpoint exists as separate melodic lines.

  Another way to think of it is that harmony is a vertical (up and down) combination of notes, whereas counterpoint operates horizontally (side to side).

  Harmony is vertical.

  Counterpoint is horizontal.

  In reality, harmony and counterpoint are related concepts; both involve “vertical” combinations of notes and both involve a “horizontal” movement of individual voices or instruments. Still, harmony is more about singing or playing parts of a chord; counterpoint is more about creating a second (or third or fourth) melody line—albeit one that adheres to the underlying harmonic structure.

  NOTE

  Technically, the study of harmony includes chords and chord progressions—basically, anything that combines two or more notes simultaneously. Because we already covered this basic material in Chapters 9 and 10, in this chapter we’re covering the use of multiple voices or instruments to enhance melodies, based on the underlying harmonic structure (chord progression) of a piece of music.

  Living in Harmony

  Harmony is like playing chords behind a melody, but using other instruments or voices. In fact, the art of adding chords to a melody is a harmonic exercise. We add harmony parts to our music because harmony lends richness to a song. It fills out a single melody line and reinforces the underlying chord structure.

  A melody with backing harmonies is the difference between a solo vocalist and a full chorus. It’s the difference between a folk singer with an acoustic guitar and a pop singer with a group of backup vocalists. It’s the difference between a jazz trio and a big band. In other words, harmony makes music bigger.

  You create harmony parts by using the notes in the underlying chord progression. If all you do is assign specific notes of a chord to specific instruments or voices, you’ve created harmony. It doesn’t have to be any harder than that. Harmony parts, whether vocal or instrumental, are typically less rhythmically complex than the main melody. It’s not uncommon to find harmony parts consisting of whole notes or half notes while the melody maintains a more complex rhythm.

  Harmony parts can also mirror the rhythm of the melody; in these instances, the harmony resembles classical counterpoint—which you’ll learn about later in this chapter. Harmony can also be used to punctuate the melody, fill in breaks in the melody, and function as a kind of call-and-response mechanism. (Think of the classic pop tune “Midnight Train to Georgia”; Gladys Knight is the call and the Pips are the response—woo woo!)

  In terms of harmonic complexity, you can have everything from a single accompanying voice to choruses and string sections with two and three and more voices. The more voices you have, the more challenging it is to create distinct harmony parts without doubling or duplicating other parts. Of course, writing a single harmony part is also challenging, but in a different way; that single part has to include just the right notes, suggesting the underlying chord without distracting from the main melody.

  For the purposes of learning basic theory, we’re going to concentrate on simple two- and three-part backing harmony, without a l
ot of rhythmic or melodic complexity. Once you master this type of rudimental harmony, you can expand to include more complex types of vocal and instrumental backing.

  Voicing and Inversions

  The order of the notes of a chord (top to bottom) is referred to as the chord voicing. (It’s also called the chord inversion, as you learned in Chapter 9.) Voicing is very important when you’re writing harmony parts, because you have to employ different voicings to avoid parallel motion between parts.

  Let’s consider the harmony you play as piano accompaniment. If you recall, we used the following chord progression as an example back in Chapter 13:

  A common chord progression that needs harmonized.

  As learned back in Chapter 13, a simple block-chord piano accompaniment (right hand only) to this chord progression looks something like this:

  Simple block-chord harmonies.

  The triads you play as accompaniment represent three-voice harmony; you just happen to play all three voices with one hand. All the chords are in the root (noninverted) form of 1-3-5—which represents a problem. When you change from chord to chord, all the harmony notes move in parallel to each other. In terms of voice leading, this is often frowned upon.

  It’s also boring.

  You can prove this by isolating the top note of this chord accompaniment. Now sing the succession of top notes as if you were singing backup vocals:

  Isolating the top voice in the I-vi-IV-V chord progression.

  Like I said, pretty boring—and not particularly melodic, either. A better approach is to vary the voicings of the chords so the harmony parts don’t have to move in parallel. For example, you might keep the C chord in its normal root position but change the Am to the first inversion (C-E-A), the F to the second inversion (C-F-A), and the G to the first inversion (B-D-G), like this:

  Inverting the chords to vary the internal voicings.

  TIP

  The succession of root position, first inversion, second inversion is fairly common—and one you can apply to any number of chord progressions. (Also common is the succession of first inversion, second inversion, root position.)

  Not only does this make the chord progression easier to play (all the notes are closer together on the keyboard) it also makes any individual part easier to sing. Take the top note part again; instead of moving G-E-C-D as it did originally, it now moves G-A-A-G, like this:

  The new top voice harmony part, thanks to revoicing the chords.

  Now the voice is fairly consistent; it doesn’t jump all over the place like it did before. And if you check out the other voices, you find that they’re also a lot more singable. (The middle voice moves E-E-F-D, and the bottom voice moves C-C-C-B.)

  When you write out each of these parts separately, you use three different staves, like this:

  Three-voice harmony—on three different staves.

  These principles apply when you’re playing piano accompaniment; they also apply when you’re writing vocal or instrumental harmonies. If you vary the voicings, you open up a lot of possibilities as far as which voice goes where.

  TIP

  It’s helpful to think of a chord progression as nothing more than a group of simultaneous melodies. This will help you create singable harmony parts, as opposed to parts that correspond only to notes within the underlying chord structure.

  Making Harmony Parts More Melodic

  Of course, you’re not limited to having your voices follow the strict chord pattern. What if we start swapping the top two notes of our harmony between two different voices? There are lots of ways to do this, but one particularly good-sounding one looks like this:

  Swapping a few notes between the top two harmony parts.

  See what we did here? We swapped the second and fourth notes between the parts, so that the first part now goes G-E-A-D, and the second part goes E-A-F-G. You’re still representing all the notes in the chord, but you’re making each individual line more melodically interesting.

  A good tip when you’re creating either vocal or instrumental harmony is to physically sing each part yourself. If the part is boring or hard to sing, consider different inversions or swapping notes between parts. The best harmony parts sound great on their own!

  Voice Leading

  Voice leading is what you get when you follow one harmony part from start to finish; the different intervals between the notes follow a set of conventions and act to create a pseudo-melody out of the harmony line. You have to make sure that one note properly leads to the next to avoid having the harmony line sound like a bunch of totally unconnected tones.

  TIP

  If you follow these voice-leading conventions, you’ll create chord progressions that sound good in both popular and classical music. When you’re working in the popular and jazz styles, however, you’ll discover that you can be a lot freer with your voice leading; let your ear guide you to what works best.

  When you’re writing harmony, there are three key voice-leading conventions to keep in mind. When you follow these conventions, the creation of harmony parts becomes somewhat easy:

  In general, voices should move smoothly. That means moving each voice the shortest distance possible, and retaining common tones between successive chords in the same voice. How big of a leap is too much? Try to avoid leaps larger than a fourth, except in the lowest (bass) voice, which can accept larger leaps that move along with the chord progression.

  When at all possible, you should avoid moving all the voices in the same direction. If some of the voices move up over the course of a line, at least one voice should move down.

  Avoid moving voices in parallel “perfect” intervals—fourths, fifths, or octaves. Voices can move in parallel thirds and sixths.

  Here’s an example of bad voice leading. Notice how the two parts move in parallel, and how each voice has huge leaps from note to note?

  Bad voice leading …

  The second example shows how to fix the voice-leading problems merely by swapping a few notes from voice to voice or by picking other notes within the chord. It isn’t that hard when you realize that any note can be assigned to any voice; all you have to do is pick the right notes to create the best-sounding musical lines.

  … corrected.

  Making a Point—with Counterpoint

  Counterpoint is the art of combining two or more simultaneous musical lines. Unlike the art of harmony, where the harmony parts are subsidiary to the main melody, both melodic parts in counterpoint have equal weight.

  The two voices in traditional counterpoint must not only sound melodic when played separately; they also must fit together harmonically to suggest the chord structure of the song. That means if you play the underlying chords against the counterpoint, the melodic lines mustn’t sound dissonant; it also means you should be able to deduce the underlying chord structure from the melodic lines alone.

  Keys to Successful Counterpoint

  The interaction of the different voices (and when I say “voices,” I mean melodic lines; counterpoint can be used in both vocal and instrumental music) is essential to successful counterpoint. The two lines have to work together, not fight with each other. The second line has to be the melodic equal of the first, and neither line should dominate.

  Classic two-part counterpoint, courtesy of Bach—notice the independence of the two melodic lines.

  It’s also important that both lines be singable. That means either melody should be able to stand on its own as a main melody against the underlying chord progression. A melody in counterpoint should not be just a combination of notes to fit the chords; it has to be melodic, it has to have its own internal musical logic, and it has to fit with the other melody.

  When composing melodies for counterpoint, call upon the skills you learned back in Chapter 8. Make sure each melody has a shape and a destination, as well as a coherent form. Also make sure each melody makes sense within the song’s general chord structure, it fits within a comfortable vocal or instrumental range (gen
erally no more than an octave range), and the intervals within the melody are small and singable.

  When you put your two melodies together, you should make sure they both fit within the notes of the underlying chord, and stay within the confines of the underlying scale. The two melodies should also not duplicate each other; if you have two identical melodies, you’re writing in unison, not in counterpoint. That means each melody should have its own motion—which should complement, but not interfere with, the motion of the other melody. The notes within each melody also should not interfere or clash with the notes in the other melody; avoid dissonant vertical intervals.

  It’s okay for the two melodies to have their own rhythmic patterns. In fact, in classical music it’s expected. (If your two melodies have identical rhythmic structure you have what is called a 1:1 rhythmic ratio, which in some ways is easier to work with than more rhythmically complex forms.)

  Creating Your First Counterpoint

  The best way to learn about counterpoint is to dive into the deep end—and start composing!

  For our first counterpoint, we’ll start by defining some parameters. These are not necessarily hard-and-fast rules for the contrapuntal form, but they do make it easier for beginners to create a working counterpoint.