A Player's Guide to Chords and Harmony (2 page)

hen I was a junior in high school, I was fortunate enough to be able to take an entire year of music theory as part of my accredited classwork. Given how checkered my college career was about to become (hey, it was the Sixties, what can I say?), it's extremely fortunate that I was able to get a thorough grounding in harmony theory at such an early date. Not everyone is so lucky.

The text we used in that high-school class was Walter Piston's Harmony [Norton]. Now, Harmony is a wonderful book. If you're serious about learning music theory, you'd be foolish not to read and study it, or another book like it. At the same time, it has to be admitted that Piston is perhaps not quite right for everyone. He begins by explaining, in detail, how to write four-part chorales in the style of Bach - not a skill that most musicians need on a regular basis. And there's not a word in his book on jazz chords or how to read chord charts. All of his examples are drawn from classical music, and most of them from pre-20th-century classical music.

More recently, I've been looking at a textbook called Harmony & Voice Leading, by Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter [Schirmer]. In some ways it's a more approachable book than Harmony, but again, it's clear that the authors are writing entirely for the benefit of those whose primary goal is, if not actually to write music in the style of Mozart or Beethoven, at least to understand what Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Schumann were up to. Aldwell and Schachter are so nervous about anything resembling jazz harmony that in their discussion of 11th and 13th chords, they put the terms " 1I ths" and " 13ths" in quotation marks, thereby refusing to grant such chords full legitimacy. They have a regrettable tendency to assert, rigidly and without qualification, that certain harmonic practices are "forbidden" And the word "jazz" is not to be found in their index. As valuable and coherent as their treatment of classical music theory is, it's hard to avoid the impression that they're a bit out of touch with what their students are actually playing down the hall in the practice room.

In Chords & Harmony, I've attempted to put together an overview of the subject that will be equally useful to aspiring pop, jazz, and classical musicians. Without going into nearly the depth of either of these monumental textbooks, I've tried to address the needs and answer the questions of several types of readers: younger musicians who are studying (or teaching themselves) guitar and other instruments in order to play pop music, older amateurs who would like to be able to play from the chord symbols in sheet music, DJs who may have no musical training but have started recording their own tracks, and - yes - classical musicians who may be very accomplished as instrumentalists but have little or no grounding in music theory, and who don't want to go back to school and sit in class month after month in order to improve their understanding.

In a very practical, no-nonsense way, Chords & Harmony covers the "other stuff" that gets skipped in most secondary school music programs and is often neglected by private teachers, most of whom focus on technique, interpretation, and literature rather than theory. Starting with the simplest concepts, this book builds a conceptual framework that will enable you both to understand what's going on harmonically in the music you play and to create your own music with greater confidence. Intervals, simple and complex chords, scales - all of the basic materials of harmony theory are described in these pages.

While Chords & Harmony will help you understand music theory at a very practical level, it's not a book of rules. Before we go any further, I want to make it clear that there are no rules. At any time, you're entirely free to play any combination of notes that sounds good to you. Some of the most exciting new styles in music - indeed, most of them - have developed when musicians tossed the old, tired ideas of the previous generation overboard and sailed merrily on, making joyful noises that shocked and offended their elders.

Nonetheless, some useful ideas about music have evolved in the European/American mainstream within the last 300 years. If you want to do things your own way, perhaps in the hope that you'll shock and offend older listeners while exciting your peers, it may prove useful to know what the old fogeys are expecting so you can do something different. And if you're planning to play with other musicians in anything but a strictly classical setting, you'll find it all but indispensable to have a common language with which you can talk about chords.

This book is about the common harmonic language of music. That is, it's about the theory and practice of harmony that has evolved in the so-called "common practice" period, which began about 1700 and ended, in the classical music world, about 1915. In the early 20th century, classical composers threw out many of the harmonic ideas that their predecessors had adhered to. With a few exceptions, such as fourth-chords and bitonalism, those experiments are not discussed in this book. The harmonic language pioneered by jazz musicians in the period between 1920 and 1950, however, is still directly relevant today, and is covered in some detail.

The book is designed for independent study by musicians who don't have a teacher, but it can also be used in the classroom. If you already know some music theory, please feel free to jump around and dip into whatever chapter looks interesting. If you're hoping to develop a thorough understanding of the subject matter, however, I'd suggest going through the chapters in order. Each chapter builds on the concepts introduced in previous chapters, so if you find yourself getting confused, you'd be well advised to turn back a few pages and study the earlier material a bit more.

-Jim Aikin

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his book would be incomplete without a huge thank-you to Owen Goldsmith, whose inspiring curriculum at Livermore High School in the the mid-1960s included a full year of music theory. I'd also like to thank Tom Darter and the other editors of Keyboard magazine, who allowed me to write a number of tutorial features on music theory, and the readers who wrote to tell me how useful they found the articles.

Tom's contributions to Chords & Harmony as an editor were also invaluable. In the absence of his encyclopedic knowledge and his careful scrutiny of my explanations and musical examples, this book would have gone to press with a couple of glaring errors. Needless to say, any mistakes that remain are entirely my responsibility.

JA

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