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harmony 101 (or maybe 102)
Nov. 14th, 2001 09:31 amI'm pretty much a self-taught musician. I had one semester of private composition lessons at CMU before the job I had there ended prematurely and that became impractical to continue. But mostly I've learned on my own. I think I'm pretty decent at composing and arranging certain types and styles of music (hey, 16th-century counterpoint is fun), but other, often-basic, stuff has just never made it onto my radar.
Sometimes when I arrange modern folk music for On the Mark I get a "WTF? but ok, this works" kind of reaction from the group member who actually knows something about harmony. And sometimes, I do the expected thing, but not necessarily intentionally. (Often, I wuss and have Kathy feed me the chords before I go off and write bass and descant lines.)
My friend Yaakov wrote a song this summer and I offered to write down the melody for him, because he doesn't read/write music and he'd like to be able to share it around. So he recorded himself singing it and I've been working from that. It's not that complicated or long (think your basic 16-bar folk song), and with the exception of one passing note that is inconsistently-sung from verse to verse, it's done.
I should have stopped there, but it occurred to me that one of the ways he'll probably use this is to put this in front of people who play guitar and ask for accompaniment when he sings in bardic circles. (He doesn't play any instruments.) So I figured I should add in some guitar chords for him; after all, how hard could that be? And if he doesn't like them he's free to dump them.
Well, the problem is that he wrote a mixolydian melody, and I never learned how to harmonize modal music. (I did arrange a locrian piece once, but I cheated and did a 2-part arrangement and avoided many obstacles rather than confronting them. It's hard to work with a scale that has a tritone where the fifth should be.) I can write counterpoint against modal melodies with no problem, but I don't know how to harmonize 'em. Just playing around on the computer, I couldn't come up with a set of chords that sounded right, but I can't articulate why the ones I tried sound wrong, either. What I really need is a cheatsheet of some sort where I can look up the standard configurations, to use as a starting point. (E.g. major/ionian probably means 1, 4, and 5 all major, and maybe nothing else, but that pattern (well, 5 minor because of the diminished 7th in the scale) is definitely wrong in this case.)
Sometimes when I arrange modern folk music for On the Mark I get a "WTF? but ok, this works" kind of reaction from the group member who actually knows something about harmony. And sometimes, I do the expected thing, but not necessarily intentionally. (Often, I wuss and have Kathy feed me the chords before I go off and write bass and descant lines.)
My friend Yaakov wrote a song this summer and I offered to write down the melody for him, because he doesn't read/write music and he'd like to be able to share it around. So he recorded himself singing it and I've been working from that. It's not that complicated or long (think your basic 16-bar folk song), and with the exception of one passing note that is inconsistently-sung from verse to verse, it's done.
I should have stopped there, but it occurred to me that one of the ways he'll probably use this is to put this in front of people who play guitar and ask for accompaniment when he sings in bardic circles. (He doesn't play any instruments.) So I figured I should add in some guitar chords for him; after all, how hard could that be? And if he doesn't like them he's free to dump them.
Well, the problem is that he wrote a mixolydian melody, and I never learned how to harmonize modal music. (I did arrange a locrian piece once, but I cheated and did a 2-part arrangement and avoided many obstacles rather than confronting them. It's hard to work with a scale that has a tritone where the fifth should be.) I can write counterpoint against modal melodies with no problem, but I don't know how to harmonize 'em. Just playing around on the computer, I couldn't come up with a set of chords that sounded right, but I can't articulate why the ones I tried sound wrong, either. What I really need is a cheatsheet of some sort where I can look up the standard configurations, to use as a starting point. (E.g. major/ionian probably means 1, 4, and 5 all major, and maybe nothing else, but that pattern (well, 5 minor because of the diminished 7th in the scale) is definitely wrong in this case.)
