harmony 101 (or maybe 102)

[cellio]

I'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.)

Comments

[jpbl.livejournal.com]

Not that I've ever looked into it closely, so I don't know any specifics, but I do know there are a lot of harmony textbooks out there, and there may be some that deal specifically with modal music. It wouldn't surprise me. There's a fairly large movement to do performances as they were heard by the original composer, and I would think that understanding the harmonies and harmonic progressions involved in the piece would be an important part of that.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I will here venture the opinion that modal music is inherently annoying to write chords for--tonal is soooo much easier since it was intended for that purpose. You might be better off writing out the individual guitar notes rather than chords? That kind of limits the number of people who can actually play it, but I suppose if you only write one or two it shouldn't be too bad...?

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

try looking at Knud Jeppessen (pronounced k-noot yep-peh-sin, sort of), Counterpoint. Of course, it's a Modal Counterpoint book, but it will give you some places to start. I know you said you can do the counterpoint but not the harmony, but he talks a lot about how the counterpoint relates to the harmony, so you can derive the harmony the other way around. It also depends on how much work and research you want to devote to it...
It's a great book and was my first introduction to counterpoint as a music major. Mind you, I changed degrees 3/4 of the way through college, but that's besides the point. I don't know if the library will have it, but I have seen larger bookstores carry it.

does that help?

As a bit of an aside, I'm personally more fond of hearing the counterpoint to a modal tune. And I think it would be interesting to hear a counterpoint melody here...so why don't you just write a single line melody, rather than chords for a guitar player?

[cellio]

Argh! I should have thought of that. I *own* Jeppessen, though it's been a few years since I last read it. I forgot that he discusses enough modal foo in there that it might be possible to derive the harmonic principles from it. Thanks!

I like counterpoint too; the reason I was thinking of adding in guitar chords in the first place is that I suspect the author is going to perform this at bardic circles and filksings and such where the performance norm is guitar chords and few people would be able to sight-read a real line. So I'll probably just leave out the chords and let him know that if he wants a real line he has but to ask.