Diatonic harmony is boring. Random dissonance is boring too. How do you make your music less predictable, but in a logical-sounding way? Especially if you want your harmony to sound “jazzy”? One reliable technique is to use secondary dominants. The idea is to treat each chord in a key as the temporary center of its …
Continue reading “Make your chord progressions less boring using secondary dominants”
I made a big spreadsheet with all the chords in it. It’s not all the possible chords, but it’s the ones you most commonly encounter in Western classical, jazz, rock and pop. I also made some videos explaining how chords work, with handy aQWERTYon visualization. Enjoy!
I have some aspirations in music theory pedagogy, and toward that end, I’m learning more about Schenkerian analysis. If I’m going to resist it, I should at least be conversant in the thing I’m resisting, right? So I’ve been reading Schenkerian Analysis: Perspectives on Phrase Rhythm, Motive and Form by David Beach. One of his …
Continue reading “Let’s argue about this one weird chord in the Brahms Intermezzo in B-flat minor”
Western music notation is a graph of pitch (on the vertical axis) and time (on the horizontal axis.) It’s mostly self-explanatory on the pitch axis, but it’s harder to understand on the time axis. It helps if you visualize your rhythms on a circle, like the Groove Pizza does. Everything I talk about in this …
If you want to understand Western music theory, the circle of fifths is an invaluable tool. For one thing, it can help you understand how key signatures work. But it also helps explain how the major scale and diatonic modes relate to each other, and gives a possible explanation for why they sound good. Here’s …
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Mozart is mostly not to my taste, but there is no denying that the man could write a melody. My favorite melody of his is the one from the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. I like Daniel Barenboim’s interpretation the best; everyone else plays it too fast for me. …
Continue reading “Remixing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – Andante”
Recently I have been digging deep into the Bach Chaconne. Since I’m a poor music reader, I’ve been using Ableton Live to remix, loop, and analyze the piece, both in audio and MIDI form. It’s working! The structure of the Chaconne makes sense to me now when I hear it, and I’m learning to play …
Most of my students struggle with key signatures. This is understandable! Like the rest of the Western notation system, key signatures are based on a big assumption: that all of the notes will be within one of the twelve major keys, or within some scale that can be derived from a major scale (most often, …
Major keys are easy to understand, at least in classical music, because a major key and a major scale are coextensive. Minor keys are harder, because you can’t just equate them to particular minor scales. To understand how chords work in minor keys, I’m going to walk you through a standard progression that happens throughout …
Continue reading “Learning minor key harmony from the Bach Chaconne”
I’ve been doing so much explaining basic music theory that I thought it would be fun to dig into something advanced: “Naima” by John Coltrane, from his all-killer-no-filler album Giant Steps. There are as many interpretations of this tune’s chord changes as there are transcriptions of it. The ones in the Real Book are real …
