Lesson with CreationArtist

Here are the corrections.

I'll get to work on the next lessons and exercises soon... sorry I'm late with these corrections.

Can we continue? What should we do now? We left off at basic cadences which I now feel comfortable with. or you can make some more cadence exercises for me to try first .. actually your previous post ^ if you could just go back to that and annotate each example pointing out why you chose to certain things like having unisons and stuff.. if you did that to your previous post everything would become clear and we could just move on from there. next we'd do inversions?

i made this midi to practice progressions and voicing. how does it look? i added some passing tones.. is that alright?

My life has been very busy lately, but I think we can and should move forward as soon as possible. Unfortunately I do not think I will be able to post any new teaching until the weekend. I will try, however, to post an exercise tonight.

Originally Posted by echurchill

Another way to keep the tonic note in the uppermost voice of the I chord is to descend from the supertonic. In this PAC, the root of the I chord is usually tripled, since the bass moves to the tonic, the leading tone should move to the tonic, and the supertonic moves to the tonic. When writing a chord with tripled root, usually the 5th is omitted and the 3rd is used instead. Cadences with supertonic-tonic in the soprano are in measures four through six. In the cadence of measure four, for example, the tenor moves down a 3rd to fill in the 3rd of the I chord with tripled root.

I think that this point here led to your confusion about unisons. I think I should explain the role of unisons in this sort of chorale exercise. The role of unisons in real music is very similar too.

UNISONS

The unison is of course the smallest interval, and some authors even deny that it is an interval at all. Of course it doesn't matter at all what we call it. In exercises like these we seldom come across
unisons yet because we have restricted ourselves to root position chords with a doubled root. Thus the tenor and bass are the only voices that can meet in unison so far (For example, if the tenor and alto were in unison, the 3rd or 5th would be doubled). You should never hesitate to use this unison between the tenor and the bass as long as you are following all my guidelines concerning disposition (spacing) and doubling. Look at bar one and bar two of the UnisonExamples file. This sort of unison is always fine.

In my last lesson on cadences, however, I introduced a common cadential formula with a tripled root. A full V chord with doubled root can move to an I chord with tripled root; see bar three. The bass of the V leaps up a fourth or down a fifth, the 3rd (leading tone) and 5th (supertonic) of the V chord move up and down a step, respectively, to the root (tonic) of the I chord. Now extra doubled root of the V chord could be tied into the next chord like in bar three; if you listen carefully, however, the I chord sounds awkward and empty to classical ears because it is missing the 3rd. Bar four presents our solution: the 5th of the V chord can leap down by a third to the 3rd (mediant) of the I chord.

This tripled root often includes two notes in unison like bars five and six. Three notes in unison are also possible, though less appropriate like in bar seven.

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Also lets not forget that the I chord can also be approached with a normal doubling when the leading tone is in the soprano. In this situation we are less bothered by the supertonic moving upwards like in bar eight.

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I hope that all this clears up the confusion from the last lesson. All the numbers and chords and scale degrees are easy to confuse, but if you read very carefully it should eventually make sense. Since this is very compressed teaching, every sentence I write is very important, so be sure to try them out on paper or Finale as you read. Of course we should not loose sight of the truth, that the exact handling of unisons is just a minor detail. The bigger picture will hopefully emerge once I teach the minor mode and inversions in the next few lessons. Exercises will be coming later today.

Also I hope that you continue to keep in mind that all these "rules" are relative. In actual music anything is possible and appropriate in the right circumstances. Following rules strictly in exercises, however, is excellent training.

Could we move on, I'm excited to finish minor and inversions so we can start studying from scores (maybe counterpoint with Renaissance music or by looking at Bach)

OK, finally our lessons will continue!! The last two weekends I was auditioning at various Universities and I really needed the rest!

Before you read the following lessons, it is still crucial that you dominate entirely everything we have done so far. Some of the exercises I have given you, you have completed perfectly; others have some very serious errors, like the last one. I suggest you always strive for perfection in exercises; as you write a real piece, you won't have time to sort through harmonic theories so now is the time to perfect your voice-leading abilities! Attached exercise I I made to review everything we have done so far.

Exercise I

Instructions: Fill in two inner voices for the cadences in bars 1-4. Bars 2 and 3 effectively have the same outer voices; make sure you think of two different ways to manage their inner voices while still keeping a third in all chords. Out of bars 1-4, which cadence is the least final sounding?
Now add three upper voices to bars 5-13. Make sure you cadence conclusively in bars 6 and 13. You might want to review the finer details of our cadence lessons. To get the upper voice to arrive at the right notes for a cadence, be sure to plan ahead.



Now on to our actual lesson.

PROGRESSIONS

So far I have been giving you the roots of all the chords in our progressions. In this lesson I will teach you one way to explain the chords I have chosen, so that you can also write pleasing progressions.

Open up the file called "Circle of Fifths."

In the first 6 bars I wrote a fairly random bass line and harmonized it. While the harmonies sound modal and pure, they are far from typical of most composers from the Baroque and onwards. Why do these harmonies seem to lack direction? The melody in the bass is fairly nice, as is the melody in the soprano, but the chords themselves lack tonal focus.

So to further investigate this phenomenon, let us look at bar 7. The cadence is the only progression we have studied carefully; its falling fifth (or rising fourth) in the bass is the strongest progression in tonal harmony. So, as the theory of the circle of fifths goes, other similar progressions with the root falling a fifth (or rising a fourth) share in that strength because they mimic the cadence.

A large part of the circle of fifths is shown in bars 8 through 10. Many composers feel that most tonal progressions can be explained as variations on this circle. Notice that here I omitted IV and vii*.

vii* is, of course, a diminished chord and we won't use it until we have studied inversions. IV and vii* are very common in tonal music, but they rarely appear in their expected places on the circle.

IV oftentimes replaces the function of ii right after vi, like in bars 11 and12. In fact, IV and ii oftentimes appear together; usually in the order IV ii, since ii is stronger, like in bars 13-15.

Another exceptional yet common progression is iii IV, like in bars 16 ands 17.

Finally, there is a new type of cadence called the plagal cadence, IV I. It isn't as strong as the perfect authentic cadence, but oftentimes complements it right before or after like in bars 18-19 and 20-21. Plagal cadences are not very common.

We can make a small chart summarizing these progressions below:

iii - vi - [IV and/or ii] - V - I

and

IV - I

and

iii - IV



HARMONIC STYLE

Don't be fooled into thinking you have to use all of those chords in every phrase of music!! In some simple styles you might only use V and I. Other times you will want to pick more varied chords. Even so, a rare chord like iii may not ever even show up in a phrase in the major mode. Be sure to combine these progressions in different ways.

And what do we do after reaching an I chord? An I chord is final enough that it can leap to any other chord, beginning a new chain of progressions back to itself.



Soon I will post exercises encouraging you to explore your own progressions. And I mean it this time; I should have free time for major lessons more regularly now.

Also, next we will move on to either the minor mode or inversions. Which sounds more interesting to you? We can begin with either.