Lesson with MonkeysAteMe

In this lesson we're going to be dealing with harmony, harmonic progressions in especial, and voice leading.

First of all we'll go through your Kyrie together.

If you'd like to attach it to a post in this thread, so that people watching can get full benefit, that would be great M.

(do you have a name, so I can avoid calling you MonkeysAteMe?)

My name is Chris. Here's the Kyrie.

Kyrie C minor.MUS

Ok, I will point out some problems in the Kyrie, and then maybe we can do some exercises to improve your writing with these techniques.

The main things I feel you need to work on are: use of dissonances, modulation, and voice leading.

A few comments about dissonances. Usually when using dissonances, you will prepare it first, in a context where it is consonant. The harmony then changes, and this note becomes dissonant, whereupon it usually resolves to a note consonant with the new harmony.

See the attached image file.

You have not done this -- it is especially important in vocal writing to prepare dissonances, because it is hard for singers to move to a part which is dissonant with everything else - much more easy for them to sing a consonant note, and hold it, while the harmony changes. For example, the alto part in bar 4 would be difficult, and would work much better if the D had been prepared, or had been more logically led into.

You do this a lot.

Modulation - at one point, you modulate (or begin to) to a different key, and then just ignore that. See bars 29-30. The end of bar 29 really implies a modulation to G, or a surprise modulation (say, to F# via C#) but you just ignore the D7 chord, and go straight back to F minor.

Perhaps you don't know this about harmony. 7th chords with a major 3rd and minor 7th (e.g. D F# A, C) act as dominants, and usually need to be resolved, and move to their tonic. So D7 moves to G, G7 moves to C. The 7th of this dominant resolves to the 3rd of the tonic chord. (e.g., the C in a D7 chord resolves to the B in the G major chord)

Voice leading - I think we'll go through some principles of voice leading in an exercise soon.

suspension.pdf

Sounds good, I do know about preparing dissonances. It was a conscious choice to not prepare them I tried to make the piece jarring, but it makes a lot of sense that it would be hard to sing and I am not very good at preparing them anyway.

I do need practice modulating, but I think that progression at 29-30 makes sense. It goes D7 to C to F. The F# resolves to the G, the D to the C, the A to the G, and the C is kind of like a suspension. So it's like a VI- V- I, but that doesn't mean the progression isn't weak and probably the voicing also.

Voice leading, I know very little about it.

I look forward to the exercises, because these are all definently areas that I need help with. Sorry my reply took so long, the rehearsals at school have left me with little free time.