The Essentials of Functional Harmony
The key concepts that are essential to understand functional harmony and how these can be used in music, no matter what genre you are working in.
Harmony
Find out all about harmony, chord functions, substitutions, chord progressions
Chromatic Mediants and Metric Modulation
An example of how chromatic mediant relationships can sound by creating unexpected harmonies and also some tips on things you can do with rhythm to surprise your listeners.
Polyharmony
Polyharmony refers to a musical passage in which polychords are used in a chord succession or create a harmonic flow. As mentioned, when introducing the way polychord structures are built, the component triads can either be kept distinct through simple… Read More »Polyharmony
Harmonic Ambiguity
A chord is ambiguous when it can be associated or implies more than one tonality or mode. As an example, every major or minor triad can be associated to two or more tonalities. For instance, the C major chord exists… Read More »Harmonic Ambiguity
How to Use Polymodal Chromaticism
The term polymodal refers to the use of more than one mode at a time. Usually the layered modes share the same tonic, like C Dorian and C Lydian. Polymodal chromaticism is related to the fact that it is possible… Read More »How to Use Polymodal Chromaticism
Pandiatonic Harmony
This is a musical technique that consists of using diatonic material to dissolve the sense of functional harmony in a tonality, as opposed to using chromaticism for that effect. It is the practice of allowing chords to be formed from… Read More »Pandiatonic Harmony
Post-Tonal Harmony
In the beginning of the twentieth century, the tonal system was already falling apart due to the extreme use of chromaticism and post-tonal is a term that is used for music that doesn’t follow the traditional conventions of tonal harmony.… Read More »Post-Tonal Harmony
How to Use Modal Modulation
Using this technique implies that you already know how each mode sounds and how to make chords that sound like the mode. If that isn’t the case, take a look at this post of how you can make “modal… Read More »How to Use Modal Modulation
Non-Functional Harmony
Any system that doesn’t fit the tension and release cycle that is pervasive in functional harmony cadences is called non-functional harmony and it occurs when no chord “wants” to specially resolve to the next one. In fact, such chords are… Read More »Non-Functional Harmony
Modal Interchange
In this post, I will be showing you how you can effectively use modal interchange and add variety to your chord progressions and (re)harmonizations. This is a technique that consists in temporarily borrowing chords from a parallel tonality or… Read More »Modal Interchange