harmony untangled

Many of my students are transfers from other teachers or adults coming back to piano. They are good readers and know their basic major and minor scales and progressions at least up to 4 sharps and flats. But every once in a while they hit a wall because there is a missing connection or a misconception.

Somehow in the last few weeks that wall has been chords. We have had our hands full untangling some basic harmonic terminology, concepts, and applications. I think I was able to diagnose their troubles sooner because we are meeting remotely and I am forced to use speech and text more often to direct and explain. Because there is less demonstration/modeling happening, terminology and conceptual deficits really become apparent. Here are a few things we have been busy untangling. 

Triads, 7ths, & Inversions

I have a young adult student who is able to play triads and 7th Chords easily. He can identify them fairly well in the score and even use them to harmonize melodies. He was having trouble learning the rapidly changing harmonies in a particular passage. He was quite frustrated because he works hard and wasn’t getting anything for the effort he was putting in. 

I asked him to show me how he was practicing. Basically, he was doing a lot of good things—slowing down, using small sections and then attempting to stitch them together, and overlapping the small sections so there were no hic-cups. But he hadn’t identified the chords. So, I asked him what the first chord was. Crickets happened. It was a Bb major chord in 2nd inversion. He said he had studied inversions but it had been a long time. 

We spent the rest of the lesson playing simple chords in inversions up and down the piano. We started with C Major. It took a bit for him to understand that a C Major Triad is always a C Major Triad no matter what the order of the notes. We talked about the fact that in English the word cat is only cat when the letters are in the precise order C-A-T. It can’t be A-T-C or T-C-A. I asked him to think about a large ensemble and how it would be impossible for every chord to be in root position all the time. 

I focused my camera closely on the keys so he could see exactly what I was doing and repeat it. It took some time before he was able to successfully play every inversion of a triad up and down the entire keyboard. Then, we talked about how the 3rd of the triad was on the bottom in first inversion and the 5th was on the bottom in second. 

The next week we worked on 7ths. I didn’t even need to say 3rd Inversion, he figured it out himself. I also had him play a variety of inversions up and down the keyboard, hands together, while keeping the pedal down. How Grand, he said, It’s like a concerto! He is a champ at identifying and untangling inversions now. The best part is his body knows the shapes of each unique configuration on the keyboard. That formerly frustrating passage? A thing of the past.

Triads of the Key, Primary Chords, & Progressions

Categories of things can be tricky. So can the concept of using a thing as a building block to create something new. Last week, one of my adult students got herself all tangled up trying to understand progressions—both classical and jazz. She has played the piano all her life and has a traditional classical background. But, for all that time she had only been taught patterns as technique and while she knew the names and had muscle memory for harmonic building blocks she had never truly understood how they related to each other. 

We have been working on keyboard musicianship for several years to strengthen her understanding of the harmonies of each key. The idea that in a major key the ii chord is always minor was a revelation. She can play and name the triads and progressions in each major and minor key very easily at this point. But she still hasn’t totally grasped the concepts behind their relationships because she hit the wall in her jazz book. 

Student: Why aren’t these chords in order?
Me: Huh? Can you find the example of these chords on the previous page? Student: Shows me the example. But why aren’t they in order?
Me: Order? Light dawns… They are patterns made from the progression in the example.
Student: What’s a progression and why aren’t the chords in order in the piece?

We spent the rest of the lesson untangling the mess. We started by reviewing basic chords. Then, we used those as building blocks to create first a I IV V I progression and then the jazz progression from her book. Then, the word order popped up again. 

Me: Are the chords in your Mozart always in the order of a classical progression?
Student: Of course not. Sometimes they are but it would get boring pretty fast if they always were.
Me: Why would your jazz pieces be any different?
Student: Silence… So, if it was 12 Bar Blues it would repeat the pattern but this piece just uses the chords.
Me: Bingo!

Harmonic & Melodic Partnerships

We have worked on several harmonization projects over this year. For some transfer students, it is an entirely new thing to choose chords that work with a melody or create a melody that works with a pattern of chords. Others have experience but it’s mostly trial and error mixed with some good instincts on their part.  Generally, most of them are pretty fluent with their primary chords and common substitutes. Some can even use borrowed dominants and diminished 7ths. 

A retired lawyer found himself in a tangle trying to relate a chord pattern to a couple of examples in his book. Both the melody and chords were given in these examples. The first one has the RH staying in the same key but the second is 12 Bar Blues? I hit a blank because the second example was not in any way 12 Bar Blues. So, I asked if he could tell me more. Well, the melody in number 1 uses G minor blues scale and never moves and in 2 the melody moves to the key of the chord. Then, I understood. 

He had 2 concepts tangled together. So, we reviewed 2 basic ways to create a melody when all you have are the chords. He had the first one—choose mostly the scale tones that are in each chord. He was nearly there with the second too—move the melody to the scale of the chord. What he missed was that example 1 used the procedure of moving the melody to the scale of the chord but was missing a key component of 12 Bar Blues—the set pattern of 12 Bars. I get it, he said, Lots of melodies can be created by moving the melody to the scale of the chords but it’s not 12 Bar Blues without both repeating 12 Bars and moving. I really almost had it- just couldn’t say it. 

Yes, yes he did. 

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