Workgroup for Chromatic Harmony

1966 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-116
Author(s):  
William Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Chromatic Harmony

scholarly journals "Chinese Harmony" and Contemporary Non-Tonal Music Theory

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Rahn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
Chromatic Harmony

Twentieth-century Chinese theorists and composers have developed a distinctively indigenous approach to harmony, based in part on earlier pentatonic traditions. Mixed as it is with conventions of diatonic and chromatic harmony imported from Europe and North America, the resulting "Chinese harmony" poses music-theoretical problems of coordinating diatonic and pentatonic scales, and tertial and quartal chords. A survey of Chinese harmony as expounded by Kang Ou shows these difficulties to be theoretically intractable within solely Chinese or Euro-American frameworks, but soluble through recent formulations in atonal—or more appropriately, non-tonal-theory, as advanced by such writers as John Clough.

Desire in Chromatic Harmony

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Piano Works ◽  
Chromatic Harmony ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Chromatic Music ◽  
Metaphor And Metonymy

Of the many composers in the Western classical tradition who celebrated the marriage between psyche and sound, those explored in this book followed the lines diverging from Wagner in philosophizing the nature of desire in music. This book offers two new theories of tonal functionality in the music of the first half of the twentieth century that seek to explain its psychological complexities. First, the book further develops Riemann’s three diatonic chord functions, extending them to account for chromatic chord progression and substitution. The three functions (tonic, subdominant, and dominant) are compared to Jacques Lacan’s twin concepts of metaphor and metonymy, which drive the apparatus of human desire. Second, the book develops a technique for analyzing the drives that pull chromatic music in multiple directions simultaneously, creating a libidinal surface that mirrors the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, and the post-Freudians Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The harmonic models are tested in psychologically challenging pieces of music by post-Wagnerian composers. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk’s Asrael Symphony to an exploration of “perversion” in Strauss’s Elektra, from the post-Kantian transcendentalism of Ives’s Concord Sonata to the “Accelerationism” of Skryabin’s late piano works, and from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski’s Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland’s The Tender Land, the book cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity and digs deep into the psychological makeup of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Pedagogy of Chromatic Harmony and Form

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-189
Author(s):  
Jennifer Snodgrass
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Chromatic Harmony ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
Musical Context

As the study of music theory becomes more advanced with the introduction of chromaticism and formal studies, there is an opportunity for instructors and students to create a dialogue based on interpretations and performance. Starting with sound is essential in teaching the more advanced topics, and students should be experiencing the music through singing, playing, and listening before analytical conclusions are made. Through visual interpretations, analogies, and incorporation of a multitude of genres, students are able to make meaningful connections between harmony and formal structures, harmony and textual references, and how formal structures are created within a musical context. These more advanced levels encourage students to become independent thinkers and to create their own understanding of “how” and “why” the music was composed by creating their own analytical discoveries.

Church Is Where “I Acquired My Singing Tactics”

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
Vic Hobson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Chromatic Harmony ◽  
Mount Zion

This chapter explores the influence of singing in Mount Zion Baptist Church on Armstrong’s development as a musician.Although we do not know exactly what Armstrong sang at his church there are transcriptions of the singing in New Hope Baptist Church just across the Mississippi River in Gretna. The transcriptions reveal a similar blues influenced tonality to the street songs and barbershop cadences sung elsewhere in New Orleans. This chapter explores the pentatonic tendency of melody in African American song; whereas the supporting lines tend to contain chromatic intervals and give rise to chromatic harmony.

Ravel's "Russian" Period: Octatonicism in His Early Works, 1893-1908

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Baur
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Maurice Ravel ◽  
Chromatic Harmony

The octatonic scale has provided composers an important alternative to common diatonic practice since the middle of the nineteenth century. Scholars have traced a direct line of transmission with respect to octatonic writing passing from Liszt, through Rimsky-Korsakov, to Stravinsky. But octatonicism also figures prominently in the music of Maurice Ravel, and several works from the first fifteen years of his career implicate Ravel directly in the octatonic legacy, simultaneously bearing the influence of nineteenth-century chromatic harmony as practiced by Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov and anticipating methods of octatonic partitioning heretofore considered specifically Stravinskian innovations.

scholarly journals An Unusual Effect in the Canon Per Tonos from J. S. Bach's Musical Offering

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Dennis Collins ◽  
W. Andrew Schloss
Keyword(s):  
Unusual Effect ◽  
Chromatic Harmony

We propose that the phrase repetitions in the canon per tonos from J. S. Bach's Musical Offering are not recognized by listeners as being successively upward. We examine possible causes for this effect and suggest that it may be due to Bach's use of chromatic harmony. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment in which one group of listeners was presented with Bach's canon, while another group was presented with a modified version of the canon in which the harmonies were altered in order to make the upward phrase repetitions more apparent. We found that subjects recognized the ascending pattern in the modified canon with greater ease than they recognized the ascending pattern in Bach's canon. We also consider briefly why Bach may have wished to cause such an effect.

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