[MUSIC] Today we'll be talking about harmony. The piece you just heard was the piano part a work by Beethoven. It has a melody yes, but the element that gives the music it's richness is the accompanying harmony. Here's the melody alone. [MUSIC] And so on. It's fine, though the rhythm might possibly be a little bit repetition. But now here it is again with the harmony. [MUSIC] As Beethoven himself is reported to have said in 1810, every thought in music is ultimately related to the whole of the harmony which is oneness end quote. Well, here's a wildly different way of thinking of it. In the 1990s, a recruiting slogan for the US Army famously said quote be all that you can be end quote. Harmony supports the melody and allows it to be all that it can be. Now here's another piece for piano one by Chopin, a prelude by Chopin. In the image on your screen you see the melody in the red above, and the harmony, those are the notes underneath. Let me play that. [MUSIC] And so on. Melody above, harmony below. Chordial accompany below. Harmony seems to be very important in music, and indeed it is. But here's a question for you. How many musical cultures around the world do without harmony, almost entirely? Actually most of them do without harmony, or at least without much harmony. Here's a rendering of the Adhan. The Islamic call to prayer, sung around the Muslim world five times a day. But it's done without any kind of accompanying voices or instruments, without any sort of harmony. Let's just listen. [MUSIC] All of the beauty of this music lies in the melody. And indeed in all the subtle gradations between pitches and what the singer does by way of varying the intensity when he has landed on a pitch. In a situation such as this, likely the addition of harmony would only obscure the chant and obscure the beautiful melody. Now some traditional music from Africa, recorded in the country of Mali. Again, there is little in the way of accompanying harmony here. There's just a call and response melody sung between two ladies, with drums pushing the rhythm forward. [MUSIC] So some musical cultures, particularly those that of the East, emphasize highly nuanced melody and those of Africa and African influenced South America emphasize rhythm. On the other hand, Western pop music and Western classical music prefer these sorts of sounds. A melody plus a rich accompaniment. Here's that Chopin prelude again. Actually in the 1970s pop singer Barry Manilow turned this Chopin prelude into a pop hit, It Could Be Magical. [MUSIC] And again, and so magical indeed. Magical because of the harmony. Harmonies are built upon simultaneously sounding aggregates of pitches called chords. A chord is simply a group of two or more pitches sounding at the same time. Let's watch a class video to see how chords, specifically those chords called triads, are built. And how they form a foundation upon which a melody can be constructed. Let's talk for a moment about chords. What's a chord? Well a chord is just a simultaneous sounding of two or more pitches. That's a very basic, general definition of a chord. And a chord can be, of course [SOUND] consonant or it can be [SOUND] dissonant. So let's stick with just consonant chords. We'll be working with consonant chords today and the most fundamental of the consonant chords is this idea of the triad. This figure that we call the triad. It's the building block really of all our harmonies whether it's pop or classical. And we're gonna use a lot of pop music today and we'll be pointing out triads there in this pop music. So what's a triad? Well, obviously you get the idea of three pitches, three pitches. How does it work? Let's go over to the keyboard and the staff here. Let's say we've got a scale. And we do have a scale, C D E F G A B C, and I wanted to construct a triad above each of these notes of the scale. Well, this happens to be a C, middle C here. So a triad is going to have three pitches and it spans five letter names. And we go one letter name, two letter names, three letter names, four letter names, five letter names. We take one, three and five. Here I'm taking C, skipping D, taking E, skipping F, taking G. And it gives me this three note aggregate. Take one, skip, take one, skip, take one, [SOUND]. And we can do the same thing. [SOUND] And so on, right up the scale in that fashion. Notice as we said before, we've got this scale, we've got some notes rather important in the scale, tonic is very important. We said [SOUND] the leading tone is important, so with chords and triads. Some are very important. The tonic is very important and this dominant. What we call the dominant. It's not really the most important. It sort of leads into, pulls into particularly important setting up the tonic. It's the next important, right below that is the subdominant. It often pulls into the dominant which then pulls into the tonic in that fashion. So we would get this idea of here's a chord here. [SOUND] There's the tonic, here's the dominant, [SOUND]. There's the subdominant, [SOUND], and there's the tonic. We can flip this just a little bit. We could say alright here's our tonic up here. [MUSIC] And go that way, tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic, [MUSIC] That way. So we could come up from the tonic, or go down from the tonic. Generally speaking, composers are more likely to go down from the tonic than come back up to the tonic than they are likely to go the other way. So we've got these three basic chords we're gonna talk about. There are others there that we've built on the second and seventh degree of the scale, but these are the most important. And it's surprising how much music these three basic chords can accommodate and with all the things. [MUSIC] Dominant, tonic, dominant, tonic, finally, [MUSIC] Subdominant tonic, [MUSIC], dominant, tonic. [MUSIC] So a lot of music is made in that fashion. So as the class video said we get a lot of musical mileage out of just these three chords. [MUSIC] So think about this the next time you listen to music whether classical or pop. I think you can hear the very least of difference between the dominant and the tonic chords. [MUSIC] Tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant, tonic. [MUSIC]
