Grade Six Music Theory - Harmony Lesson 1: Introduction
What is Harmony?
The first three questions in the ABRSM Grade Six Music Theory Exam are all about harmony - but what exactly do we mean by "harmony"?
When we look at music with our analytical hats on, we can think about it in two different ways. We can look at it from left to right - this is the melody and rhythm.
Or, we can look at it from top to bottom - this is the harmony.
For example, here are a few bars by Bach from his "O haupt voll Blut und Wunden".
There are 4 melodic lines (or "voices") here, the soprano, alto, tenor and bass.
On each beat of the bar, those four voices combine to make chords. The science of how we combine notes into chords, and how the chords work together, is called "harmony".
Tonal Harmony
For Grade 6, we are going to study Tonal Harmony. This just means that we're going to focus on the kinds of chords used by composers from roughly the 17th to the 19th centuries - composers like Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert.
Grade Six Harmony
In this part of the course we're going to study:
- How chords are built
- Different naming systems to describe chords
- Chord inversions
- Chord progressions and cadences
- How to choose chords to harmonize a melody (Q.1a in the exam)
- How to understand "figured bass" (which is a chord short-hand system)
- How to complete a bass line and add a suitable figured bass (Q.1b in the exam)
- How to recognise "melodic decoration" (which means notes which aren't part of the main chords)
- How to realise a figured bass (Q.2 in the exam)
