Welcome. This time also I come with a big amount of time without publishing on Steemit, these weeks have been complicated and I have finally managed to organize my time, so please expect to see me more often around here.
Don't expect an article focused entirely on music, I want everyone to appreciate it and learn something new, so I will try to make it digestible for all readers.
Anyway, let's get started.
A few personal anecdotes about Harmony and Music
This week I've decided to take the study of music more seriously, I've been playing my guitar more, and I have revived very good moments that I had with my first masters of the instrument.
The element I am most passionate about and attracted to about music is harmony, I remember that before I played any melody or scale the first thing I learned was chords, I enjoyed and still do, moving the voices and seeing how the sound of the chord changes. In the beginning, before understanding music theory, I was always very curious about seeing my favorite guitarists, like Joe Pass, Paco de Lucia, and others, I wanted to know with all my heart what kind of magic was behind everything that was heard on the surface, how everything was logically and coherently related to produce such audible beauty in their playing.
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"Reflejo de la Luna" by Paco de Lucia, from his album "Fuente y Caudal, and "Sultry" by Joe Pass, from his album "Virtuosso #4"
I've always been an analytical person, I consider myself a thinker, I don't know much about philosophy and psychology, but I'm constantly wondering about the nature of things.
That's why I decided to write this article, and I intend to write many more in the future, the aim of it will be to think about music, I want to invite everyone who knows and does not know about music to take a look at my personal vision.
On this occasion, we will take a look at harmony and music theory, I want us to see these concepts from different points of view and to understand them.
Harmony from my perspective
From my point of view, the best tool to learn after the experience is the understanding of metaphor and analogy, so let's see my human and personal metaphor about Harmony:
Imagine that one day you are walking in the park, you marvel at how beautiful the day is and you don't feel bad, but you still feel lonely. And suddenly, one or two people come to walk with you, start talking to you about what they think, their feels, and their dreams, now everything takes on a different dimension. That's harmony.
Just a small analogy, which allows us to understand and connect harmony as an element of our daily life with harmony as a core element of music - the interaction with other human beings and its equivalent in music that it would be the interaction between different or various sounds.
As a way to express this idea, of how beautiful harmony is and how important it is to the music, let's take a look at the following video:
"Canons diversi. Canon à 2 "Canon Cancrizans" (Crab Canon), an excerpt from "Musikalisches Opfer", a work composed by Johan Sebastian Bach, this Canon has a coherence and beauty both melodically and harmonically, regardless of whether it is played in order, backward, or polyphonically varying his own order.
Funny, isn't it? It makes me think a little about how the lives of all human beings seem to be connected, or even how our present seems to be a reflection of the lives of our ancestors in the most elementary aspects.
It also makes me think about how much beauty we take away from our lives by not generating a harmonious interaction with like-minded human beings, with our own dreams and goals. In the eyes of those who like to daydream and see beyond the "veil of reality", music has many life lessons to teach.
How do we define harmony musically?
According to Paul Hindemith in his book "Traditional Harmony" (page 3) we have a simple and general definition of Harmony:
"...harmony is a simple art, based on a few empirical rules derived from historical and acoustic facts, rules that are easy to learn and apply..."
In the book "Harmony 1" (page 3) by Barry Nettles we have the following definition:
Harmony deals with the study of chords and their relationship to one another. The understanding of harmonic practice is essential to understanding the language of music. As in learning any language, the first step in the learning process is the development of a vocabulary.
All of these are correct definitions of harmony, now, in those definitions, we have some terms which are related and also need to be understood: "rules", "historical facts", "acoustic facts", "language of music" and "vocabulary". All these terms are related to each other and refer to a common element:
- Music theory
Let's see more about this subject according to Walter Piston in his book "Harmony" (page 3):
"...if we reflect that theory must follow practice, rarely preceding it except by chance, we must realize that musical theory is not a set of directions for composing music. It is rather the collected and systematized deductions gathered by observing the practice of the composers over a long time, and it attempts to set forth what is or what has been their common practice. It tells not how music will be written in the future, but how music has been written in the past."
So far, as explained, to understand harmony we must learn a language, which in this case is the language of music, better known as music theory. But it is not totally necessary, even though theory is one of the best-known means to learn music, the most essential thing we need to improve in order to learn music is our hearing sense.
Because theory is nothing more than the way we organize, categorize or develop a model for understanding music in a systematic way, but it is not the only way to do it, there are many musicians who have developed a great ability to express themselves musically without having studied any theory, among them we have: Stevie Wonder, Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery and others.
Of which we will surely be able to talk about in an upcoming post. I don't want to go into it any further at this time, so I'll just say goodbye for now ;).
If you are interested in more music articles, I invite you to see some that I have previously made:
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://joedukeg.vornix.blog/2018/08/03/a-journey-through-harmony-and-music-theory-music-for-everyone/