Appendix IV:

Harmony in Detail

Harmony is a combination of simultaneous notes, and  Harmonic Character  is the quality of sound resulting from those notes played together.  Since harmony is the combination of notes,  there is no harmony if only one note is sounding. Monophonic texture, which has only one sound at a time, has no harmony and we can not therefore describe the sound of the harmony of monophony.  [See Appendix III for more about the different types of texture.]

We feel and hear greater or lesser amounts of tension when two notes are played together, and this tension is the physical result of the sound waves either working together (little tension) or colliding (much tension).    We call the quality consonant when there is little tension. We call the quality dissonant when there is much tension.    Since we tend not to like tension in our lives, we frequently find consonance pleasant, and dissonant unpleasant, but dissonance remains an extremely effective expressive tool. Musicians can not express the full range of human emotions, situations, and activities without musical tension.

Example 1  has two notes that are consonant, followed by two notes that are dissonant, followed again with two notes that are consonant.

There are different qualities of both consonances and dissonances, and these different qualities are the result of what the specific intervals (distance between two notes) are.    When dissonant harmonies result from notes that are really close together, we tend to hear them more harshly than if they are further apart.

In  Example 2, the first dissonant interval is a bit more mellow than the second one. The first (mellower) one repeats again after the second harsher one.

We can identify different kinds of consonant sounds. When the notes are far apart we consider the sound to be fairly hollow.   When the consonant sounds are close together, we hear them as sweeter.

In Example 3, a hollow consonance is followed by a sweet consonance, then again a hollow consonance.

As there are different kinds of consonant harmonies such as sweet and hollow, there are different types of sweet harmony, again, depending on the types of intervals.  One type is major harmony and one type is minor harmony.  In The United states, we tend to hear major harmony as happy and minor harmony as sad (in other areas of the world they hear them differently).

In Example 4, we hear a major harmony, then a minor harmony, then a major harmony;   we then hear a richer major harmony (with another note added), a richer minor harmony, then a final rich major harmony.  

What makes harmony are different types of chords.  A Chord is simply two or more notes playing at the same time. If you don’t have a chord, you don’t have harmony because you have a chord every time two or more notes are being heard.  A triad is a special type of a chord that we use most often in the United States.  A triad is chord made up of three notes, and each note is the interval of the third away from the other notes.  In Example 4 above, the first three chords are just two notes, so they are not triads.  The last three chords are triads because they are all three notes a third apart. The first of these is a major triad (with major harmony). The second chord is a minor triad with minor harmony, and the last one is the same as the initial major triad. 

As with all of the elements, harmony is always changing because the notes are always changing.   Some songs have predominantly consonant harmony, some have predominantly dissonant harmony, and some have a lot of both.  What is important is to describe what changes you hear as the harmony change. 

Here is an African song that might sound familiar to you, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” While many know this song from the Disney’s The Lion King, it was actually written in South African in 1939 by Solomon Linda. 

Can you hear both major and minor chords?  Where do you hear dissonant chords, and where do you hear consonant chords?

The piece begins with a brief solo, followed by an opening phrase that consists of very close, consonant harmonies, in which it seems that the lines are only spaced slightly apart but move in the same directions, with the same space in between each of their notes. For the next few phrases when the percussion section begins, the singers are in unison, until the solo voice comes in on the higher line. The harmony for that phrase is much more open than the beginning, because the solo voice is in a much higher range than the unison voices repeating the previous line. The harmony is still consonant, and when the line of the solo voices drops down to the same range as the unison choral voices, it return to the close, consonant harmonies that occurred in the beginning.

In the next section, there is not a solo high part, but the lower unison choral voices continue on their same motif. The next layer that is added is another chorus that is not unison, but harmonic. They use that same close and consonant harmonies from the beginning, and like in the beginning it sounds as if each part is moving the same amount of steps in between their notes. They create a more open harmonies with the unison line below them, which sounds as if it functions like the bass for the higher, crowded harmonies in the higher chorus. This same harmonic sounds occur in the next two sections, with the higher, mixed voices moving together with consonant harmonies and the unison chorus providing a bass line below them.

After these sections, there is a brief section where we only hear the unison, lower voices. The high soloist from the beginning then comes back in, and there is a little more dissonance in the harmony between the soloist and the bass unison chorus, due to the slight alterations in notes that the high soloist  chose to use. Again there is a more open harmonic effect here because of the differing ranges that the soloist and the chorus are performing in.

There is one final repetition of each of the previous sections, after which the piece slows down and ends on a single chord. The choruses are all joined together at this point, and the effect created by the last chord uses much more even spacing between the harmonic notes than any of the previous sections, with either very open or closed melodies, and the final chord is very consonant. The overall effect of the piece harmonically is that of a melody, provided by the mixed voices, accompanied by a bass line, the unison chorus.