Notes

This week, we will learn about harmony, the simultaneous sounding of more than one pitch, to put it simply. In non-musical terms, harmony refers to the idea of people getting along together, or things that agree with each other (as in "the colors harmonize well").

In terms of world music, a main difference in how harmony is perceived is that some cultures hear certain intervals as consonant (pleasing) while others hear the same intervals as dissonant (not pleasing). Harmony refers to multiple pitches sounded at the same time (whether pleasing or not), but is often associated with notes which are consonant.

Many cultures do not think in terms of harmony in music, but think about the movement of individual lines of music happening together (horizontal rather than vertical). In Western music, harmony is almost a defining characteristic. Without harmonic progression in a song, we would feel the music is unorganized and even boring. Harmony is underneath almost all music most we listen to in mainstream American culture.

Here are a few comments to help you understand some of the key words for this week:
•Key refers to the specific scale (remember that from chapter 6?) in a piece of music. A piece of music in the “key of G” uses a scale that starts and ends on the note G.
•A drone is a pitch that stays the same, played along with a melody. The bagpipes have three drones, all playing pitches that never change, as the piper plays melodies on the chanter of the instrument. I am very familiar with this, as both my husband and son play bagpipes!
•Tonality concerns the harmonic basis of a piece of music. Most music is tonal, and has a tonal center, or “home” that it begins with, ends with, and around which it is centered. Atonal music is much less common. It has no tonal center or “home.”
•A triad is basically a group of three notes played together, a “stack” of notes, sometimes called a chord. If you play guitar, you know that a chord is usually three different pitches, using intervals of a third between each.