Culture · 6 pages · 12 min
How harmony stacks notes
Harmony is pitches sounding together, and tonal practice often stacks them in thirds.
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From the opening
Harmony is the vertical side of music, the pitches that sound at the same time and the intervals between them. In the tonal practice that produced most staff-notated chords, those pitches are stacked in thirds, so a chord is heard as one object built upward from a root rather than as several unrelated tunes that happen to collide. The opening covers thirds above a root, inversions keep the same pile, and fourths and clusters stack differently.
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Inside
- Thirds above a root
- Inversions keep the same pile
- Fourths and clusters stack differently
- Lines can meet as chords
- Where the idea stops applying
- A distinction worth keeping
Sources
- Tertian harmony and the triad
- Figured bass as a shorthand for chord stacks