MUSICAL HARMONY

theory with examples from PIANO REPERTOIRE 

This free book helps people involved with music to understand music theory

Many people involved with music run away from music theory. They consider music as magic that cannot be explained and musicians as wizards. While there is some truth in that, many things in music can be explained very well. Exceptionally talented musicians may have an intuitive approach, while the rest of us have no other choice but to learn music theory. Learning harmony can be the single best thing that leads to a better understanding of music.

This book teaches harmony. Harmony is an important part of any academic study of music. Harmony studies chords and sequences of chords that occur commonly in music. The book covers all the important topics: diatonic chords, various altered chords, cadences, modulations and chord progressions.

To include the widest possible circle of readers, the book also covers general music theory and explains how to read scores. The author hopes that this book can be of good use to all musical enthusiasts having a desire to learn harmony, even when they are not proficient in reading scores or basic music theory.

The book illustrates the theory of harmony with many examples. The examples are taken from compositions written for solo piano by great composers, mostly Bach and Chopin. In addition to the examples, there are many harmony analyses of complete compositions, including some of Bach’s Two Part Inventions, Bach’s Preludes from Well-Tempered Clavier and Chopin Preludes.

Separate and consistent notations are used for annotating chords and harmony. The notation used for annotating chords comes from popular music and Jazz and is convenient for playing music. The notation used for annotating harmony is convenient for the tasks of analyzing and composing music. In the book, all examples and all harmony analyses are annotated for both chords and harmony.

An important goal of this book is to teach readers how to analyze harmony in compositions because there is no better way to understanding music than by analyzing the works of great composers. The standard method of harmony analysis is given which will equip readers to learn from the scores of great composers.

Each score that appears in the book is linked to a YouTube video so that readers can listen to a performance of it. 

The book is accompanied with an online tool that helps in learning keys, chords and harmonies and can be of great assistance during harmony analysis. The tool can find keys, chords and harmonies that contain the note names entered using an on-screen piano keyboard. The great strength of this tool is that it distinguishes between the enharmonically equivalent note names and that besides chords it can recognize all the harmonies described in the book (diatonic chords, borrowed chords, Neapolitan chord, augmented sixth chords and even secondary chords).

Hrvoje Staneković, author 

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