Piano Practice - Borrowed Chords

Examples

These excerpts demonstrate how you might come across borrowed chords in a harmonic dictation exercise.

• Here again is the most familiar borrowed chord, the Picardy third.

• In this example, the deceptive cadence gets an unexpected twist…♭VI!

• In this example, the expectation of the standard I-IV-V progression gets a new and unexpected color when we have iv, instead of the usual IV, as our predominant.

• Here, instead of the “textbook” progression I-ii-V, we get a colorful tonic-predominant-dominant progression, I-ii^∅4/2-V^6/5. We also have another instance of minor iv instead of major IV: remember, there may be more than one borrowed chord within the same harmonic dictation.

Instructions for practice

At the piano, play through these progressions. Then, for comparison, play what they would sound like without the borrowed chords (i.e. in the more “normal” way, such as chord IV instead of borrowed chord iv in a major key. The trick to learning to hear different color is to be 100% familiar with the “expected” chords so you can understand how how the borrowed chord changes the color of the harmony.