Now that we understand how circle-of-fifths progressions within a key create a basic harmonic “outline”, we can use that pattern to begin analyzing harmony. The framework of these progressions can be used to organize any piece of music in this tradition and allows us to ask the two fundamental questions of all harmonic analysis:
Regardless of the complexity or era of a composition, if a theorist can answer these questions about a piece, they can analyze the qualities that define that style of composition.
As we progress through the examples below, we will develop a process for analyzing a piece of tonal music. Students often think that “analyzing” a piece of music simply involves identifying and labeling a bunch of chords, but as you move through this, be aware that the goal of harmonic analysis is to explain how the listener hears the music. While the first step is identifying harmonies, it is far more involved than that, so as you move past the first step of identifying chords, I encourage you to make a list of all the questions and decisions that you encounter as you work.
Study the following chorale, and provide a Roman numeral and inversion figure below every new harmony. As you go through this process, keep track of the questions that you solve as well as what makes this difficult. Start by looking at the big picture, and do not get bogged down in trying to figure out every pitch and chord at first glance. If you get stuck, keep moving and return to the difficult sections after you have a feel for the piece as a whole. You should also consider starting with leadsheet notation until you are confident of the key of the piece; you can then return to add Roman numerals once you have more context.
To do this, there are three primary questions that must be answered in a harmonic analysis:
We will tackle the second and third questions in the example below, but before you can begin to analyze the chords within a piece, you need to figure out how often the chords change. This concept is called harmonic rhythm. It is different for every piece; sometimes it will be every beat as in the chorale above, but other pieces will have irregular patterns and/or many measures before new harmonies.
Determining harmonic rhythm is intuitively obvious to most musicians while listening, but can be difficult to illustrate when looking only at the music. This is often a chicken-or-the-egg question: you need to know how often the chord changes to determine which pitches to include in the chord, but you also need to look at which pitches create chords to figure out how often the chord changes. Chorales are an easy place to start, because most often, they change chords in a consistent rhythm–in this case, every beat–and this creates an easy-to-see visual cue as each chord is stacked vertically and mostly homorhythmic. For more complicated textures, studying melodic patterns and bass-lines is often enough to provide enough context for an educated guess. Bass-lines in particular will often sustain pitches and/or outline chords until the harmony changes, and this gives a clear indicator of probable harmonic rhythm. This becomes much easier as the student gains experience.
The Old Hundreth Psalm has a number of incomplete chords, and this may not be obvious at first glance. To fill in the missing pieces, music theorists use a number of tools, most of which are designed to look at contextual clues and draw conclusions based on their general knowledge. We created one of these tools in Unit 7a with the diatonic harmony flowchart.
| (unnamed) | (unnamed) | pre-dominant | dominant | tonic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| iii | vi | ii | V | I |
| IV | viio |
By employing the progressions from this flowchart, a theorist can look at a given harmony and decide which pitches support a harmonic progression that is likely to be heard by a listener, even if those tones are not present.
One of the most difficult issues to tackle in harmonic analysis is determining which pitches are functional.
Analyze the following embellished first phrase of the Old Hundredth Psalm. Which notes are not necessary for the harmonic function? How would you describe their motion? If you are struggling to determine whether it belongs or not, try referring to your the harmonic outline that you built in the previous topic Unit 7a. Does the voice-leading–i.e. how each chordal member resolves–work with the rules that you established in Unit 7a if you do not have a non-chord tone?
The essential pitches of any harmony are those that if removed, would noticeably alter the way the listener hears the harmony. As you attempted to analyze this decorated melody, were you able to see and hear the basic framework from the first phrase of the Old Hundredth? If so, it should have allowed you to figure out both the harmonic rhythm as well as which pitches were decorative.
The harmonic rhythm stayed the same; one chord per quarter note, even though the voices were often filled double the amount of notes.
From there, you must consider a number of factors to determine which notes are embellishments.
As you answered each of these questions, you began understanding how harmony functions. Even without much guidance, you can use your knowledge of musical fundamentals–intervals, chords, melodic lines, Roman numeral labeling, etc.–to create a sketch of the harmonic underpinnings of this chorale.
We use chorales to begin studying analysis because of the vertical nature of the writing. Every chord in this composition is aligned to where it can be easily parsed by sight, and almost every tone is functional. As you look at other musical styles, try to reduce the music down to a simpler texture–one that resembles a chorale voicing–if you cannot answer the basic questions of finding harmonic rhythm and chord tones.