Introduction

In what follows, we will get to understand some of these ‘secrets’ of tonal composers. To be sure, this is not to say that these composers consciously thought of harmony in exactly the terms we are explicating here, but the musical understanding we present is one which largely stems from the way western harmonic thinking evolved, and has been proven useful to explain tonal harmony, especially the harmonic language that was developed during what Walter Piston has called “the common-practice period” (essentially referring to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). We shall refer to this language as classical functional harmony (or functional harmony, for short).

To help us better appreciate the nature of classical tonal harmony, we shall also bring in some non-classical repertoire for comparison purposes. Eventually, you will understand the caveat below.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT:

This functional approach is not absolute, it does not mean that a progression that goes against the T-P-D-T syntactical order is necessarily wrong. It is interesting, indeed salutary, to note that nineteenth-century theorists like Gottfried Weber permitted all 6888 possible chord relationships he defined within and between keys, and for Hugo Riemann, who used also the concept of Funktion (Ger) but of a different kind to explain harmony, there is no such thing as a non-functional progression in his concept of tonality, see David Kopp, “On the Function of Function,” Music Theory Online 1.3 (1995).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

For the understanding expounded here, I am greatly indebted to Steve Laitz, The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Tonal Theory, Analysis, and Listening (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008/2003). Whilst the notion of harmonic function in relation to voice-leading elaboration has been broached by other authors (e.g. Gauldin, 2004/1997: 120-124; Roig-Francolí, 2011/2003: 145), Laitz develops this aspect more thoroughly as a second-level analysis (2008: 454).

However, due to other considerations, for illustration purposes, most of the musical examples are based on Roig-Francolí's Harmony in Context, 2nd ed. (2011).