ABOUT THIS BOOK

To simplify things, we can say that music consists of two main ingredients: melody and harmony. Between this two, melody is more popular. People with little musical experience and even children can easily enjoy a good melody. This is why great melodists are very popular among the composers. For instance, Johann Strauss Jr. and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky are composers that are known for their great melodic resources.

The second ingredient (harmony) is more like a secret sauce. It is very powerful but not as well-known and popular as melody. However, musicians and people with experience in music can enjoy a good harmony as much as a good melody. For instance, Johann Sebastian Bach and Frédéric François Chopin are composers that are known for their great harmonic resources.  

This book teaches harmony. In the first part of the book, concepts from general music theory are explained to help readers with the knowledge required for understanding harmony. In the second part, the theory of harmony is presented and illustrated with many examples. The examples are taken from compositions written for solo piano by great composers, mostly Bach and Chopin. At the end of the second part, there are many harmony analyses of the complete compositions.

A final goal of this book is to teach its readers how to analyze the harmony in compositions. This is an important goal because there is no better road to understanding music than by analyzing the works of great composers.

The knowledge from this book is best suited for analyzing music that belongs to the so-called common practice period. The common practice period is the period of classical music that spans the Baroque, Classical and Romantic era when tonal music prevailed. Tonal music relates to compositions which are, in every moment of time, melodically and harmonically organized around some major or minor key. Harmony requires such an organization and is only suitable for analysis of compositions which are tonal. In the history of music, the common practice period was preceded by the period of modal music and succeeded by the period of atonal music. Popular music belongs also to tonal music.