DIFFICULTIES WHILE FINDING CHORD INVERSIONS

When a bass line is complex and it consists of many chord tones that appear throughout the duration of a single chord, it may not be clear how to delimit and annotate chord inversions. For instance, the next figure shows three viable possibilities for annotating chord inversions during the long C major chord that spans two measures. We see that many chord tones occur in the bass line. The C major key is used for the annotation of harmony. The bass notes of the annotated chords are marked in blue color.

Figure: Three different possibilities for annotating chord inversions (each possibility is shown in a separate grand staff)

In this book, practically always, we use only one chord inversion throughout the entire duration of a single chord. This may differ from practices used in other books but it has some clear advantages, primarily simplicity and repeatability (i.e. the method is not subjective and different persons following it will arrive at the same results). The following figure shows this method when applied to the previous example.

Figure: The simplest method for annotating chord inversions in which we annotate only one chord inversion during a chord

You might be wondering what happens when a nonchord tone appears in the bass line. If you strictly follow the instruction in this book to ignore nonchord tones during harmony analysis then you don't have a problem. For example, the next figure shows a chord whose bass tone can be said to be the nonchord tone F#2. However, if we decide to ignore nonchord tones during harmony analysis, then we do not see the nonchord tone F#2 and the chord tone G2 is the bass tone. Thus, in the figure, we annotate the C major triad chord in the second inversion and the related harmony annotation in the C major key.

Figure: If nonchord tone is ignored during harmony analysis, it does not determine the chord and harmony annotation

However, since after the main melody, the bass line is the most important melodic line, you may find situations where people want to point out that the bass line contains a nonchord tone. This can be easily indicated in chord annotations. For example, in the previous figure, we can say that we have the C major triad chord over F#, or C/F#. In Jazz music, such chord annotations are used. This is illustrated in the next figure. However, the problem is that such an annotation possibility does not exist for harmony annotations. Therefore, by the principle "when a position cannot be annotated, the harmony is annotated in the root position", such a harmony is written as if it is in the root position. This is also illustrated in the next figure. The author of this book finds this quite confusing, avoids it entirely in the book and instead uses the method illustrated in the previous figure.

Figure: If nonchord tone is not ignored during harmony analysis, it does determine the chord and harmony annotation