Here is (or, I hope, will be) a repository of all my lectures on Tonal Harmony. Now that I’m no longer teaching this course series full-time, I might as well put them here in case they prove useful to someone. It’ll take quite a while for me to complete this task, though, since lecture handouts written for students whom I expected to meet every week are very different from guides written for online readers whom I’ll likely never meet. My current plan is to post the lectures in chronological order, but if you’d like to see specific topics first—such as the Neapolitan chord or modulation (which will take quite a while for me to reach)—just let me know, and I’ll try to edit and post those lessons first. For this introductory post, let me list some general concepts, suggestions, recommendations, and warnings that I usually shared with my students during our first class meeting.

Academically speaking, tonal harmony covers music composed roughly between the 17th and 19th centuries—what is usually called the Common Practice Period. In reality, tonal music continues well beyond the 19th century and thrives even today. Blues, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, pop, hip-hop, trip-hop, and many other styles all make use of tonal harmony to one degree or another. Different styles and genres integrate the principles of tonal harmony in different ways, and a good theory should be able to account for all aspects of tonal music.

My usual approach is to show why the music of, say, the Beatles and Beethoven is not all that different when it comes to the essentials. The styles and goals are different, and those differences are reflected in their approaches to tonal harmony, resulting in different chord progressions, tonal centers, forms, orchestration, and so on. But the underlying harmonic concepts are fundamentally the same.

Consequently, different genres and styles often seem to have their own theories. If you study in an academic environment, you might notice that your friends majoring in jazz take jazz theory or jazz harmony courses, while classical piano students take the usual tonal harmony courses. You may also notice that the terminology varies between these courses. That’s perfectly normal. Just as large countries often contain different dialects in different regions, music is a vast continent, and some terminological differences are to be expected.

When it comes down to the heart of the matter, though, they are often talking about the same underlying concepts. For example, what your jazz-major friends call a tritone substitution is closely related to concepts you may know as augmented sixth chords and secondary dominants (but never a Neapolitan!). Same idea, different dialect.

And even within what we call the classical music tradition, different schools often use different terminology. You may already know that an “imperfect cadence” and a “half cadence” refer to the same thing. Another example: some schools and textbooks prefer using lowercase Roman numerals for minor chords, while others use uppercase numerals throughout, so “ii” might appear as “II.” That’s also perfectly fine, as long as you understand what they mean, and they understand you.

In the lecture notes that follow, it may seem that many examples are drawn from so-called “classical” music. However, I hope that the theory presented here will be applicable to other genres of tonal music as well. If most examples come from classical music, it is simply because that repertoire has a longer documented history.

In most undergraduate music programs, the study of harmony is usually introduced during the first year. At some schools, this spans just two semesters, while at others it may cover three or four. Usually, harmony is studied alongside Aural Skills (or Ear Training) and Keyboard Skills (or Keyboard Harmony).

In an ideal world, students learn to recognize harmonic progressions and related concepts through their ears in Ear Training classes. They then demonstrate what they hear at the keyboard in Keyboard Skills classes. Finally, the theory component helps them understand why those progressions exist—the logic behind them, based on voice leading, historical practice, stylistic conventions, aesthetics, acoustics, and, to some extent, statistics.

Of these three areas, I would say that aural skills are the most important. You should work on developing your ear as much as possible. Music is ultimately about sound and silence, and listening is the most valuable musical skill you can possess. If you have a great ear but know nothing about music theory, no problem—that can be taught. But nobody can truly understand the logic of music without a well-developed ear.

One final point—and perhaps the most important one:

It’s a free country. Anything goes.

What your school, teachers, textbooks, and even I tell you are really guidelines—descriptions of common practices that we have learned from more than a millennium of Western music history. Many great minds have studied what we regard as the finest music of the past and have tried to answer questions such as these: How was this music composed? What characteristics do these works share? What kinds of musical logic seem to underlie these great repertoires? Why does one piece do this while another does not?

In a sense, music theory is partly a study of statistics—an examination of how certain musical events tend to occur within a repertoire. We use this information in an attempt to reverse-engineer the compositional process.

Did Mozart consciously think about all the theoretical concepts we discuss in schools when he wrote Don Giovanni ? I would say no. Certainly, he understood and felt the musical principles our theories attempt to describe. But when good composers write music, theory is usually the last thing on their minds. Their understanding of musical logic has become intuitive—a feeling, a subconscious process, if you will.

Likewise, when Beethoven wrote the Waldstein Sonata, many of the theoretical concepts we now use to analyze the work were still evolving. There was no fixed, universally accepted theory of sonata form at the time. The form was still alive and changing. Only much later, when scholars looked back, did they begin identifying common traits among works that we now group together as examples of “sonata form.” By then, however, the form was no longer evolving in quite the same way.

So yes, I genuinely believe there are no rules in music.

Music theory can help you understand when it is effective to use parallel fifths or those awkward leaps that your teachers usually forbid—and when it is not. If you are taking a theory exam at your school, or a graded examination from organizations such as Trinity or ABRSM, then your teachers and examiners will necessarily treat these guidelines as rules. Such exams implicitly assume the instruction: “Approach this exercise as if you were a musician working during the Common Practice Period.”

That is probably not the place where the argument, “But why could Jimi Hendrix use parallel fifths?” will be received very enthusiastically.

And if you are taking such an exam, please treat my notes as a guide while following your teacher’s instructions closely. If I write, “In our imaginary choir, let’s say the bass can go as low as low D,” and your teacher says, “The bass may only go as low as low E,” then you already know which instruction you should follow!

All right, I think that covers the usual warnings. If you’re ready, please go ahead and read the first lesson!