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Harmony
Harmony is the simultaneous occurrence of two or more different tones. If three or more different tones happen at the same time, a chord is produced.
Harmony was the last of the four tools to develop. It seems not to have been known prior to the 9th century C.E. All music discovered prior to that time has a single melodic line. Today harmony is considered to be a science and students majoring in music devote a year or more to master all of its rules and nuances.
Harmony began in the 9th century with a primitive form known as “organum”. To produce organum the harmony tones lie beneath the melody at intervals of a 4th or 5th. Through the years the general public has developed more accepting standards of what constitutes good harmony. At the beginning, only intervals of perfect 4ths and perfect 5ths were used. Today, anything goes. Listen to contemporary art music or jazz and you will hear that every possible interval finds its way into harmony.
Although chords are vital to providing the harmony backdrop for a composition, individual harmonies define a composer’s or arranger’s style. Simply by listening to the harmonies of a piece of music, the educated ear can distinguish Wagner from Debussy and Schoenberg from Copland. Even in commercial music harmonies can define composition. Consider the rich vocals of Crosby, Stills and Nash against the relatively predictable harmonies of early rock-and-roll such as heard from Elvis Presley.
Harmony is, at first hearing, pretty. But it serves a larger compositional purpose. Harmony helps to move music and, most especially, it serves to tell the listener when music is coming to a turning point or conclusion. The proper term to describe such change points is “cadence”. A cadence closes a musical phrase.
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