Read an Academic Passage

The Concept of Musical Harmony

Harmony in music is the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce chords and chord progressions with a pleasing effect. While melody consists of a sequence of single notes, harmony adds a vertical dimension to music, creating texture and emotional depth. The principles of harmony in Western music have evolved over centuries. In medieval music, harmony was quite simple, often consisting of parallel motion in intervals like perfect fifths. It was during the Renaissance that composers began to explore more complex relationships between notes, leading to the development of tonality, the system that has dominated Western music for the past 400 years.

Tonality is organized around a central note, the tonic, which provides a sense of resolution and stability. The relationship between different chords and the tonic creates a feeling of tension and release, which is fundamental to the emotional arc of a piece of music. For example, a dominant chord creates a strong expectation for a return to the tonic chord, providing a satisfying conclusion. This system, with its established rules of chord progression and voice leading, allowed composers like Bach and Mozart to create works of incredible complexity and emotional power. The predictable yet powerful nature of these harmonic structures is key to their appeal.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some composers began to challenge the traditional rules of tonality. Figures like Arnold Schoenberg developed atonal music, which avoids a tonal center and treats all twelve notes of the chromatic scale with equal importance. This created a new sound world that was often dissonant and unsettling to audiences accustomed to traditional harmony. While tonal harmony remains prevalent in popular music and film scores, the exploration of atonality and other harmonic systems has greatly expanded the expressive possibilities of modern classical music.