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Tonal
Harmonic Principles
through Four Part Harmony
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. . The aim of my own studies as a young musician was
to aquire skills to practice the art of making and inventing
music. Later, as I gained experience as a teacher, I began to
find that my method, which is closer to an apprenticeship than
a pedagogy, solidly appropriated this emphasis. My lessons are
derived from musical practices in order to establish procedures
that enable students to experience for themselves, the flow
of musical processes. It is a practitioner’s approach to
music theory.
. . . This text deals with tonality,
and specifically with the practice of tonal voice-leading as
both a linear (melodic) and a vertical (harmonic) process, that
is, with the commonly accepted nature of musical processes of
western-classical-music as described in Rameau’s Treatise
on Harmony.
. . . The text identifies and imparts
the nature of music’s behavior through the setting forth
of principles, procedures, and practices of four-part tonal-harmonic
voice leading. it is not an exhaustive topical study of tonal
harmony.
. . . It owes its existence in
this form primarily to the many jazz keyboard students who began
showing up in my studio disillusioned by their contact with
jazz theory. The relationship of the harmonic nature of jazz
to classical musical principles is severely misunderstood by
the jazz-theorists. For the most part they merely catalog and
enumerate vocabulary items such as scales and chord voicings
without any reference to what Professor Leonard Meyers calls
the “laws of good continuity.” These Jazz students
(at best) know what to play but not when or why .
. . . An example; the performances
of Herbie Hancock during 1964 through, say, 1966 in Miles Davis’
Quintet, are with general agreement recognized as a high point
of expression and imagination in the context of the role of
the pianist in a rhythm section ensemble of this nature. Can
this music be analyzed, described, or understood by the methods
of the jazz pedagogists? Jazz and Classical music are not identical,
but harmonic procedures in a jazz context are not unrelated
to harmonic procedures in non-jazz settings. Jazz pianists find
through this study that keyboard extemporizations are best understood
as expansions upon these principles.
. . . Rhythms and meters are provided
for all of the voice leading exercises. This rightly connects
the harmonic-melodic process to the passing of real musical
time. Therefore, from the beginning, melody and harmony are
related as they should be with musical time.
. . . The limitations and restrictions
of this study could best be regarded as ‘directions for
a laboratory experiment’ whose purpose is to demonstrate
how one achieves continuity and relationship in music. The rules
when respected and carefully followed will result in musical
examples that clearly reveal the principles upon which effective
and expressive melodic and harmonic practices are based. That
is the purpose of the study.
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