Harmony

By Thomas Erma Møller (Translated from Norwegian by Sarah Osa)

If you have ever played the guitar, you have probably noticed just how many songs you can play if you know just three “grips”. Within orchestra music there are also works, both old and new, which are built upon just a few chords. Classical music history can be said to primarily be a trajectory which reflects the development of new sounds and the desire to break down stylistic barriers in order to create completely new harmonic worlds.

Some of the music composed during the 18th century is, harmonically speaking, relatively simple. Many of the chords are triads  —they consist of three tones in a particular order — and are presented in a system with limited possibilities when it comes to which chords can be played consecutively. This so-called “functional harmony” was established in the 1600’s. Only during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century was it seriously challenged as a paradigm, and at times it was discarded completely. Nevertheless, it still constitutes the starting point for most of the music written in the Western world, especially within popular music.

Although the chord foundation and the harmonic system of the 18th century were relatively simple, composers were experts at exploiting its technical and the expressive possibilities to the utmost. Johann Sebastian Bach achieved a perfect balance between each individual voice and the chords which were created when the voices were played together in an advanced “counterpoint”. This linear play can be seen in his The Art of Fugue, The Well-Tempered Clavier, or The Brandenburg Concertos. In Bach’s time it was also common practice to make the harmony more expressive through the use  of “trills” and other ornamentation, which took the audience by surprise.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seldom based his work on as intricate a play of lines as Bach did. On the contrary, he had a talent for composing unusually expressive music using simple and subtle harmonic devices. Listen to the “Lacrymosa” from his Requiem, or the second movement from his Clarinet Concerto. Both the chord foundation and the harmonic system were already expanded by Ludwig van Beethoven’s time. This development continued through the whole of the 19th century until the traditional harmonic apparatus reached the limit for what it was capable of expressing.

In Richard Wagner’s operas — especially in Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal — the harmony is so advanced that it’s difficult to discern just where the chords originate from and where they are headed towards. This reflects a critical development which, in the transition to the 20th century, allowed composers such as Claude Debussy to use advanced and tension-inducing chords without the traditional system of transition. Good examples of this are Afternoon of a Faun and La Mer.

Some went even further and didn’t simply discard functional harmony, but tonality as a whole. In much of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg’s music it is close to impossible to discern a key or a tonal “home ground”. Instead, these composers created new systems for the chords’ content and order —among these the so-called twelve-tone system. Another composer who created his own, extremely complex harmonic universe during the 20th century was Frenchman Olivier Messiaen. Listening to Turangalila, Vingt regards su l’enfant-Jésus or L’Ascension is like stepping into a new and unknown musical world.

As a counterweight to this harmonic complexity, American composers in the 1960’s such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass created what is known as Minimalism. Here, entire musical works could be based on a single or just a few chords, the focus being mainly on small changes in rhythm, sound or other elements. A similar harmonic simplicity can often be seen in Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s meditative music. For instance, his Spiegel im Spiegel is built on just a few triads which are played on the piano, and some simple scales played on the violin.

Both music from the 18th century and the minimalistic music from the 20th century have become very popular, perhaps because the respective styles reflect a harmonic apparatus reminiscent of what is often used in popular music. Few chords are used and the harmonic system is simple, yet the music can still have a strong effect. However, if one takes the time to familiarise oneself with the more complex harmonic worlds found in the orchestra music composed during the 19th and 20th century, great experiences are likely to await, both in the concert hall and through one’s headphones. Few experiences can be said to match getting sucked into Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky or Messiaen’s wondrous harmonic worlds.