How Tones Fit Together

I've been thinking about harmony for a long time.

Harmony sits at the heart of partimetnti. But this summer I've decided to stop talking about harmony-at least for a little while-and start talking about something broader.

I'm calling the series How Tones Fit Together.

The more I think about the word harmony, the more I feel it's limited by the way we've chosen to teach it. It's shaped by the textbooks that get written, the traditions we've preserved, the styles we've valued, and the institutions that decide what belongs in a harmony curriculum.

Sometimes harmony means chord theory.

Sometimes it means counterpoint.

Sometimes it means jazz harmony, or pop harmony, or functional harmony.

The word carries a lot of baggage.

So I'd like to step back and ask a simpler question:

How do tones fit together?

That question feels much bigger.

It includes the music of the Ars Nova, the Franco-Flemish composers, from the Roman school, from Paris, Naples, Vienna, and the broad common-practice tradition from before Bach to after Brahms. That today stretches throughout the world.

It includes the blues, whose roots stretch from Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South before intertwining with European musical traditions to become jazz.

It includes folk traditions from around the world.

It includes the harmony of a Taylor Swift song, and the harmony of a remix.

It includes the classical traditions of India and the Middle East,

It includes indigenous musical traditions from around the work, and countless other ways human beings have organized sound.

Every musical culture has asked, in its own way, how tones belong together.

The answers have been shaped by acoustics, by culture, by instruments, by history, by community, and-perhaps most fundamentally-by melody.

I suspect melody is the great organizing principle of music. Harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, texture, and form all grow out of melodic relationships. Whether that's true or not is one of the questions I hope to explore in this series.

But over the coming weeks, I'd like to think out loud with you about one of music's oldest and most fascinating questions:

How do tones fit together?

I'm looking forward to exploring it together.