HARMONY

Harmony is what is around the music when we listen to it. It is a canvas on which everything else is painted and conditions everything that surrounds it, having the power to drastically change its meaning. Harmony is one of the parts of music that has been most theorized and defined and perhaps that is its greatest danger, especially when studying it in isolation. There is the generalized idea that knowing music is understanding its harmony, and nothing is further from reality: music is understood when we understand the relationship of everything that sounds at a certain time, and not just a part in isolation.

What is certain is that the study of harmony gives us the virtue of naming sonorities resulting from sets of notes. Names that refer to physical-acoustic states and effects that we can all feel, only that we must learn to look for them and find them within the musical ethereal. The tonic, the dominant and the subdominant are functions that are based on relationships between the sounds, just like the Neapolitan or any type of cadence. It helps us to rely on this knowledge when we read or listen to music, and sometimes when we compose.

In musicaparacuentos we know that harmony has a very instantaneous utility and that it has tricks with which to play for fun. We know that it is good to know them and that any perspective on something adds and does not subtract. However, we also want to convey that harmony has non-definable norms that depend on the context. It is true that there are formulas that always work, but reproducing those formulas does not mean having music with content . The harmony must be in relation to everything else that sounds.

In this way we think that any medium is good to understand harmony, from jazz and improvisation to the analysis of scores. The only essential thing is to constantly look for the differences between the sounds to understand their authenticity.

If you are interested in our vision of harmony and want to delve deeper into it, you can contact us here .