What is harmony?

Harmony is multiple notes being played together. That’s all it is. Different combinations of notes being played together. If we define it this way then we have many different ways of creating harmony. It doesn’t just have to be triads, or seventh chords. It could be clusters. It could be fourths.

To use a quote from Vincent Persichetti’s book Twentieth -Century Harmony:

“… any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones …”

I like this definition because it includes everything and well it’s true. Any notes can be played together. They might sound harsh and dissonant, but there’s nothing preventing someone from composing dissonant music.

As an example of harmony we can listen to Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently. This has one type of harmony.

This song has 17,572 singers, but that doesn’t mean that each of those singers is singing a different note. I participated in this video and there were only 5 unique parts. It was arranged for soprano, alto, tenor, bass 1, and bass 2. And even then there were doubled notes between those parts.

At most that’s five different notes, but a lot of the time it’s four.

That’s one type of harmony. Another type of harmony can be heard in Jacob Collier’s arrangement of Moon River by Henry Mancini.

Here we have fewer voices, but more notes being sung together. Jacob Collier often uses extended chords that have five or six or even seven different notes all being played together.

This creates a different kind of harmony. The more unique notes you have the more colorful the harmonies become. Think of the notes being vertical. What’s all being sung at the same time is what the harmony is. So it can change pretty quickly if all of those notes are constantly moving.

One thing that makes singing harmony difficult is that you’re singing a part that you’re not hearing. If I’m singing a tenor part in a four-part choir and I’m the only tenor singer, I’m only hearing the soprano, alto, and bass lines. Those are all musical lines that I’m not singing. So I need to be able to concentrate a little more and sing a little more independently than if I were singing the melody or singing in a group.

Hearing the part you’re singing becomes a little more important because I need to be able to hear it purely in my head. I can’t rely on other singers to help me.

In following with our quote from Vincent Persichetti above; some harmonies can be more harsh than those examples. Pieces of music like “Dash” by Jennifer Higdon have harmonies that create a harsher sound.

These harmonies sound harsh often because there are notes that are close together.

Some words we can use to describe the differences in harmonies are consonant and dissonant. Consonant means that the harmonies aren’t very harsh. They’re a little more pleasant. Dissonant means the harmonies are harsher.

The harmonies used in the Eric Whitacre video above are often consonant.

The harmonies used in the Jennifer Higdon video above are often dissonant.

The harmonies used in the Jacob Collier video above are mixed. Some are dissonant and some are consonant.

Often in music there’s a swing between consonance and dissonance. Slowly the music gets more dissonant and creates tension and then that dissonance is resolved to consonance. This is the idea of tension and release, which is a very common idea in all types of music.

Try to figure out if a harmony is consonant or dissonant. It can be tricky at first, but eventually it will get easier until you notice it right away.

ISJ