harmony, in music, simultaneous sounding of two or more tones and, especially, the study of chords and their relations. Harmony was the last in the development of what may be considered the basic elements of modern music—harmony, melody, rhythm, and tone quality or timbre. The polyphonic superposition (see polyphony polyphony (pəlĭf`ənē), music whose texture is formed by the interweaving of several melodic lines.
..... Click the link for more information. ; counterpoint counterpoint, in music, the art of combining melodies each of which is independent though forming part of a homogeneous texture. The term derives from the Latin for "point against point," meaning note against note in referring to the notation of plainsong .
..... Click the link for more information. ) of horizontal melodic lines prevailed until the 16th cent., when the vertical or harmonic construction of chords was established. Rameau, in 1722, presented the idea that different groupings of the same notes were but inversions of the same chord. During the 18th cent. the concept of tonality tonality (tōnăl`ĭtē)
..... Click the link for more information. , with the major and minor modes as its basis and with a certain chord serving as the key center of a composition, became general. The polyphonic music of Bach has a harmonic structure. As the system of triads and their relations was explored, the principle of modulation modulation, in music, shift in the key center of a composition. For its accomplishment use is made of the fact that each chord figures in the harmonic relationships of several keys.
..... Click the link for more information. appeared, and composers developed freer concepts of tonality; Liszt, Wagner, and Richard Strauss greatly expanded the chordal vocabulary of tonal harmony. Finally, in the 20th cent., some have discarded tonality in favor of music that is composed in terms of horizontal contrapuntal lines. See atonality atonality (ā'tōnăl`ĭtē), in music, systematic avoidance of harmonic or melodic reference to tonal centers (see key ).
..... Click the link for more information. ; serial music serial music, the body of compositions whose fundamental syntactical reference is a particular ordering (called series or row) of the twelve pitch classes—C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B—that constitute the equal-tempered scale.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See W. J. Mitchell, Elementary Harmony (3d ed. 1965); A. Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony (rev. ed. 1969); W. Piston, Harmony (5th ed. 1987).

harmony

In music, the sound of two or more notes heard simultaneously. In a narrower sense harmony refers to the extensively developed system of chords and the rules that govern relations between them in Western music. Harmony has always existed as the “vertical” (the relationship between simultaneous melodic lines) aspect of older music that is primarily contrapuntal; the rules of counterpoint are intended to control consonance and dissonance, which are fundamental aspects of harmony. However, the sense of harmony as dominating the individual contrapuntal lines followed from the invention of the continuo c. 1600; the bass line became the generating force upon which harmonies were built. This approach was formalized in the 18th century in a treatise by Jean-Philippe Rameau, who argued that all harmony is based on the “root” or fundamental note of a chord. Tonality is principally a harmonic concept and is based not only on a seven-note scale of a given key but on a set of harmonic relations and progressions based on triads (three-note chords) drawn from the scale.

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Bibliography

harmony

Harmony