Lessons 4 and 5 of the Harmony Course are now published

A few days ago I apologized here for the delay of Lesson 4. Today the wait is over: Lessons 4 and 5 of the Harmony Course are published in English and Spanish, each with its video.

Lesson 4: fifth chords

In Lesson 4 we build fifth chords, or triads, on every degree of the basic scales, and discover the four types that appear: major, minor, diminished and augmented.

The assignment is a big one: the chords of the six scale variants on all twelve tonics, 72 series in all, in a single MIDI file written in the sequencer. The Virtual Teacher recognizes each series even if you write them in a different order, tells you which ones are missing and explains every error: a wrong note, an incorrect spelling, a missing or extra chord.

Lesson 5: degrees, chords and tonality

Lesson 5 is an explanatory lesson, with no assignment, that prepares the ground for four-part writing:

• The names of the degrees: from the tonic to the leading tone and the subtonic, and how they mirror each other around the tonic.
• The functions of the degrees: tonal, modal, secondary and attractive.
• Chords in stacked thirds: fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh and thirteenth chords.
• The harmonies and the harmonic series: how each period of history, from monody to the microtonalism of Julián Carrillo, took in harmonics further along the series. In the video you hear an excerpt from each stage.
• Tonal regions: subdominant, tonic and dominant, and why III and VI belong to two regions.
• Tonality and the circle of fifths, with all thirty keys and their key signatures.

A course that began with pencil and paper

I took this course in 1988 with my teacher, Medrano, and wrote it all down in pencil and pen. Seeing those pages turned into scores, graphics and videos in two languages today moves me deeply. Artificial intelligence tools helped me prepare the graphics, the scores in the videos and the narration in my own voice; the method, the order of the ideas and the music are the same as always.

What comes next

Lesson 6 is already under construction: the harmonic vocal quartet. There we will start writing for soprano, alto, tenor and bass, and the Virtual Teacher will learn to check vocal ranges, spacing between voices and doublings.

If you have questions or comments about the lessons, write to me from the contact page.

Luis Cárdenas