Borrowed Chords: Modal Mixture in Practice
Mixture borrows chords from the parallel mode. What the common borrowed chords do to a phrase, how they resolve, and where labelling fails.
Topic
Harmony
Chord function, voice leading, cadence and modulation: how tonal music moves from one place to another.
Functional harmony is a way of describing what chords do to a phrase rather than what they are in isolation. These articles move from tonics, predominants and dominants through voice leading, cadence, seventh chords and mixture, and finish with the chromatic devices — secondary dominants and modulation — that let a piece change where it stands.
Cadences: How Phrases End in Tonal Music
Authentic, half, plagal and deceptive cadences, and the real reason a close sounds strong: what happens in the bass, the top voice and the metre.
Figured Bass: Reading Intervals Above the Bass Line
Figures name intervals above the bass, not chords. What each shorthand means, how accidentals override the key, and what the player decides.
Functional Harmony: Tonic, Predominant, Dominant
Tonic, predominant and dominant describe what a chord does to a phrase rather than what it is. This is how the three harmonic jobs divide the work.
Modulation: How a Key Change Is Confirmed
A modulation is not a chromatic chord; it is a new key confirmed by cadence. The routes into one, and how to read them off the page.
Secondary Dominants and How Tonicization Works
A secondary dominant makes any chord a temporary tonic. How to spell one, where it turns up, and what cancels the effect.
Seventh Chords and How They Resolve in Tonal Harmony
The chordal seventh falls, the leading tone rises, and the tritone at the centre of V7 resolves by step. What each diatonic seventh chord is for.
Voice Leading: Why the Rules Exist in Four-Part Writing
Parallel fifths, tendency tones, spacing and doubling, read as solutions to one problem: keeping four lines heard as four lines.
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