Chord Voicings in Four Parts
This chapter serves as a preparation for the second semester's work. It gives students who are not continuing on in music theory a sense of how this study progresses, and it provides a conceptual introduction to those who will be moving on to part writing in the second semester.
The model of all tonal music is the four part chorale. This is based on a technique of writing for voices, arranged as Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass. It distributes the notes of a chord to these four voice types, and thus is referred to as voicing a chord. This terminology continues to the present day in all styles of tonal music. Jazz pianists or guitarists, for example, learn various ways to voice a chord when presented with an abstract chord symbol.
Four-voice chordal harmony grew out of the complexity of Renaissance counterpoint, where the emphasis was on the independence of the voices and the fluidity of the vocal line. Over time, equal emphasis was given to the vertical dimension of the vocal interplay, and certain vertical relationships came to be established as concords, or chords. This grew into the system of tonal harmony that you learned in the last chapter.
That last chapter presented a somewhat global, generalized view of harmony that applied to a great many musical styles and situations. This short chapter provides a brief overview of tonal harmony as it would have been known in the 18th Century, which in turn informed all the great music written in Europe during the 19th Century.
If you have ever attended church and sang hymns from a church hymnbook, four-art chorale writing will look familiar to you. If you have not, the basic idea is that a simple melody is presented in the soprano, with the other voices filling out the harmony in a smooth and graceful way, resulted in a straightforward presentation of harmonic motion and harmonic progression (as presented at the end of the last chapter).
Here is a beatiful, early version of this approach. It is a traditional Christmas Hymn by the composer Praetorius, composed in the 16th Century. It can serve as a model for all later four-part writing. We listened to this in class a few days ago. Here is the harmony that we wrote in during the class period.
Here you can see that the harmonies move clearly and stately from beat to beat. The melody is in the soprano and the other voices support the melody in such a way that harmonies can be clearly derived from the chord voicings. The tonic triad, the I, is usually voiced here with the C in the bass and the other voices filling in the other notes of the triad. Since these are all three-note chords, often one voice will be doubled, that is, two voices will be singing the same pitch. (In the first measure, the G is doubled in the first two chords, and then the C is doubled on the fourth beat chord). Whenever chords are voiced with the tonic note in the bass, we say that this chord is in root position. There are occasions, however, primarily for purposes of smooth movement in the bass voice, when a note other than the root of the chord appears in the bass. This provides a certain shift in the weightiness of a chord. When such an occasion happens, as in the fourth measure of the piece, we say that the chords have been inverted. Let's look at chord inversions a little more closely.
Chord Inversions
There are many ways that a triad can be voiced into a four-voice texture. In the first example, the C triad is simply undergoing a shift of position, with different notes of the triad being distributed to the various upper voices. Since the C remains in the bass, these chords remain in root position.
In the next example, however, the bass line also receives a distrubution of notes, such that the bass sometimes has the 3rd or 5th of the chord. We say then that chord has been inverted. The manner of this inversion is simple:
- If a chord has the root in the bass, the chord is in root position.
- If a chord has the third in the bass, the chord is in first inversion.
- If a chord has the fifth in the bass, the chord is in second inversion.
- If the chord is a seventh chord, as in the case of a dominant seventh, and the seventh is in the bass, the chord is in third inversion.
The above is true, regardless of how the rest of the voices are distributed. As long as the third is in the bass, for example, then the chord is in first inversion. The upper voices can then be voiced in a variety of ways, as we will learn in the next semester.
We can indicate these in a simple manner by putting the number of the chord tone below the Roman numeral. So a first inversion tonic chord can be indicated with a 3 below the Roman numeral I, to indicate that the third is in the bass, but the chord itself is still the tonic triad. The 5 below the I indicates that the fifth is in the bass, but the chord is still a tonic triad.
The same can then apply to all other harmonies. If you look back at the harmonic analysis of Lo, How a Rose e'er Blooming, you will notice the indications of the chord inversions below some of the ii, iii and V chords.
There is another method for indicating chord inversions, which is based on the procedure of figured bass. This is method most commonly in use among practicing music theoretians and will be covered in section 6C of this chapter. I want you to understand the basic concept of inversion before moving into the topic of figured bass notation.
With this clearly now in mind, let's analyze a Bach chorale using Roman numeral analysis to better understand chordal harmony and harmonic progression using diatonic triads and various types of dominant and secondary dominant chords.
NEXT: 6B Analyzing Chorales