Lesson 3 - Parallel Sixth Progressions

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Из курса от партнера National University of Singapore

Write Like Mozart: An Introduction to Classical Music Composition

221 оценки

National University of Singapore

Write Like Mozart: An Introduction to Classical Music Composition

221 оценки

This course introduces students to strategies for style writing of common practice European art music. The issues of harmonic progression, voice leading, and texture are addressed in addition to relevant compositional concepts like repetition, variation, and elaboration. The course aims to offer a creative space even within the restrictions of stylistic emulation.

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Module Three

In this module, we look at a few commonly found sequential progressions. We will do some analysis of excerpts from Mozart and Beethoven that demonstrate the use of these types of progressions. I will also show you how to apply patterns to these progressions to make 3-voice polyphonic passages. We will also look at what I call the circle of fifths progression. The term can cause some confusion, so I want to quickly address that here. We are probably all familiar with the circle of fifths since it is commonly used to teach keys and key signatures. If we descend or ascend in a series of perfect fifths, we cycle through all of the 12 keys. Starting at C, ascending gives us keys with sharps, descending gives us keys with flats. When we ascend/descend by a perfect fifth for a 13th time, we end up back where we started. The circle of fifths progression, however, does not use perfect fifths exclusively. In many instances, it simply can’t because doing so forces a key change, and this is frequently not desired by the composer. So, sometimes the perfect fifth is adjusted to a diminished 5th to keep the progression in the same key. You could look at the circle of fifths progression we examine this week as a diatonic version of the original circle of fifths concept. With it, we cycle through not all 12 keys, but all 7 chords of the key. Some of you may know this progression simply as the circle progression. There is one self-assessed assignment.

Lesson 1 - Circle of Fifths Progressions8:12

Lesson 2 - Descending 5-6 Progressions14:07

Lesson 3 - Parallel Sixth Progressions8:09

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Peter Edwards
Associate Professor
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music

Okay, now we move on to the parallel sixth progression.

And the first thing I say about parallel sixth progression is that

it's not really a progression.

Not in the way that the one, four, five progression is.

And this is largely because, well actually it's exclusively because

it has no, none of these chords in the parallel sixth progression,

that we'll look at in a second, have really any function.

And in fact, the way I usually describe parallel sixth progressions is that

they essentially act like glue.

They're often used to move from one register to another.

They're often used to move from one chord to another chord that they,

that the composer wants to get to, and

just wants to have some kind of sequential progression to get there.

So what does this thing actually look like?

Well, let me first put in some roman numeral analysis here.

Whoops.

And if we're in the key of C, then this would be a sixth chord in first inversion.

Easy enough.

And what we get then with, with, parallel sixth, I'll just do like this.

[MUSIC]

And I'll just go that far.

Now clearly, these aren't six, sixth chords anymore, but

when we look at them we see, well what is this?

This is the Fa in C Major again.

This is the five chord and first inversion, which makes sense, right?

We just take it and transpose it down by a step diatonically.

This is the four chord and first inversion, three chord and

first inversion, and two chord and first inversion.

And if you think back on that chart that I presented very early on, first week of

class, in fact some of the first videos, you'll, if, if you recall that and

the possible progressions that are there, you'll notice that this isn't one of them.

The idea that you can go from a six chord to a five chord to a four chord to

a three chord to a two chord that wasn't there.

And it seems a little bit weird probably, to you.

How can we just do that?

And well, the only time where this is really permitted, it's really important to

understand this, the only time this is stylistically permitted in

classical music is when you're dealing with first inversion chords.

And a series of first inversion chords like this is completely fine.

You'll notice what I mean also by them not being very, not being functional.

Is this a subdominant, is it a dominant?

It's clearly not atonic, and it's not the dominant.

So is it a subdominant or a predominant?

Well, I don't know, maybe.

Let's see what we get here.

Let's see how this is treated.

This could be a dominant.

But no, we're going to go to the four chord.

So now once we get into three chords, we realize actually,

this has no function except to to sort of fill in space and

glue together what's sort of up in this range that goes down into this range,

and then I'll show you what happens after right here.

So there you go.

This is basically what a parallel sixth progression looks like.

Here you see five chords.

And one question students sometimes raise with me is,

well how many chords can there be?

Theoretically, or not theoretically, but technically, you can

keep doing this until you run out of keys, or until you run strings or, or whatever.

You can just keep going down and

down and down, but that is not what usually happens.

What usually happens is what you see here.

You've got about five chords, maybe six, maybe four, it could be even as few

as three, but usually it's about four, five or six, somewhere in there.

So we have a kind of normal parallel sixth progression in terms of length.

And now we see that we get to the two six.

And with this two six we'll treat this as a kind of subdominant chord.

So we'll go to the five.

Actually I just-

[MUSIC]

repeat this, a bit easier.

[MUSIC]

We'll go to the five, and this will be in root position.

And, I want this to actually go down.

[MUSIC]

I'll just do that.

[MUSIC]

And then-

[MUSIC]

our last chord, which is one.

And maybe I want this to be longer.

[MUSIC]

Like that.

Let me play this.

Now, you may be noticing something that's very important to notice and

I'll talk about that in a second.

But, let me first play this so you can hear what the progression sounds like.

[MUSIC]

So you hear these falling first inversion triads.

And I should say that, I can't think of a time when this happens with

falling first inversion seventh chords.

This I could be mistaken, but

I'm pretty sure this is something that you really only see with with triads.

And you'll also notice a kind of voice leading problem,

which is parallel octaves.

Okay, and so you, this may have caused some of

you as you're sitting there to short circuit a bit as I was doing this.

This is something we can work out when we,

when we do something later on in, in a later video for this week.

We can get it so that those, those parallel octaves aren't very clear.

But if you were dealing with this in just a homorhythmic homophonic fashion,

they're, they're two options really.

One is fix it.

And to fix it you'd probably do something like the following.

[MUSIC]

You'd avoid this parallel here-

[MUSIC]

and just do this.

This is a familiar voicing, right?

We have the third in a bass, then this octave and

a fifth in, in the upper voices.

And we go.

[MUSIC]

We have a pattern as well, but it's a pattern that a voice

leading pattern that occurs over two beats rather than in every beat.

And this one sounds something like this.

[MUSIC]

The other is actually, the other way to think about this is to say,

well you know, this isn't vocal writing.

And in fact if this was, well if this was keyboard music you'd probably keep it to

three voices, although you may, you may not.

But especially with orchestration, imagine for instance,

two instruments took this octave and then another two instruments took these,

and it was just a kind of orchestration orchestral reinforcement.

Reinforcement of the instrumentation, that's another way to think about it.

You might not do that in, in something that is a homorhythmic homophony, but

you may encounter that in something that's been orchestrated and involves some

non-chord tones and some kind of pattern, which we'll look at a little bit later on.

So that's a brief introduction to these parallel sixth chords.

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