Advanced Harmony Tutorial - Using Two Keys Together - Beyond Polytonality

so I thought that some of you might be interested in a system for writing harmony that I developed a few years ago a system that allows me a high degree of harmonic agility and although there are other ways to achieve the sorts of harmony I'm about to show you I do find that this one is nice and fast also I personally love listening to other composers describe the tricks they use when writing music so I'm going to assume you feel the same way there are a number of interest in harmonic systems out there that allow you to write very different sounding stuff standard harmony extended harmony the twelve-tone technique set theory specifically pitch classes and a few others including negative harmony which is getting a lot of attention on YouTube at the moment thing is once you get comfortable with these harmonic systems you begin to notice some similarities and points of crossover at the core of what's important about all these systems is the interval the distance between two notes it's fine to look at two notes and say these are three semitones apart but if you replace them with up two chords then you suddenly find yourself with an unmanageable amount of intervals to keep track of but why do harmonic systems exist well if you try to just forge ahead with your music without paying attention to how your intervals are working you can very easily get bogged down and inconsistent repetitive or meandering harmony and since the meticulous logging of intervals is extremely time consuming harmonic systems offer a shortcut that enable consistency without all the tedious bookkeeping so the aims of the system I'm about to show you are one to give the composer the maximum amount of for harmonic flexibility anywhere from pureed tonality to perfect harmonious 'no supervise of keeping track of how the harmony is working in order to maintain consistency if that's what the composer is after and three not to be too abstract and slow allowing composers to use their ears without getting too bogged down in the hard core cataloging of intervals so to begin let's take a quick look at the famous petrushka chord used by Igor Stravinsky in his ballet petrushka this is a combination of C major and F sharp major two chords that sound extremely dissonant against each other this is an example of what's called poly tonality a technique that increased in popularity during the early to mid 20th century where two distinctly different keys exist at the same time each with their own tonal center or homecourt [Music] but a concern here isn't to simply play to harmonic total centers against each other if we play C an f-sharp major at the same time we're listening to a single complex chord and if we stick with piano writing for a second what if I assign seats my right hand an f-sharp to my left hand in the first bar and then swap them around in the second the quality of either cord is quite different this swapping hides the individual tonal centers and what we're listening to sounds like just two complex chords so what do we do with this well let's take a standard harmonic progression say minor second perfect fifth first which would sound like this in C and instead we're going to apply it to both keys at the same time while continuing to swap them between hands so now we have three destroyed sounding chords nothing to write home about just yet so let's use them to construct a few bars of music what I'm doing here is separating out the notes of each chord to find interesting harmonic interplay sometimes deleting thirds or fifths where I think they detract from the sound due to the harshly dissonant chords we started with the resulting experiment is also predictably dissonant ah how lovely perfect for a 24-hour news bulletin I went from very successful businessman to top TV star to president of the United States on my first try I think that would qualify as not smart but genius and a very stable genius at that so what if we'd like something harmonious sounding well then we could use two keys that have more notes in common say G major and B minor and following the same process as before bearing in mind that the chords in a minor scale work a little differently I've chosen the following sequence for both keys our first a fifth a second a sixth and then a first again the resulting sequence is pretty easy on the ears and using this I created a quick somewhat jaunty musical example [Music] and this is really only scratching the surface of what you can do instead of having the keys follow the same progression here I've given them different progressions which I can now alternate on a larger scale by swapping them around in their entirety and if you're the kind of writer who loves harmonic symmetry this is a lovely system to try out alternatively if you like a bit of chaos you can just allow the two keys to remain independent throughout for this last example I'm gonna pull the previous ideas together to show how much harmonic control this method can afford you if you saw my recent video on Cardiacs you'll remember my segment on the Cardiacs cadence which I'm assigning here to both Keys simultaneously and using this I created a passage to demonstrate how you can transition from a really harsh dissonance to perfect harmonious 'no sin a very short amount of time [Music] [Applause] so that's the basics of how this system works there's a lot more detail to go into especially how it can be used for writing and other styles like rocker metal if you're interested in learning more or if you want me to do a Q&A session then send me your questions and I'll respond to them in another video if you'd like to hear some of my music that uses this system then look through my videos for a piece called three barriers to concentration which was written for solo piano the first movement was written using this system and if you want to keep up to date with my future music tutorials then please subscribe and if you like this video blah blah blah you know the drill YouTube punishes me with obscurity if my videos don't get any likes which forces me to harass you sorry don't hold it against me we're all friends here

Channel: Tantacrul

Views: 121,923

Keywords: Tantacrul, harmony tutorial, Composition tutorial, Music Theory, Song writing, polytonality music, polytonality, polytonal music, polytonality example, advanced harmony, using two keys together

Id: PNnMx9tvB9Q

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/phamtasticgamer]

That software looks Hella fluent. Anyone knows the name of that program?

[u/the-postminimalist]

This is pretty nice and simple. I'd love to hear this applied to a full piece.

[u/HenriDutilleux]

God I love Cardiacs.

[u/Z0idberg_MD]

I’m not a composer, but the concept of creating music this way seems odd to me. Not hearing or feeling a melody or progression in your head as your target, and literally mixing pre-chosen chord progressions up and seeing if you can get it to work (he said “experimenting) seems more like an intellectual or process-driven exercise than a musical or expressive one.

[u/OktoberStorm]

Wait, what exactly were we supposed to learn?

[u/tksteaks]

It’s been a long time since I’ve composed anything but this gets me all excited. I love systems that allow for a lot of flexibility but also help keep you focused.