Bundle Summary
In Fundamentals, customize your learning of reading music with nearly 3 hours of video lessons, 750 flashcards, and 220 quiz questions. This comprehensive course covers all essential aspects of musical notation, scales, and chords.
In Diatonic Harmony, learn how to write diatonic harmony in both a classical “strict style” and a more film-oriented “free style”, and see how the two are combined in cues from well-known film scores.
In Chromatic Harmony, we cover emotional expressions, voice leading, and harmonic progressions for a wide range of chromatic chords and modulations, focusing on their film-specific uses.
And in Extended Tonal and Atonal Harmony, write chords for non-diatonic scales like the whole tone and Phrygian dominant, learn common dissonant chords, and compose with modernist techniques like the 12-tone system, clusters, extreme registers, and aleatoric music.
Fundamentals – Breakdown
Course Content
- Pitch
- The Staff and Clefs
- Accidentals and Enharmonic Notes
- Rhythm and Meter
- Note Values and Rests
- Dotted Notes and Ties
- Simple, Compound, and Irregular Meter
- Tuplets and Pickups
- Beams
- Rules for Rests
- Terms and Symbols
- Italian Terms
- French Terms, German Terms & Symbols
- Scales
- Major and Minor
- Modes
- Pentatonic and Blues
- Chromatic and Whole Tone
- Octatonic and Hexatonic
- Key Signatures
- C, G, and F Major
- Other Major and Minor Keys
- Intervals
- Major and Perfect Intervals
- Minor, Diminished, Augmented, and Enharmonic Intervals
- Simple and Compound Intervals
- Inversions
- How to Identify an Interval
- Triads
- Triad Structures and Qualities
- Inversions and Spacings
- Popular-Music Notation
- 7th Chords
- Chord Structures and Qualities
- Inversions
- Popular-Music Notation
Diatonic Course Breakdown
Course Content
- Preliminaries
- Strict Style vs. Free Style
- Strict-Style Rules for Four-Part Writing
- Voice Leading
- Non-Chord Tones
- Melody-Bass Counterpoint
- Harmonic Progressions – General Concepts
- Common Root Motions
- The Three Progression Types
- Writing Melodies from Progressions
- About Our Examples
- Cadential Progressions – Strict and Free Style
- Dominant and Final Tonic Chords
- Common Subdominant Chords
- Less Common Subdominant Chords
- Initial Tonic Chords
- Tonic-Prolongational Progressions – Strict Style
- Root-Root Prolongations
- 3rd-3rd Prolongations
- Root-3rd Prolongations
- Leading-Tone 7th Chords
- Expanding a Chord with Arpeggiation
- Tonic-Prolongational Progressions – Free Style
- Major Keys
- Major-Tonic Substitutes and Multiple Prolonging Chords
- Minor Keys
- Minor-Tonic Substitutes
- Prolonging Chords Other than Tonic – Strict Style
- Pedal 6/4
- Passing 6/4
- Other Passing Chords
- Putting It All Together
- Composing in Strict Style
- Composing in Free Style
Chromatic Course – Breakdown
Lesson 1 – Using Secondary Dominants, Augmented 6ths, and Common-Tone Chords
- Secondary Dominants
- Signaling the Classical Tradition – Using Secondary Dominants
- An Unexpected Moment – Elision
- Love or Sweetness – Deceptive Leading-Tone Dominants
- Longing or Aspiring – V#5(add9)
- Soothing, Lamentful, or Serious – Chromatically Descending Lines
- Augmented 6ths
- Overview and Notation
- Foreboding or Parody – Resolving to V or Cadential 6/4
- Love – Resolving to Major I
- Common-Tone Chords
- Common-Tone Diminished 7ths – Overview and Notation
- Innocence, Benevolence – Common-Tone Diminished 7th to Major I or V
- Mystery, Danger – Common-Tone Augmented 6th to I or i
- Composition
Lesson 2 – Mixing Modes and Harmonic Styles
- Refining Expression with Dominant Substitutes
- Beauty, Buoyancy, or Heroism – Sus-Type and Quartal Dominants in Major
- Extraordinary, Supernatural – Tritone-Polyrooted Chords
- Modal Mixture – Threats, Tragedy, Parody, or Wonder
- Minor-Based Mode in Major
- Phrygian bII in Minor
- Other Chromatic and Dissonant Chords
- Whimsical, Magical, Mysterious – Chromatic Planing in Diatonic Settings
- More Beauty, Buoyancy, or Heroism – Other Quartal, Sus, and Added-Note Chords
- Compositions
Lesson 3 – Expression with Modulation
- Overview of Modulation
- Techniques of Modulation
- How Modulation Creates Expression
- Modulation vs. Chromaticized Half Cadence
- Varying Modulation Models
- Modulations from Major Keys
- To V – Uplifting, Optimistic
- To iii – Amazement from Magic or the Supernatural
- To VII – Tenderness
- To III – Awe, Wonder
- Modulation Cycles
- Modulations from Minor Keys
- To bIII or biii – High-Energy or Action Themes
- To iv – Fateful, Tragic
- To bvii – Fearsome (and Its Parody)
- Using Chromatic Chords to Modulate
- Enharmonic Modulation
- Triadic Transformation
- Composition
Extended Tonal and Atonal – Breakdown
Lesson 1 – Non-Diatonic Scales
- Pentatonic Scales
- Major and Minor Pentatonic Melodies
- Pentatonic Mixture Melodies
- Harmonizing with Dyads
- Harmonizing with Diatonic Harmony
- Composition 1
- Whole-Tone Scales
- Typical 2-, 3-, and 4-Note Chords
- Combining Harmonic Materials
- Composition 2
- Augmented-2nd Scales
- Phrygian Dominant
- Variants of Phrygian Dominant
- Hungarian Minor
- Composition 3
Lesson 2 – Extended Tonal and Atonal Chords
- Extended-Tonal Chords
- The M(b6) Chord
- Dissonant-Bass Chords
- Polychords
- Polytonally-Voiced Chords
- Voice-Leading Chords
- Sequences with Voice-Leading Chords
- Composition 1
- Atonal Chords
- Chords from Stacked 2nds
- Common 3-Note Sets
- Common 4- and 5-Note Sets
- Dissonant-Chord Polychords
- Composition 2
Lesson 3 – Advanced and Extended Techniques
- The Twelve-Tone System
- Twelve-Tone Rows and Operations
- Subsets
- Invariants
- Composition 1
- Other Post-Tonal Techniques
- Composing with Clusters
- Extreme Registers
- Aleatoric Music
- Final Examples
- Smaller Texture
- Larger Texture
- Composition 2
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