1. Intro
What will you learn through these courses?
Functional Harmony
Functional Harmony has an amazing power to almost instantly manipulate and mold the listener’s mind. In a very literal sense, harmony is the ultimate mind-control tool!
Functional harmony can subconsciously control our expectations.
Listen to an example featuring functional harmony’s power of suggestion:
Rhythm
Rhythm is in all of us, ingrained from sounds heard throughout our life. The rapid taps of a woodpecker pecking at a tree trunk, footsteps along a tiled surface, a door opening and closing, the cadence of a conversation...these all have rhythm. But how can we communicate a specific rhythm to another person? Music notation is a tool to communicate meaning to another person without the use of words. When you’ve heard that music is its own unique language, this is accurate!
The possible combinations of rhythm are as bountiful as the color pattern possibility of M&Ms.
Listen to an example featuring a musical passage that makes extensive use of rhythmic variation:
excerpt from IGOR STRAVINSKY Rite of Spring (Berlin Philharmonic)
Worlds of Music
The world is connected through commonalities in musical elements. These are the elements we study in this class. Vivaldi, Ravi Shankar, Mozart, the music of the Zulu people, Bach, Swiss yodeling…all of these make use of sonority, rhythm, harmony, and function in their own unique way. Through the study of the sound of music, we find that the world is perhaps not such a big place, and is full of strings that connect us all.
Music connects the world.
Only the beginning…
To be human is to be a student of sound...and learning never stops!