Like many Asian kids,
I played the piano when I was small.
I gave up when I failed grade four.
Meanwhile, when I was in university
I marvelled at my friends
who could play the guitar,
improvise at the keyboard,
or sing harmony by ear.
At one point,
I think,
one of my friends told me learning music theory would help.
But I did learn some music theory when I learnt the piano!
but I never understood the point of it.
I guess I’m now playing catch-up.
I don’t hope to master this craft
(it does seem to me to be a craft)
but all I want is to emulate “continental” clock chimes[Note 1]
and get something that sounds convincing enough to myself.
So here’s roughly what I’ve read so far:
Annotated bibliography
Harmony
Belkin, Alan. “General Principles of Harmony” (2003). Accessed October 11, 2021, https://alanbelkinmusic.com/site/en/index.php/harmony-basics/.
Too advanced for me (the author was a professor)
but this was one of the first few sites I read, probably the second or third.
(See my comment in my note about Frank Lehman.)
“Harmony Tutorial—Seven Harmonies of Music” (2012). Accessed October 7, 2021, http://www.musicawareness.com/Tutorial3.html.
I believe this was the first site I read in depth,
and I think they explain things really well for an absolute beginner like me.
Lehman, Frank. “Film Music and Neo-Riemannian Theory.” In Oxford Handbooks Online (2014). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.013.002.
Too advanced for me but
what’s interesting is that this says a lot of film music is “Neo-Riemannian” but never (before 2014) analyzed as such by academia.
This perfectly explains why Alan Belkin claimed one of his examples was “aimless”
(and therefore bad)
but I felt it sounded perfectly fine:
Before 2014,
anything that sounds like movie music to a layperson would have sounded “aimless” to a professor.
Signature Sound Studios. “Basic Harmony,” June 18, 2012. Accessed October 7, 2021, https://signaturesound.com/basic-harmony/.
I actually didn’t read this; I bookmarked it for future reference to learn about production.
Townsend, Bryan. “Musical Satisfaction.” The Music Salon (blog), November 16, 2015. Accessed October 12, 2021, https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/11/musical-satisfaction.html.
The second article I read on this blog, after reading the tritone article.
The partimenti system sounds like what we’d call “design patterns” in computer science.
