Edward Aldwell - Harmony and Voice Leading 5th Edition PDF

It may seem strange to those who study popular music and jazz, but everything we do in music is essentially the same thing. Musical genres only change over the decades and centuries, to the point that we now hear Bach's compositions played on synthesizers with rock rhythms on the guitar.

For instance, if you listen to J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, it has a very heavy, metal-like quality, almost like pure heavy metal noise, despite being composed during the Baroque period. Surprisingly, this piece was never intended for Protestant or Catholic masses, but rather for grand organ concerts.

I once had the opportunity to witness this piece performed live in the monumental cathedral of Seville. Remarkably, the cathedral has two pipe organs, and the organist played this entire Toccata on one organ at a breakneck pace, finishing in just 5 minutes. He then immediately moved to the other organ and played the same piece at a slower tempo. It was an incredible experience that I never imagined I would witness.

If you are afraid of Roman numerals, learn it today, it's a physic map of harmony, because everything we read or do in sheet music today originated in Italy in the 11th century with Guido d'Arezzo. Then, 500 years later, it evolved further in France in the 17th century with Jean. P. Rameau, and later the Germans built upon this foundation. This allowed the rest of the world to adopt and use this system as it is known today, used even in Japan.

Many have tried to reformulate the harmony of music, but they have failed, and their poor efforts are not even remembered today. Music is like engineering that has to work with heavy materials - if it does not have a solid foundation, everything falls apart.

The poorest adaptation of German chords (C, D, E,F, G etc) in popular music is not an invention, but rather an adaptation by some dead idiots of the past, in an attempt to make it easier for those who wanted to play faster without fully understanding the simple system. This poor simplified approach, while not as sophisticated as the original "Italian"-French chord system, has nonetheless persisted to this day.

It is important to remember that all the unconventional ideas that emerged appeared in books in the 20th century, such as the redesigned diagram of circle of fifths in Germany using Germanic letters like C, D, E, etc. This was not part of the natural musical evolution up until that point.

The harmony of music for its evolution has never depended on that ordinary diagram, which is not an invention, but rather a discovery of how the human physics of sound resolution works, when the chord resolves a fifth below.

The core of music evolved from the contributions of Italy, France, Germany, and Austria.