COLOURS:

HARMONIC FUNCTION

Why do we have

?

What do these 3 colours do for us?

They show functional relationship between chords

Essentially, we can use all purple and green chords in the key of C major

We put this into action in the Cook Book, but here we're going to explain it

So let's unpack:

I learned this from Erno Lendvai in his book 'Symmetries of Music' (where he calls this idea axis theory)

It's the power to understand and use any possible chord

Learning outcome: all purples are dominant to C, all greens are subdominant to C

Ok,

We're in the key of C major

We have chords I, IV and V built on the 1st, 4th and 5th degree of the C major scale:

Each of these chords has a harmonic function

C is called the Tonic because it feels like home

G is called the Dominant, it has tension which pulls back to the tonic

F is called the Subdominant, it can either set up the dominant or resolve to C

Hear how the dominant pulls back to the tonic

Can you hear how C is resolved and G feels unnresolved, pulling us back to C?

What about the subdominant?

It can either set up the dominant as in the first audio example of this page

or it can resolve to the tonic in its own way like this

this movement of IV to I is often called a plagal cadence

So these are the 3 functions: Tonic, Subdominant and Dominant

But have you noticed something?

Our 3 harmonic functions map to the 3 secondary colours:

And heres the punchline of this entire page:

Chords of the same colour have the same function

This applies to all possible chords

Of course there's much detail and nuance within this

But essentially we can say:

"If we're in the key of C, all purple chords are dominant"

We'll be having fun with this over at the Cook Book

But we're on this page to understand it:

Here are all the purple major chords resolving to C:

Not only can we see our regular dominant Gmaj above Cmaj

But we also find traditional dominant substitutions here

You'll notice the tritone sub (Db), which traditionally sounds like this:

We did a 251 into C (Dm G C) but substituted the 5 for the purple Dbmaj

The progressions been jazzed up with extra notes but the underlying chord movement and functions remain

Next up is the backdoor dominant (Bb)

Which could sound like this:

Once again we're playing in a jazz context, but the movement of Bb to C as a dominant cadence is strong

In the Cook Book page 'exploring the dominants' we explore and get different sounds out of this

Ok, What about E major?

It's the last of the purple major chords

Traditionaly E major resolves to the relative minor of C: A minor

That sounds like this:

But here's where metaharmony starts getting cool

We can use the colours to make chord movements that aren't traditional

We can resolve Emaj to Cmaj, simply because its purple to orange

This isn't a traditional cadence, but it sounds beautiful:

Ok, so we've resolved all 4 purple majors into the key of C

Let's go another layer deeper into metaharmony

We can use the purple minor chords as dominant to Cmaj

Let's hear one:

Check out the Cook Book: Exploring the Dominants for more contemporary explorations of this

including how to get chords like Bb minor to flow well in C major

But to conclude what we've just covered:

"All purple chords are dominant to C"

Great,

One last thought for this page

In the same way all purples work as dominant in the key of C,

All greens work as subdominants in the key of C

All greens can either set up any dominant cadence

or resolve to C as their own cadence:

They can move in other ways too

Here's an example from the cook book page 'Exploring the subdominants part 1'

The progression goes:

C^7, F^7, C^7, F^7,

Dadd9, F^7, Dadd9, F^7,

C^7, F^7, Cmaj...

Ok, thats a lot of information!

Conclusion:

We've learned that all purple chords are dominant to C major

and all green chords are subdominant to C major

We explore all of these in the Cook Book:

But what about all the other orange chords?

and what if your song is in a completely different key?

When you're ready, continue to the next page