Musically Conversant II: Intermediate/Advanced Harmonic and Metric Vocabularies

Expand your vocabulary of harmonies you can create, and the range of rhythms and meters that your voice can gracefully dance in.


You’ll Learn:

  • Seventh Chords and Extensions
  • Half-Time and Double-Time Meter
  • Diminished Chords
  • Polymeter
  • Chromatic Harmonies: Secondary Dominants, Augmented 6th Chords, and the Neapolitan Chord
  • Odd, Irregular, and Asymmetric Meters
  • Harmonic Function using Tritone Substitution and the “Backdoor Dominant”
  • Metric Modulation
  • Basics of Non-Diatonic Scales (Whole Tone, Octatonic)
  • Introduction to Quartal Harmony

Description

If you’ve spent a significant amount of time making music, you’ve inevitably gained some understanding of how it moves in time, and how notes and chords work in a scale. Sometimes—when harmonies get strange or fancy or when rhythms get tricky—you might wish to have a bigger musical vocabulary, so that you can navigate a broader range of musical moments. This course uses a sounds-first. ear-training approach to intermediate/advanced harmony and rhythm, and is ideal for people who want to learn more about music but “don’t like Music Theory.” Learn how to find 7ths, extensions, and suspensions in chords; how to recognize and create a variety of extended-harmony chords; how to sing using a variety of uncommon scales; how to find rhythms in a variety of uncommon meters.

Schedule

These days and times are subject to change, based on the best availability of the students enrolled in the class. If you sign up and the class meets at a time you are unable to attend, you will receive a full refund or credit toward a future class. Instruction takes place over the course of four classes, held over Zoom:

  • Class 1: week of January 30th, 2022—exact day and time TBD based on participants’ availability
  • Class 2: week of February 6th, 2022—exact day and time TBD based on participants’ availability
  • Class 3: week of February 13th, 2022—exact day and time TBD based on participants’ availability
  • Class 4: week of February 20th, 2022—exact day and time TBD based on participants’ availability
  • Class 5: week of February 27th, 2022—exact day and time TBD based on participants’ availability

Requirements

Designed for singers (and other instrumentalists) who understand basic harmony (major and minor chords, diatonic harmonic function) and rhythms (simple and compound meters with 2, 3, or 4 beats per measure). You do not need to be able to read printed sheet music.

Register Now

$265.00 for 7.5 hours of online instruction.