Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Non-Harmonic Tones and Analysis

When trying to determine what is going on in a piece of music it doesn't help that the composer will often put in notes that don't quite fit the surrounding harmony.
In Common Practice we call these  Non-Harmonic Tones. 
You might even consider these notes the rebellious tinkering of composers shackled with pumping out music to please the often limited tastes of those paying the bills.
Of course, musicologists have studied these very rebellious notes and codified them into Non-Harmonic Tones.
Checkout the following tutorial on Non-Harmonic Tones and then see if you can identify some of them in an excerpt from our good friend J.S. Bach.

In this excerpt from a Bach piece, I have highlighted (in red) incidences of Non-Harmonic Tones. Feel free to work together to identify the types of Non-Harmonic Tones.


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