So really, any chord can be used under any melody note, as long as it supports the musical message and fits into the overall context.īeyond that, chromatic music can be written either semi- or fully contrapuntally, where there isn't as much of a harmony/melody distinction, but intertwining passages that form both a melodic and harmonic picture. It can be very interesting to continue the scale an octave higher than you started it, to see how the distance between the "melody" notes and the chord makes a difference.
Don't listen for whether the notes "work" or if they sound "right" or "wrong" with the chord, listen to how everything sounds together and what kind of feel you get from it. If you have a keyboard instrument or some ability to do so, I highly suggest playing or programming a single chord to repeat or sustain, and then slowly play a chromatic scale above that chord, listening for how each note of the scale interacts with the chord. What if we asked, "How can one make a chromatic melody work over a I - IV - V chord progression?" Well, that's kinda like what blues is! So that suggests approaching your question from the opposite direction. I think delta and Chicago blues are excellent examples of very straightforward harmonies backing subtle and not quite diatonic melodies. Secondly, even when the harmony for a piece is very simple, often the melody that goes with that harmony is all the more complex. Two things: Sometimes the musical equivalent of baby talk is exactly what is intended, either to highlight the universal and ageless nature of the message or to leave the listener able to focus on lyrics or something like that. Obviously there are many effective, evocative songs that only use I, IV, and V, or even simpler harmonizations. So even in diatonic composition, we would have a very small musical vocabulary and we wouldn't be expressing ourselves well if we A) had "doubt" about what chord to use and B) pretty much kept to I, IV or V because of that doubt. Like a red apple, or a rotten apple, or a poisoned apple, or a Cox's Orange Pippin just like your mom used to bring home from the orchard in early fall when you were living in upstate New York at the age of seven. Then you can talk about different kinds of apples by changing the harmony supporting the note. Suppose a melody note is like the noun "apple". It's that the melody and chords work together to say what they want to say, and only one chord is the right chord for that statement combined with the melody note.įor me, it was Leonard Bernstein who helped me understand this by drawing an analogy between the notes of the melody being like nouns and the chords/harmony being like adjectives. It's not like they have a melody and they are just searching for chords that work with it. I suspect that most songwriters and composers are not at all thinking like that. If it's a note in the scale, choose I, IV or V if in doubt. When choosing chords in a tonal, diatonic concept, the formula is somewhat clear to me. I would say, to best understand harmonization of all music, it would help you to move beyond this concept: What principles are there for harmonizing a chromatic melody, other than just trying out if something might work? If I come up with a Debussy-like melody that is chromatically all over the place, I don't know what chords I should choose beneath it. Debussy choose chords to his music? I see he uses lots of whole-tone scale and doesn't always resolve the lines the traditional way, but when I try to compose in his style, I find it difficult to think out-of-the-box. In jazz, I can somewhat understand the concept of passing chords and chord substitutions.īut coming to impressionism and modern music, where functionality isn't necessarily the goal anymore, how did eg. Sure there are lots of other ways to harmonize a melody in a functional setting, but I think these are the basic tools that classical and romantic composers used. If it's a chromatic note, choose a secondary dominant, neapolitan chord or an augmented 6th, and maybe use the chromaticism as a point of modulation, if that's what you are going for. I've been listening to a lot of impressionistic and avant-garde jazz music lately.
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