But around the year 900 we know from some treatises that survive, that they were adding lines on top of these Plainchant originals. But often times several people would be singing this music at the same time but they would always be singing in unison, the same melody exactly at the same time. Plainchant is always just one line of music. Plainchant is a term used to describe the singing of the sacred text in the Christian Church. In order to understand the development of harmony you have to really go back to the very beginnings of Western music to the origin of Plainchants. That’s what we use as the basis of our music in the 19th and 20th Century, but it really wasn’t always the case. Well the term harmony is used in Western music to describe the simultaneous sounding of several notes, what we call chords. The story of how these ideas developed can be traced back through the Baroque, Renaissance and Medieval periods. Within the Western Classical tradition ideas have varied over time as to what combinations of notes make good harmony. What constitutes being in agreement or being dissonant or being consonant is a culturally determined thing. And in Bosnia that sound is of the essence of music. In Gangan music they sound notes at the same time that are very very close together. In Eastern Europe there are some sounds that they think are in agreement that most people who are not from Eastern Europe will think are very very much in disagreement in the style of music called Ganga. What constitutes agreement is the key question. In music it’s similar, musical notes, musical pitches can be in agreement with each other. You can say that some people are working in harmony, they’re working in agreement with each other toward a common goal. In a general sense harmony means being in agreement. In Zimbabwean Mbira music there is a kind of harmony, although Africans don’t have words for chord and don’t have a word for harmony. In Indonesia, in Gamelan music, you have a kind of harmony because you have notes that are tuned together that are being sounded simultaneously. It happens in a million different ways all around the world. If you look at harmony as the sounding of a number of musical notes at the same time, it’s not a phenomenon that is confined to Europe or the United States. This hand is going to play the harmonic accompaniment, this hand will play the melody again. Now if we hear an accompaniment to it this would be considered harmonizing the melody. If we hear only a melody by itself, with no harmonic accompaniment, it might sound something like this (plays). Harmony can best be described as notes sounding together in combination, pitches that are stacked on top of one another. So in that sense I really feel that the harmony is responsible for how a melody makes you feel. You’ve got a melody, there are many different ways you can harmonize the same melody and the way you choose to harmonize it is what will give you a different emotional response. To me harmony is similar to the spice that you use when you’re creating a sauce. This interaction, how the pitches relate to each other is defined in western music theory as harmony. Much of the world’s music involves the interaction of two or more tones being sounded simultaneously. Exploring The World Of Music Program# 9 “Harmony” Transcript
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