Piano Video Lesson: Mastering Non-Chord Tones: Unlocking Beautiful Harmonies

This is LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin with a really interesting show mastering non-chord tones, unlocking the secrets of beautiful harmonies.

If you've ever tried to do a harmonic analysis of your music, what is that? Figuring out what chords the music is based upon, sometimes you can run into snags. And now I'm going to show you what you may have been running into and how you can do a successful harmonic analysis to understand the structure of your music, so important for remembering it and being able to play it successfully on the piano. First of all, let's talk about how to basically do a harmonic analysis in the first place.

In western harmony, almost everything is built upon chords containing intervals of thirds. What are thirds? Simply put, every other note of a scale is a third because scales are built in seconds, diatonically.

Well, thirds are every other note of a scale. If you see them on the staff, they'll be all lines or all spaces. For example, a C major triad, there is a simple chord, C, E, G.

Now sometimes it can be a little bit confusing because the chord can be inverted like this.

It's the same chord, C, E, G, with the C on top. In this case, what you do is you rearrange it until it's in thirds and then you know the root of the chord. But what if you do all of that and you still can't find the root of the chord, there's notes that don't seem to belong. These are non-chord tones. Now, in more sophisticated harmonies in the 20th century, all bets are off. You know, the impressionists like Debussy and Ravel, Scriabin, Bartok, you know, and then of course jazz harmonies can have such expanded chords that almost any note can be a chord tone. For example, a 13 chord, root, third, fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, 13. Notice I'm playing seven notes. That's all the notes of a C major scale. So if you saw a chord like this, that could be a 13 chord.

But for the most part, if you're playing Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. What I'm going to show you is going to apply. This is how you can do a harmonic analysis and figure out what these non-chord tones are doing in there and how to find the underlying harmonies in your music. So let's start with the very first one. We're going to cover a whole bunch of non-chord tones or different types. They all amount to the same thing. They're notes that don't belong in the chord and it adds tension and beauty to the music as you're going to discover. So the first one we're going to talk about are passing tones, basically approached by step and left by step in the same direction. Now I say these words like what? I'm going to demonstrate because when you hear it, you go, oh, that makes perfect sense. So once I get a passing tone.

So here you have a nice C major chord.

The D doesn't belong in the C major chord and then it passes right down to another note in the chord, C. So you have the E and the C that are part of the chord and the D passes between them.

So that's one very simple type of non-chord tone, passing tone, very similar in our neighbor tones. Neighbor tones are approached by step and left by step in the opposite direction.

Once again, starting with a C major chord.

What's that F doing there? Well, it's a neighbor tone and comes right back down to the chord of the tone, of the tone of the chord, I should say.

So there are other types. The next type we're going to talk about is a really common one and it's called a suspension and a suspension is approached by the same note and resolves downward by step.

So, start with an F major triad and then we have a dominant seventh but the C doesn't belong.

There's the chord, there's your suspension resolving downward to the B and finally resolving to the tonic C major.

What else do we have? There's one that is not as commonly used in music but it is another non -chord tone that's very similar, approached by the same note and resolves upward by step. And so this sounds like this.

And so very similar. You'll find that many of these are really similar and labeling them is not really essential. I'm just showing you the different types so you get a handle on what they are. You don't need to learn all of these different terms. You just have to recognize when a note is part of the harmony and when it is a non-chord tone and you'll always find one thing similar with all of these. The non-chord tones resolve to chord tones. It creates that momentary tension. And what better example of this than an appoggiatura. An appoggiatura is approached by leap and left by step. Now, interestingly, appoggiaturas are written in your music and sometimes look like grace notes but they actually should not have the little line through them.

Appoggiaturas are little notes that are longer than grace notes and they shouldn't not have lines in them although some additions mistakenly put in grace notes that should be appoggiaturas. And this is how they sound.

So we start with a V7, a G7. Then we should have a C major chord but there's a D resolve to C and again F doesn't belong in the C chord.

And that D and that F would typically be written as a small note before the note of resolution that follows. Those are what appoggiaturas are and you've heard them all the time, I'm sure. Now we have another one called escape tone. Escape tone is approached by step and left by leap in the opposite direction. What the heck does that sound like? Let's hear it.

So you start with a C major chord and then it goes up to an F which does not belong, that's the non -chord tone.

Then you have a V7 with the seventh in the base, a V4 too and the E does not belong, another non-chord tone and resolving downward again.

So those are escape tones. Then we have anticipation, approached by step and remains on the same note. So let's listen to anticipation.

So you have your V7 chord and then you have the anticipation of the C that's gonna be in the next chord, the C major chord.

And it creates that beautiful tension instead of, you get the, ah, feels so good when it resolves, doesn't it? That's the whole point of non-chord tones is that it creates the momentary tension so the resolution becomes that much more satisfying. And I left a best for last, one of my favorite non -chord tones is the pedal point. Now the pedal point derives its name from the organ. An organist will push down a low pedal, just leave it down and play all kinds of different harmonies above it. So some of the notes above, some of the chords above will be indeed be part of that pedal tone harmony and some will not be. So you could do something like.

There, it's part of the tone, that's not part of the tone, not part of the tone, part of the tone, part of the tone and finally the full resolution.

And that gives you a taste of non-chord tones. So remember in your music when you're trying to figure out the harmonic underpinnings of the music you're playing so you know where you are and it can make sense of digesting your score, first try to figure out the harmonies by arranging the notes in thirds. Remember the chords may be inverted, you may need to shuffle them around, put the bottom note on the top or the top note on the bottom so you can arrange them so they're all in thirds. That is skipping a letter between them.

And then any notes that absolutely do not make it into the cut, you can't figure out where they go, they're probably non-chord tones and look at the previous and the harmonies just beyond and you will probably find a resolution of that non-chord tone to the actual harmony without the non -chord tone because that's what they all do. The commonality of all these different non-chord tones is they all resolve to the chord whether it's.

Or.

It doesn't matter, it's the, you have a non-chord tone that then resolves to the harmonies and this can be enlightening to get a sense of the structure of your music.

If any of you have any other ideas about non-chord tones or any that I've missed here, leave in the comments here at LivingPianist .com, your online piano store. Thanks again for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/mastering-non-chord-tones-unlocking-beautiful-harmonies/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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