Harmony and Poetry

Exercises in harmonic progression and voice leading resemble sonnets. Or any other strict form of poetry. There are weak chords and strong chords; there are chords that rest and chords that tend to push forward. For any given melody line, you have to write a sequence of strong, weak, moving, and unmoving chords that makes sense of the phrasing and ends of phrases. There's standard rules for how to match harmonies with melodic notes, and how to shift certain chords into others, but they can be broken for emphasis. At the beginning, there's many possible harmonizations for each note of the melody -- but the more of the form you fill in, the more limited your options become for the remaining measures.

The workbook I'm using gives an increasing number of chordal options each chapter, making the process an increasingly more creative endeavor than a mechanical one. Toward the beginning, you're pretty much limited to I and V...but throw IIs and VIIs and IVs and all their inversions into the mix, and it's possible to call the even the standard two-line workbook exercises "art."