Summary of Classical Chord Progressions (by an amateur)

[Derek]

Hello everyone, I was wondering if the resident forum music theory experts might tell me how well I've summarized the basics of classical chord progressions.

I discovered all these things by improvising....then later read about their labels in books. Everything I've learned about theory went like this: 

1) I improvised something that sounded cool, and remembered the device.
2) I heard the same device in a piece of music I like
3)I read about the same device in a music theory book and said to myself: "so THATS what that was!"

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Principles of Chord Progression


Chord progressions are fairly simple. I used to think one had to more or less memorize a vocabulary of chord progressions in order to use them effectively, but the truth is that all chord progressions are composed of small parts. Within any given scale, if you change to a chord a fifth below (same as a fourth above), this is considered, and I think with fairly good justification, to be the strongest progression. This is especially true in the perfect cadence which is the progression V-I, or the fifth chord of a scale to the first chord of a scale. It just has this very, well, strong sound. Of course, the fact that it has this particular sound isn't neccessarily a reason to use it all the time in one's compositions, for strong can mean many things other than obvious harmonic progression.


If you start at the first chord of a scale and keep changing chords down by a fifth or up by a fourth, including fifths that are actually a tritone, you'll eventually hit the V and return back to the tonic. Pretty neat, huh? This chord progression is called the circle of fifths progression. Play it on your piano in any key you like. Then listen to a bunch of baroque pieces, by Bach, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, any of those guys. You'll find that this progression is one of the most common progressions in all of Baroque and Classical music. Why? They were obsessed with this strong harmonic sound of moving down by a fifth.

Of course, moving down by a fifth is not the only progression. The next strongest progression is considered to be movement down by a third. If you'll experiment with moving down by thirds while improvising, you'll see that this also has a pretty noticable, strong sound, especially when used cleverly with inversions. Using interesting patterns of chord inversions can make any progression sound better, in fact. Using nothing but root position chords can get rather monotonous sounding.

Other progressions, such as movement up by a fifth or up by a third, are like going backwards, and as such have a less strong sound. However, as I've said before the term strong, though probably the only apt label for these raw harmonic devices, often does not carry over to real music. In some of the intro passages to Chopin's Fantasia in F Minor, we hear a progression up by thirds, which has a very strong and dramatic sound. The truth is strength of sound is very subjective; but for the purpose of describing how progressions sound isolated by themselves, it will suffice.


Progressions on sixths or fourths are of course inversions of the progressions I've mentioned above. There is also of course the progression by seconds. Thats simply moving up or down the scale. This always has a pretty strong sound since every note you're hearing changes with each new chord. The strongest progression by a second is from IV to V. As you can imagine, that V is very often followed by I. IV-V-I is a complete perfect cadence. It defines tonality stronger than anything else.


The best progressions borrow chords from other keys. Often this is in the form of secondary dominants. That is, instead of moving directly to the next chord in your progression, you suddenly move to the V of the scale of that next chord, and then resolve into it. When applied to a circle of fifths progression, we have a real monster! Its not common to hear an entire circle of fifths progression spun out with secondary dominants, however. Like I said, the best progressions combine all these little parts in an irregular, organic way. Listen to the second movement of the Pathetique by Beethoven for an excellent example. Gorgeous.
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[abell88]

I'm impressed with what you figured out by improvising/recognizing, Derek! I studied harmony from a very slim book -- all the rules were condensed as much as possible.

The basic rule I learned for harmonic progressions was: 2 4 5 6 / 7 3. That is, the root of the chord should rise a 2nd, 4th, 5th, or 6th, but not a 7th or 3rd. Of course there are exceptions/variations, but this is sure an easy way to remember the basics!

Alice