Twentieth-Century Techniques
For three centuries harmony had gravity: chords pulled toward a home. Then composers took the gravity out, and had to find something else to organise sound. Stacked fourths, symmetry, clusters and serial rows are the four main answers, and all four are audible in a second.
- no tonic
- 4 approaches
- built on intervals, not keys
In which styles
- Classical
- Film music
- Modal jazz
- Game music
- Ambient
In short
Traditional harmony stacks thirds, and thirds produce the tonal system with all its pulls. Stack fourths instead and you get a chord that is stable, modern-sounding and pointing nowhere, because the intervals that create tonal gravity are simply absent. The same logic runs through the other techniques: change the building block and you change what the music can want.
Open and unanchored. Twentieth-century harmony is not necessarily harsh; quartal chords are actually gentle. What it lacks is the sense of a destination, and that absence is the whole aesthetic point.
Where it sits in the phrase
These chords do not sit anywhere in a phrase, because the phrase as tonal music understands it has been given up. Their function is colour and texture, which is why they moved into film and game scoring so easily.
Where you run into this
- A quartal piano voicing under a modal jazz solo
- A whole-tone passage where nothing sounds like it could end
- A tone cluster used for weather, dread or machinery in a film score
The types side by side
Quartal harmony stacks fourths and sounds open. Polytonality plays two keys at once and sounds like two things happening. Clusters treat adjacent notes as a single colour. Serialism organises all twelve notes so that none becomes a home. Played one after another the point becomes obvious: these are four different ways of replacing gravity, not four kinds of noise.
Keep going
Everything in harmony
- Four-Part Chorale Style
- Species Counterpoint
- Imitation, Canon and Fugue
- Counterpoint in Pop
- Jazz Harmony
- Twentieth-Century Techniques