Who Killed Harmony?

I've put up a few posts on the problem of harmony. Here, here and here. I'm putting up another one because a friend of mine just sent me an email about a concert she attended of the Del Sol String Quartet playing new music. She commented that there was virtually no harmony, everything was layered counterpoint. Yes, I think that there are two main schools of thought among composers these days. One school is still loosely following the modernist tradition begun by Schoenberg that emancipates dissonance. Without the tension between consonance and dissonance there can be no functional harmony so they relied mainly on counterpoint and canon. Serialism, with its use of a tone-row along with its retrogrades and inversions is the prime example. But even in the absence of that technique composers in this school tend to avoid any suggestion of functional harmony. The other school, often called 'minimalist', unashamedly uses consonance, but as they tend to sit on one harmony most of the time, thus making it by default 'tonic' also don't really have functional harmony. The third post linked to above discusses this in detail. Oh, one other school is the neo-classicists, but they tend merely to imitate traditional forms with "wrong notes" so their harmony isn't functional either. The result in all three cases is to my mind unsatisfactory because music without harmony is a lot less than it could be.

For the last few years I have been exploring how to write truly harmonic music again. I think the first thing composers should shed is their irrational fear of harmony. Don't worry, even if you write functional harmony it isn't going to sound like Beethoven or Brahms anyway--unless you try to parody them. What you need to do is develop a sensitivity to harmonic function and let your instincts go to work. There are two models that I think can be useful. One is Debussy as I talk about here. One thing I am surprised by is that while, on the one hand, everyone talks about the huge influence Debussy had on 20th century music, but on the other hand, everyone avoids being influenced by his music. Dig into it and you will see that underneath the beautiful 'impressionistic' surface, he is using a lot of harmonic function to structure the music. The other model is Shostakovich, anathema though he may be to composers. He is certainly appreciated by audiences and performers. And yes, he very much uses functional harmony, though of a kind that has scarcely been examined by theorists. Another composer who continued to write functional harmony was Benjamin Britten.

The lesson that most composers seem to have gathered from the paroxysm in music that happened in the 20th century is that functional harmony is no longer a possible option. But I think that music with no functional harmony is crippled both in terms of how you can structure it and in terms of the expressive content. So let's rediscover functional harmony. We don't have to follow the old rules, we can make up new ones, or just rely on instinct. Here is another piece by Britten: