[low hum and sticks clacking] [cultural music montage] [keyboard plays light jazz music] man harmony can best be described as notes sounding together in combination; pitches that are stacked on top of one another. If we hear only a melody by itself, with no harmonic accompaniment, it might sound Something Like this. [plays melody line from we three kings] now if we hear an accompaniment to it, this would be considered harmonizing the melody. This hand is going to play the harmonic accompaniment. This hand will play the melody again. man if you look at harmony as the sounding of a number of musical notes at the same time, its not a phenomenon that is confined to europe or the united states. It happens in a million different ways all around the world. In indonesia, in gamelan music, you have a kind of harmony because you have notes that are tuned together that are being sounded simultaneously. [ensemble plays gamelan music] in zimbabwean mbira music, there is a kind of harmony, although africans dont have words for chord and dont have a word for harmony. I wonder wheryou are, my darling. In a general sense, harmony means being in agreement. You can say that some people are working in harmony. Theyre working in agreement with each other toward a common goal. In music, its similar. Musical notes musical pitches can be in agreement with each other. My heart. What constitutes agreement is the key question. In Eastern Europe, there are some sounds that they think are in agreement that most people who are not from Eastern Europe will think are very, very much in disagreement in the style of music called ganga. [singing ganga music] [shrill yell] in gangan music, they sound notes at the same time that are very, very close together. And in bosnia, that sound is of the essence of music. What constituteseing in agreement or being dissant or being consonant is a culturally determined thing. And it can change over time. [ensemble plays early music] narrator within the western classical tradition, ideas have varied over time as to what combinations of notes make good harmony. The story of how these ideas developed can be traced back through the baroque, renaissance, and medieval periods. man well, the term harmony is used in western music to describe the simultaneous sounding of several notes what we call chords. Thats what we use as the basis of our music in the 19th and 20th century, but it really wasnt always the case. In order to understand the development of harmony, you have to really go back to the very beginnings of western music to the origin of plainchants. Plainchant is a term used to describe the singing ofhe sacred text in the christian church. Plainchant is always just one line of music as if only one person is singing. But oftentimes, several people would be singing this music at the same time, but they would always be singing in unison the same melody exactly at the same time. But around the year 900, we know from some treatises that survive, that they were adding lines on top of these plainchant originals. At first, it was a line that would move exactly in parallel contour with the original melody, and one theory is that because men and boys often sang together in the Liturgical Services and the boys just didnt have voices low enough to sing with the men, they would sing as best they can in their own range, and it wound up being just not an octave higher and not in unison, they would have to sing a fifth higher about five notes higher than where the men could sing. And so it was an accidental development that these two lines were sung simultaneously a fifth apart. [singing a plainchant] the Church Musicians must have really liked the sounds because they really took off on this idea, and soon there developed a free form where the added line was not tied to the melodic contour of the original melody, but sometimes went up when the original plainchant went down or vice versa. [plainchant continues] eventually, even more lines were added so that in the late middle ages, around the year 1400 for example, three voices was the norm. By the year 1500, 100 years later, four voices were the norm. The texture of having these four voices Work Together was such that there was a lot of imitation between the four lines. And it was rather playful. The four parts would weave in and out of each other, they would chase each other, echo each other, and always come to a nice chord at the end. The notes were sounding together forming chords, even if the composer didnt think of them as chords. Certain notes would line up at a certain time and create a chord. And in the renaissance in the 15th, 16th centuries, these harmonies were sort of the result of the different lines of polyphony as they sort of made a tapestry of music all together. Composers became increasingly aware of these vertical sonorities or chords. By the end of the 16th century, composers were ready to drop the middle lines of a standard fourpart texture, and just keep the top and bottom lines. Why did they do this . For a very good reason. This is at the time when the earliest operas were being written, and the solo song was of prime importance. [singing bass solo] in these new art forms, the composer intended to get across the text of the song in as clear and immediate way as possible. So by getting rid of the middle lines, he focused all the attention on that top line so you could really hear what the singer was singing. [solo continues] the melody and the bass became the two most important voices as the inner voices became less important. What the composer substituted for those middle lines was little chord symbols that he wrote above the notes of the bass line, and the instruments that played that bass line were the instruments that can actually play more than one note at a time instruments such as the lute, harpsichord, organ, and performers became adept at reading these symbols and knowing what notes to add on top of the bass line. [light strumming using chords] all written in this shorthand of figures over the bass line. It probably saved a lot of paper. zajac the use of the figured bass adding symbols above these bass notes is really the whole foundation of our modern concept of harmony. [classical piano music plays] narrator the harmony that underlies much of the standard classical and popular music we hear today was developed by the 18th century. It involves rules and conventions about how chords are constructed and how they progress from one to the next. woman a chord will have certain sounds or colors that give the composer a lot of choices in how hes going to make a piece sound. In fact, its kind of like a painters palette. They have a palette of different colors to choose from, and a composer has different chords or harmony to choose from to make his piece come alive. When a composer takes chords and strings them along one after another, thats called a chord progression. Heres a very simple chord progression. [plays chord progression] three chords coming back to the first chord. In a chord progression, often the chords will lead to a point of tension, and then you have to have resolution. See if you can hear the tension of this one. It wants to resolve. Its not finished, and then we come home. narrator the idea of moving music to and from a tonal center is referred to in western music as tonality. [orchestra plays dramatic music] man this is the really great discovy in european music where you know where home is. You have a tonal center. If i go like this, and i stop there, after a while, you got to run down, and turn off the light or Something Like that. Its like, im not done yet. Hes saying, the end. The end. The end. Over and over again so you dont make any mistake about it. This symphony which has taken 45 minutes is done. And so whenever you talk about harmony in our context, youre talking about tonality, about the way the harmony shapes the movement of the music. [playing dramatic music] and thats what provides that sense of shape and direction and flow. ying we, as musicians, would like to sort of define harmonies and the way they operate because they create within us a set of expectations. When i hear a chord like this, i want to hear as a resolution of the first chord. And those expectations are important, and theyre very conditioned to us especially in western civilizations. What is really exciting about harmony is when those conventions are gone against. At the beginning of the brahms b major trio, there are certain notes like when i play with the violin this sort of melody in sixths, [plays melody on violin] not every interval is a sixth. [violin continues] even if were not aware technically of whats going on, your ear picks this up. It disturbs our sense of emotions, and thats one reason why music stirs us. pagano harmony in western Classical Music has always kind of come with a set of rules. Composers were supposed to follow those rules. Of course, being creative people, they also wanted to explore further tonal possibilities. So each composer would try to take harmony to kind of the next step. By the end of the 19th century, composers had moved harmony almost to a breaking point. They had basically explored as far as they could go, and then they decided to break with harmony and tonality. And thats when atonal music came in. It was so to the edge that you dont have a neat, clean, predictable harmonic progression. [light jazz music] narrator while much of western Classical Music in the 20th century has moved away from tonality, popular music and traditional jazz have not. In jazz, it is the chord progression of the tune that provides the foundation for the improvisations of the soloist. [solo saxophone plays] tesar if im playing with a group, i have to coordinate certain elements of the harmonic accompaniment with other players particularly the bass player. He and i have got to be in agreement. man the main function of the bass is to play the bottom note of the chord. Thats pretty much what youre hired for. Thats your function. Thats your responsibility. Outside of that, you can play other notes in the chord, for instance, the piano player or the guitar player is playing a g chord. The root of that chord is a g note. Now other notes in the g chord would be the g and the b or the third, mong up to the fifth, which is d, and then, in the octave, another g at the top. You can use those notes to create an interesting line, you know, thats the first those are the most common tones, the most inside notes to play that will agree with what the piano player is playing. Oh, lets try that again. Yeah, right. tesar after we agree on the basic harmony, we can still shape each individual chord a little bit differently. The page may call for e minor, 7, a7, d major, 7, so itll give us a description of chords. But i can play the chords in different registers. I can play them close. I can spread the notes out so i can change the general texture of the chord, so we have the freedom to improvise harmonically. A very important thing to be listening for is the soloist. I have got to listen to that person and play forms of the chord that are hopefully going to best complement the melodies that the soloist is playing. Lets just say somebody playsomething, and theyre playing a lot of notes, theyre playing a very fast passage. Maybe i want to stay out of their way, and not fill things up, and just play a chord, and hold it out. Lets say the persons holding one long note, and theyre sustaining it, and its growing dynamically, and theyre really milking this one long note, i may want to play. I may want to play a rising pattern to create some kind of further supporting tension for what that person is trying to do. [saxophone solo continues] you want to have the soloist have the freedom to choose their direction, yet you want to give them some support, and that might mean sort of helping to push them in a direction, even if maybe its not where they were intending to go originally because thats where the best performances sometimes come from those little surprise turns that music can take when youre improvising. [saxophone playing we three kings] man harmony is a word that was developed to understand western music that is music of the european and american traditions over about the last 500 years. When people started going out from that tradition and running into the musics of the rest of the world, they needed words to talk about how those other musics work that didnt have our tradition. So harmony is applied sometimes to other kinds of music than the music it was meant to describe. [drumming and chanting] narrator there are many forms of harmony found throughout africa. In zimbabwe, one of the most common traditional harmony producing instruments is called the mbira. Mbiras are often used to accompany song and dance. They are constructed with metal keys fixed to a sound box that is often surrounded by a gourd resonator. brown in africa, there is no word for chord, and there is no word for harmony, but there are chords in african music, and there is harmony in african music. For example, in zimbabwean mbira music, the chords will consist of two notes being sounded simultaneously that are a fourth or a fifth or an octave apart, and thats what the harmony is built on. Now, that song consists of a series of two note chords that are being sounded in sequence so theres a chord progression. There are two phrases. Heres the first phrase. Heres the second phrase. So the whole song consists of two phrases each of which has three chords. Now, thats the basic framework. I want to elaborate on it, so im going to take some notes out of the chords, play them independently of each other, and develop a more interesting melody. So here we go. [plays mbira music] the chord progressions in mbira music are very much like the chord progressions in jazz or the chord progressions in bach. They are the underlying framework. In a jazz context, you improvise over a recurrent cycle of chords, a chord progression. In mbira music, its the same. You improvise over a recurring chord progression. [playing mbira music] you dont have the word for chord, and you dont have an explicit body of musical theory. But if you play notes that are not in the chord, your teacher will tell you, or someone in the audience will tell you, or theyll throw a stick at you. You dont do that. Theyll say, here, leave that alone. Dont play that note here. And theyll show you, here play this one. And if you analyze what theyre telling you to play, theyre telling you to play the notes that are within the chord. So theyre hearing the relationship of tones to each other. Theyre hearing chords, but you dont have a word for it. And really that was the situation that existed in western europe before music theory was developed. Music theory is something that is based upon practice. Its based upon what musicians do. You look at what musicians do, and you find some patterns in it, and then you write down those patterns, and you can make that prescriptive. You can make those into rules. [bass solo] narrator while some musical genres have explicit, formalized rules for harmony, others do not. But the impulse to sound notes together, to make harmony, is an essential part of music in many diverse cultures around the world. [classical ensemble plays] [tonal drumming] [jazz music] [singing ganga music]. My heart, eet adeline, eeadeline, my adeline. Beautiful mine, my adeline. Say youre mine, adeline. Funding for this program is provided by annenberg media. Narrator 97 of the earths water is contained in the oceans. Some forms of life flourish in this salty environment. But humans require an abundant supply of freshwater. Less than 1 of all the earths water is readily available for human consumption. In the semiarid desert plains of the southwest united states, where rainfall averages just 2 1 2 centimeters per month, tom maddock studies this scarce resource. Dr. Maddock the real problem that we have is that with increasing populations