Chords: What They Are and What They Are Not (Part 2)

Classical Principle Weekly
March 21, 2023

Chords: What They are and What They are not. Part 2

Last time we examined the first 19 measures of Bach's Prelude in C Major from the Well-tempered Clavier, Book One. We borrowed the idea of a phase space from physics and used the musical equivalent of time-lapse photography to create a musical phase space. That experiment helped us discover that chords are not built from the bottom up, as vertical triads strung together like beads on a string, but arise out the interplay of horizontal motion in different voice species.

Now we will continue our analysis of Bach’s prelude in C as it encapsulates all of the discoveries that go into the Well-Tempered Clavier—discoveries that changed the face of music forever.

A. The Different Human Voice Species
B. The Vocal Registers
C. The Diatonic Octave Scale
E. The Major-Minor complex.
F. The Chromatic Scale
G.The Tonic-Dominant-Subdominant Complex.

Here is the video!

https://drive.google.com/…/1ZMWu3iYA63b4HC3h0h3thYlK8…/view…

Part 3 will examine the role of the Lydian (tritone) intervals.