[Music has several primary characteristics. In a series of blog postings I’m calling “Music in Pieces,” I’m looking at them one at a time from the perspective of my own work. Now that I have a “body of work,” I can speak to how I handle each “piece” generally.]

This does not mean I turn my nose up at all of the other “pieces” we’ve looked at so far, but there are a few spots of harmony in my own works that’ll bring a tear to my eye almost guaranteed — the cascading woodwinds from the opening of “September,” the strings entry towards the end of the gavotte in “Je danse, J’apprends,” the chord clusters which end Pianisms’ “Rondo B’out” and, not incidentally, open “Errant Watlz,” to name a few…

…But in “perfect harmony?” That phrase occurs in dozens of pop song lyrics, but “perfect” has some pretty pedantic implications. Time for a little story from the early days of my music studies.

It was 1972, and I had entered a Masters program in music theory at one of the largest schools of music in the country — North Texas State University (now University of North Texas). The chair of the theory department, Robert Ottman, had written one of the best-selling texts of the time, and his classes were, well, rigid. He’d managed to distill the world of “four-part chorale style” composition, as defined by the works of J. S. Bach and much of his contemporaries, into a set of iron-clad rules. If you followed them to the letter, you could write harmonies indistinguishable from those of Bach himself. In Dr. Ottman’s world, that was the whole story. His coverage of the discipline stopped about 1900, a time when composers were beginning to explore what might happen if you expanded on, even ignored, the standards of harmony those rules defined.

A coming tsunami was poised to engulf the world of Western European harmonic practice. But it begged a question — did Bach really ever play by those rules? Did he build a logical world which drove his composition, or was he (very much like me) just making his ear happy by using what he’d been immersed in for decades? Is the following 300-ish year practice of music harmony he spawned a world of mathematical precision, or just a world of aural precedence? For centuries, music theory as a discipline largely assumed the former, and understanding Western European music demanded you understand these principles.

Then along came jazz, blues, rock, and dozens of other musical trends which reflected some of these traditions without caring about the rules that supposedly drove them. In Classical music, composers went even further, designing “harmonic” systems which deliberately avoided the Bach-inspired traditions, often not incidentally in a logical/mathematical way itself. But many of the consumers of Western music abandoned the idea that excellence in music was rule-based. This revolution ran parallel to a cultural one, where practitioners of music were found in clubs and speakeasies rather than concert halls. Rule-based stuffiness had lost its grip.

I’ve greatly oversimplified hundreds of years of musical practice, but it all speaks to what I do in my own music. When I restarted my music studies 5+ years ago, I went through the same traditional music theory academic sequence I experienced as a student in my youth, only to fail to apply the lessons to my own compositions. That doesn’t mean Bach isn’t still in there, I’m just not systematic about it. My “harmony” is a collection of impressions I have in my head, some of which came from Bach and his followers, some of which didn’t. In particular, my approach to harmony takes delight in building a sequence of chords that might seem rule “adjacent,” then adding tones and moving in directions that aren’t. I have taken inspiration from a huge body of 20th Century composers who sound very much as if that was what they were doing too. (I won’t pretend they were, you’d have to ask them, and they’re all pretty much dead, so I’m safe!)

For me, “perfect harmony” is clusters of notes played together that just sound good to me, and, frankly, all those pop song references probably agree. Here’s hoping that they sound good to you as well, but I’m creating here — it’s what it is, and you’re free to work out your relationship with that world however you like. That’s the beauty of being a student of composition well past the emotionally complex days of a young student of theory, composition, history, and performance practice. I care, but I don’t, and I’m hoping there are old and new things in my works that produce the same response in you that I experience.

This approach really is everywhere in my work. If you’d like another, somewhat more extensive treatment on the theory, see “Notes on Style” under “About.”

I’m going to go back and have another listen to that string quartet, where I first started to explore this balance. The 3rd movement, “Adagio,” layers in the “perfect harmony” right near the beginning. ‘Scuse while I go get a tissue…