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The purpose of this inquiry-style lesson is to help you better understand music by studying the way chords are used to organize the music, create moods and effects, and evoke genres and styles. You do not have to be able to read music in order to pursue this inquiry, but you must have some way (for example, using chord symbols ) of identifying, understanding, and keeping track of the chords that are being used.
In this inquiry, you will choose a piece or pieces to study, and will study the harmony of those pieces with the goal of answering a particular question about the harmony. You will then demonstrate in a creation of your own what you discovered in your studies.
The questions that can be answered by analyzing the harmony of a piece of music are typically questions about what is happening in the harmony and how it affects the form, style, mood, and other aspects of the piece.
Questions that are useful for inquiry are those that are interesting to you and will require some effort to discover and understand the answer. They should be specific. For example, "What is jazz harmony like?" is too general, but "What is it about the harmony of this piece that makes it sound jazzy?" is specific enough.
Even though you have a specific question in mind, you may have trouble stating it at first, because you don't have the vocabulary to talk about it yet. For example, you may begin with the question "What is going on in the harmony" at a particular point in the music that sounds interesting to you.
Once the inquiry question has been identified, some careful thought should go into choosing music that is likely to help answer the question.
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