18,706 views
Advanced music theory continues where the music theory that allows us to cover all the music of the common practice period stops. Graphic representations of voice leading, tonnetz, different modalities of set theory and concepts such as the interaction between different tonal spaces in contexts of functional harmony and non-functional harmony, fall into this field of advanced music theory, to distinguish it from the basic music theory that we usually use. This week, studying some texts by Tymoczko, I posted a graphic on my social networks that represents the voice leading relationships that exist between different scales that, in turn, are used in different harmonic languages that became common in 20th century practice and that also permeated jazz and by extension urban popular music. The image was accompanied by a text that said “if the circle of fifths seems complicated to you, you will love this.” Hours later, the harmonic diagram had many comments asking me to make a video explaining what it was. It's about how different scales from different languages are connected by voice leading, the diatonic major scale, which belongs to the heptatonic language, the acoustic scale, known in Jazz as Lydian b7 and in Rock as Mixolydian #11, also belonging to the heptatonic language, the whole tone scale, which belongs to the hexatonic language, the octatonic scale, which belongs to the octatonic language, and various hexatonic models. The idea is that, just as we use voice leading to move between two chords, we can use voice leading to move and connect two different tonal spaces, that is, convert a hexatonic model into an octatonic model and vice versa. With this type of procedure we can obtain a vision that can help us in composition but also in the analysis of works by authors such as Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, Wayner Shorter, Chick Corea and other authors who, despite not renouncing tonality, move in different tonal spaces that are often better explained from transformational models such as the one proposed here than from more traditional approaches. This is the video. I hope you like it.