Elements of classical music harmony

These pages are from the K. Merz’s “Elements of Harmony”, a book published at the end of the XIX Century. However, it contains a lot of helpful and well explained resources about musical harmony.

The study of Harmony implies the study of the rules appertaining to the combinations of tones into chords, their names, their resolution, etc.

The student who masters these rules, attains a more perfect understanding of the construction of music, and will for this reason derive greater pleasure from the art. Moreover, the study of harmony enables the student to read music with more facility, for by knowing the rules that underlie the chords, he can, as it were, guess at them and their progressions, while others, who have not studied these rules, must read notes carefully.

“Elements of Harmony”: summery

• Sounds and tones
• The division of the octave
• Naming different octaves
• Diatonic major scales
• Diatonic minor scales
• Chromatic scales
• Church or modal keys
• Temperament
• Intervals
• The common chord
• Inversion of the common chord
• Dominant chords
• The inversions of the dominant chord