Harmonic rhythm from Abba’s Take a Chance on Me It gives the melody and the lyrics a sense of lightness. As we’ve already seen, the sparse harmonic rhythm gives the music a sense of space. In this song we get more chord changes but still they are not frequent. In this case it’s elements such as the guitar strumming, the several layers of percussion and the vocals. Just like the Mendelssohn example above, this music is interesting through other means. This doesn’t make it boring as we might suspect at first. Harmonic rhythm from Bo Diddley’s Bo Diddley YouTube links to the originals are provided below. The audio for these examples are stripped down to just melody and chords so that we can really hear the harmonic rhythm. The whole song, though short, is practically just one chord. This is an interesting example because there is no harmonic rhythm to speak of. Bo Diddley wrote this song in 1955 and he named it after himself. This allows the melodies to play around on top of a firm harmonic structure underneath.Īs a principle, it holds true in music from Bach to Shostakovich and beyond. This extract from Schumann also reveals that music composed of several melodies playing at the same time, often has a simple harmonic rhythm. It is unlike any of the melodic rhythms above it (although quite similar to the bass): The harmonic rhythm of Schumann’s Träumerei. What’s really fascinating is that the harmonic rhythm is unique. Some chords are used for more than a measure, others for a beat or two, and others still for just half a beat. The individual rhythms of the parts of Schumann’s TräumereiĪt the same time, all these lines are based on a chord progression and it too has its own rhythm, that is, the harmonic rhythm. Here we have a main melody on top, an accompaniment and a low supporting bass line, all with their own rhythms. Schumann: Träumerei from Kinderszenen, Op. This is a wonderful example of how many different rhythms can occur at the same time. It’s his Träumerei from Kinderszenen, Op. The choice of when to change a chord is just as important as which chord to change into! Once again, this is how significant harmonic rhythm is. Melody on top of chord progression in 3/4 It’s exactly the same chord progression but the melody is completely different (even though I kept most of the same notes). Here is a melody I just wrote on top of the first version of our chord progression: Melody on top of chord progression in 4/4Īnd here is a melody on top of the fourth version. So let’s see how this works. If we had melodies on top of the progressions from our little game above, they would all be different. The melodic rhythm is just the same but instead of the chords, it’s the duration of the notes of the melody.The harmonic rhythm is what we’ve been playing around with above: it’s the rhythm of the chords.So in music we often have at least two levels of rhythm happening at the same time: the melodic rhythm and the harmonic rhythm: What’s interesting is that these melodies have their own rhythm too. As you know, chord progressions seldom work by themselves. They’re usually meant to accompany and support melodies on top.
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