Harmony is the outcome of confluent, congruent individual strands within the entire fabric of an enterprise-musical or otherwise.īy way of illustration, consider the biblical Star of Bethlehem observed by the Magi, which, some scholars propose, appeared as the conjunction of several planets at the time of Christ’s birth.
From an artistic point of view, the Oxford dictionary definition of harmony as “a simultaneous sound of notes” is not entirely adequate, because the “vertical” cannot really be separated from the “horizontal.” Harmony is not merely the momentary experience of resonance-exhilarating though such a moment might be. Troeger wrote, harmony arises from the confluence of independent contrapuntal voices. It is immaterial whether harmony is the by-product of a Renaissance motet, a Bach fugue, a homophonic Viennese minuet, or the simplest harmonic theory exercise: all harmony is polyphony.Īs in the “harmony of the spheres”-a marvelous image!-about which Dr.
This play of inner voices moving to and from a tonal center (or a series thereof), leads the listener along an odyssey of keys. Musical progress and meaning arises from an ongoing discourse of sonorities, whose composite inner voices bear a relationship to one another.
An isolated chord is indeed a resonant sonority, but it only becomes music in the context of other sonorities. This is a rather static notion of harmony, however, perhaps stemming from the historical preeminence of keyboard instruments. Troeger hints, we typically talk about musical harmony in terms of chords, the “simultaneous sound of notes” that yields “vertical music,” as the Oxford Dictionary explains. His recent entry, “Salutary Harmonies,” (TAO, June 2011) prompts me to respond with an alternate understanding of the characteristics of harmony, one that offers a fresh and complementary perspective on the meaning of harmony in terms of human relations.Īs Dr. I often read Thomas Troeger’s insightful columns with interest and sympathy.
Troeger discusses musical terminology as metaphors for the non-musical, focusing in this particular column on the significance of harmony, both musical and spiritual. The following is a reflection on a recent column in The American Organist magazine (June 2011 issue) by Thomas Troeger, the national chaplain for the American Guild of Organists.