Harmony As Everything

 

AI-Generated Cyanotype

The composer really is the controller of emotion at the harmonic level. If a composer gets a commission to write the music (or even choose the music as a director) for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth at some point (she is 93), a consideration of the cultural elements is supremely important. This is where Universals become useful. Perhaps over time, traditions themselves drive the decisions and knowing what the Universals are is intuitive. In this example, my intuition tells me that the harmony is strictly functional and perhaps plagal. It shouldn’t be modern or contemporary or (gasp) jazz—but even jazz can be used in the right contexts, along with angular (or even dissonant) harmony. Jazz resonates at the spiritual level, but it has to be “Sunday morning”, not “Saturday night”, even if the chord changes you used are the same. This is where we might reflexively allude to “nurture”, i.e. the proper treatment of small details surrounding some kind of ritual and the place in which it occurs. The appreciation comes in the appropriateness of the music in a situational context.

6/23/2019

[6/23/2025: We think emotion primarily comes from melody, but sometimes it’s a chord that starts the whole process. Brian Wilson described how he writes songs and typically it’s sitting at the piano and working from chords and chord changes. This is the one facet where AI music cannot compete. There’s no one sitting in a room with a piano or guitar. When I was heavily into jazz, harmony was everything].