Music Harmony for Beginners: Triads, Progressions & Functional Theory

This book offers a structured approach to the fundamentals of music harmony for beginners, designed to provide a solid understanding of how music is constructed.
Begin your journey with the essential music theory basics, starting with intervals as the foundational building blocks of harmony. You will learn to form and identify different interval qualities and understand their roles in creating consonance and dissonance.
The guide proceeds to explore the melodic framework of scales and modes, covering the construction of major and minor scales, the application of church modes for varied sonic colors, and the use of pentatonic and blues scales.
A dedicated section on the circle of fifths demonstrates its practical utility in determining key signatures, identifying related keys, and visualizing chord relationships.
Further chapters focus on the construction of chords. You will learn to build triads and seventh chords, including major, minor, diminished, and augmented types, and understand how to use their inversions to create smoother voice leading. The text also covers the notation of chords using standard chord symbols.
The core of the book is dedicated to the systems of chord connections. Explore the principles of functional harmony understanding the roles of tonic, subdominant, and dominant functions. You will also work with Roman numeral analysis to deconstruct and understand chord progressions. The guide details the composition and application of established cadences in music, such as authentic, plagal, and deceptive cadences, providing the tools to create conclusive or open-ended musical phrases.
Finally, the book addresses applied harmony and ear training harmony. It introduces the principles of voice leading to connect chords effectively and develops your auditory skills by teaching you to aurally identify intervals, triads, and simple cadences. The concluding sections touch upon harmonic refinement through the use of non-chord tones and the fundamentals of modulation to closely related keys.