We will assume that the prevalence of pitch-time patterns in musical scores reflects the degree to which composers and listeners of the time liked them for the purpose of this study, we will make no distinction between liking and consonance, nor will we consider voice-leading (the ease with which a sonority can be approached or quitted). The usage of both words depends on context.Įven Wikipedia seems to be onto what I'm talking about here.Our aim is first to clarify some basic questions about the harmonic vocabulary of mainstream Western tonal music, including the rank order of prevalence or consonance of trichords as it changed from one historical period to the next, and then to explain those rank orders by means of quantitative models based on psychological or perceptual theory. Thus, I don't bother referring to non-tertian harmonies as "chords" because of the need to understand the sonority when we're no longer in familiar, tertian waters. There is little if any need to analyze the "sonority" of a tertian harmony at that point - we know what it is by looking at the tertian harmonic material around it. Once we learn basic I-V-I hierarchy, chord extensions in tertian harmony, and modality in general, the mystery is gone. So, yes, as Tokkemon states, a chord is sometimes referred to as "any vertical grouping of three or more notes, regardless of interval" (like I said, theorists tend to vary their usage here) but that's often not how it applies when we actually study music. This is not usually the case in non-tertian harmonies because each and every note of a sonority requires us to analyze each interval occurring within the sonority. Tertian harmonies are so common, a trained eye can usually determine what the chord is based on its placement in the progression alone. Ergo, it makes no sense to call a chord "any vertical grouping of three or more pitches" in the context. In this "non-tonal" language of music, we often refer to "chords" as sonorities because the chord itself cannot be -defined- in relation to another chord the way it can be in tonal music. There are plenty of different approaches to these terms. What do we learn from arguing over terminology anyway?
#New sonority how to
I'd rather just write music and be done with arguing over how to use words to describe it. But we're speaking in semantics here, which usually displeases me.
Some theorists refer to it in this way already, so I think it holds weight. I would expand sonority to include all the chords that make up the musical "syntax" representative of the style of music. Personally, I'd expand "chord" to include any single moment where multiple pitches are sounding at once, regardless of the intervals used to create the chord. So, for example, we might say that a non-tertian (meaning, a group of pitches sounding at the same time that are NOT built on thirds) harmony is a "sonority" but not necessarily a "chord" in the traditional sense. The broader scope of sonority includes all "chords" and non-tertian harmonic expressions.
A chord is a triad or triad + extensions in the tonal harmonic language. The context is what we generally use to distinguish "sonority" from "chord." In the context, a chord falls under the broader scope of sonority.
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