The Violin Harmony Handbook Christian Howes
Preface Acknowledgements: The materials in this book have been developed with assistance and inspiration from several people: Christopher Marion provided substantial editing, notation, feedback, and organization throughout. Yap Shu Mei provided transcriptions and notation. Tomoko Omura provided transcription. Thanks to my former classical violin teachers Ginny Christopherson and Michael Davis. Also to my former classical music coaches, among them Markand Thakkar and Marshall Haddock. My classical teachers taught me to listen and play with musicality. Thanks to Paul Brown and Bobby Floyd, among other jazz mentors, for teaching me to think about jazz improvisation and harmony. In recent years, I’ve become a friend, collaborator, and fan of the great violinist, Billy Contreras. Several of his ideas have come to influence me in the study of jazz violin, and his influence can be found throughout this book. Billy would undoubtedly credit many of his own ideas to his mentor, the great violinist and teacher, Buddy Spicher.
Introduction If you’re a violinist, violist, or cellist interested in creating your own music, I hope this book will enrich your understanding of harmony on the fingerboard and give you a clearer sense of the choices available to you as a composer or improviser. You’ll find approaches to developing a strong harmonic comprehension, both from a listening and a theoretic viewpoint. Through application of these materials, I hope you’ll be able to improvise richer melodies which flow from a strong harmonic understanding and intention. This book can be useful both for beginning improvisers and advanced jazz string players. Outline (Synopsis) 1)Context- Harmonic fluency is one important component of the knowledge and skill set necessary to improvise and compose on your instrument. Here we provide a context within which this book fits. 2) Finding triads in all inversions on the instrument. 3) Applied theory: How does improvisation relate to keys/chords/and modes, and what is voice leading? 4) Harmonizing melodies 5) Tips on improving your ear to hear chords. 6) Chord pairs 7) More on chord pairs. 7) Tomoko’s Lesson- In this lesson we go quickly through much of the material we’ve already covered, showing one possible “practice regimen” 8) solo arrangements for violin 9) chord glossary The best scenario for approaching music is one in which a player has developed a harmonic ear and theoretical knowledge base. One supplements the other. For example, if you hear a chord which your ear can’t intuitively recognize, then you use your theoretical knowledge to make sense of how to treat it. Conversely, when you’re confronted with a theoretical situation that doesn’t make sense, trust your ear. The exercises in the following chapters are designed to develop both. By compiling these exercises into one harmony handbook, I hope you will find yourself empowered in your creative musical pursuits.
Context There are at least three challenges facing any “creative (improvising) string player”, i.e., improvisation, style , and harmony. Style is difficult to teach. Like when learning a spoken language, one needs to listen to and speak the language, for a long time, preferably around other native speakers. I can’t teach style, but I encourage my students to do a lot of listening, transcription, and interacting within a community of players who are fluent in the musical language they are interested in learning. If there’s a cultural origin of the style they’re interested in, all the better to study (or somehow participate in) the culture from which the music comes. Improvisation is easy and natural, like an ability we’re born with, but most of us have, through training, conditioning and/or socialization, become self-conscious and inhibited. We’re afraid to take a chance, play a bad note… Those of us lucky enough to be encouraged from an early age to be creative on our instruments are well-adjusted. The rest of us need to get over our fear and, in effect, “learn” to be comfortable with improvisation. We have to learn to be creative with our instruments. The best way to learn to be comfortable with improvising is to just do it. However, we feel we must have a structure to work within. Completely “free” improvisation can be overwhelming because it offers too much choice. Too much freedom is unbearable. It exacerbates selfconscious doubts. Better, when first learning, to assign limits, parameters, i.e., “structure”, to our improvisation. One advantage this provides is that improvisation becomes more of a “task”, like a question on your math homework, a household chore, or anything with simple steps to follow. People aren’t self-conscious about tasks, but they’re self-conscious about overt creativity, about making choices... Common structures include tunes, chord progressions, grooves, and drones. But there are many other structures we can use to practice improvisation and gain comfort improvising. If I ask a player to improvise continuous eighth notes in the key of D major , in a 4/4/ tempo at 90 bpm, this is much easier to accomplish for some than, “playing something free”. I am preparing a separate book to address this issue. One does not need to know style or harmony, or even technique, to improvise. One only has to be comfortable enough to be creative., and this must be practiced by improvising as much as possible. The more accessible structures one is given to work with, the easier it is to become comfortable with improvisation over time.
When it comes to harmony, string players tend to be like the emperor who was wearing no clothes. We pride ourselves in our ability to hear and comprehend music, but rarely can we actually recognize the harmonic progressions underlying melodies. Many of us classically trained string players thought that we had actually learned harmony and theory in our classical studies or our college performance degrees, but we never learned either to hear the chords, create melodies that fit over the chords, or even how to play the chords on our instrument. On the other hand, fiddle players trained by ear in folk traditions typically have a different set of problems. They often hear and improvise comfortably and intuitively over simple chord changes. But when the chords become slightly more irregular, their ears break down and they have no theoretic foundation to lean on. The optimal scenario is one in which a player has developed their harmonic ear and their theoretic knowledge. One supplements the other. For example, if you hear a chord which your ear can’t intuitively recognize, then you use your theoretical knowledge to make sense of how to treat it. Conversely, when you’re confronted with a theoretical situation that doesn’t make sense, you should be able to trust your ear. The exercises in the following chapters are designed to help you develop both.
Step 6. Quadruple Stop (Spread) Voicings: (Here you will double one note per triad): A, F#, D, and A. D, A, F#, and D. F#, D, A, F# (6ths and 5ths) Step 7. Next, we'll look at diminished chords, augmented chords, and start to play 7th and other extended chords. After you've figured out the triad shapes in a few keys (minor and major), you'll start to recognize the shapes in all keys, and this will be helpful whether you're comping, soloing, harmonizing, arranging, or composing. This is a great way to build your comfort and understanding of harmony. I suggest working no more than about 15-45 minutes per day on these, depending on your burn-out meter.
Triad Chord Voicings Build Harmonic Proficiency I doesn’t hurt to internalize basic triads on your instrument. Try these rigorous, yet rewarding, exercises in which you will learn to articulate all major and minor triads as double stops, triple stops, and quadruple stops. Let’s start with a D major triad. Our goal will be to find all ways to play (or imply) the triad on the violin. The notation at the bottom of the page corresponds to the text below. Step 1. Single Notes: Start with the single notes in the arpeggio. Each note in the D major arpeggio represents the triad. In other words, play any one of these three notes - D, F# or A anywhere on the violin, and you are, in effect, "implying the chord D major". That was easy! Step 2. Double Stops/ Close Voicing: Now harmonize the arpeggio by playing the next voice in the triad above. For example, if you start in the low register, your first double stop consists of the notes A and D (a perfect fourth on the G and D strings). The next double stop is D and F# (a major third). Then the notes F# and A (a minor third). Keep going up (you will duplicate the first three double stops up an octave.) As you harmonize the D major arpeggio using the note directly above, all your intervals will be either 3rds or 4ths. The combinations include these note pairs: D and F# , F# and A, and A and D (voices in close proximity). Step 3. Double Stops / Spread Voicings: This time you will harmonize the arpeggio using 5ths and 6ths, instead of 3rds and 4ths. Starting from the bottom of the register on violin you'll have the following note pairs: A and F#, D and A, and F# and D (and then duplicating up the octave). Step 4. Triple Stop / Close Voicings: From the bottom up you'll find the following voicings: D, F#, and A (root position triad). F#, A, and D (1st inversion triad). A, D, F# (2nd inversion triad). Continue up the octave. Step 5. Triple Stop Spread Voicings: The spread voicings skip over chord tones to create a triad using wider intervals. From the bottom up you'll find the following: A (on the G string), F# (on the D string), and D (on the A string). D (open), A (open), and F# (on E string). F# (on D string), D (on A string), A (on E string) Continue up the octave. Note: In these exercises, you should never double a note. In the triple-stop exercises, you will always play three notes that form a triad.
