Great Pianists on Piano Playing / Study Talks with Foremost Virtuosos. A Series of Personal Educational Conferences with Renowned Masters of the Keyboard, Presenting the Most Modern Ideas upon the Subjects of Technic, Interpretation, Style and Expression

by James Francis Cooke

Studying the Harmony

"Every piano student ought to have a knowledge of harmony. But this knowledge should be a practical one. What do I mean by a practical knowledge of harmony? Simply this—a knowledge of harmony which recognizes the ear as well as the eye. There are students of harmony who can work out some harmonic problem with the skill of an expert mathematician and yet they never for one single moment think of the music their notes might make. This is due to the great neglect of the study of ear-training in early musical education.

"To be able to recognize a chord when you see it on paper is not nearly such an acquisition as the ability to recognize the same chord when it is played. The student who can tell a diminished seventh, or an augmented sixth at a glance, but who could not identify the same chords when he saw them through his ears instead of his eyes is severely handicapped. But how many musicians can do this? Ear-training should be one of the first of all studies. It may be acquired more easily in childhood if the student is not naturally gifted with it, and it is the only basis of a thorough knowledge of harmony. The piano teacher cannot possibly find time to give sufficient instruction in the subject of harmony at the piano lesson. It demands a separate period, and in most cases it is necessary and advisable to have a separate teacher; that is, one who has made a specialty of harmony.

"The piano itself is of course a great help to the student in the study of harmony, providing the student listens all the time he is playing. Few adult piano students study string instruments, such as the violin or 'cello—instruments which cultivate the perception of hearing far more than can the piano. For this reason all children should have the advantage of a course in ear-training. This should not be training for pitch alone, but for quality of tone as well. It may be supplemented with exercises in musical dictation until the pupil is able to write down short phrases with ease after he has heard them once. A pupil who has had such a training would make ideal material for the advanced teacher, and because of the greatly developed powers of the pupil would be able to memorize quicker and make much better progress. In fact, ear-training and harmony lead to great economy of time. For instance, let us suppose that the pupil has a chord like the following in a sonata:

If the same chord appeared again in the piece it would probably be found in the key of the dominant, thus:

It seems very obvious that if the pupil could perceive the harmonic relationship between these two chords he would be spared the trouble of identifying an entirely different chord when he finds the repetition of it merely in another key. This is only one of scores of instances where a knowledge of the harmonic structure proves to be of constant importance to the student.