Music Composition DUMmIES

Half-cadences are the only ones that don’t end this way. With a half-cadence,

the musical phrase ends at the point of tension — the V/v chord itself. It basi-

cally plays to a chord that is not the I/i and stops, resulting in a musical

phrase that feels unfinished. Examples would be a V-IV progression, a V-vi

progression, a V-ii progression, and a V-V7 progression. It’s called a half-

cadence simply because it just doesn’t feel like it’s done yet.

Fitting Chords and Melodies Together ......................................................

Often, when you’re working with just a melody, the basic accompanying har-

mony is already there in your subconscious. The melody lends itself to the

harmony so obviously that accompanying the melodic line is the easiest part

of writing the music. You may be aware of which note in your melody repre-

sents the tonic note right away, and you might even be aware of very specific

chord movements that are screaming out at you from your melody.

Likewise, that cool chord progression you came up with last night is eager to

provide you with structural tones (also sometimes called chord tones) from

which a melody can magically emerge (see Chapter 8 for more information on

structural tones).

Extracting harmony from melody ....................................................

If you take a simple major scale and consider only the I chord (also called the

tonic), the IV chord (the subdominant), and the V chord (the dominant), you

can hear fairly simple and obvious suggestions of relationship between notes

in the given key that might be used to accompany them.

There are, of course, many other possibilities and substitutions, but here we

stick with the I, IV, and V chords in the example shown in Figure 10-23.

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Figure 10-23:
Seeing
the scale in
I, IV, and V
chords.

Chapter 10: Composing with Chords 117