- People often get in touch with me asking for help
with harmony and counterpoint.
Which is fine from my point of view
because I've always loved harmony and counterpoint.
You can call me a saddo,
but I've always loved doing this stuff.
And I've always loved teaching it.
And people often find it a real stumbling block.
I think people have different starting points,
different points of access with it.
For me, it started really through life as a church organist.
I started playing the organ in my local church
when I was 10 years old.
That seems remarkable now, really.
And of course, it involved playing hymns.
And I remember practising these hymns,
which is a wonderful way to learn your four-part harmony.
And for me, of course, the great advantage
of being the organist in a church was
that you learn your harmony under your fingers.
So I definitely played all this stuff
before I had a clue what it was,
before I understood it at all.
But by the time you've played a few hundred hymns,
you've got a natural sense of harmony under the fingers.
For keyboard players who are learning harmony like this,
I think that's the best way into it.
Now, not everybody's lucky enough
to have had the kind of background that I had.
Some people get a very long way down a route
with their music-making without doing any of this stuff,
and find it a big sweat.
Particularly, actually, if you're not a keyboard player
because it's much harder if you're playing
a melodic instrument to have some sense of harmony.
But I do think a practical approach to this is good.
At the end of the day,
what makes good harmony and counterpoint?
Well, something that sounds good.
If you can improvise, if you can think in chords,
if you can think in counterpoint,
linear progressions of things,
then, obviously, coming to that as a practical musician
is the best way of going about the task.
But nevertheless, I think it's also deeply logical.
And many of the people who've come my way
have found themselves sort of pitching in
trying to do something without having really secured
the basics properly.
There's definitely a logic in the theoretical approach.
How do we go about learning our chord language
from kind of base point, really?
How do we then extend the basic diatonic language
into using chromatic chords?
How can we deal with things like modulation properly?
How can we think vertically and think horizontally?
Because those are the skills that we need
for harmony and for counterpoint.
And I think there are great ways of going about this
that very quickly empower people.
And it always grieves me when people come along
who've been trying to do this stuff for donkey's years
but haven't done it systematically in any way at all.
And they get really stuck with it.
It's partly kind of understanding this
from a theoretical point of view.
And it's also developing the aural and practical skills
that are really going to enable this to be done properly.
And it's one of the great things that inspires me
through the work we do at Music Matters.
Just making videos for YouTube
about harmony and counterpoint,
and producing online courses that cover this whole area.
And all the supporting stuff that goes with it,
learning how to analyse the music of the great composers
as a great insight into writing harmony and counterpoint.
So I don't think it's some great mystery
that's inaccessible to people.
But I do think there's a logic that lies behind it.
And it's something that I've worked at
over many, many years.
And if you kind of hook into it in a logical way,
it's amazing how well you can get hold of it.
The trouble is, most people try to learn it from textbooks.
And that's not the easiest way of doing it.
There's some great textbooks out there.
But actually, you want to have it explained to you,
you want to see somebody actually write it down,
and you want to hear what it sounds like.
And that means that the whole kind of video format
is a perfect way of presenting it.
Which is why I'm totally signed up to doing it
the way we do at Music Matters.