Chopin was a master of melody, harmony and voice leading - the art of smoothly moving from chord to chord.
Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.
They don't bother too much with the balance and things on blues records.
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
A chord is just the name of a sound.
Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
The formation of scales and of the web of harmony is a product of artistic invention, and is in no way given by the natural structure or by the natural behaviour of our hearing, as used to be generally maintained hitherto.
