A Short visit to a foreign key

By Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene (get free updates of new posts here)

On Monday during our harmony lesson, I taught Victoria the concept of secondary dominants.

It's a trick we use in harmony to visit closely related keys for a very short period of time.

It's not a modulation where we end a musical idea in a new key with a cadence. It's much much shorter - just 2 or 3 foreign chords.

Imagine C major key for a moment. Here is the tonic chord from bass up (CEG). Now maybe D6 chord (BDG) and back to tonic (CEG).

Now play BDEG#. That's D43 chord of A minor. A minor is the 6th scale degree chord. So that's D43 of vi. Now resolve it to A minor chord (ACEA).

So BDEG# is a secondary dominant chord in this case.

Then you can come back to C major by playing ii65 (FCDA), Cadential T64 (GCEG) and D7 (GDFB) and Tonic (CCEC).

Try to play the whole cadence on the keyboard:

CCEG-BDDG-CCEG-BDEG#-ACEA-FCDA-GCEG-GDFB-CCEC.

You see how colorful your harmony with this G# already is? Victoria thought so too.

Would you like to know more of the things I taught Victoria recently? If so, today I'm glad to share with you my Harmony Review for Beginners 3. It's the material from my last 4 lessons with her (over 3.5 hours of audio training).

I will teach you the 2nd scale degree 7th chord and its inversions (ii7, ii65, ii43, ii42 and their multiple resolutions) as well as harmonic analysis of "Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ", BWV 639 by J.S. Bach.

I'm including Vidas' PDF guidebook to mastering this piece with fingering and pedaling as a bonus. If you order until May 31, you'll get 50 % discount.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that this training is free for Total Organist students.

Happy practicing!

Let me know if you need help with anything or feel stuck.