Hello friends!
Another fun week of AP Music Theory gone and away, sigh. This week, we continued our study of our textbook’s chapter 4, “Chords”. One of our assignments to “re-re-read” the chapter, it was clear that this was important stuff we can’t miss. We discussed more about roman numeral analysis, which I feel very confident about especially after analyzing almost all of the Christian Worship hymn “Silent Night”. We also again dipped our fingers in the fondue fountain of seventh chords, with things like a “five-four-three” chord (a roman numeral V followed by superscript 4 atop a superscript 3). Looking up if it was possible to type this out, I found this fairly clever Google auto-complete:
Isn’t that cool? A five-four-three chord is, in fact, a seventh chord in third inversion! Anyway, back to the real stuff…
Overall, I feel comfortable working with roman numeral analysis and popular music notation (writing the chord names in letters above the staff). What do I not feel comfortable with? Chapter 5. The chapter focused on cadences such as perfect/imperfect authentic cadences, half cadences, plagal cadences, interrupted/deceptive cadences, inverted cadences, and upper leading-tone cadences, and nonharmonic tones such as passing tones, neighboring tones, suspensions, retardations, anticipations, pedal tones, appoggiaturas, and other big, scary words. We were just instructed to read the chapter and have yet to discuss anything in class, so hey, that’s definitely what I want to accomplish in the week to come. Mostly vocab.
That’s it for now; stay tuned!
The Making of a Musical 