music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

, parallel harmony, also known as harmonic parallelism, harmonic planing or parallel voice leading, is the parallel movement of two or more melodies (see

voice leading Voice leading (or part writing) is the linear progression of individual melodic lines ( voices or parts) and their interaction with one another to create harmonies, typically in accordance with the principles of common-practice harmony and cou ...

Effects

When all voices between chords move in parallel motion, this generally reduces or negates the effect of harmonic progression. However, "occasionally chords such as the tonic and dominant may create the sense of harmonic progression".

Illustrative example

Lines with parallel harmony can be viewed as a series of chords with the same intervallic structure. Parallel means that each note within the chord rises or falls by the same interval.

Examples from works

Feuilles mortes Dead Leaves diatonic planing

Prominent examples include: *

Claude Debussy Achille Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influe ...

's '' Beau soir'' (1880), '' Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune'' (1894), '' Nocturnes'' (1899), '' La Mer'' (1905), '' La cathédrale engloutie'', "

Voiles Voiles is a musical composition for solo piano by French composer Claude Debussy that was composed in 1909. It is the second piece in Debussy's first book of Préludes (Debussy), préludes, published in 1910. The title may be translated as either ' ...

", " Feuilles mortes" *

Maurice Ravel Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism in music, Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composer ...

's '' Daphnis and Chloë'' Suite No. 2 (1913), "Menuet" from ''

Le Tombeau de Couperin ''Le Tombeau de Couperin'' (''The Tomb of Couperin'') is a suite (music), suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel, composed between 1914 and 1917. The piece is in six movements, based on those of a traditional Baroque music, Baroque suite. Each ...

'' * Erik Satie's '' Le Fils des étoiles (1892) *

Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...

's ''

The Rite of Spring ''The Rite of Spring'' () is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky ...

'' (1913) * Olivier Messiaen's music features abundant planing *

Richard Strauss Richard Georg Strauss (; ; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor best known for his Tone poems (Strauss), tone poems and List of operas by Richard Strauss, operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Roman ...

's '' Elektra'' (1909) *

Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first Modernism (music), modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-centu ...

's '' Pierrot lunaire'', "Columbine" (1914) * William Schuman's ''Three Score Set for Piano'' (1944) *

John Williams John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932)Nylund, Rob (November 15, 2022)Classic Connection review, ''WBOI'' ("For the second time this year, the Fort Wayne Philharmonic honored American composer, conductor, and arranger John Williams, who w ...

's "Rebel Fanfare" from ''

Star Wars ''Star Wars'' is an American epic film, epic space opera media franchise created by George Lucas, which began with the Star Wars (film), eponymous 1977 film and Cultural impact of Star Wars, quickly became a worldwide popular culture, pop cu ...

'' In the Schuman example (''Three Score Set for Piano''), the inversions of the chords suggest a bichordal effect.Kliewer, Vernon (1975). "Melody: Linear Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music", ''Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music'', pp. 332–333. Wittlich, Gary (ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. . In the example on the top right, we see a series of quartal chords in parallel motion, in which the intervallic relationship between each consecutive chord member, in this case a minor second, is consistent. Each note in the chord falls by one semitone in each step, from F, B, and E in the first chord to D, G, and C in the last.

Usage in electronic music

Parallel harmony is frequently used in

house music House is a genre of electronic dance music characterized by a repetitive Four on the floor (music), four-on-the-floor beat and a typical tempo of 115–130 beats per minute. It was created by DJs and music producers from Chicago's underground ...

and other

electronic music Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music ...

genres. Historically, this resulted from producers sampling chords from soul or jazz and then playing them at different pitches, or using "chord memory" feature from classic polyphonic

synthesizer A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis a ...

s. Modern

digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW ) is an electronic device or application software used for Sound recording and reproduction, recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software pr ...

s offer similar chord-generating tools for achieving parallel harmony.

References

Bibliography