Melody and Harmony for Guitarists

from Mel Bay Publications
review by Richard Turner

Melody and Harmony for Guitarists, by John Duarte, is the subject of this month's featured review. In overview, this is a theory book for guitarists that begins by explaining the basic elements of sound, and concludes with information on chromatic harmony, tone clusters, and polytonality. That is a lot of ground to cover in a book of 160 pages. For comparison, this book covers most of the subject matter involved in the first two years of college music theory.

Where it parts company with most conventional theory books is that in this book Duarte uses mostly musical examples from classical guitar literature. Conventional theory books tend to rely on keyboard music and on four-part vocal writing. Guitarists should find Duarte's approach friendly and refreshing but be aware of the fact that this is an in-depth theory book that will require a lot of time and work to understand and assimilate.

As prerequisites for using this book Duarte suggests that the student possess knowledge of note reading, scale construction, and intervals. For those not yet to this point, he recommends his book titled The Guitarist's ABC of Music. Any lower division college course in music fundamentals should also fill the same requirement.

In the early section of the book titled "Musical Sounds and their Organization" Duarte discusses vibration, oscillation, amplitude, the behavior of vibrating strings, harmonics, the overtone series, and temperament. It provides an excellent short course in the physics of sound as it relates to the guitar.

In The Organization of Single Notes the author examines simple melodies and how they are based around groups of the groups of notes that we call scales. He discusses heptatonic (7-note) and pentatonic (5-note) scales. He then defines the tonal relationships in major and minor scales and shows how this works on the guitar fingerboard. Transposition is briefly discussed with examples given moving from CM to FM, and from Am to Em.

Duarte also devotes considerable time to the church modes, examining all of them and citing many examples of modal melodies. Several of these examples are from Renaissance lute literature. So, Duarte is definitely speaking our language!

"Melody" is a chapter where the author discusses scale tendencies, with particular attention to the relative stability or instability of different notes within a given scale. Many short, familiar examples are presented of melodies within a given key, and then melodies with chromatic alteration. Changing notes and sequences are defined, discussed, and illustrated using examples by Dowland, Sor, Ponce, Bach, and Rameau. From these examples Duarte extracts short motifs or cells. In this chapter conjunct and disjunct motion is defined as well as melodic contour.

In his brief discussion of intervals, Mr. Duarte defines consonance and dissonance and uses reader-friendly terminology to help us along. For instance he cites all perfect intervals as sounding empty, strong, stark, and severe. Major and minor seconds and sevenths are termed acrid, aggressive, disturbing, and nasty!!

Next we come to "The Beginnings of Harmony" and here we get a quick basic overview of the transition from monody to movement in parallel 4ths and 5ths and fuller chords. Duarte discusses major and minor chords, the use of the Picardy 3rd, inversions, and the relative stability and instability of different chord voicings. He presents the basic Roman numeral system for defining chords, briefly discusses figured bass, and even mentions the alfabeto chord system used in Baroque guitar music.

After this background, we get to the important information on functional harmony and cadences. Again, examples familiar to guitarists such as Sor, Giuliani, Carulli, da Milano, Tansman, Narvaez, and Milan are used to help us along. After using the primary I, IV, and V chords, the author moves into the use of secondary triads and chord substitution. As I mentioned earlier, this book moves fast and really covers a lot of ground.

The book also covers modulation, secondary 7th chords, the cadential six-four chord, and 9th, 11th, and 13th chords. All of these topics are dealt with clearly and illustrated with many examples.

It was surprising to me that in this volume Mr. Duarte found the time to touch on chromatic harmony, remote modulation, and pedal points. By itself, chromatic harmony could warrant an entire book but at least it is nice that the author gives us a taste of it.

Late in the book is a chapter called "Steps Beyond." This is where the author defines and discusses non-triadic harmony, tone clusters, polytonality, and the undermining of conventional tonality.

Melody and Harmony for Guitarists is an extremely valuable book and one which will demand a lot of time and work to fully digest. I see at least a year or two-year commitment in terms of the time required to get the most out of this volume. I love the fact that it uses examples from guitar literature and really presents all of the information with the guitarist in mind. While it is important to also be able to work with bass clef and vocal score as taught in conventional theory, but for relevance to the guitarist, this book can't be beat.

Richard Turner

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About the Author

After demonstrating an early interest in music with the clarinet and folk guitar, Richard Turner studied classical guitar with George Sakellariou and José Rey de la Torre and received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Music from San José State University.

Since 1994 Mr. Turner has taught in the large classical guitar program at California State University at Fullerton. Several years ago he revived his early interest in American roots music and developed a course in the history of American folk music which he also teaches at Cal State Fullerton. His instrumental interests are diverse, including classical guitar, slide guitar, banjo, and steel-string fingerpicking and flatpicking styles.