Chris Bonds wrote:

>To you, harmony must not be limited to the simultaneous sounding of
>different pitches.  Barring archaic definitions of the word (which put
>it as synonymous with melody), I think this is what most people understand
>to be a requirement for harmony to exist.  If you want to broaden the
>definition, you would strengthen your case by explaining in clearer terms
>what you mean.
>
>I agree that all humans are biologically the same when it comes to the
>structure of the ear. Big deal. It seems to me by identifying harmony so
>closely with perception you are simply making the definition of "harmony"
>so broad as to be useless.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but this is all old - and I do mean
OLD - news.  "Most people" are not musicians, and the generic popular
description of what constitues harmony, or a harmonic event, is fine
for the layman, but for the professional little more than poppycock.
I don't have the time or patience to go into the details of harmonic and
contrapuntal organization in the context of how voices are laid out and
put together in a horizontal context; nor do I care to elaborate here just
how trained ears can discern relationships over temporal distances that
in fact, not only govern compositional strategy, but create the harmonic
underpinnings of a composition, no matter how complex or how simple.  To
describe harmony as merely the vertical organization of tones one upon
another is simply naive and jettisons without even so much as a modicum
of aforethought or critical analysis the labyrinthine organization of a
musical text; to do so would be to ignore the function, to cite only one
example, of leading tones and pedal points, and all they imply within a
larger structural Diaspora.

Instead, I would simply suggest that you get your hands on an introduction
to the theories of Heinrich Schenker, or better yet, after you've consumed
that, on "Structural Hearing", perhaps the most famous critique of Schenker
by his distinguished protagonist, Felix Salzer, or the no less famous
dissertations by Carl Schachter.  These will address your questions with
meticulous detail as it disavows and assassinates mercilessly any notion
that the idea of harmony is as black and white as you, and many others,
think.

An enlightened definition of harmony is broad, but certainly not useless,
unless of course one prefers to remain satisfied with the reification of
a listening apparatus no longer able l to fathom anything more profound
or complex than a pretty melody.  But it's perfectly obvious to me that
Stirling makes no reference whatsoever to the physiological structure of
the ear, but to the manner in which music is perceived; and taking that
a step further, his statement implicitly suggests the very thing that
Schenker does, namely, that the immanent structure of a composition moves
in on the listener in ways that he is not necessarily aware of, at least on
first listening.  The migration of such complex information sets its own
stage upon first hearing, laying the groundwork for the elaboration of
dimensions considerably more probative upon each revisiting.  A work of
music, as an autonomous structure, is no less complex than the workings of
the mind - indeed, what Schenker did for musical composition is akin to
what Freud did for the mind; mapping out its functions and regions, calling
into question its structures and motivation.  The conscious perception of
music only begins to scatch the surface of what's really going on.  On the
contrary, music is a perpetually evolving entity, an organic matrix of
dendrites and rhizomes, of branches and synapses which rely upon each
other for nurturing and growth, to speak nothing of structure.  And if a
persistent pedal point, for simple example, becomes the sun around which
a work orbits, reaching out like an aged root into the fertile soil of a
composition as its destiny unfolds, then its relation to other harmonic
systoles, likewise coalescing around it, also metamorphoses.  So you see,
it IS a big deal - a very, very big deal.

John Bell Young