Class 9

Okay, so I'm a week late with this post. Sorry. We didn't go over much new information in this class, which is fine because we're getting into some pretty thick theory.

Roman numeral analysis is tedious at first, but I promise it gets easier. Remember when you were learning to read? (I don't actually remember that far back, but I'm imagining here.) You knew your alphabet already, and you knew how to speak. Learning to read was simply a matter of putting together these letters you knew into words you knew. Well, maybe it wasn't as easy as that, but you get the idea. Think of chords as words. We're taking the notes you already know and putting them together to form sounds you already are familiar with. This median process of reading the chords is much like reading words. Once you begin figuring out patterns and common happenings (like cadences), the whole thing becomes much easier.

In this class we learned about secondary dominants. A secondary dominant is any non-diatonic chord that functions as the dominant (leading) to its own tonic. For example, say we're in the key of G. You're going along minding your own business when all of a sudden you see an A chord. Well an A chord has a C#, which is not in the key signature, so you make a guess that this chord may be a secondary dominant. You look at the next chord and see that it's a D chord. You think about it and remember that an A chord is the dominant of D (in other words, an A chord is the dominant -- 5th -- in the key of D). This A chord is functioning as a secondary dominant.

More on secondary chords later. Your homework was to analyze the hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy." God bless!

Josh