Billaudot Andrieu Michael - La Culture Musicale Vol.b (coll. Les Essentiels De La Musique)

Summary of This Book

This work is designed to guide step-by-step the learning of musical writing, from understanding harmonic mechanisms to making arranging and orchestration choices. The first part, Harmonizing, lays the essential foundations: it explains how chords function within the tonal framework, how to recognize and develop them, and especially how to connect them coherently. You will work on the concepts of degrees and functions, the use of substitutions, the integration of secondary dominants, and the art of modulation, not forgetting inversions and voice leading to achieve fluid and balanced writing.

The second part, Arranging, transforms these skills into writing reflexes. It provides a method to adapt a musical idea, build a texture, distribute roles among sections, and orchestrate effectively. The book notably includes a table of tessituras (instruments and voices), invaluable for avoiding uncomfortable writing and aiming for a natural sound. Pages dedicated to the principles of transposition complete the set, to work properly with transposing instruments and secure your copies, scores, or parts.

Finally, the book is enriched with practical summary sheets, useful for both harmonization and arranging. They cover essential landmarks of the harmonic world (keys, modulations, degrees, cadences), the chord domain (composition, chord symbols), and the melodic framework (modes, intervals, ornaments, non-chord tones). An ideal support to structure knowledge, gain autonomy, and write faster, with more control over harmonic color and musical balance.

Technical specifications

Theme

Theory - Harmony

Genre

harmonization and arranging method

Language

French