The Harmonious Blacksmith: A Music Theory Exploration
The Harmonious Blacksmith: A Music Theory Exploration is a podcast dedicated to unraveling the complexities of music theory, designed for music theorists, musicians, educators, and students alike. Whether you're a seasoned composer, an aspiring music student, or a music historian, this podcast provides insightful discussions, expert interviews, and deep dives into the principles that shape Western classical and contemporary music.
Each episode explores key topics such as scales, chords, chord progressions, melody, harmony, triads, the circle of fifths, chord inversions, I, IV, V progressions, musical improvisation, bass lines, greek modes, keys, key changes, modality, and the evolution of musical structures throughout history. With an emphasis on both theoretical concepts and practical applications, The Harmonious Blacksmith bridges the gap between academic rigor and real-world music practice, making it an invaluable resource for those looking to deepen their understanding of how music works.
Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned pro, The Harmonious Blacksmith provides a rich, engaging exploration of the art and science of music theory, all while fostering a deeper appreciation for the beauty of sound and structure.
#music #podcast #musictheory #musiccommentary #musichistory
The Harmonious Blacksmith: A Music Theory Exploration
Ep. 11: Season_1_Review/Season_2_Preview
In this special episode of our Music Theory Podcast, we dive deep into a comprehensive Season 1 Review and provide an exciting Season 2 Preview. Whether you're a passionate music theorist, a dedicated music student, or a seasoned musician, this episode is packed with valuable insights and analysis that will help you elevate your understanding of music theory.
In Season 1, we explored foundational concepts like harmony, counterpoint, scale construction, and chord progressions, offering practical applications for students and professionals alike. We'll review the most popular topics, key takeaways, and memorable moments from the season, perfect for anyone who wants a quick recap or missed an episode.
Looking ahead, Season 2 promises even more advanced discussions on topics like form analysis, tension and release in music, and historical music theory. Get a sneak peek of upcoming episodes focused on specific composers, styles, and theoretical breakthroughs.
This episode is a must-listen for music theory lovers, music historians, and anyone looking to deepen their knowledge of how music works at its core. Tune in for a journey through both the past and future of music theory!
Keywords: Music Theory Podcast, music theorist, music student, music theory review, music theory preview, harmony, counterpoint, chord progressions, scale construction, musicians, historical music theory, season review, season preview.
Linear Music Theory Learning For Everyone!
piano plays
SPEAKER_00:Hello music theory lovers, scholars, and students alike. Happy 2025. This is my first episode back of The Harmonious Blacksmith, a podcast on music theory exploration. This is episode 11, and I am your host, Kevin Patrick Fleming.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my! Oh my goodness, that's so unexpected! Oh my gosh, I can't believe it.
SPEAKER_00:thank you so much everybody i appreciate it look i'm really excited to announce that i have a few little new perks that are coming up for my podcast going into this year very much would love to create some visual resources for y'all to go with my episodes so that it would include like pdfs and also videos with me just explaining things with pdfs and with visual aids and things like that which where when they're coupled with the episodes, it just makes it a little easier to follow along. Also, the website for my podcast specifically is up and out now. And so if you scroll down through the description of the episodes, you will find a link at the bottom that says episode website. And you can click on that and go to the actual individual website for each episode. But also at the bottom there in the description, there's a link to my podcast. There will be a link that says support the show. And look, I love making this podcast. I love giving it to you. I want to make it as great as possible. I want to improve on it and also bring visuals to you. This is just a little call for support. If you really enjoy my podcast, please click the support the show link in the description of this episode and just check out the options there. And look, thank you so much for your support, y'all. I really, really do appreciate it. and I'm just really looking forward to making some really good podcast episodes and resources for you going forward. Reminder, this is a linear and cumulative podcast, so if you are new to my podcast, first of all, welcome, and we're happy you're here along with us on this journey, but you're probably going to want to go back to episode one and listen through all the way until you get to where we left off. Basically, everything is a building block on a building block on a building block as we're building this music theory fabric, if you will, to make sure that we understand all the concepts as a whole. So this being episode 11, this is actually the first episode of season two of the Harmonious Blacksmith. And because of that, I'm going to do for y'all what I do for all my music theory students. We're going to do a rebuild today. That's what I call it. We're going to do a little music theory rebuild, which is basically a recap of the first season and how we got to where we are today. So where did we start? We started with a single note. and sound in the ways of music was born. Mankind learned how to harness this sound and control it. So what is a note again? It's really just a controlled vibration that creates a constant sound based on vibrations of a string, right? Which are measured in frequency, which is like vibrations per second. Yada, yada, yada. I won't have to go too far in the science further than that. But once we learned how to harness one sound... Then we wanted to learn how to make more sounds. And basically what we realized is, you know, once you Something like a string, for example, which, you know, you can imagine there are different amalgamations of that over the centuries and eons. But once we learn to harness that and get different sounds and go higher, go lower and create different sounds, then we started putting the sounds together in what we call a scale. Right. Right. which is kind of what I'm doing right here, a little bit of a C major scale, or in a lower register would sound like this. Ah, that's lovely. So there is a long evolution into that, as you know. And then eventually the evolution led us to put those notes together in patterns that sounded pleasant to our ears so that we could use them to create music and sing tunes. That's how scales were born. And of course you remember everything comes from scales. The major scale is the predominant pattern in Western harmony. that we base everything off of. And of course, you remember that pattern's whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. So then melodies started being created. The idea of this memorable, controllable sound that we call music. So then how do we define melody exactly? Melody is the succession of connected notes sung or played one at a time in order to create the main thematic material in music. The common colloquialism for the word melody is tune. So when people say, can you carry a tune? Or, wow, he can carry a tune. Really what they mean is that that person has a good ear for music, meaning they can hear something and reproduce it with the accurate sounding pitches. That's what carrying a tune is. Simply put, just think of melody as something that one person can sing, right? Because one person's not gonna be able to sing a bunch of notes at the same time they're not gonna be able to create chords and things like that they're singing one note at a time in succession and connecting them so when you think melody just think solo singing and as it evolved evolved evolved people started wanting to get even more creative and that's how harmony was born so remember what the definition of harmony was two or more notes sounding simultaneously And eventually, we just started stacking more and more notes on top of each other, and then chords were born. And remember the definition of a chord, any three or more notes stacked on top of each other sounding simultaneously. Okay. So now we have melody, harmony, and chords, and in a big picture sense, that really does catch us up to modern times. And as creativity began to spin out in a lot of different directions and new scale patterns were being experimented with, our Western system entered the modern dichotomy that is major and minor. Those are the two main realms that we tend to write and enjoy music under the major sound and the minor sound. And thus it was established to have the overarching colors of the music rainbow be happy and sad as opposing emotions. And of course, in the spectrum of human emotions and experience, happy and sad are really just very general emotions, right? Think of them as the two main colors in the musical rainbow. And there are many, many colors and shades in between. As there are different emotions and experiences and stories to tell in life, but this just gives us a place to start. And as the realm of sound is cut up into finer colors so that we can continually evolve our expression, now you have the seven Greek mode. And remember, major and minor are just two of the seven. So now we're broadening our spectrum from two scale patterns to create major melodies, and sounds all the way to seven patterns. Who remembers how to name all seven modes? Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian, and back to Ionian. So recall that a major scale in Greek modes is called Ionian, and a minor scale in Greek modes is called Aeolian. Also, on a side note, if you just need a silly sentence to help you remember the order of the modes and their names, I dig potatoes, leave me alone. Ionian. I dig potatoes, leave me alone. So A and lone, A is Aeolian, lone is Locrian. I know it's a little silly. It's very silly, but somebody told it to me back in high school and I've remembered it all the way since then. So hopefully you will too. So then as we continue to progress and organize these ideas, then the concept of a key comes around. And what is a key exactly? When you really get down to it, it's actually just manipulating the seven pitches of a diatonic scale vertically and horizontally in very creative ways. To expand on that, it is the scale that you play. It is the triads that come out of that scale using the skipping method in thirds that we learned back in the triads episode. of season one, expanding those triads into chords, extended chords, like sevenths, ninths, elevenths, even including suspension chords, add chords, and all kinds of colors like that, which turns into chord progressions, which is really just a succession of chords going from one to another to another within that key that give us this harmonic backdrop from which we can continue to write music, melodies, harmonies, and really be as creative as we want to create whatever we want. So everything we talked about so far leads up to the concept of keys and chord progressions and things like that based on major and minor scales and the other five iterations of the Greek modes. But one thing I also don't want you to forget is that there are many, many evolutions and variations of scales, as you can imagine. And I did an entire episode dedicated to minor, and I don't want to leave that behind. Because remember, even though we have a natural minor scale that we also call Aeolian within the Greek modes, that scale has typically produced weak chord progressions and weak musical tension within those chord progressions and melodies. And so songwriters and composers alike kind of evolved and started altering it into a couple of different iterations one of which was called harmonic minor which is just the natural minor scale with a raised seventh scale degree and it's called harmonic minor because if you recall that seventh scale degree is raised to make the five chord in the key major instead of minor and you might also recall that we call that a leading tone. A leading tone is that seventh scale degree that is only a half step away from the octave or the root. And a leading tone has tremendous amounts of musical tension when you get to it that want to be resolved back to the octave or the one. Hence the reason that it's been raised in minor because the regular natural minor seventh scale degree is just weak sounding and it doesn't produce that leading tone sound that gives you that beautiful musical tension that is then resolved so let's compare them real quick remember the natural minor will sound like this and with that you can hear that the seventh scale degree is actually a whole step away from the octave And it just doesn't create enough musical tension to have a resolution, so we create what's called a leading tone, which, remember, is a raised seventh, which is a half step away from the octave. And that gives us harmonic minor, which sounds like this. And you can just hear that seventh scale degree pulling up to the octave.
UNKNOWN:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Don't forget melodic minor. I'm not going to go too detailed with melodic minor, even though I'll have an episode in the future that will. But basically, melodic minor is where you raise scale degrees 6 and 7 on the way up, and you natural them out on the way back down. So melodic minor sounds like this.
UNKNOWN:Melodic minor.
SPEAKER_00:In summary, harmonic minor has a raised seventh specifically for the harmony, which gives us its name. Let's not forget that. It's raised in order to make the five chord a major chord in minor and also to have that leading tone that creates more musical tension. It is done for the chord progressions, for the harmony, as opposed to melodic minor, which has raised six and seven on the way up and lowered six and seven on the way down which seems kind of strange, but it really is for a more colorful melody, better melodic options in minor keys. And look, this is just a rambling review today, as you can tell. But as y'all know, I have plenty of audio examples on all of this in season one. So again, if you're stumbling on this episode sort of randomly, I have lots of audio examples in season one in episodes one through 10, and you should definitely go back and Check those out. Another thing we did in season one is we introduced the concept of ear training or aural skills for the purposes of fine-tuning your ear to music so that you can continue to refine your ability to understand what you're hearing and how to associate it in a lot of different ways. And this season, we'll have one or two new ear training episodes for sure, but we introduced the concept using the concept of intervals in music. And if you recall, an interval in music is really just the sound that is produced, the unique sound between two notes. So the way I did it is we would play a low note and then play a higher note above it, give the interval its name, and then learn to associate that sound with something that's extremely familiar and memorable to you. For those of y'all who've been listening listening this far, you have a list of those things, right? If you remember, like for example, when I did the tritone interval, it reminded me of the intro of the Simpsons theme song. Not sure if you remember that, but that's just an example. And you're going to find that ear training is really powerful in a lot of different directions. The ability to learn and recognize these different aural colors that we call intervals, in ear training. It just gives you the ability to recognize and associate things faster, to organize them quicker, and to really understand what things are supposed to sound like, how they function. And I could go back to what we were talking about with carrying a tune. Being able to carry a tune well means you have an understanding of the distance of the pitches that you're singing and how exactly they're supposed to sound in the end. So in season two, we will continue our ear training studies and of course we will continue the interval studies which will turn into learning things like melodic dictation and harmonic dictation which is how to hear a melody and either sing it or play it back so to get more efficient at that and to hear chord progressions and bass lines even and be able to understand what you're hearing there and how to connect those together just so that you can Organize it all in your mind faster, hear it faster, understand it faster, and just get better at the language altogether. So that's a lot to look forward to here. Oh, yes. Yes, that's right. Let's get excited about season two. This is a lot of great stuff we're going to go over. It's going to be so much fun. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. So that brings us back to current, which is about keys, key relationships, and the circle of fifths, which is what the last episode of season one was all about. And so we just talked about the amazing tool that is the circle of fifths and how freaking cool it is, man. I mean, you have this interval of a fifth that you can use on a lot of different And mainly to understand sharps and flats, how many of them are in each key, and what order the keys are organized in based on that. And there's a couple things I didn't even address yet about the circle of fifths that I'm looking forward to getting to in another episode about circle of fifths. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's get fired up. And the study of the circle of fifths is also going to help us in our understanding of key relationships, which becomes very important. Key relationships like relative keys and like closely related keys. We're going to learn those kind of concepts so we can learn things like modulation. Oh, yeah. And key changes.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Holy cow, that's amazing. And we're even going to study improvisation. Yeah. Yeah. Vote Harmonious Blacksmith in 2025. That's right. That's right. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. But now it's time for breakdown. Today we recapped and reviewed season one. Yeah! Thank you so much. We started with a single note. We learned how that evolved to scale patterns, how scale patterns evolved to triads and chords, how chords evolved to chord progressions, how all of that ended up evolving into what we call keys. Yes, my honorable subject, it's okay to be excited about keys. Don't ever let anybody tell you otherwise. In season two, we're going to talk about chord inversions and bass lines. Oh, yeah. Yeah, baby. Let's go.
UNKNOWN:Let's go.
SPEAKER_00:in season two we're gonna talk about harmonic and melodic dictation yes we're even gonna talk about improvisation oh yeah and we're even going to talk about songwriting and composition Oh, baby, oh, baby, it's going to be good. So I will see you in the next episode where I can continue this music theory exploration with all of you.