Could you educate the masses (me) and explain exactly what a harmonic analysis is and/or does?
Basically, if I remember correctly, you take a piece of music bar by bar and figure out each detail of it's chord structure.? You use a bunch of fun notation devices like figured bass, and it "does" absolutly nothing.? Seriously.? Nothing.
thats the one dude. i had to write what each chord of every bar was using roman numerals(to denote what degree of the scale the chord was on),
i had to identify these horrible things called secondary dominants ( which is a chord based on the dominant(5th) degree of any chord in your key signature),
look for enharmonic modulations (which is where the music changes key on you without going through the proper channels of regular modulation-it just takes the diminished 7th of the key then re-writes it so it fits into another key and then goes to that key, regular modulation has like a billion rules and is a real headache to look for)
and i had to identify all the non-harmonic tones. there a bunch of categories of non-harmonic tones to choose from. they are notes that are not in the key you are in but it sounds pretty if you chuck a couple in every now and again.
from what i gather, the point of all of this is to see how fucking clever the composer was and how he put all this thought into the composition. also so we can prove that we've learnt something. sometimes i wonder whether the composer had no clue what they were doing and just wrote a bunch of sounds that they thought worked well together rather than thinking about what chord voicing resolves best from a half diminished 7th in 3rd inversion.
so yeah. welcome to my incredibly fucked up uni course haha
