This assignment from the How to Write Music course from ThinkSpace Education was concerning harmony and how it works with a melodic line.

Initially this module dealt with diatonic chords and how to create a fundamental harmonic progression and then looked at ways in which to make things more interesting. In particular the idea of harmonic development.

The course only dealt with a subset of the many ways of adding harmonic interest to a chord progression as the goal of the course is to get you creating music as quickly and painlessly as possible, not stressing over the minutia of theoretical concepts.

As such it looked at methods of development like integration, evolution, expansion and variation along with reflection and reduction. It also looked at techniques such as the use of pedal tones and rhythmic development.

There was also a section on how you would put a melody to the harmonic progression using chord tones and neighbor tones if your idea started with a harmonic idea.

They introduced a very handy pyramid to explain the harmonic order of priority indicating which chords were likely to have the greatest precedence in a progression and what is likely to follow and where interest can be added based on functional harmony/

A section on chord voicings and inversions followed, before moving on to different chords like suspensions and extensions such as 7^th, 9^th, 11^th, and 13^th chords.

Looking at the effect of pedal notes on how a progression can be varied was very interesting.

This then led to the assignment, which was to experiment with creating harmonic progressions and adding variety and interest to them, and so that is what I am going to do.