Year 10 - Music
Harmony and tonality in film music
Film music: developing ideas and understanding
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Unit Summary
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Lesson Summary
You will learn to explain how harmony and tonality help shape films and have reharmonised a melody.
Key Notes
- Harmony and tonality have a significant impact on the mood of film music.
- Composers use atonal, diatonic (major or minor) or modal tonality to create different moods.
- The choice of chords and use of chromatic harmony are also important for creating the correct emotions for the scene.
- Reharmonising a melody, by changing the harmony, is an effective way to develop a melodic idea in a film.
Vocabulary To Learn
- tonality: the set of notes that a piece is based on (e.g. major, minor, atonal)
- diatonic: music that uses only notes from within a key
- chromatic: music that uses some notes from outside of the key
- modal: music based on a mode, a type of scale different from major and minor scales
- reharmonisation: when a composer keeps a melody the same but changes the harmony
Common Mistakes To Avoid
- Chromatic and atonal are the same thing.
3 Quick Questions (With Answers)
1. Explain the lesson in two key points.
Harmony and tonality have a significant impact on the mood of film music. Composers use atonal, diatonic (major or minor) or modal tonality to create different moods.
2. What does this key word mean in this lesson? 'tonality'
the set of notes that a piece is based on (e.g. major, minor, atonal).
3. Correct this common mistake.
Mistake: Chromatic and atonal are the same thing. Correction: Atonal music sounds chromatic, because there is no clear tonal centre. However, chromatic music isn't necessarily atonal - a piece can be in a key, but use chromatic notes from outside of it.
More Lessons In This Unit
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