# Composition 102: Harmonic Planing (Anne-Kathrin Dern)



## Pier (Jul 20, 2022)




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## Pier (Jul 20, 2022)

Please excuse my butchering of music theory...

So the basic idea is that this is a technique for harmonizing a melody where the chords always follow the same voicing and the melody is always the root note?


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## szczaw (Jul 20, 2022)

No rules


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## Nico5 (Jul 20, 2022)

First pop song that came to my mind was this:


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## Pier (Jul 20, 2022)

Found this other video that was also quite interesting:


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## Pier (Jul 20, 2022)

At the risk of offending all the gods of music theory I will say this planing thing is like writing a melody with chords.


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## Nico5 (Jul 20, 2022)

Pier said:


> At the risk of offending all the gods of music theory I will say this planing thing is like writing a melody with chords.


Or just moving your hands up and down on the keyboard, in a fixed triad position while in a C or Am song.


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## jbuhler (Jul 20, 2022)

Pier said:


> At the risk of offending all the gods of music theory I will say this planing thing is like writing a melody with chords.


It’s a common technique. Jazz solis often use diatonic and/or chromatic planing. Fauxbourdon is another kind of planing using first inversion triads (though some restrict planing to voice leading where some voices move by parallels other than thirds, fourths and sixths). But planing doesn’t have to use root position triads; it’s the parallel movement of a chord structure that makes for planing.


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## Pier (Jul 20, 2022)

Thanks @jbuhler that makes a lot of sense!


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## Nico5 (Jul 20, 2022)

You gotta love that classical and jazz have terms for pretty much every little (or big) musical trick. An outstanding example of a rich and rather well defined taxonomy!

Maybe that’s possible, because music is so adjacent to math?


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