Beethoven’s Harmony

By Ian Campbell

This week we will take a look at the harmony from the famous opening phrase of Beethoven’s first piano sonata.

Try This!

Try playing this in whatever way works for you. Try it at your instrument, go slow, it doesn’t need to be perfect!
Look at bars 1-8. The harmony is clear in the bass staff and the outlined harmony is clear in the treble staff. What rule (that you’ve seen here recently) is Beethoven using?
How is Beethoven adding notes between the chord tones?
How does the phrase work? What bits are repeated? How do the repeated bits change?

Keep all of those things in mind. Next week we’ll try creating our own phrases based on this one.

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