Sobre harmonia: uma proposta de perfil conceitual

Abstract

The present research is about one of the most basic elements of Western music: harmony. Harmony is the study of the simultaneous combination of sounds, the socalled chords, and investigates the myriad possibilities of organizing them. Despite all the number and variety of publications on harmony, there still is an important, not yet bridged gap: publications that originate in the classical music world do not include more or less recent popular repertoire, and publications that originate in the popular music world do not include so many materials that have been long established by the historic tradition of harmony studies. This gap has been producing much theoretical, conceptual and epistemological incongruence. Given the growing space allotted to popular music inthe academic sphere, and our need to adjust the traditional music academe to this new reality, we deemed useful to work with the notion of conceptual profile, an educational device that allows for the cohabitation of different concepts of a subject. We call the latter conceptual zones. As we realized that other views on harmony coexist with thetwo theoretical trends mentioned above, and because our didactic model lays out the comprehension of the contexts and practical limitations of all views, we propose a conceptual profile of harmony. We start off our work by defining and describing such already existing conceptual domains. Then we propose a new zone which takes advantage of, revises, criticizes and integrates the available tools of other epistemological realms, and also creates new explanatory devices. And finally we perform a discourse analysis of a live teaching-learning situation that we enacted and filmed. This field material is then used to defend the profile that we propose and suggest didactic procedures for the future. In order to achieve our goal we use an educational analytical tool which values dialogue and the comparison of different perspectives, so as to interpret data according to the polysemic character of the notion of conceptual profile.