How Can Harmony Guide Dynamics and Timing?

Geoffrey Chen

Building a Piano Piece · Season Three: From Score to Interpretation: Building a Performance of Your Own · Article Five

Knowing chord names is not the same as knowing how to perform harmony. A student may cover the page with tonic, dominant, subdominant and diminished-seventh labels while the sounding music proceeds one bar at a time without direction. Another student hears a dissonance and accents it, then slows at every cadence, turning every kind of tension into the same dramatic gesture.

Harmony becomes practically useful not when it attaches labels to notes, but when it reveals relationships: where stability is left, where an unresolved condition is prolonged, where bass direction changes, where a local resting point occurs, and where a larger arrival is finally achieved. Dynamics and timing can make those relations audible. They should not mechanically translate harmony into “tension gets louder; resolution gets slower”.

Begin with bass and arrival

Reduce a complex texture to its bass and decisive harmonic tones. Before naming every chord, circle stability, departure, continuation, turn and arrival. In tonal repertoire, identify cadential levels, preparation and resolution of dominant function, sequences and pedal points. In music not well described by conventional functional harmony, examine how collections, register, common tones, colour and density alter stability.

Hierarchy is essential. A local dominant may need to move onward rather than become the climax of the whole phrase. One dissonance may pass; another becomes structural because of duration, position and manner of resolution. The performer must understand what an event does in this passage before deciding whether to change loudness, timing, voicing or pedal.

Research on expressive performance relates harmony, melody, written dynamics and structural features to sounding loudness and timing, but it does not derive a unique performance from harmonic labels. Expressive-dynamics modelling demonstrates statistical relationships between score and performance, while a broader expressive framework treats timing, dynamics and articulation as joint communicators of structure. This supports bringing analysis into sound; it does not support a formula requiring a crescendo through every dominant.

Make a three-track harmonic map

Draw three parallel tracks beneath a passage.

The first records function and tension: stability, departure, prolongation, modulation, suspension, resolution and arrival, with size indicating hierarchy. The second records dynamics and voicing: overall loudness, bass weight, melody and any inner voice that must be heard. The third records timing and articulation: reference pulse, possible motion, dwelling, release and pedal change.

The tracks need not form one matching arch. As harmonic tension increases, loudness might grow; alternatively, the performance might remain quiet while a chromatic inner line and bass direction carry tension. An arrival can be louder or suddenly narrowed. A resolution can relax in time or move immediately into the next phrase. The map exists not to impose uniformity but to give each parameter a reason.

Four events that are easily confused

Dissonance is not an accent command. Ask whether it belongs to the main line, an inner part or an ornament, and whether its resolution needs equal audibility. Emphasising tension while swallowing resolution leaves the relationship incomplete.

Harmonic change does not by itself specify every pedal action. On a modern piano, a new harmony commonly requires resonance to be cleared, but melodic connection, bass resonance, room and tempo affect depth and timing. Pedal should clarify harmonic relation rather than divide every vertical sonority into an isolated block.

Cadence does not mean ritardando. A local cadence may be a comma. Slowing at all of them destroys long direction. Establish hierarchy under a maintained pulse before deciding which arrival merits time.

Modulation does not automatically require crescendo. A new region can be differentiated through colour, voicing or articulation. Loudness is one option among several.

Conduct a subtraction experiment

In the first version, maintain an almost steady rate and moderate dynamic; expose harmony only through voicing and appropriate pedal. If departure and arrival remain perceptible, the structure itself is working. In the second version, alter dynamics but not tempo. In the third, alter timing while constraining dynamics. In the fourth, combine only the most effective cues.

When listening, do not ask merely whether the performance has emotion. Ask which arrival sounds premature. Where has loudness already reached its maximum even though a larger level remains? Which hesitation converts a local event into a false final cadence? Has a changing inner voice been covered by bass weight?

Subtraction reveals compensatory behaviour. A player who does not know harmonic direction may use continuous crescendo to manufacture it. Muddy pedal prompts harder attacks in an attempt to restore clarity. A tempo that is too slow may be animated by incessant rubato. Restore harmony, voicing and pulse first; much rhetorical excess becomes unnecessary.

Use Bach’s C major Prelude as a laboratory

The C major Prelude from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier is often treated as a succession of arpeggiated chords. It is well suited to the three-track map because the repeated surface pattern means that direction cannot depend only on a foreground melody. Bass, common tones, chromatic changes, prolongation and levels of arrival become decisive.

Play the bass and highest note of each sonority, then add the inner tone that determines its character. Do not assume one expressive swell per bar. Mark which changes prolong a condition, which redirect it and which create stronger arrival. Record an even version, a voicing-and-dynamics version, and a timing-only version. The eventual design should make the large direction audible without exaggerating every harmonic change.

The method transfers to Romantic repertoire, but its rhetoric does not. A Chopin prelude, Schumann character piece or Brahms intermezzo presents different melody, inner-voice and pedal conditions. Draw a new map instead of applying “move through the dominant; relax on the tonic” as a universal expression dictionary.

When Roman numerals do not fit

Harmonic direction is not confined to conventional function. In tonally mobile passages, parallel sonorities, pedal-based textures, clusters or colour-organised music, replace the functional chart with a map of stability factors. Which tones persist? Which common tones remain? Does register expand or contract? Does the bass change its point of support? How do density, colour and dissonance move? Do not force the work into tonic–dominant syntax merely to obtain decisive labels.

The practical procedure remains. Establish which changes constitute structural events, then let performance parameters respond selectively. Ascending parallel chords may retain one colour to project a single process, or change hierarchy at a registral turn. A pedal point can provide temporal reference while upper material becomes flexible. The analytic vocabulary has changed; the principle that relation precedes effect has not.

Preserve a decision record

Select three important harmonic events at a time. Record location, structural function, level, voice that must be heard, chosen sonic means, result in the recording and effect on later proportion. If a large crescendo or pause cannot be explained in one sentence as serving a relationship, reduce it and compare again.

Harmony does not make dynamic curves or rubato decisions on the performer’s behalf. It provides constraints and direction by identifying which events depend on one another and which arrivals carry different weights. A choice is harmonically supported only when it preserves those relations in sound.

Harmonic analysis is not a search for emotional buttons in the score. It discovers which relations the music establishes, delays and fulfils, then asks for proportionate means of making them audible.

Primary sources and further reading

Continue reading: Building a Piano Piece series page

If you would like to bring these ideas about listening, understanding, and practice to the keyboard, you might try ScoreFlow, an app I developed to make score reading and daily practice flow more naturally together.

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