Visual Harmony of Top 100 Composers on MuseScore.com

I invite you to my journey through 100 pieces of composers whose music is popular nowadays.

I use my own piano-roll-based notation with notes colored into 12 colors, always starting from the main note – the tonic.

This simplifies visual analysis: chords like

and other structures become visible, scores become readable and interpretable.

This is the color scheme we'll use through the entire book:

You don't need any knowledge of standard notation throughout this journey.

There are twelve notes in each octave of a piano:

Throughout the book I'll mention keyboard layouts to try out different concepts by playing them directly from your computer keyboard. Here are two keyboards showcasing all 12 notes:

Each color is present several times on a piano keyboard – in different octaves:

Some pieces are built entirely on a subset of seven notes called a major scale:

If you play three colors, it's called a chord. How to draw a nice chord from a scale? You pick a root color - eg.

, and then you pick every other note after it: skip

, take

, skip

, take

. This way we get a "one" chord - 1-3-5

.

We can do this from any note of the scale:

• 2-4-6
• 3-5-7
• 4-6-1
  – in seven-note scales 8=1, 9=2 etc.
• 5-7-2
• 6-1-3
• 7-2-4

Chords are words in the Western musical language. Western music is melody plus chords.

Here are all seven chords that we can build on a major scale this way:

In this intro we'll have a close look at the song "Happy Birthday". The arrangement we're gonna analyze uses three chords played in the left hand, underneath the melody:

,

and

, in this order:

Click on the link below to open the score: