Improve Your Tonal Harmony Workshop

A 2-hour Tonal Harmony Workshop for Composers and Performers

Key changes—also known as modulations—are some of the most powerful means of expression in music.

Writing a smooth key change requires a certain amount of fluency in tonal harmony.

Understanding how they work will lead to stronger musical performances!

Let's say you're writing a piece of music that starts in D major and you want to connect it to a contrasting section of music in F minor.

There are so many ways that you can go about doing this.

You can go directly from one key to another. Or you can prepare the ear by destabilizing the D major while pivoting to a key somewhere around F minor at the same time. This second way is a very common compositional technique of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, their contemporaries, and everyone else who has followed the musical paths they have laid.

Understanding exactly how to go about writing a smooth chord progression that starts in one key and control it so that it becomes another key by the end is an incredible practice, and one that prepares you really well for deeply understanding scores, both of your own creation and the works of past musical masters.

This workshop explores everything around modulations, and by the end of it you will have the skills to write dramatic and powerful modulations to and from any key.

Practicing modulations helps with so many areas in harmony—

• Improve your fluency with chords

• Get better at writing progressions that accomplishes a goal

• Better understand analysis

• More deeply understand the stuff that holds a piece of music together

This workshop completely expands on the concepts of key relations and offers us a way to learn about music on a more holistic level through building more interesting and dramatic modulations to more distant keys on the circle of fifths by thinking about neutral fields of harmony.

I teach the way of looking at harmony that makes being harmonically creative much easier. This develops our skill at part writing and helps us compose better for voices and instruments.

Who am I?

My name is Jordan Boucicaut, and I teach music at jordanali.com. I'm a composer, conductor, and cellist with over a decade of experience making music in solo, orchestral, and chamber music settings. During my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University I took grad level theory and analysis classes, and I'm so excited to share my theoretical and practical knowledge about music with you! I learned the approach I teach in this workshop from a former maestro of the Munich Philharmonic. You won't find this exact technique or perspective in textbooks anywhere else.

How does it work?

When you invest in this workshop, you get 2 hours of lessons (14 videos) that you can access forever.

The only way to get better at something is to practice, and this workshop builds dozens of chord progressions to and from different keys. It will help with your harmonic imagination, and it is my hope that by the end you'll have an easier time creating the music you imagine.

You won't find this technique or perspective in textbooks anywhere else. Try it out! I know you'll gain something from this workshop.