Atmosphere

Musical

Example

Atmosphere

Secret

Score

Atmosphere

Music/

Score

Introduction

A simple way of creating an atmospheric mood is with quartal harmony. In quartal harmony, every note in the chord sits a perfect 4th apart from the next note in the chord.

And to really give the music an airy feeling, we place these harmonies in the higher registers. Listen to our opening harmony:

Here we have the violins playing a five-note chord. As you can see, every note in the chord is a 4th higher than the note below it:

This harmony has a lush, almost magical sound. It also has a slightly ambiguous quality to it. We take advantage of these qualities by simply moving the harmony around:

As you can see in the violins' parts, we have simply moved the complete harmony from bar 1 down a minor 3rd into bar 2. After restating our original chord again in bar 3, we lower that chord by a half step in bar 4. We return to our opening chord in bar 5. You will see that within each new chord, every note is a 4th apart from the note above it or below it.