SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Adventurous improvisors learn how to substitute alternate harmony for those that the composer originally wrote to increase harmonic interest as they play. Those who play this game need to know the harmonic construction of a piece so that they can know what substitution devices will work during a performance

Composers need to build a vocabulary of harmony that they can use as they write their own music. A good portion of that vocabulary is acquired by listening to other composer's works and figuring how their harmony works.

To develop your own powers of analysis, it's valuable to have a collection of analyses available that can show you how more experienced musicians have made sense of the harmonies of compositions that you might know.

I (Dave Luebbert, your webmaster) have done a handful of these for SongTrellis (for Beautiful Love, Four, Giant Steps, Lover Man and Milestones). I'd appreciate any feedback that you might be able to offer since I'm still an amateur at this game. If you feel that you are competent at analysis of harmony, please post articles in Song Discussions. I'll promote them to this department.

The Tunetext service on SongTrellis makes it phenomenally fast to create musical illustrations for your analyses. The musical examples for the two Wikipedia articles referenced (All The Things You Are and the Coltrane Changes article) were created using Tunetext

All of the Beatles tunes analyses were done by Alan W. Pollack for the Soundscapes website, who's done this for nearly every piece that the Beatles members composed.