Thanks a lot Paul!

Glad you enjoyed it Mr. Barton. We've been enjoying your playing and instructional piano videos for many years!

So glad that you enjoyed this and thanks for the comment! We'll have more videos like this coming.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm glad you found this brief intro on Tristan und Isolde enjoyable.

Thanks! Glad you found it inspiring! If you like you can check out the full episode from which this excerpt was taken: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pJzMm36Pac-Ia80si=BhDhY9N5mMnYb8Aq

This is in fact not a naive question at all, quite to the contrary. Minor harmony gets messy very quickly and explaining the emergence of minor chords through the overtone series is not at all as straightforward as it is for major chords. Indeed, if you’re trying to look for the appearance of a minor third, for example an E-flat when playing the note C, you won’t find it without taking into account some harmonic acrobatics: C gives you the overtone G (3rd harmonic). Now the pitch G is also included as an overtone in the fundamental of E-flat (as the 5th harmonic). So C and E-flat both have a prominent overtone in common. But you are of course right in observing that in playing C, you also get an E-natural overtone which won’t harmonize well with the E-flat of your minor third. That clash is indeed there and if you listen very attentively you might be able to detect it. The minor chord not being as completely at peace with the natural overtone series as the major chord is probably one of the reasons why composer throughout the renaissance and baroque eras often ended minor works of music with a triumphant and most stable major chord (aka the picardy third). All this aside though, when we are in the minor mode, we do perceive the third scale degree as a stable tone and not an active one. We derive the minor (aka aeolian mode) from taking a major scale and playing it from the 6th scale degree. What used to be the 6th scale degree in the major scale we now perceive as a new tonic, the 1st scale degree of our minor scale. And in the context of the minor scale we hear the minor third as a stable tone. The former leading tone that we had in the major scale is now a very active 2nd scale degree driving towards the third (and often we sharpen the minor 7th scale degree to create an “artificial” leading tone towards our tonic, leading to a different “flavor” of minor which we call harmonic minor). The main point though is that tonal harmony in music is an interplay between nature and culture. It is grounded in something we observe “out there”, which is then taken and formed into ways to create and express meaning. This is why music and harmony have not remained fixed but have evolved and changed over time and musical eras, as has our perception of tonality. I’ll go much more deeply into this very topic with various musical examples in my upcoming episode, which you’ll be able to access very soon. Thanks for your question!

@@pianoonpark That's super interesting, thank you very much! ☺

Hi Hilda, this is Jessica, your aunt from Taipei. We all proud of you:)