20 May Harmony
Among the most important classes there are two that are particularly difficult: they are called harmony and counterpoint.
I will not talk about technical details about these two classes, but I’m going to loosely explore them.
Harmony is a very old practice – the manuals we use have been written around 1800 – and is essentially based on exercises that we call “bassi“. There is a line like this:
(we call it “basso” – bass – because it’s the foundation of all the beautiful things that can be build above this line, and also because it’s written in the bass clef), and the first thing to do is to give each note a Roman numeral, that will indicate the scale degree, and little Arabic numerals that will tell us which note to use to build a chord above the bass.
The result will be something like this: 
Once you place the numbers the job is halfway done: all you have to do is to build all the chords in the treble clef like this:
The only thing I didn’t mention is that there are incredibly strict rules to follow; you probably noticed that the number I is often written with the small 5, but there is one that has the numbers 2 and 4: this means that each chord can change depending on the note of the bass that follows that specific chord. There are also exceptions and embellishments that follow other rules.
Long story short, this is my favorite subject but it usually takes 2 to 4 hours to complete an exercise made of around 35 bars. It’s pretty complicated, nevertheless I absolutely adore it. Makes me feel smarter. 😀
Alongside the bassi, there is the “romanza“:
This is another kind of exercise where you have to place a melody (the higher notes), an accompaniment (the lower notes in the treble clef), and a bass following the same rules of the bassi. But in this case, the score is supposed to be played by a pianist; it’s more free (you can place notes that are not in the chord, for example the first chord is C E G Bb but there are A and F in that bar) and it sounds a bit less like an exercise and more like a Romantic piece of music.
Next time I will talk about Counterpoint! If you think that this is complicated, you have no idea of how bloody difficult is that 😀