The artistic progression of harmonic triads

Sorge, writing around the middle of the eighteenth century, claims that “one gradually comes to understand that all music is nothing but an arrangement of one harmonic triad after another; and all that occurs therein is focused principally on its harmonic progression.” For those who shared Sorge's view, attempts to clarify the principles governing harmonic progression would constitute a primary goal of musical speculation. Composers, who daily confronted the task of shaping cogent harmonic progressions, were a primary audience for such efforts, though elite performers, who often put notes together themselves in the form of improvisations, cadenzas, or their own compositions, would likewise be receptive to clear prescriptions that might enhance their artistry.

The extent to which any set of guidelines for harmonic progression could succeed was itself a subject of dispute. In the early nineteenth century Momigny asserts that the “genius” is guided by a “natural and almost divine instinct … in the absence of written laws” and suggests that if the music examples in a harmony treatise are of high quality it is likely because they were composed by a fine musician, not because that musician's rules are particularly discerning. Such rules are “almost always feeble or false.”