Harmony for Composers and Arrangers

With simple, elegant tools, Harmony for Composers and Arrangers explores the harmonic grammar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western popular music and presents a streamlined overview of the harmonic issues arrangers and composers encounter when working in these music traditions. Author and seasoned educator Nicholas Urie unites the musical worlds of theory and arranging to illuminate the many options and techniques available to composers, arrangers, and students. The book is organized as a glossary of conventional harmonic sounds that composers and arrangers encounter while working in Western popular music styles such as pop, jazz, folk, rock, and gospel. Building on the fundamental rules governing major key diatonic scale degree tendencies, Urie demonstrates how diatonic chords create a gravitational system as a result of the tensions inherent in the major scale--a system that forms the basis for contemporary Western popular music. Throughout the book, Urie addresses major and minor keys in tandem, covering chromaticism, the three most common types of modulation (direct, pivot, and sequential modulation), diatonic chords derived from Composite Minor, and secondary and substitute dominant chords. The book concludes with two full, original arrangements to demonstrate how the lessons learned can be put to practical use. Both arrangements show the original chord progressions of the songs along with an analysis of how they were altered in the arrangement process. Recordings of both arrangements are available on an accompanying website to enable readers to follow along with the scores.

As an active composer and arranger, Nicholas Urie has written commissioned music for concerts and recordings in collaboration with Cory Wong, John Scofield, Queen Latifah, Steve Vai, the Metropole Orchestra, the Boston Pops, and the Luzerner Sinfomieorchester, among many others. Urie's recordings of original music, Excerpts from an Online Dating Service (2009), My Garden (2012), Quintet (2019), and Two Songs (2022), have earned wide critical acclaim. Urie received both bachelor's and master's degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music and is an Associate Professor in the Contemporary Writing and Production department at Berklee, where he has been teaching since 2012.