Workshop 60 mini-test

1. What is the core difference between functional harmony and the floating pedal harmony studied here?

2. Why is the 3rd especially important in suspended/modal voicings?

3. What is the difference between C Dorian and C Aeolian?

4. What does Dm/C mean as an upper structure?

5. What is planing?

6. Why does a single bass change feel unusually strong after a long pedal?

7. What is the advantage of slash-chord/upper-structure thinking?

8. Why can quartal voicings feel less functionally directional?

9. Why can one ordinary G7alt→Cm cadence sound especially dramatic in this environment?

10. What is the deepest lesson of Workshop 60?

Answers

1. Functional harmony emphasizes direction and destination; floating pedal harmony emphasizes changing color around a stable tonal center.
2. The 3rd strongly defines major/minor/dominant identity. Omitting it preserves ambiguity; introducing it can suddenly clarify the harmony.
3. C Dorian has A natural (6); C Aeolian has A♭ (♭6).
4. A D-minor triad D-F-A over C bass, producing 9, 11, and 13 above C and creating an open suspended modal sonority.
5. Moving a chordal shape in parallel, exactly or approximately, so the voicing itself becomes the moving object rather than following conventional functional voice-leading.
6. Because the ear has strongly adapted to the pedal as the center; after prolonged stability, root movement carries far more perceptual weight.
7. It compresses complex sonorities into simple modules—bass + familiar upper shape—making them easier to hear, visualize, voice, and transpose.
8. Their stacked-fourth structure often obscures conventional triadic root/quality relationships, emphasizing openness and color rather than dominant-tonic expectation.
9. Strong functional gravity has been mostly absent, so its sudden return creates a large contrast in harmonic behavior.
10. Harmony can develop richly without constantly changing roots: bass pedals, upper structures, modal color, common tones, planing, and inner motion can make one tonal center feel like an entire landscape.

The central lesson of Workshop 60 is:

A chord progression moves from place to place. A harmonic field can stay in one place and keep changing what that place feels like.