Alternative theories of harmony?

Question

Do you know of any alternative (to functional) descriptive theories of harmony or attempts at creating them? By that I mean attempts to explain both functional and non-functional harmonies in a single and coherent way, focusing for example on voice leading and not function or any other approach. To try to explain better as it indeed might sound confusing: in today's music we come across progressions that are not easy to explain using functional harmony so we invented this term non-functional harmony that seems to be just a way of saying: the established theory doesn't really handle this case very well. Hence the question: is there any research or attempts to create more unified theory of why certain chord progressions sound good and others don't. And I don't really mean microtonal or serial theories but attempts at describing all existing practice of western harmony based on 12-tone scale in a different way.

Answer 1

Ideas about how to describe harmony changed considerably following Rameau's proposition that the bass note is not always the root of the chord, an idea that took several decades to change thinking about harmony over the course of the latter half of the eighteenth century and into the 19th. For instance, a chord with C in the bass and F and A above it is to us an F major triad in second inversion. To Bach, and even to Mozart, it was a C64 chord (C in the bass, with the intervals above it a sixth and a fourth). Also counterpoint reigned supreme in Bach's time, and harmony was in some instances an accidental byproduct. Over centuries, it seems that harmony as an entity - even the essential perfect V-I cadence - only gradually evolved as vertical alignments of counterpoint that sounded good enough to figure out.

Answer 2

There have indeed been some attempts. Whether or not they're successful is a matter of opinion. I'd suggest looking at Hindemith's "The Craft of Musical Composition." You could also try the Schillinger System of Music Composition.