What is Reharmonisation? (Randy Felts)

Randy Felts of Berklee College of Music states that:

"Reharmonization is the musical equivalent of a new paint job on an old car. When you reharmonize a tune, you give the melody new color by changing its underlying harmonics."

In his book "Reharmonisation Techniques", Felts discusses the concept of harmonic "families" within music.  In keeping with his illustration of reharmonisation being like a new paint job, he talks about different families of colours: you can repaint a car blue, though there are many, many shades of blue. You can repaint a car pink, though there are many shades of pink.

Similarly, you can reharmonise something, but that's only a blanket term; it' like saying you can paint something.  If you reharmonise something into a specific genre (or colour) like Bebop (or blue), you have several sub-genres and styles within be-bop that you can reharmonise it to.  Or you could reharmonise into a smooth-jazz style (or paint something pink), but you'd then have to look at the many ways in which something could be reharmonised in that style (the various shades of pink).

Because of this, an effective project based on reharmonisation requires researchers who are able to differentiate between various styles, in order to create something that sounds authentic - if a reharmonised piece sounds like a be-bop piece at one point, a smooth jazz piece two bars later then ends up sounding like a thrash-jazz piece at the end, it won't sound like an authentic replication of a piece.  It will just sound like a mish mash of chords thrown together for the sake of it.

It is for this reason that the project has chosen a single sub-genre to focus on, and why it is important for the researcher to study all genres - a basic understanding of what harmonic concepts go where will mean that chord sequences and harmonic movements that may be out of place in the targeted genre will not show up in the reharmonised pieces.

[In hindsight, the end result of the project was more than smooth jazz - smooth jazz turned out to be the starting point for the whole project; from then onwards the ruleset proved to be diverse, able to reharmonise pieces into many different styles.  In this way, it could be seen that the project was either a success or a failure from the viewpoint of this early blog.]

References

Felts, Randy. Reharmonization Techniques. Boston: Berklee Press, 2002. Print.