ABSTRACT
The music of the tonal era is almost exclusively tertian in its harmonic orientation. That is, its harmonies can generally be thought of as being constructed of stacked 3rds, the only exceptions being “voice-leading chords” such as the family of augmented-6th chords and the chords produced by the omnibus progression. That tonal music used tertian harmony was not the result of a conscious decision on anyone’s part but instead was the result of classi cations of consonance and dissonance and the development over centuries of various voice-leading procedures. The fact that the underlying harmonies in the tonal style are known to be tertian makes the labeling of chords and the identi cation of nonchord tones in tonal music a relatively simple task.
