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Borrowed chords: the parallel minor, on loan

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Modal interchange is the simplest idea in chromatic harmony: a piece in major briefly borrows a chord from its parallel minor — a bVI, a bVII, a bIII — and the light changes for a bar. Where applied dominants push forward, borrowed chords change the color. They're rarer on the page — 61 across 18 pieces in our corpus — which is exactly why they gleam when they arrive.

Practice with the pieces that use it →

The census

Reducing every piece in our corpus to its harmony and counting the borrowed chords:

chordcountborrowed from
bIII19the parallel minor
bVII14the parallel minor
bVI12the parallel minor
bIII+74the parallel minor
bv4the parallel minor
bIII+3the parallel minor
bVII+72the parallel minor
bVI+1the parallel minor

The borrowed bIII leads the corpus's loans, with bVI and bVII close behind — the three flat-side colors that turn a major phrase briefly overcast.

Hear them in real pieces

Each link opens the piece in the harmony player, with every chord labeled — the borrowed chords read as bVI, bIII, bVII above the staff. Bar numbers below point at the first few.

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