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Harmonizing a melody requires choosing appropriate chords and then voicing them to create smooth voice leading. The melody note becomes the soprano; inner voices and bass must move smoothly while supporting the harmonic progression.
Harmonize folk melodies with progressions; analyze how Bach harmonizes chorales; compare your solutions with existing harmonizations.
You already know the fundamentals of voice leading—smooth motion, contrary motion preferred, avoid parallel perfect intervals—and you understand harmonic function: how chords group into pre-dominant, dominant, and tonic categories, and how progressions create forward motion. Harmonizing a melody integrates these skills under a new constraint: the soprano line is *given*, and everything else must serve it while also forming a coherent progression. This is different from writing a progression from scratch; you're working backwards from melody to harmony and then layering voice leading on top.
The first step is analyzing the melody before adding any chords. Which scale degrees does each note represent? Notes on strong beats are often chord tones, especially at cadence points; notes on weak beats may be passing tones or neighbor tones that don't need to be harmonized as chord tones. Look for the structural cadence points: where does the melody come to rest? Those moments demand an authentic or half cadence. The melody itself suggests a harmonic rhythm—how often chords change—and sometimes the melodic contour implies a functional direction (a rising phrase pushing toward dominant, a stepwise descent pushing toward a final tonic).
Once you've identified the structural points and the implied harmonic rhythm, choose chords based on functional logic, not just note-matching. Every melody note above a given chord must be explainable as either a chord tone or a non-harmonic tone—but that still leaves several chord options for most notes. The choice between them should be guided by progression quality: does this chord connect smoothly to the next? Does the progression move through pre-dominant and dominant toward tonic at cadence points? Avoid choosing chords that are individually "correct" but produce a weak or repetitive progression when heard in sequence.
The final layer is voice leading the inner voices once the chord roots are chosen. Your soprano is fixed; your bass is largely determined (often the root, sometimes an inversion for smoother bass motion); your alto and tenor must fill in the chord tones while moving as smoothly as possible. Apply everything you know: prefer stepwise motion, resolve tendency tones (leading tone up, chordal seventh down), and maintain voice independence. Bach's four-part chorales are the canonical model precisely because he navigates all of these constraints simultaneously with extraordinary craft—analyzing even two or three chorales will teach you more about integrated harmonization than hours of abstract exercise.
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