Melharmony

Melharmony is an avant-garde form of music composing that explores new harmonies and voice leading anchored on melodic progression. In other words, melharmony aims to create chords and counterpoints based on the melodic rules of evolved systems across the world. Melharmony thus blends the two primary, yet diverse concepts in world music - melody and harmony. It was originally proposed and developed by musician-composer Chitravina N. Ravikiran. British-American composer Robert Morris further developed it from the standpoint of Western Theory. Melharmony is an inclusive, comprehensive approach to music that takes into consideration the rules and aesthetics of melody-centric systems like Indian Classical as well as harmony-anchored systems like Western Classical & Jazz but is not limited to only those. Some of these approaches can be fundamentally very different between cultures - including concepts of consonance & dissonance, melodic rules in modal/scalar systems as opposed to rules of counterpoint in harmony based systems. Melharmony breaks new ground by exploring artistic solutions to create music that sounds true to and enjoyable and acceptable to connoisseurs and scholars of both melody-centric and harmony-centric systems while performed by symphony/chamber/string orchestras as well as jazz and world music ensembles.

In short, Melharmony is about empowering composers to have awareness and reasonable knowledge of any given systems that are being fused and creating music that sounds true to listeners of each system or votaries of both systems. Music can sound true if composers and artists handle each fused system with sensitivity. For instance a composer trying to harmonize an Indian raga must be aware of not only the chords each note can produce and their progressions from a Western standpoint but must also be cognizant of what notes are present/absent, prominent or non-prominent in that raga and in what sequence they can be used in ascent and/or descent etc. This is rarely the case in reality, as it can seem almost impossible for a composers to master two very different systems. However, a mastery of one system with a working knowledge of the other would be quite sufficient to melharmonize.

Melharmony has been defined as "harmony and vertical layers of music with an emphasis on the rules and principles of highly evolved melodic systems". It was initially seen as a unique classical fusion engaging Western and Indian Classical systems, though it has subsequently also been a synthesis of melodic rules of India's classical music with jazz, Brazilian and other world cultures.

American composer and music theorist Robert Morris notes, "Melharmony therefore suggests that voice leading should be derived from the melodic and combinational structure of a mode (raga). Further, while almost any note combination could be workable when rendered successively, only certain combinations will be palatable when rendered simultaneously, which makes melharmony all the more intricate."

...
Wikipedia