Home, leaving, pulling · From Zero to Mozart

Chord quality (major/minor) tells you a chord's colour. Chord function tells you its job — where it sits in the story of the key. There are only three jobs, and hearing which one is playing is how you follow a piece's harmony without a score.

The three jobs

Stage 4's the-chords-of-a-key named these tonic / predominant / dominant. In plainer words:

Home — the I chord (and its stand-in, vi). Rest. Nothing pending. The story is at a stable point.
Leaving — IV and ii. Motion away from home; a touch of travel or lift. Not tense, just departed.
Pulling home — V, V7, vii°. Tension, lean, the strong wish to resolve to I. V7 especially: it contains the tritone (^4 and ^7 grinding), and it aches to land.

Most tonal music is a loop: home → leaving → pulling → home, over and over, at different speeds. Hear the loop and you can predict where the harmony is going.

60 bpm

G major, four broken chords: I, then IV, then V, then I. Name each one's JOB — home, leaving, or pulling home — before revealing. Feel how the third strains and the fourth releases.

Try it

Try

Play open G–D as a drone-ish double stop (that's the bottom of I). Add B on the A string — a G chord, home. Now move to C–E–G in your ear (or play C on the G string, 3rd finger, with open D above) — IV, leaving. Now D–F♯–A — V, pulling. Back to G — home. Say the job out loud each time. Do it as a slow four-chord loop until "pulling home" is unmistakable.

The usual mistake

Trying to name the exact chord (a G, a C, an E minor) before you can hear its function. Flip that: function first — is it resting, leaving, or pulling? — then the specific chord follows. The other mistake: hearing IV as tense. It isn't; it's just away. Only the V-group truly pulls.