[Music] in western classical music we have a series of so called rules that governs how music progresses particularly during the common practice period in that period we have what is known as functional harmony which is like it sounds harmony that serves a particular function that function is primarily to move us from home to something that is not home and then move us back to home let's look at an example this is mary had a little lamb we see two courts here G major and D major each of them play a particular function in this case we would call G major home or the tonic chord D major plays a different function it takes us away from home we call this the dominant chord however the dominant chord really wants to go back home and in this case it does last time we looked at how in a major key the 1 4 & 5 are major the 2 3 & 6 are minor and the 7 is diminished however a chord being major or minor doesn't necessarily determine the function that it plays in each key there are 3 basic functions that a court can play and it changes based on the key that we're in for example G major won't always play the home function a chord can either be tonic dominant or sub dominant and I understand what a debate I might have just started among theorists but you clearly see which camp I'm in generally speaking sub dominant chords want to go to dominant chords dominant chords want to go to tonic chords and as we've said tonic is home we can split each of the seven diatonic chords into their respective functions the tonic chords are the 1 the 3 and the 6 the sub-dominant are the 2 and the 4 and the dominant are the five in the seven so from this we could create a progression of chords that follows these functions we see a tonic that leads to a sub-dominant that leads to a dominant that leads back to a tonic we'll look more in depth at each of these functions in a later episode next we'll take a closer look at tonic chords so leave any questions you have in the comments and I'll see you next time thanks for watching this episode of 2 minute music theory if you liked what you saw please like and subscribe also be sure to check out my other channel jesse Strickland music which is home of all of my compositions and if you're the kind of person who uses social media feel free to connect with me there [Music]