It's hard to say exactly what your teacher was on about. I would imagine he/she was drawing attention to the various "functions" (or classifications) of chords; pre-dominant chords lead to dominant chords which lead to tonic chords (for example).merkutinaa wrote:Any idea what order the numbers go in.
Probably some variation on this:
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III VI IV V I
II VII
Some theorists put III and VI together.
In order to literally have a chord "progression", you move from left to right (though the tonic, I, can come in-between anything and it still works). If you skip one, it's called an "elision", and if you go backwards (from right to left), it's called a "retrogression". Most elisions and retrogressions are considerably less common in classical music than progressions... But there are many exceptions (which is why I'm not a huge fan of this method).
When you're just starting out though, it can be a useful means of coming up with a quick chord sequence that's likely to work well.