The way I was taught, a group of notes can be a chord IF:JumpingJackFlash wrote: Literally, a "chord" is simply a group of notes (most would say it needs at least three, although some argue it could be two) sounding at the same time. In the West, we traditionally make chords from stacking thirds, but that is not the only way to build them. There is certainly a lot more to "chords" than just G7, C minor and so on. And there is a lot more to "harmony" than the conventions of Western functional tonality.
1. You have three or more notes (if its just two, you have a harmonic interval, but not a chord);
2. You can superimpose all notes in triads from the root of the chord (of course, you can have inversions, but when you count from the root, you have to have 3, 5, 7, 9 and so on).
3. You can have notes that are not triads, but they are considered "foreign" to the chord, and have to be "explained" within the musical context.
Exactly. And you have more examples of music with no awareness of chords than the opposite, both in time (history) as well as in space (worldwide).JumpingJackFlash wrote: There's also an interesting debate here about counterpoint vs. harmony, or the horizontal vs. the vertical. It varies with time and geography whether a culture values one over the other (and to what extent), but there is no objectively "right" and "wrong" way, and just because an approach is more recent does not make it "better". Just because a culture has no concept of "chords" and/or "harmony" does not necessarily mean those things are not there. In most cases, whenever there is more than one note sounding at the same time, both vertical and horizontal elements are going to be present to one degree or another, although one might only be a by-product of the other.
And even when harmony was important (in the baroque era, for example), it was looked as a "dress" for more important things, like the melody and the expression of the singed words, for example.