Perhaps it's time to talk about the "Emancipation of the Dominant"?
(By which I mean the major-minor 7th chord, or any extension thereof.)
Debussy did a pretty fair job of emancipating the major-minor 7th
from its dominant function, and using it as a freestanding sonority
with perfect integrity and without a need to resolve. (I'm not
claiming that he was the first, because I'm not a theorist and don't
know that to be true, but he was certainly the most obvious.) Jazz
musicians who adopted his ideas about harmony, after the mandatory
50-year delay, did much the same.
In the '40s my mother was taking graduate work at Teachers College,
Columbia University, and after the entrance exams was placed in the
last semester graduate theory class "so she could learn and
understand their terminology." The two professors' names I recall
were Murphy and Stringham, and to my knowledge they never actually
published a textbook based on their teaching. One of the things they
did was, again, to emancipate the major-minor 7th from its dominant
function by calling it not a Dominant but an X7 chord. It could be
used on any scale degree and did not necessarily require a
resolution, thus doing away with the endless spiral of secondary
dominants that STILL clutter up music analysis!
In the '60s songwriter Burt Bacharach popularized the non-dominant
cadential chord--a IV chord over a dominant bass--which has become a
full-fledged cliche in Contemporary Christian songs. (In jazz
situations, of course, the basic subdominant may be elaborated into a
ii7, a IVma7 or IVma9, or other variations.)
In my Survey of Music class for non-music majors, I emphasize the
importance of the most compelling interval in Western Music, the
half-step. (And yes, I demonstrate it by playing the first 7 notes
of a C major scale and leaving it at that!) In functional harmony it
is the pull of the halfstep between 3 and 4 that moves the harmony
away from the tonic and into the subdominant region, and the equal or
stronger pull from 7 to tonic that pulls it back, especially when
combined with the tritone pull from 4 back to 3. And I demonstrate
how changing a single note by a halfstep can immediately pull a piece
into a new tonal center. (And yes, I believe that 99.99% of the
music written in the Western tradition to this day IS common
practice-based, DOES have tonal center(s), and DOES use functional
harmony.
So if I am even close in reading the situation correctly, both sides
in this thread are at least partly right. Yes, in music that is
basically limited to common-practice harmonic practice there is a
strong leading tone or dominant-tonic effect, and while it can be
avoided in a variety of ways, the avoidance itself reflects its
important.
And yes, that is not necessarily true of anything beyond the
admittedly wide scope of common practice harmony, or of the music of
other cultures, or of music that deliberately avoids common practice
harmony.
So everybody's right and we can stop arguing, OK?
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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