On Monday, Oct 30, 2006, at 06:43 America/Los_Angeles, David Rastall wrote:
> Minor seventh chords?- I thought they would have been rarely used back > then.- I was assuming that a chord with a seventh added should take a > major third. A dominant seventh is, strictly speaking, a seventh chord on the dominant. Excuse the lecture if you already know about this, but there is a set of defaults known as the "rule of the octave," which says that in the absence of figures you play a root position chord on the all the diatonic notes of the scale except the third and seventh (some sources also include the sixth) which take a first inversion (i.e. the figure 6), and all raised tones also take a 6. So in C major, D, will be minor, and so will E and A if they are root position and not 6 chords (i.e. e minor and a minor and not C major and F major), which will be the case if they have a seven under them. So in this passage from a Telemann recorder sonata in C: E A D G C 7 7 7 7 You get four sevenths in a row, and three of them are minor sevenths. There are similar passages in Corelli, I'm sure. > So any time we see a figured bass, we are looking a part that could > have been written by the composer, the publisher, the editor, or maybe > even the last person to have used that sheet music? All are possible, and you probably listed them in decreasing order of probability. And it can get a lot more complicated than that. If you're lucky, the modern editor will tell you all about it. For your immediate purposes, it's not critical; if you're learning how to play a 7-6 suspension, it doesn't really matter who wrote it. > --I have one more question:--where do I have to go to find editions of > sonatas, arias, canzone etc. that contain figured bass parts, and not > some ridiculous piano or (worse yet) guitar accompaniment part? Why not start here: http://icking-music-archive.org There's probably lots of good stuff in Gordon Callon's online archive, for which I don't seem to have the URL. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
