source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 13:27:50 -0800 Subject: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad 9:7? Part 9 From: Gary <71670.2576@compuserve.com> +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Tip #15: | | 9:7 can also be used as an intermediary in the resolution of scale | | degree 4 down to 3 in authentic cadence. | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ (John Chalmers pointed this one out to me; thanks, John!) Contrapuntally, you could present this somewhat like you would suspended fourth. That would be kind of like suspending the fourth on elastic string! In other words, the fourth would go down a little bit to 9:7 above the tonic in the suspended chord, rather than stick at 4:3 like in a true suspension, then finally resolve to 5:4. I found it more effective, however, to not move the bass up a fourth from scale-degree five to one until sounding the final tonic triad. Neither of these two subtly different progressions seems to heighten the need to resolve as much as does a 9:7 injected into the leading-tone rise path, as suggested in the previous tip. That's probably because the suspension gives the sense that the authentic cadence has - conceptually speaking - already taken place, even though we still have a note left over. Here's another intriguing and somewhat similar possibility. I won't dedicate a tip to it because I haven't studied it enough to get a clear feel for its usefulness. Consider quartal harmony, or in particular, the three-note chord formed by two 4:3s stacked atop one another. The top note in that chord is a 16:9 minor seventh above the root. It's certainly possible to move that chord to a dominant seventh (with omitted fifth) by dropping the middle note from 4:3 above the root to 5:4 above the root. That however is a rather weak harmonic movement, probably because the harmonic tension doesn't really change all that much. But what if we make that movement through the 9:7? The tension certainly goes up. One probably contrapuntally interesting way to do that would be to have root and seventh first move up by 28:27 to where the 4:3 above the root becomes 9:7, and then move that middle note down the remaining 36:35 to form the 5:4 against the moved root. Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 8 Feb 1996 22:08 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id NAA28164; Thu, 8 Feb 1996 13:08:18 -0800 Date: Thu, 8 Feb 1996 13:08:18 -0800 Message-Id: <960208210404_71670.2576_HHB78-4@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu