source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 10:03:20 -0800 Subject: Re: TUNING digest 1008 From: Andrew Milne Ray Tomes wrote: > I certainly don't know enough about music history to argue on that score > and anyway accept that 16/9 is sometimes the correct value for that > note. However I would argue on the basis of logic. If you have a > dominant 7th chord and the other notes have frequency ratios of 4:5:6:8 > why should the extra note be 64/9 in that ratio scheme when 63/9 would > cancel down nicely to 7 and make an elegant 4:5:6:7:8? Whatever was > actually played historically I still feel that the intention or meaning > of such a chord is 4:5:6:7:8. If the 7th in a dominant 7th chord is tuned to 7/4, then it loses its dissonance and instability. Indeed such a chord can function as a tonic (as it does, quite exceptionally for the time, in Chopin's 22nd Prelude). But, in common-practice classical music, and indeed in most contemporary (not blues-based) pop music, the dominant seventh chord is a chord which actively seeks resolution to the tonic (usually a major or minor triad a perfect fifth below) with the seventh resolving down a minor or major second and the third resolving up a minor second. It is the unrelatedness of the seventh to the rest of the triad that makes this such an effective leading tone. For this reason it is absolutely incorrect to tune the seventh of a dominant seventh to 7/4 in the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin (exception noted) etc., because to do so is to misunderstand the harmonic function of this note, and to give the dominant chord an entirely different function to that intended. Andrew Milne Islington London Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 01:34 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA10626; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 01:34:52 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA10312 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id QAA14332; Sun, 9 Mar 1997 16:33:18 -0800 Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 16:33:18 -0800 Message-Id: <336b49f1.802701832@kcbbs.gen.nz> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu