[Smt-talk] I-II-IV as a progression

[Reed,Smith Alexander]

It was pointed out that the really striking feature here is the 
II-IV move (as I-II is explicable in a number of contexts).  There 
are of course classical precedents for some chromatic mediant 
alterations like this in other contexts ?????the middle section of 
Hugo Wolf's "In Dem Schatten Meiner Locken" springs to mind, with 
its vacillation between D and F major, but the overriding key in 
that piece is Bb, not C.  And I think it's important and telling 
that in nearly every case we've brought up in this thread, the 
resolution is back to I (and not to V, vii??, or something 
weirder) -- even when it's delayed (see Jesus Jones's "Right Here 
Right Now").

I am therefore not certain as to how connected the I II IV move is 
to bVII I bIII -- though it sounds just fine going back to bVII, 
I'm not sure I know of many uses of it; I'd love to see some 
examples cited.

Within rock music I do suspect, however, that I II IV it has a lot 
of kinship with a later move that shows up in a fair bit of 80s 
and early 90s rock, in which an expected cadence from V to I 
instead goes to bVII (see the final cadence of the theme song from 
the TV show "Growing Pains").  In this case, the behavior is 
certainly that of a deceptive cadence, which supports the notion 
proposed earlier that the move to IV from II might be considered 
deceptively as well.  Typically when this happens, the next chord 
is IV (quickly voiced in "Growing Pains," and given more time in 
other uses of the deceptive bVII, like Nine Inch Nails' "Something 
I Can Never Have" or The Lemonheads' "It's a Shame About Ray."  
This move would be analogous to the plagal resolution to I in the 
songs by The Beatles and Donovan.

A note about Moore's suggestion that I II IV might be a third 
substitution for I bVII IV -- the latter is sometimes called the 
"double plagal" (assuming it resolves to I); this is then 
analogous to suggesting that one could substitute a vi chord -- 
nay, a VI chord -- for the IV in a plagal cadence, which strikes 
me as intuitively incorrect.  Both have the effect of a lessening 
of tension on the arrival of the subdominant (due to the 
respective chromaticism of II and bVII resolving down by half 
step), but they seem to me as if they're coming at the IV with 
quite difference baggage.

S. Alexander Reed, Ph.D.
University of Florida

alexreed at ufl.edu