[Smt-talk] I - II- IV as a progression (counterpoint)

[Murphy, Scott Brandon]

Yet another perspective (hopefully, I¹m not overstaying my welcome):

This, or some variant of this, may have already been recognized either in
this thread or in the pop-music literature (if so, forgive the redundancy
and my ignorance), but one way to singularize the I - II# - IV progression
is that, when abiding by the two preferences of 1) maximizing tertian
consonance (e.g. major preferred to minor, triad preferred to seventh chord)
and 2) using chords closest (via the circle of fifths) to tonic, I - II# -
IV - I is the optimal harmonization of the descending, stepwise, and linear
melody ^5 - ^#4 - ^4 - ^3.

If one allows tonic harmony to be minor as well as major, then I suspect
that optimal, or near-optimal, harmonizations of other descending, stepwise,
and linear melodies that span tonic triad members (e.g. ^8 - ^7 - ^6 - ^5,
^8 - ^b7 - ^6 - ^5, ^3 - ^b3 - ^2 - ^1, etc.) yield other common pop-rock
chord progressions. (Be sure to allow for repetition of scale degrees and
their non-repeating harmonizations: this is what allows I - bVII - V - I to
be equally optimal to I - II# - V - I in harmonizing ^3 - ^2 - ^2 - ^1. Yet
I - V - bVII - I ranks just as high, I suppose.)  I do not know this music
and the music-theoretic literature on it terribly well, but this relatively
simple scheme seems to work fairly well as I mentally rummage through, among
other things, my high school prom songbook.

Scott

-- 
Scott Murphy
Associate Professor, Music Theory
University of Kansas
smurphy at ku.edu



on 9/27/09 11:03 AM, Walt Everett at weverett at umich.edu wrote:

> The descending line, ^5 - ^#4 - ^4 - ^3 ("How dry I am"), appears often in the
> classical literature, but almost always as part of a circle of 5ths, as in the
> support of Susanna's part in the second-act trio of Figaro (mm 40-45), where
> the applied leading tone's resolution is elided.  The Beatles' first use of
> II# - IV for this descent comes in "She Loves You," and after "Eight Days a
> Week" it became a pop mainstay.

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