[Smt-talk] Passing and Neighboring 6/4s

[Dmitri Tymoczko]

Recently I was preparing to teach second-semester harmony, and found  
myself contemplating once more the idea of "passing" and "neighboring"  
6/4 chords.  And it suddenly occurred to me that these terms are  
potentially misleading.

My basic worry is that, in classical music, "neighboring" and  
"passing" 6/4s occur only in very specific circumstances (e.g. I- 
 >IV6/4->I or IV6->I6/4->ii6), whereas the terms "neighboring" and  
"passing" suggest more general contrapuntal functions that should in  
principle appear in a broader range of progressions (e.g. vi->ii6/4- 
 >vi or vi->iii6/4->vi6).

In other words, if the IV6/4 is really the byproduct of "neighboring"  
motion, then we should expect progressions like ii->V6/4->ii.  And  
conversely, the absence of ii->V6/4->ii should give us good reason to  
think that IV6/4 is not "simply a neighboring chord."  But then it's  
hard to understand what's gained by labeling IV6/4 as "neighboring."   
Are we really explaining anything, if we have to add the proviso that  
other neighboring 6/4 chords are almost never used in the style?

This is leading me to wonder whether I wouldn't be better off simply  
teaching a few specific tonal idioms, and leaving the labels  
"neighboring" and "passing" out altogether: I could just say that  
tonal composers often use I->IV6/4->I, V->I6/4->V and IV6->I6/4->ii6,  
and that would cover ~95% of the cases students encounter.

Does anyone have any thoughts about this?  When you teach  
"neighboring" and "passing" 6/4 chords, do you teach the specific  
idioms or general principles?  And if you do the latter, how do you  
prevent students from overgeneralizing to nonsyntactic progressions  
like vi->iii6/4->vi6 and so on?  And do you feel any tension between  
"this is just a neighboring chord" and "these other progressions,  
though contrapuntally quite similar to the acceptable case, are never  
used?"

Thanks,
DT

Dmitri Tymoczko
Associate Professor of Music
310 Woolworth Center
Princeton, NJ 08544-1007
(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri