[Smt-talk] Seeking deceptively resolving applied dominants.

[dec2101 at columbia.edu]

Dear List,

I could be wrong (and I'll be glad to be corrected), but I don't  
believe that the analysis that Karst de Jong attributes to Rameau is  
by him:

> On Jan 24, 2010, at 7:57 AM, karst de jong wrote:
>
>> I think that Rameau already considered the  iii in the progression   
>> iii-IV a I7 with a non-sounding fundament, thus closely resembling   
>> a I-IV progression. Consequently V/vi could be regarded as an   
>> altered version of this chord (I7/9 augmented without its fundament).

This sounds more like Kirnberger--or rather, J.A.P. Schulz in his  
Kirnberger-approved _Die wahren Grundsaetze zum Gebrauch der  
Harmonie_. Kirnberger applied this reasoning to 7th chords with  
fundamental basses moving up by step (in particular, as I recall, to  
IV7 - V), reading them as being "really" 9th chords sans root (thus he  
reads IV7 - V as II9/7 - V). Schulz, as I recall, applies this  
analytic strategy to triads, so that IV - V becomes II7 - V. I don't  
recall whether either of them applies it specifically to III - IV so  
as to read it as I7 - IV, as Karst de Jong suggests Rameau did.  
(Needless to say, our use of Roman numerals with reference to theories  
of Rameau and Kirnberger/Schulz is anachronistic, but they'll do,  
_faute de mieux_, as a clumsy substitute for a fundamental-bass  
analysis.)

David Feurzig's reasoning in the following also seems questionable:

> Though personally I suspect Rameau's missing-fundamentals hypothesis is
> superfluous--that is, that the musical "data" are just as
> well-accounted for as a matter of common triadic subsets, without
> appeal to imaginary notes. E.g. Cmaj7 shares a triad with Em7, etc., so
> it's no great wonder they share tendencies.

Do not ii7 and vii7 (in both major and minor) share a "common triadic  
subset"? How about iii7 and V7 (in major only), for that matter? Yet  
if the chords in each of these pairs "share tendencies," they are not  
the ones that are most evident in their normal syntactical behaviors.

-David E. Cohen
Columbia University