[Smt-talk] Doubling the tone of resolution

[Dmitri Tymoczko]

I just noticed one pretty interesting thing about that list of Bach chorale suspensions: there are virtually no suspensions of the chordal fifth anywhere on that list.

Now some of this may be an artifact of my analytical process -- a suspended fifth C-E-(A/G) (here A/G means "suspension A resolving to G") can often be read as a 6 chord, so you have to have a pretty strong harmonic reason to assert the presence of a suspended chordal fifth.  To check into this, I should tell my computer to identify every 6-5 formation where the 6 *could* be a suspension (i.e. is held over from the previous chord, is rhythmically strong relative to the resolution), and to see what percentage of them I have labeled as a suspended fifth.

Nevertheless, it is possible to create unambiguous suspensions of the fifth -- as for instance with seventh chords like C-E-(A/G)-Bb (again A/G means A is suspension that resolves to G, with the whole chord being C7).  Similarly, in a IV-I6 progression you can delay the 6-5 motion to create a suspended fifth, creating (E, A/G, C).  Both of these are pretty rare in Bach.

(Though as I recall, there are a few reasonably clear examples of "suspended fifths" in the chorales -- for instance, beat 2 of measure 2 of the first Riemenschneider chorale, where I take the apparent "iii6" to be a V with the B being a suspension and the A being harmonic.)

This is really interesting because none of the three most popular textbooks (Aldwell/Schachter, Gauldin, Kostka/Payne) mention any sort of preference of this sort.  And now that I think about it, my students periodically try to decorate chordal fifths with suspension-like figures, as when they write 5-6-(6/5) over a I-IV-I progression. This always feels unstylistic, though I've never put my finger on why.  My guess is that "suspended fifths" are more of a nineteenth-century thing, and that they occur in just a few idiomatic contexts, but this is a matter for further research.

The take-home pedagogical lesson here is that it might be useful to supplement the figured-bass view of suspensions (9-8, 7-6) with a root-functional/triad member point of view.  In Bach Chorale style:

	1. Don't double the tone of resolution unless you have a 9-8 suspension over a root-position triad; and
	2. More generally, the tone of resolution is almost always the root or a third of the chord.

If anyone has any thoughts about suspensions of the fifth -- when it becomes popular, what sort of contexts it occurs in -- I'd be very interested to hear them.  Right now I'm thinking that "avoid suspensions that resolve to the fifth of a chord" is a pretty good rule of thumb for the baroque and classical style.

DT

Dmitri Tymoczko
Professor of Music
310 Woolworth Center
Princeton, NJ 08544-1007
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