[Smt-talk] Reply to Dmitri Tymoczko's "Doubling the tone of resolution" thread, Nov. 2012

[Dmitri Tymoczko]

Hi Alexander, 

> Thanks for sharing your findings on resolution-tone doublings.  Although it's a bit of a different question, I am very curious to know what you would find in the Bach chorales about the contrapuntal practice of doubling the tone of resolution at the moment of resolution in 4-3 suspensions.  This is something I was often advised to incorporate whenever possible when I was first learning counterpoint.  

This is a very good question, but I would need to do a little bit of programming in order to compile a comprehensive list of cases and I am pretty busy right now (4-week old daughter).  Going just by memory, there are a bunch of examples of this, but most involve *minor* triads.  I would want to double check to be sure, but in the first 30 chorales, a comprehensive search finds 5 examples all involving minor triads, and 0 examples with major triads (Riemenschneider chorale 6, m 5, D minor chord, chorale 11 m11, chorale 15m3, chorale 26m5, chorale 30m11).  

This feels about right to me -- the figure is rare with major triads, I think, but reasonably common with minor.

DT

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