<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Dear Dmitri and all,</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Sorry for coming late to this question. I don't claim much knowledge of popular music from the 1920s and earlier, but it strikes me that one songwriter who used a lot of sliding chromaticism was Irving Berlin. His well-known song "Always" (1925) immediately comes to mind as a place where he used sliding chromaticism as a clever (some might say cheap) way to move away from or back to tonic. The one-bar transition that takes us from "Days may not be fair, Always" to "That's when I'll be there, Always" transports us from a tonic chord in FM to V7 of ii via parallel motion dominant seventh chords (F7, E7, Eb7, D7). On the one hand, we could write that off as a non-functional passage, but we could also say that the last motion (the return to functionality) represents a tritone substitution.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">A better case can be found in Berlin's "All by Myself" (1921), which ends with the progression CM, Am, Dm, Db7, CM (that's the last two bars, comprising the second ending -- which means that it follows the song's structural dominant. In other words, the tritone sub comes at a place where plagal and authentic motions are both conventional.)</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Again, I haven't looked at a lot of Berlin songs, but his music seems like good territory to mine for such chromatic adventures.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Also, since Walt Everett brought up Frank Loesser's "Luck be a Lady" from *Guys and Dolls* (1950), I can't help but chime in when he asks:</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><blockquote type="cite"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#0a26c4" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #0a26c4">"Luck Be a Lady Tonight" is built over a rumbling alternation of I and bII that I think carries on over a ^1 pedal (or maybe the pedal sustains in upper voices). I hear neighbors in a modal context, but how many would hear this as necessarily a V sub? (There may be others in the show; this example comes to mind first--my 13-yr-old was just Nicely Nicely Johnson for two perfs--boy, was that fun!)</font></blockquote></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">There's no tonic pedal here -- at least not in the original (consulting the published vocal score and the original handwritten conductor's score) -- but that "rumbling alternation of I and bII" certainly is there. I do hear that as an example of tritone sub, but also as a persistent neighboring motion. I don't see why this would be an either-or situation. Certainly we commonly call V65 both a (weak) dominant and also a neighboring chord. I'd put this in the same category; indeed, if anything, I think that the even-numbered bars in the chorus of "Luck be a Lady" carry an even stronger dominant function than do weak inverted dominants that prolong the tonic through neighboring or passing motions, but that's just my opinion. (Incidentally, kudos to Walt on raising a Nicely-Nicely -- I'm sure he rocked... the boat.)</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">I'll offer up two earlier Frank Loesser tritone subs, and then pose a question of my own:</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">In the hit 1937 song "The Moon of Manakoora" (lyrics by Loesser, music by Alfred Newman) from the film *The Hurricane,* there's lots of pseudo exotic descending chromatic motion throughout the refrain and the song ends with a bona fide tritone sub at "And you'll be in my arms once more." But this is a case of a tritone substitute for a secondary dominant (V7/V) rather than a tritone substitute of the primary dominant (the song ends with the progression: B7, Bb7, EbM). Some might protest that the B7 chord is merely a "misspelled" German augmented-sixth chord. However, the voice leading conforms to my expectations of tritone substitution. Again, I can hear the protests that it's merely an augmented-sixth chord with an elided resolution... but where do we draw the line? If we allow such beasts into our pantheon of tritone subsitutions, then I think we could easily look back to Victor Herbert and Rudolf Friml to find similar substitutions. The only real difference involves placement within the phrase (and that is a significant difference).</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">In Loesser's "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve" (1947), there is a very clear tritone sub in the transition from the first phrase of the refrain to the second. At bar 8 of the refrain, we have an imperfect authentic cadence, landing on I6 (FM6), which slides down to Gm7(ii7), Gb7(Vsub), and F (at bar 9, marking the beginning of the second phrase).</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">I confess that I'm only bringing up that song as a transition to another question. Frank Loesser sometimes used the subtonic triad as a neighbor to the (major) tonic. In refrain measures 1-3 of "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve," the harmonic progression is FM (tonic), EbM, FM (lyrics: "Maybe it's much too early in the game, Ah, but I thought I'd..."). He also used this subtonic neighbor even more memorably at the beginning of "The Inch Worm" from *Hans Christian Andersen* (1951) (lyrics: "Inch Worm [tonic], Inch Worm [subtonic], Measuring the [tonic] marigolds [subtonic], You and your [tonic]...")</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">My question: does anyone here know how long the neighboring subtonic has been used in popular music? Feel free to e-mail me privately.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Thanks!</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Michael</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">-----------------------------------------------------------</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Michael Buchler</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Associate Professor of Music Theory</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Florida State University College of Music</font></div>
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