<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">I tend not to get too hung up on theoretical elegance but think in terms of both "general principles" and "specific idioms" (a tension that's by no means confined to the case of 6/4 chords).<div><br></div><div>I-IV-I is a common chord progression; neighboring motion is an effective decoration; pairs of neighbor decorations in parallel thirds or sixths is especially effective. Each of those things points to a particular device, namely I-IV6/4-I. Other considerations point <i>against</i> the possibility of ii-V6/4-ii (though I expect we could come up with an example or two without too much trouble): the rarity of ii-V-ii in general and the inherent difficulty of motion from ^7 to ^6, for instance, are two such considerations.<div><br></div><div>So yes, I think of I-IV6/4-I as a "neighbor progression," but <i>not</i> as "simply a neighbor progression."</div><div><br></div><div>More troubling, in my mind, is the inconsistency of the terms "neighboring" and "passing": in some cases, the motion in question is in the bass (as in "passing" vi-I6/4-ii6) whereas in others the motion is in the upper voices, above a pedal (as in "passing" V-I6/4-V7). Those strike me as funcamentally different categories.</div><div><br></div><div>JDOC<br><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>- - - - - - - - - -</div><div>Jeremy Day-O'Connell</div><div>Assistant Professor, Music</div><div>Knox College</div><div>Box K-95</div><div>Galesburg, IL 61401</div><div><br></div><div>(309) 341-7301</div><div><a href="mailto:jdayocon@knox.edu">jdayocon@knox.edu</a></div><div>fax (309) 341-7605</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></span></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br><div><div>On Jan 18, 2010, at 8:02 PM, Dmitri Tymoczko wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>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.<br><br>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).<br><br>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?<br><br>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.<br><br>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?"<br><br>Thanks,<br>DT<br><br>Dmitri Tymoczko<br>Associate Professor of Music<br>310 Woolworth Center<br>Princeton, NJ 08544-1007<br>(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)<br><a href="http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri">http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri</a><br><br><br><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Smt-talk mailing list<br>Smt-talk@societymusictheory.org<br>http://lists.societymusictheory.org/listinfo.cgi/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org<br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></body></html>