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<font face="Calibri">May I recall (as I think I already said here)
that "sudominante" (i.e. "super dominant") is the standard
designation in French today, as it probably was in the 18th
century? Naming all the degrees of the scale has been an important
issue in music theory since at least the early 18th century;
naming functions, or "sonorities", is a recent concern. </font><br>
<br>
I think that the most important issue concerning the term "super
dominant" (instead of "submediant") is that it involves
understanding the subdominant as the degree under the dominant, not
as the dominant under the tonic. I don't know enough about early
German terminology to know how it compares to French terminology of
tonal degrees, but I do believe that the discrepancies about super-
and subdominant do reflect important differences in the conception
of tonality in France and Germany.<br>
<br>
I don't think that the etymology of mediant as "middle" is a
"pseudo" etymology. The term is one of the earliest ones to describe
a scale degree, certainly much earlier than "tonic". It denoted the
intermediate note between final and tenor in modal theory. In this
context, may I remain once again that Fétis did not use the term
"subdominant" and prefered "4th degree of the scale"?<br>
<br>
As to the dominant as the "governing tone", I think that Momigny
said something like that early in the 19th century. Such a statement
to some extent is linked to the belief that tonality arises from the
harmonic series: if pushed to harmonic 7, the series (as usually
notated) seems to describe the dominant, not the tonic – or in other
words, the diatonic scale of a given key is best built on its
dominant. [May I had that, in my opinion, the belief that the
dominant seventh cord is formed of harmonics 1–<small></small>3–5<small>–<small><small></small></small></small>7
or 4–5–6–7 is but a phantasm – or a metaphor?]<br>
<br>
I feel that since the beginning of this thread on SMT-Talk, there is
a constant confusion between the history of theories, the origin and
history of the terms, etc., and opinions about what they "really"
mean. My own belief is that our opinions should be based on history,
and that the more you know about history, the less certain you
become of your opinion.<br>
<br>
Yours,<br>
<br>
Nicolas Meeùs<br>
Université Paris-Sorbonne<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Le 4/05/2012 19:35, Arthurs, Daniel a écrit :<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:1B4470DF6A181C439D25B392FDA0B45338D6D665@GABMBx01.ad.unt.edu"
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">To
Michael, David (Feurzig), and the list,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">To clarify
my remark: it’s strange to me because Venth (et al.
according to David) is describing a scale step, not a
sonority (so far as I can tell, and which your descriptions
focus on). It’s entirely possible I am reading it too
literally when he states, “</span><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">Each tone
of the scale, whether major or minor, has its distinctive
name.” It’s going to be much harder to teach a class that
the dominant scale step somehow governs over the key (and do
we really use such tyrannical metaphors in describing stuff
like this? Michael says it “dominates” the tonic, and so
does the Clendinning & Marvin text). </span><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">Otherwise
I agree with both of your descriptions of functional
harmony.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">Perhaps
this arises from a potential confusion that comes up every
time I teach Theory 1: First I introduce the functional
scale-step names, then later the functional harmonies that
are created from those scale-steps, often stating, “The
harmonies share the same formal names. Sometimes we may
refer to the tonic as a melodic tone, other times as a
triad.”</span><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">I also
found it strange because sometimes it appears Venth (and
others, as David Carson Berry pointed out) attempts to give
(pseudo?) etymologies of scale step names (mediant is
“middle”, for instance, which I have no argument with).
Today some ascribe numeric equivalencies to those formal
names, calling mediant “third” as opposed to “middle”, and
submediant (which doesn’t appear in Venth and others) as
“under-third” (i.e., relative to the tonic). In
Kostka-Payne, they plainly write, “Musicians…often refer to
scale degrees by a set of traditional names rather than
numbers,” p. 17. Also, modern texts today show a literal
orbit of scale steps below and above the tonic (as in the
Clendinning-Marvin, Kostka-Payne, or Laitz texts), but
Venth’s clearly has everything literally orbiting the
dominant by capping it with the tonic and eighth tone as
“completing tone,” which of course is also the tonic.
(Also, I didn’t intend for any negative connotation by my
use of the word “strange.”)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">Finally,
if students today were asked to decide which scale step
governs over the key, I wonder how many would say
“dominant”?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext">Danny<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif"">Danny Arthurs, Lecturer,
UNT</span><span
style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Segoe
UI","sans-serif";color:#1F497D"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>
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