Sunday, July 6, 2008

Tonal Harmony - Week 3 Homework

Did anyone get a good chord for measure 28 of the Well Tempered Clavier? That G is along for the ride from the last measure but how does A7-dim fit in with the analysis? And is it still A7-dim even though it's written with an F# instead of a Gb?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're right to pay attention to the enharmonic spelling of the chord. Keeping in mind that you want to look for tertian harmonies as much as possible in this genre, the triadic way to spell m. 28 (excluding the G pedal non-chord tone) is F sharp-A-C-E flat (an F# dim 7 in other words). This is the vii fully diminished 7 of V, and with the E-flat in the "bass", my opinion is vii fully dim. 4-2 of V would be the best analysis.

One small thing Steve hasn't touched on, though the Gauldin talks about it on p. 268, is the cadential 6-4. Basically it says that when a I 6-4 precedes a V in a cadential passage, the I 6-4 can be functionally treated as part of the "bigger V" chord. I mention this only because it's what occurs in mm. 29-30, which is why Bach can get away with the vii/V in m. 28.

m0joe said...

Awesome, thanks for the tip Aaron.

Anonymous said...

Wow, after re-reading my comment it comes off as rather pedantic...Steve could very well refute everything I posted but that's really just the way it appears to me. *hides in corner*