Monday, November 19, 2018

A Gallery of Simple Examples of the Dominant Ninth

I have published an essay titled Dominant Ninth Harmonies in the 19th Century: A Gallery of Simple Examples Drawn from the Dance and Theater Repertoireslink to the essay.

Here is the abstract:
In European music, freer treatment of the sixth and seventh scale degrees in the major key encouraged the use of independent V9 chords, which appear already early in the nineteenth century, are common by the mid-1830s, and are important to the process by which the hegemony of eighteenth-century compositional, improvisational, and pedagogical practices were broken down. This essay provides multiple examples of the clearest instances of the V9 as a harmony in direct and indirect resolutions.