Postscript to Dehn: Ludwig Bussler

Ludwig Bussler was a student of Siegfried Dehn, whose Harmonielehre was discussed in the previous post. Bussler was born in Berlin and spent most of his life there. He published a number of textbooks, including a Praktische Harmonielehre in Aufgaben in 1865. A posthumous fifth "revised edition" edited by Hugo Leichtentritt (1903) was available to me, along with an English translation of the second edition published in 1891.

It's hard to see any particular evidence of Dehn's influence in Bussler's dominant-ninth chapter, which is indeed practical and whose explanations and strictures are in line with most textbooks in the latter half of the 19th century.

Bussler generates the ninth chord by adding the ninth above the dominant seventh. He never mentions other extended chords. The dominant ninth is among the dissonant principal chords (Hauptakkorde), along with the dominant seventh, the diminished triad, both diminished seventh chords, and the tonic 6/4. He shows the standard resolutions, with the third (D5 in the first chord below, D4 in the second) rising to avoid parallel fifths:

He admits three inversions (the examples are from the English edition, p. 41):

but rejects the fourth "for the principle of chord-formation by successive thirds would thereby be abandoned, and the chord of the ninth be stricken out of the list of chords in a limited sense" (English trans., p. 40). He adds that the interval of the ninth must never be inverted to a seventh: "It is only necessary to strike such an inverted chord to make plain the need of this rule."

Of the following example, Bussler remarks "By the aid of this chord the descending scale can now be well harmonized between the seventh and sixth degrees" (p. 41).

Finally, he says that the ninth is best when "prepared" by appearing in the immediately preceding chord. He rejects the following (even though they were quite common in music, especially music for the stage, even at the time of his book's first edition, a point which he does not mention).

Reference:
Ludwig Bussler, Praktische Harmonielehre in Aufgaben (1865).
Ludwig Bussler, Elementary Harmony (1891), translated from the second German edition. Source: Internet Archive; digital facsimile of a copy from the University of California at Berkeley.
Ludwig Bussler, Praktische Harmonielehre in Aufgaben, Part 1 of Praktische musikalische Compositionslehre, edited by Hugo Leichtentritt (1903). Source: Internet Archive; digital facsimile of a copy from the University of Toronto. The 2-volume edition (with counterpoint as the second volume) was first published in 1878-79.