Eight songs by Marion Bauer, part 2

In this post I will look at the two earlier songs: "Send Me a Dream" (1912) and "Only of Thee and Me" (1914).

"Send Me a Dream" has an unusually large number of direct and "almost direct" resolutions of the major dominant ninth chord. Here are two near the beginning. Neither ninth resolves by step, but both chords are clearly independent harmonies acting as V9s in context. Note that the second chord is inverted.

The situation is less clear a few bars later. In the dotted box is a harmony better heard as Eb: viiø7/V. I have made the second box solid but its identity as a ninth is only slightly improved, as the voice's F5 could still be heard as an appoggiatura.

At bar 44 is another instance of a clearly defined secondary V9.

And here are even more just a few bars later.

The climax chord (bars 67-68) is a V9 with more iterations of the ninth than I have seen anywhere else to date. At bar 72 is the chord from bar 12, now in root position, and as a surprise G9 appears in the final bars without function, as part of a coloristic wedge figure.

By comparison, "Only of Thee and Me" has just one point of interest, and it's a dominant 7th with raised 5th that only becomes a ninth chord (still with raised 5th) when the voice puts in a "throw-away" note D5. The first time (end of the first verse) D5 disappears for sake of A4; the second time (third verse and ending) it acts as ^6 resolving upward to ^8.

Eight songs by Marion Bauer, part 1

Twelve songs by Marion Bauer are readily available through IMSLP. Of those, eight make use of major dominant ninth harmonies: "The Epitaph of a Butterfly," "Gold of the Day and Night," "Night in the Woods," "Only of Thee and Me," "A Parable," "Roses Breathe in the Night," "Send Me a Dream," and "Thoughts." I am uncertain of composition dates; IMSLP has publication dates of 1912 for "Send Me a Dream," 1914 for "Only of Thee and Me," and 1921 for the others. These correspond to the copyright notices.

The poets are Thomas Walsh (Epitaph), Katharine Adams (Gold; Thoughts), Edward Rowland Sill (Night), Louis Untermeyer (Only), Stephen Crane (Parable), Margaret Widdemer (Roses), and Emilie Francis Bauer (Send).

The first of the eight--"The Epitaph of a Butterfly"--is remarkable in being grounded on a G9 harmony. Treatment of V9 in the others is more typical of American songs in the period after about 1890, both in operettas and musicals and for domestic or recital use.

I'll begin with "The Epitaph of a Butterfly"--see the score below. The poem is a brief narrative of a butterfly in late autumn, falling into a pool to die. The imagery of light and color were an invitation to write in an Impressionist style that reminds me, at least, of Griffes' song "Symphony in Yellow" and perhaps even the opening of "The White Peacock." (Bauer and Griffes were friends, incidentally.)

I have ventured a chordal reduction below and emphasize that it is both informal and biased. The former is inevitable, the latter acknowledges that I have firmly resisted any further reduction to triad abstractions or even to a more plausible series of chord roots. In any case, observe that the chordal repertoire is entirely major dominant sevenths (on G, A) and ninths (on G, C, Eb, B), half-diminished sevenths (on G, B) and a mixture of major seventh and add6 (on C).

Here is an annotated version of bars 7-16 (with chord roots added in bars 9-10). The passage begins with a familiar succession of roots in fifths and thirds (G, C, Eb, implied Ab to follow) but with dominant ninth chords. After that is some typical late-19th century chromaticism relying heavily on the ambiguous half-diminished seventh chord. The shift is easily explained by the contrasting texts: "hope" in bars 7-10, followed by a vain search for a "comrade." Finally, note the curiously traditional 2-3 bass suspension at the end (2-3 or 9-10 being the only bass suspension allowed in ancient counterpoint). Also, the V7/ii itself can be explained by separating out the left-hand elements in bar 17--see the end of the example below. The first thing we hear is in fact ii, not V, as iiadd6; only on the third quarter beat is the bass G2 sounded. Although the overall effect here is certainly that of a break, the harmony does offer some continuity.

5-34 and its hexachords--V#11

This is a follow-up to the previous post, where I showed what happens when you expand the major dominant ninth (seen as a pc-set) by a note. Here I will take the first of the hexachords generated that way--see below--and go the reverse direction, successively removing a note to generate its six constituent pentachords.

Hexachord 1 has the complete contents of the major dominant #11, here, G-B-D-F-A-C#. It's no surprise, then, that the pentachords produce a variety of interesting -1 voicings of that chord:

5-34 and its hexachords

 The five-note pitch-class set for the dominant ninth chord is Forte-label 5-34 (0, 2, 4, 6, 9). Here it is with its inverse (the set is symmetrical and so both forms have the same notes, just with D at the bottom or at the top). As a "science experiment" (to quote Dr. Emmett Brown), I've written out the hexachords that can be made by adding one note to 5-34. In each case, I've marked the new note.

The first pair (with either C# or Eb) further increases the already strong whole-tone character of the dominant ninth chord when written as a scale. The second pair (with C or E) does the opposite: bring out the diatonic-scale qualities. I'm not sure what to say about the third pair (with A# or F#), but the last one (with the Ab axis of symmetry) almost succeeds in undermining the whole-tone quality with the fully diminished (as F-Ab-B-D).

Here are all eight again, this time written out as chords, followed by "shortened" versions that might be familiar (or at least usable) as voiced harmonies. The second system gives an alternate voicing for each of the seven hexachords followed by a plausible tonic-chord voicing.

Note that hexachord 1 is the dominant with a sharp 11. Hexachord 2 is the dominant ninth with both diatonic and raised 5th. In the second system I've simplified it to a dominant ninth with (just) raised fifth. Hexachord 3 is the generally unusable diatonic dominant 11th, but it has several -1 and -2 voicings, two of which are shown. Hexachords 5 & 6 split a note: for hexachord 5 it's the ninth, A-A#, OR the third, B-Bb; for hexachord 6 it's the 7th, F-F#. The last hexachord combines qualities of major and minor ninth chords. (The last two hexachords might perhaps be understood as splitting the root--for 6, G-Gb; for 7, G-G#--but I've never been able to absorb that idea.)

Liszt, Liebesträume, no. 3

The Liebesträume were published in 1850, with the subtitle "Drei Notturnos." Each is given a poetic epigraph; for no. 3, it's by Ferdinand Freiligrath, "O lieb', o lieb', so lang du lieben kannst."

I was alerted by Joel Love (his website: link) to the striking major dominant ninth in the main theme for this well-known piece. Here it is:

Despite the doubling, this is a "bona fide" dominant ninth chord, an independent sonority whose ninth only resolves in the following chord--and takes some time doing it, too: see the dotted lines that reconnect C4 from bar 4 with the one in bar 5. In other words, in one octave or the other, C is present through a bar and a half. Note also the instruction to hold the pedal down throughout bar 4.

When the theme reappears in its more intense form--and in B major--the situation is less clear. The upper ninth, D#5, still reconnects in the following bar, but the lower one, D#4, resolves internally and rather quickly to C#4: see the dotted line.

The third time around, in E major, the ninth is emphatically present—see the first box, with G#4, 5, and 6—and now Liszt adds a ninth to the following dominant as well; that's C#5 and 6 in the second box.

The cadenza is unusual—in fact unique in my survey experience to date—in being founded on V9: see the open box; in the two small boxes the underlying 7th chord amidst the chromatic shower of dominant 7th chords; in the third box V9 again; and connected by the beam, the V9 elaborated yet again.

Liszt certainly understood the specifics of affect and topic associated with the major dominant ninth chord around mid-century.

Brahms, Four Serious Songs, op. 121

The composer Gerd Zacher has written about a phenomenon in the last of the Four Serious Songs, op. 121: "appearances of the major ninth chord always feature the vowel 'i'." From this Zacher makes some observations about a subtle highlighting achieved through "a scalar microtone series." See the reference and abstract at the end of this post.

The ninth chord is especially prominent in setting the word "Liebe." See the first page of the score below. Note that the ninth, F4, is resolved internally but is repeated. To the circled notes: shifting the affect, Brahms uses the minor V9.

Here are the recurrences of the passage. The first repeats the figure from the opening page, the second attaches even more prominence to the ninth by giving it to the voice (C4) and stretching it out to nearly four beats.

Here are two more instances, from the subsequent section. The first is striking because it's unexpected in context, and because the ninth Ab3 isn't resolved, nor is the chord, which changes to an inverted Ab dominant 7 over the pedal Gb. The second is a common type of internal resolution but stands out because the ninth is not only in the voice but is also placed in a cadence.

The last statements are in the final section. The first gives, in its higher alternate note, the only ninth in the song with a direct resolution: G5 to F5 as V9/V goes to V7. The second is in the final cadence, again in the voice, a common figure I call ^6-down-to-^7; note that the ninth is given unusual prominence by this means and is not resolved (for that, one would have to take the Bb3 in the left hand on beat 2 of the next bar). The two boxes with dotted lines are the only two cases in which "Liebe" is not adorned with a dominant ninth.

Reference:

Gerd Zacher, "Komponierte Formanten," Musik-Konzepte 65 (1989): 69-75.

Abstract (from RILM): In the last of Brahms's Vier ernste Gesänge, appearances of the major ninth chord always feature the vowel "i". He lends strong support to the ninths of these chords in the region of the "i" formant. In the registers that Brahms uses here, the partials are separated by semitones. The difference between the equal temperament of the piano and the natural tuning of the partials produces nuanced vibrations that can be arranged as a scalar microtone series. The aural result is a highlighting of the particular tone (such as in setting the word Liebe). (NB: I had access only to the abstract, not to the article.)