Textbooks, update, part 2

Forte (none); Laitz (none)

Of the ten textbooks I browsed during a recent visit to a college library, two don't mention ninth chords. These are Allen Forte, Tonal Harmony in Concept and Practice, 2d ed.; Steven Laitz, The Complete Musician, 2d ed. In Forte's case, the reason is clear: his pedagogy is based closely on Schenkerian theory, a conservative (in 2023, one might better say reactionary) model of harmony in which everything is reducible to triads and their linear elaborations. I don't know Laitz's reason--I am relying only on the table of contents and the index, where extended chords including ninths don't appear. It's possible he may say something in the preface or elsewhere.

Gauldin

Ch. 31 of Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music is 11 pages, of which 4 are given to the dominant ninth and just a half page to non-dominant ninths. He does give some space at the end of the chapter to added 6ths and 9ths, which is a positive point.

Gauldin uses a simple "extended tertian harmonies" model. The 9th in the dominant chord, whether major or minor, "became a bona fide member of the V chord" in the later 18th century, which is fair if we mean V(b9) but overstates the case if we mean V9 as an independent chord. The same is true of the claim that "by the middle of the 19th century, composers were using prolonged dominant ninths quite frequently" -- he then quotes the inevitable Franck Violin Sonata (1886) as well as the Prologue to Act I of Götterdämmerung (prod. 1876). European and European-influenced musicians working in all styles were indeed using dominant ninths by this time, but "quite frequently" misrepresents the statistics if by "frequently" one means "commonly" or "often." And "prolonged dominant ninths quite frequently. . ." is simply not the case: "expressive" and "prominent," perhaps, but "not often" if we take the repertoire as a whole before the 1880s. Finally, we note that he doesn't mention inversions.

Early on, Gauldin asserts that "we will regard [the] added thirds as dissonances and treat them as suspension or neighboring figures, much like the chordal 7th in seventh chords." Later examples do have chord labels for V9 but show voice leading figures above. I would read these as direct resolutions: V9 goes to I. Saying that these independent V9s "have their [historical] source in suspension or neighboring figures" would be adequate to clarify the situation.

Mitchell

In Elementary Harmony, 3rd ed., ch. 15 is 30 pages long, the topic being seventh chords, after which 10 pages are given to ninth chords in ch. 16. Eleventh and thirteenth chords are not mentioned. The final chapters are on applied/secondary dominants (17) and modulation (18).

Mitchell distinguishes between "simple" and "manipulated," which correspond to my "internal resolution" and "direct resolution." (For definition and examples, see my early post on the 7 types of the major dominant ninth: link.) Despite the seemingly derogatory "manipulated," Mitchell regards the V9 in direct resolution as a distinct harmonic entity. Later he strengthens the point by calling internal resolutions "pseudo ninth chords." He does, however, return to a "descending natural succession" to describe the origin of the major dominant ninth chord.

He rejects all non-dominant ninth chords out of hand: "they remain details of horizontal motion"--a bit extreme perhaps but still a reasonable description of most music before the 1890s. He says of inversions, "chances are that [they are] the result of simple figuration," but in a later paragraph he rejects them as "fiction" and "alleged." 

Mitchell was also under Schenkerian influence, and we can be thankful that he did recognize the independent ninth chord, even if it still suffers the stigma of being "manipulated."