My last post added to the series on traditional harmony textbooks (link to first post) discussion of a modern harmony text from the 1950s. Vincent Persichetti doesn't have anything negative to say specifically about the major dominant ninth chord, but as I wrote, he "greatly favors other seventh and ninth chord types over the major dominant ninth, which does appear in a reference example of the same kind of sequential progression that we saw in Mitchell and Ottman, but only once in the chapter's nine composed examples."
Just a few years earlier, Paul Hindemith indirectly offered an explanation: the major dominant harmony (like its close cousin the half-diminished seventh) was too strongly associated with 19th century music. Hindemith was a student in the years before WWI, and matured as a musician and composer in the years immediately following, when the aesthetics and practices of the earlier era, especially anything Wagnerian, were soundly rejected. Thus there is a definite sarcasm in his proposing composition exercises for the harmonium, that "primitive wheezebox": "Is not treasuring such a pitiful instrument like preaching the virtue of poverty and the moral value of asceticism to one living in luxury? The counter-question might be: Why not, if that will further the development of the individual and the general welfare?" (Traditional Harmony, vol. 2, 31, 32) In other words, the argument is a bit like that for writing species counterpoint. . . .
In his conclusion, it's obvious that Hindemith is referring to the major dominant ninth, the ΓΈ7, and various altered dominants:
"In respect to harmony and tonality, our pieces will inevitably sound like so many hundreds of the sentimental genre pieces of the post-Tristan style. . . . What was originally felt to be so 'modern' and to promise so much, turns out to be a technical device that is useful only for the creation of all too limited effects. Nevertheless, it is advisable once, for practice, to wallow thoroughly in this style of writing if only to learn through exaggeration what in the end one wants to avoid."
"Major and minor ninths can be added to all of the seventh chord structures, both diatonic and altered. The dominant ninth was the first to be incorporated into the harmonic vocabulary, but its value to serious composers is impaired by popular connotations and triteness. The sounds of other less hackneyed ninth chord forms are still capable of pungent expressiveness, even to jaded twentieth-century ears, when used with imagination."
Ouch. Still, for the era, Dallin was undoubtedly right. In a later post, I will write that musicians working in the popular styles he denigrates were equally reticent: the statistics will show that the major dominant ninth appears surprisingly infrequently in songs from the 1920s through the 1980s.
