MacDowell, "Thy Beaming Eyes"

This is a second postscript to the post on Hull's Modern Harmony (1915). Among his examples is an excerpt from Edward MacDowell's "Thy Beaming Eyes," no. 3 in Six Love Songs, Op. 40 (1890). Here that is again:

Hull offers no context and no explanation for the harsh dissonance—arguably, much harsher in this voicing as a first inversion minor dominant ninth than any fourth inversion of the major dominant ninth!—and incongruously setting the word "Paradise." We will explore that here, as the song is rich in its treatment of ninth chords and their inversions.

The poems in Op. 40 are by William Henry Gardner and are largely simple expressions of love in a style that is a restrained version of sentimental songs from the late 1800s. "Thy Beaming Eyes," however, introduces irony. Its text:

Thy beaming eyes,
Are Paradise,
To me, my love, to me.
Thy trembling kiss
Is heavenly bliss,
To me, sweet love. 

But oh, thy heart!
It has no part,
With thee, my dear.
Tis strangely cold
And doth withhold
Its love, I fear. 

Thy beaming eyes,
Are Paradise,
To me, my dear.

The sentimental expression (in the opening at least) helps to account for the ninth chords (I have noted in earlier posts that major dominant ninth chords are more common in lyrical, sentimental genres), and the irony accounts for the increased dissonance.

"Passionately" and "loud" signal something unusual from the start, although one could say that "beaming eyes" and "Paradise" are worthy of intensified expression, the more so for sake of contrast with the familiar soft and sighing notes of the second phrase, "Thy trembling kiss . . .". Here "Paradise" is set to a second-inversion dominant ninth -- at (a). The ninth D5 is duly placed at the top, but the voice then doubles it (as a written D4) and resolves that note upward (while D5 remains in the piano part). That E4 remains in the subsequent A7 over C#.  The phrase ends with a plaintive "to me" on another dominant ninth, this time in root position with the ninth at the top in both voice and piano. With the following second-inversion C7, the ninth disappears more than it can be said to resolve (it's B-natural3 that's readily heard as moving to Bb3, and G—to which the ninth A might resolve—is already stationary in the bass). Whatever the explanations, both major dominant ninth chords here are prominent and striking in their voicings and treatment.

In the second phrase, we find the first hint of trouble: at (c) "kiss" is set to a version of the same dissonance that we saw in Hull's quote. Here it is heard not as a ninth, but as an F# diminished seventh chord with upper neighbor D4. At (d) and (e) the same chord pair as at (b) but now with forceful expression and the C7 in root position. Here the textbook writers' suggestions about the ninth chord as offering intensified expression are certainly realized.

The third phrase brings us to the poem's second verse. Apparently a reprise of the opening in the melody, the music quickly takes another direction, but not before "kiss" has become "heart" set to the same chord in the voicing of Hull's example -- at (f). At (g) I imagine a textbook writer might call this a dominant ninth with its root deleted. This is one of the few places in practice I might find that plausible. Supporting this hearing is the conversion of the ninth chord from (a) to the same half-diminished seventh at (a?).

The second phrase returns with harmonies intact—(b) through (e) below—but "kiss" and "bliss" are now "cold" and "withhold." The singer's final reiteration of the opening, then, is wistful and without much hope. It is here that the irony reaches its natural end-point, as "Paradise" is overtaken by the D minor ninth chord (this is Hull's example).  At the very end, note C9 and C13 in the cadence--at (h1) and (h2).

Schoenberg in Hull, Modern Harmony

A. E. Hull reproduces the famous fourth inversion of the dominant ninth chord from Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (1897).

The example is Schoenberg's own, no. 267 (p. 418):

Hull mistakenly assumes that example 273, below, is from Halm, but it is actually Schoenberg's rewriting of Halm's Ex. 97 (for that, see the previous post). Recall that Halm's position on the ninth chord was somewhat more conservative than most textbooks in the second half of the 19th century: the dominant ninth chord is a proper harmony, but may only appear as V9 and only in root position. Schoenberg ridicules the inconsistent and un-argued assertions about inversions of the ninth chord in textbooks, especially the ban on the fourth inversion as "harsh" (or, as Halm does, banning them all). Schoenberg turns this around, saying that what was ugly yesterday may be considered beautiful today and noting that his sextet was rejected for performance but then was premiered two years later and nobody noticed that there was a fourth inversion ninth chord (1912/22, 418-419). He also refers to multiple instances in Richard Strauss's Salome.

Extended, detailed discussions of Verklärte Nacht may be found in Swift 1977 and Lewin 1987. Swift notes that the longer progression of which the dominant ninth is a part is "more than a linking passage, for it returns at two crucial structural points. First, it is the harmonic scaffolding for the recapitulation of the first group sentence (mm. 181-87), and is in part responsible for the ambiguity and uncertainty of that return. Second, this 'uncatalogued dissonance' returns in the first part of the coda as part of a succession of important motives from the composition" (10-11). Lewin's exceedingly detailed discussion weighs a variety of potential analyses and implied progressions. He focuses particularly though on the chord-pair together as occupying the functional space of a leading-tone diminished seventh chord, a hearing one can recognize if one expands the context to include the subsequent chords:

At the asterisks are two enharmonically equivalent diminished seventh chords (see Lewin 52-53, for the derivation of the first one, where the chord tone is the Ab3 and A-natural3 is understood as a passing tone). Ultimately he settles for the idea of the functionally ambiguous vagrant harmony, pointing simultaneously away from D minor (deceptive progression) and toward it (note the inverted chaconne-bass figure starting from i 6/4: A2-Bb2-B-nat2-C3-Db/C#3-D3).

Here is still another possibility. At (a) below is Schoenberg's Ex. 267b, the root position of the Ab major ninth chord. At (b) are typical textbook voicings of the first three inversions (I took these specific ones from Catel and Bussler). At (c) is Schoenberg's fourth inversion with a partial resolution into an augmented sixth chord in D minor; note that Ab is enharmonically G#. At (d), an alternative: the same augmented sixth chord in D minor with raised 3 and 5 (D becomes D#; F becomes F#) and a cadential close follows. This is consistent with Schoenberg's strict, even radical, notion of monotonality: all chromatic chords are alterations of diatonic ones (such that even what we now commonly regard as secondary or applied dominants are considered altered chords), and it is also consistent with Schoenberg's notion of vagrant chords, or chords with multiple potential harmonic meanings and therefore potential progressions (these are diminished seventh chords, augmented triads and their derivatives, and the augmented sixths; see 1912/22, 288 ff., especially 296 ff.).

Reference:

• August Halm, Harmonielehre (1900).  Source: IMSLP; digital facsimile of a copy in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill library.
• Alexander Eaglefield Hull, Modern Harmony: Its Explanation and Application (1915).    Source: Internet Archive; digital facsimile of a copy in the University of Toronto Library. The Halm/Schoenberg example perhaps is a hint of the loose mode of quotation from sources that eventually fueled public complaints of plagiarism.
• David Lewin, "On the 'ninth-chord in fourth inversion' from Verklärte Nacht," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10/1 (1987): 45-64.
• Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (1912/1922).   Source: Internet Archive; digital facsimile of a copy of unknown provenance.
• Richard Swift, ‘‘Tonal Relations in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht,’’ 19th Century Music 1/1 (1977): 3-14.

A. E. Hull, Modern Harmony (1915)

Alexander Eaglefield Hull was a prolific writer, biographer, and encyclopedist on musical topics. His Modern Harmony: It Explanation and Application (1915) is atypical of his work in its focus on a technical subject, but its source must certainly lie in biographies of Scriabin and Cyril Scott that Hull was preparing at about that time (and published in 1916 and 1919, respectively).

Hull makes his advocacy of contemporary practices crystal clear at the outset:

The swift current of modern musical art during the past ten or fifteen years seems at first glance to have ruthlessly swept away the whole of the theories of the past. The earnest student may well be excused if he is bewildered completely on rising up fresh from his theoretical treatises to plunge into the music of actual life—of the twentieth-century opera houses, concert-halls, and music-rooms. . . .
      The whole of musical history . . . warns one against the too easy acceptance of the neatly turned epithets of persons who are . . . too indifferent to appreciate a new kind of music which claims at once wide sympathies and considerable powers of concentration. . . . Even on short acquaintance these modern musicians have too much method in their so-called “modernity” to be dismissed thus cursorily. It is the greatest possible mistake to view these modern schools as things separate from the art of the past. Indeed, most, of the new traits are legitimate growths out of the art technique of the acknowledged great masters. It does seem as if there were nothing new under the sun. As the principles of the twentieth-century Cubism in painting were well known some 400 years ago, so the modern methods of part-writing and chord-building all find their prototypes time after time in the pages of the great masters of the past.  (1-2; lightly edited)

Then Hull offers up a complaint frequently heard in the century or so from 1850 to 1950:

So much harmony teaching is founded on mere text-book formalities that there is little, if any, appeal to the evidence of the aural intelligence—the real arbiter in all matters of musical taste. It is the empirical method which makes the theory of the music of [recent] composers so difficult, and we cannot suppose that all of the explanations set down herein were present in the composers’ minds at the time of conception, or that they may even be acceptable always to the composers themselves. The system of teaching harmony by attaching names to the chords often produces an altogether false way of regarding music. No chord in itself conveys any meaning whatsoever. It can give a vague impression. . . , but thought in music can only be transmitted by chordal succession and forward movement, and the chord, however wonderfully arranged, has value only in this light. (4-5; emphasis in original)

Consistent with his approach—which simplifies discussion of harmony largely by removing complex labels—Hull has this to say about the dominant ninth and its inversions:

The unnecessarily forbidden appearance of the root in the inversions of the chord of the ninth tends to cramp part-writing, and the prohibition robs diatonic music of some of its most powerful effects. The root, which merely requires judicious placing and arrangement, may appear above the minor or major ninth with great effect. A wide selection of resolutions should be allowed.
For instance:
    (a) Both the major and minor ninth may fall a tone or semitone.
    (b) The ninth may remain.
    (c) The ninth may rise a chromatic semitone.
The case of (b) will be clearer still when the ninth is prepared, thus appearing as a pedal note. In all cases, so long as the ninth is satisfactorily resolved, the other notes are comparatively free. (18-19)

His example for (a)—see the arrow in the second bar—is from a song by Edward MacDowell, a piece so interesting in its treatment of the ninth that I will devote a separate post to it. For (b), see the beginning of the excerpt from the Verdi Requiem. For (c), look at the first chord pair from August Halm's Harmonielehrebuch [sic].

This last example is not in Halm's book. Hull is quoting from Schoenberg's Harmonielehre (1912), complete with the misspelling "Harmonielehrebuch" (properly it would be "Harmonie-Lehrbuch," although that isn't Halm's title, which is simply Harmonielehre).

Halm's example 97c is this. Schoenberg rewrites the progressions under (c). I will discuss his treatment of ninth chords in a separate post.

Halm's Ex 97c is actually meant as a negative example. He regards the V9 resolving to I (see his first examples under 97) as the only correct use of the ninth chord, in contradistinction to the dominant seventh, which he says has a much "softer" character and can move in almost any tonal direction. The two chord pairs under 97c show that one cannot reasonably apply the same traits to the ninth chord (Halm 1900, 118-119).

Reference:

• August Halm, Harmonielehre (1900).  Source: IMSLP; digital facsimile of a copy in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill library.
• Alexander Eaglefield Hull, Modern Harmony: Its Explanation and Application (1915).    Source: Internet Archive; digital facsimile of a copy in the University of Toronto Library.
• Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (1912/1922).        Source: Internet Archive; digital facsimile of a copy of unknown provenance.