Update/Administrative

I have placed a file called "Index to V9 blog and essays" on my Google Drive. The document's title is "On the Dominant Ninth Chord: (1) List of posts to the blog; (2) List of essays published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform; (3) Repertoire list for the essays." Link.

Here also is the complete text of an administrative post I put up on 11 February 2019:

[Blog introduction]  In the introductory post to this blog, I wrote that in studying cadence figures in the upper tetrachord of the scale, "I noticed the variety of treatments of scale degree ^6 as the ninth of a dominant ninth chord. This blog is intended to document some of those, especially in the essential 19th century European repertoires of the musical stage and music for dance." Link to the introduction.

[Types of the dominant ninth]  A subsequent post looked more closely at the different melodic and harmonic treatments of the dominant ninth: link to "On seven types of the dominant ninth."

[Gallery]  I also announced publication of an essay, Dominant Ninth Harmonies in the 19th Century: link to the post. Link to the essay on Texas ScholarWorks. This is intended as a gallery of simple (clear) examples from the repertoire.

Originally I said the blog would be limited to the major dominant ninth chord. I am focused now on music in the first quarter of the 20th century and, not surprisingly for the period, am finding the forms with lowered or raised fifth more often. That being the case, I will be including those forms occasionally if their presentations are of interest, even while continuing primarily to document the unaltered major dominant ninth chord. Cases in point are two of the songs by Marion Bauer discussed in recent posts: V9#5 in "Only of Thee and Me" (link to Part 2) and V9b5 in "Gold of the Day and Night" (link to Part 4).

The four ninth chord types are shown under (a) below. Under (b) I have repeated them with a traditional altered form (without root; for the major and minor dominant ninths) or a common voicing (for the raised or lowered fifth).

Administrative

In the introductory post to this blog, I wrote that in studying cadence figures in the upper tetrachord of the scale, "I noticed the variety of treatments of scale degree ^6 as the ninth of a dominant ninth chord. This blog is intended to document some of those, especially in the essential 19th century European repertoires of the musical stage and music for dance." Link to the introduction.

A subsequent post looked more closely at the different melodic and harmonic treatments of the dominant ninth: link to "On seven types of the dominant ninth."

I also announced publication of an essay, Dominant Ninth Harmonies in the 19th Century: link to the post. Link to the essay on Texas ScholarWorks. This is intended as a gallery of simple (clear) examples from the repertoire.

A Gallery of Simple Examples of the Dominant Ninth

I have published an essay titled Dominant Ninth Harmonies in the 19th Century: A Gallery of Simple Examples Drawn from the Dance and Theater Repertoires: link to the essay.

Here is the abstract:

In European music, freer treatment of the sixth and seventh scale degrees in the major key encouraged the use of independent V9 chords, which appear already early in the nineteenth century, are common by the mid-1830s, and are important to the process by which the hegemony of eighteenth-century compositional, improvisational, and pedagogical practices were broken down. This essay provides multiple examples of the clearest instances of the V9 as a harmony in direct and indirect resolutions.

Duration and sound, part 1

In the previous post, I wrote: "The ninth above a V7 harmony can be categorized in two ways: (1) in terms of its resolution (and the distinction between what I call internal and external); (2) or in terms of its duration (that is, sound or "color" versus harmonic function)."

Both duration and metric position are represented in an almost direct sequence in types 1.1 through 2.2. These are reproduced below. In 1.1 and in 1.2, a & b, the ninths are eighth notes; in 1.2, c-e, the ninth is a quarter note; in 1.3, the duration is two quarters; and in 2.1 it is two or three quarters.

As I noted  in the previous post in connection with Figure 2.1e, faster tempi for dancing after about 1830 encouraged the writing of 16-bar and eventually 32-bar themes, in which the older basic idea of two bars frequently is four bars instead. A simple example is the famous Skater's Waltz by Emile Waldteufel (1882). The main theme is a very clearly formed 16-bar sentence:

The ninth of V9 is as prominent as it could be (arrows below). Also note that Waldteufel succeeds in stretching out the V harmony over four bars (boxed as bars 2-6) in a way that overlaps the four-bar ideas.

 The second strain is almost as well-known as the first. It is presented here in a "violin direction" score -- these were often used by small ensemble directors instead of the full orchestral score, and they played a substantial role in theatrical and film music performance as well. Note that the disposition of I and V harmonies is the same as in the theme, though the dissonances are missing. The two arrows show 9 as neighbor note, then as direct resolution into the fifth of the tonic chord.

Waldteufel continues the pattern in the first strain of the second waltz, where he reverts to the leap to the ninth familiar from early Laendler -- and even makes use of the "double play" of scale degree as ^6 over I, then ^6 over V, and here ^6 over I again: see the asterisks.

In another very familiar piece—the first strain of the "Waltz of the Flowers" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker (1892)—there is no V9, though he does bring forward the waltz's typical expressive rise, here to a diminished seventh chord over a tonic pedal. The point of interest, though, is that this is another very clear 16-bar sentence where the basic idea is four bars long, not two. (I've shown only the presentation phase -- that is, the first eight bars.)

The second strain continues the pattern of four-bar ideas -- see the boxes below. Here the dissonances are extraordinary -- and all diatonic!  The C# in bar 1, for example, briefly creates a I7 (that is, with major seventh)--a sonority we already saw in the first strain of the Skaters Waltz, bars 7-8. These kinds of diatonic dissonances had become common in the waltz repertoire by about 1880, so much so that a simple diatonic and consonant melody could be heard as contrast, a device often deployed by Waldteufel in particular.

In the third strain of the "Waltz of the Flowers," we finally hear a dominant ninth -- see the arrow in bar 6. The boxes show a two-bar basic idea this time—though one might well argue that these are really motive-sized chunks in this context, that is, smaller units, not ideas. The eight bars are the sentence phase of a sixteen-bar period.

Introduction

This is an offshoot of my blog Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music, which necessarily focuses attention on the upper tetrachord of the scale (primarily major, but occasionally also minor). In the course of studying these gestures, I noticed the variety of treatments of scale degree ^6 as the ninth of a dominant ninth chord. This blog is intended to document some of those, especially in the essential 19th century European repertoires of the musical stage and music for dance.

To be as clear as I can: the blog is not a primer in ninth-chord types, and the mode of harmonic theory is 19th-century based classical-music theory, not jazz theory. Although there is some overlap in repertoires in the Swing era and in the American musical, jazz theory is primarily aimed at a different, more contemporary repertoire and performance practice, and it wields a different notation system in service of a much wider range of ninth (and other "extended") chords and their voicings. Jazz theory is now well represented in a variety of online resources.

[Note 19 November 2018: I have published an essay titled Dominant Ninth Harmonies in the 19th Century: A Gallery of Simple Examples Drawn from the Dance and Theater Repertoires: link to the essay. Here is the abstract: "In European music, freer treatment of the sixth and seventh scale degrees in the major key encouraged the use of independent V9 chords, which appear already early in the nineteenth century, are common by the mid-1830s, and are important to the process by which the hegemony of eighteenth-century compositional, improvisational, and pedagogical practices were broken down. This essay provides multiple examples of the clearest instances of the V9 as a harmony in direct and indirect resolutions."]

The origin of the dominant seventh chord in a passing tone is generally accepted, and there is certainly sufficient evidence in 17th century music to support that. At (a) below are two triads in four voices. At (b), a passing tone connects the notes in the upper voice. At (c), the passing tone is "frozen" and the resulting harmonic entity is a dominant seventh chord. At (d), an alternate voicing allows a complete chord in bar 1.

By analogy, the dominant ninth chord could also be said to arise from a passing tone, as in the series at (e) to (g) below, where the passing tone is within the dominant chord (f), but alternatively connects two chords (g).

We will see examples of these in the repertoire, but it is clear that another derivation is equally prominent (if we judge from the evidence of musical practices in the first quarter of the 19th century rather than from the assumptions of a historical narrative alone). The progression at (h) is modified at (j) with a leap upward—this "one too far" figure is one of the most distinctive and characteristic stylistic identifiers of the Laendler and early waltz repertoire; it is in fact applied to every scale degree, not only to ^6. In this specific case, a potential dominant ninth is formed, although we would have to call it "apparent" because the 9 resolves to 8 (A5 to G5) within the chord. At (k) and (m) are two versions that are less abstract: at (k), the 9 is a neighbor note rather than an appoggiatura; at (m), on the other hand, the expressive intensity of the appoggiatura is heightened with a larger leap (C5 to A5).

At (a) below, the melody of the last example above is shown with the typical Laendler accompaniment. At (b) is the commonplace figure where a two-bar idea over the dominant is repeated (and slightly adjusted) over the tonic. The same notes, A5-G5, are 9-8 over the dominant bass, then 6-5 over the tonic bass. It is not the topic of this blog, but the add6 chord derives in important part historically from these parallel treatments of ^6 over dominant and tonic in the waltz repertoire. At (c) is what I call a direct resolution, where the ninth (A5) moves to the tonic's fifth (G5) without an intervening note. At (d), is an indirect resolution, or what I like to call an "almost direct resolution," where the repetition of the two-bar idea sets up a pattern such that F5 in bar 1 can be heard to resolve to E5 in bar 3 and A5 in bar 2 to G5 in bar 4. 

Each of the figures shown above can be found easily in the repertoire, but they do not by any means exhaust the treatment of ^6 or of all the notes in the upper tetrachord. The musicians of this era were creative artists—most of them violinists skilled at improvisation as much as composition or score-compliant performance—and they tested multiple ways to exploit the expressive potential of ^6 and the dominant ninth harmony.