Harmony Anthology

Throughout this textbook, we have provided short examples of the musical subjects under discussion such as a specific chord or progression. These examples have included both simple, ‘prototypical’ versions to clarify how the idea works in principle, and also moments from real pieces in the repertoire.

Inevitably, these chapters only have space for a few such examples, so this final, ‘anthology’ section seeks to provide many more instances, enabling users to see a wider range of cases and with full context. No textbook or anthology can hope to capture the full range of ways in which these chords are used. Indeed, it’s not always clear whether a moment constitutes a ‘real’ example of the chord at hand. Hopefully, this at least provides space to roam and explore those ‘edge cases’.

This first instalment of that vision focuses primarily on harmonic matters and on a corpus of nineteenth century songs encoded as part of the OpenScore Lieder Corpus which releases its transcriptions under the CC0 licence meaning that they can be used for any purpose whatsoever without restriction.^[1] The tables below list moments identified as relevant by human analysts. So while much of the grunt work of collating lists and retrieving examples etc. has been automated, the analysis itself has not.^[2]

Each of the tables below gives the:

• song’s metadata: composer, collection title, song name,
• measure number and Roman numeral (figure and key) for the moment in question.
• URL link through to check out (play, download, etc) the score online.

This page currently includes lists for:

• Augmented Sixth chords
• Augmented Triads
• Common Tone Diminished Sevenths
• Modal Mixture
• Neapolitan Sixth Chords

Please get in touch if you would like to see other chords or progressions represented here. For those interested in the computational side, all source material (scores, analyses, code, etc.) is available here.

Augmented Sixth chords

Click here for this textbook’s chapter on this topic.

Augmented Triads

Click here for this textbook’s chapter on this topic.

Common Tone Diminished Sevenths

Click here for this textbook’s chapter on this topic.

Modal Mixture

Click here for this textbook’s chapter on this topic.

This table provides examples of modal mixture which is much more difficult define robustly than is the case for the Neapolitan sixth chords, for example. The list here provides examples where:

• Clearly mixed tone counts towards mixture and clearly non-mixed tone counts against it.
  • E.g., F-Ab-C-E in C major has both a clearly mixed tone (Ab, the minor sixth) and a clearly non-mixed tone (E, the major third).
  • Clearly clearly non-mixed tones do not necessarily preclude mixture if there are also strongly mixed tones.
• Mixture does not necessarily need to work in relation to all forms of the minor mode.
• “Chromatic” notes (that are not diatonic to the primary mode, shared between major and minor, nor mixed) are neutral
• Enharmonic spelling of the chord matters (so Ab might indicate mixture from c minor into C major, but G# probably does not);
• Secondary Roman numerals
  • can indicate mixture (are not necessarily excluded);
  • are considered against the home (primary rather than secondary) key. E.g., viio/V is considered against the I, primary tonic rather the V secondary.

Complex eh?! I’ll provide a clear explanation and demonstration of all these options somewhere accessible soon. For now, every entry on this this makes at least a reasonably strong case for mixture.