Anthology
Harmony Anthology
Mark Gotham
Key Takeaways
- This is an anthology of a different kind and at a larger scale than the usual provision. Instead of showcasing a few, select examples (as the textbook chapters proper do), the goal here is to provide long lists of cases that at least one analyst sees in terms of the chord under discussion.
- Harmonic analysis is a reductive and subjective task and you should fully expect to disagree with some of the entries included here.
- The idea is to provide minimal curation, allowing you to roam freely among potentially relevant cases from across a broad repertoire, making up your own mind about what counts as an ‘real’ example.
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.
[table id=32 /]
Augmented Triads
Click here for this textbook’s chapter on this topic.
[table id=34 /]
Common Tone Diminished Sevenths
Click here for this textbook’s chapter on this topic.
[table id=85 /]
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.
[table id=31 /]
Neapolitan Sixth Chords
This table includes root position (bII) in addition to first inversion (bII6) chords, as well as seventh chords based on both.
Click here for this textbook’s chapter on this topic.
[table id=33 /]
… and many more
Here, finally, are external links to corresponding anthologies on the same topics for other repertoire collections. These don’t get the same focus here as they are slightly more experimental and the all important links to scores online are not currently possible. All the same, “more is more” for this large, exploratory style of anthology.
- Here are links to the public-facing "version of record", the Github mirror (download all at once), the first report (2018), and the updated report (2021). ↵
- For a longer discussion of (methods for) creating a digital age anthologies, you might like to check of a paper I published with DLfM in 2019, called ‘Moments Musicaux’. ↵