Last edited by EdwardBast; Mar-22-2019 at 21:52.
Your frogs make me shudder with intolerable loathing and I shall be miserable for the rest of my life remembering them.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Fatal Eggs
Originality is a device untalented people use to impress other untalented people and to protect themselves from talented people.
— Basil Valentine
Your frogs make me shudder with intolerable loathing and I shall be miserable for the rest of my life remembering them.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Fatal Eggs
Originality is a device untalented people use to impress other untalented people and to protect themselves from talented people.
— Basil Valentine
I'm late responding, but I was in fact thinking of that very part of the first prelude in WTC Book 1.
I agree fully with Woodduck's take on the role of music theory here.
Perhaps more controversially, I think the same idea is applicable to Wagner and the dissolution of tonality. I've started to write a post about that a couple times and may yet finish it in the future.
"I think I let my discomfort with using harmonic explanations when linear explanations are available get the better of me."
Yes, your arms must be sore from trying to stuff that horse into a suitcase.
I've got the Kalmus, the light blue one.
Last edited by millionrainbows; Mar-22-2019 at 22:47.
In the Bach Prelude No. 1, there's a B-C-E-G-C which occurs early on, before the F chord.
In measure 8 of prelude 1 of WTC1 the B in the bass is a suspension that resolves down to A with the change of harmony from C major in m.8 to Am7 in m.9. Dissonances resolving at the change of harmony is common in CP music.
The B in the bass is treated as a dissonance, a suspension, a purely linear event, not as a chord tone. It also sounds, quite obviously, like a suspension.
Any more examples?
P.S. Bach never wrote a maj7 chord. Ever.
Well it has all the notes of a maj7, it sounds like a maj7, it has all the harmonic flavor of a maj7. Call it what you want.
I don't think there's any disagreement among us about the harmonic and contrapuntal origin and function of these maj7 chords in Bach. We'd can all see what's happening in the music (can't we?). The disagreement is in the use of the term "chord," which has more than one usage. This strikes me as a meaningless dispute.
It's obvious that Bach doesn't land on seventh chords out of the blue, just for the "color" of it, as happened in the 19th and 20th centuries. But it's interesting to observe what he does with them when they occur. In measure 21 of the WTC first prelude, where the melodic element is more implied than defined, the color of the chord really takes center stage, all the more so because it resolves into a dim7. Of course Bach was not averse to interesting harmonic effects, as heard in some of the extraordinary, expressive chromatic passages in many of his works (the Goldberg Variations and the "Crucifixus" from the B minor Mass come to mind).