Who's Afraid of the Big Bad 9:7? Part 2

The fact that 9:7 has always struck me as something in its own right rather
than an off-5:4, may have something to do with how I first experienced it. That
was in Dave Hill's "Introduction to Nontraditional Harmony". In particular, he
introduced it by extending the harmonic series to include 9 on top of the 7 he
had already introduced. That means that he used 9:7s as parts of intuitive
chords, notably harmonic- and subharmonic-series fragments.

That brings me to my first tip:

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Tip #1: |
| Don't start with supramajor triads, especially not in close-voicing |
| (14:18:21). |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

When confronted with a new third, trying it out in a traditional triadic
structure is perhaps the immediate, natural inclination. You're better off with
inversions of that structure, or better still, using something else instead of a
fifth above the root of the 9:7. Because the 4:5:6 structure is so audibly
intuitive, using 9:7 in place of the 5:4 of that chord, tends to suggest 9:7 is
as a substitute for a 5:4. It generally makes an awful substitute! Again,
we're looking for environments that bring out 9:7's own unique meaning.

Now I'm not claiming that supramajor triads unusable, of course. They're
great when you want your music to portray a startling sensation. They don't
portray 9:7's innate exotic sensation all that well though.


+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Tip #2: |
| A 9:7 supramajor third "stack" also contains an interval close to a |
| sweet-sounding major sixth (5:3). |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+


By a "supramajor third stack" I mean a chord all of whose pitches are a
supramajor third apart, in the same sense that an augmented triad is major third
stack.

The 9:7 supramajor third roughly bisects the 5:3 major sixth. 9:7 x 9:7 =
81:49, which is close to 80:48, 80:48 being the same as 5:3. A 9:7 works out to
about 7 cents flat of half of a 5:3. 9:7 and 5:3 intervals above a common root
sound sweeter and more meaningful together than 9:7 and 3:2 above a root.

In my next posting, I'll mention a few more exotic 9:7-based chords you can
try out.


Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl
with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 4 Jan 1996 04:13 +0100
Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI)
for id TAA05795; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 19:13:46 -0800
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996 19:13:46 -0800
Message-Id: <9601040313.AA18576@ ccrma.Stanford.EDU >
Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu
Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu