Who's Afraid of the Big Bad 9:7? Part 8

As with a lot of musical sounds in new tunings, what I guess we might call
"lack of legacy" makes it a little difficult to clearly pinpoint the unique
sensation of 9:7. It's very easy to pinpoint the sound of a major triad in part
because we hear them all of the time. But it's also easy to pinpoint because we
have a rich legacy of well-known chord progressions with well-understood effects
to relate it to.

What sorts of cadences would you build using 9:7s? That's a tough question
to answer because the significance of a cadence is just as much cultural as it
is strictly musical. By that I mean that the musical effect of a cadence is
based every bit as much upon how listeners greet it as it does upon how it
sounds. How a cadence is used historically in well-known music is as important
as how it sounds in isolation.

The problem there clearly is that there's very little well-known music, in
Western tradition anyway, that uses 9:7s. So we can only propose possibilities,
try to pinpoint best usages in real music, and then start using them that way so
that they'll start developing this sort of cadential personality.

One way to start in this effort, is to build upon tradition by adding 9:7s
into well-known cadences.


+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Tip #14: |
| In the traditional resolution of a dominant seventh to tonic (an |
| authentic cadence), the leading tone can be made to rise from 5:4 |
| above scale degree 5, through 9:7, then up to the tonic (4:3). This |
| is a smooth movement, and successfully adds more tension resolved in |
| the movement to the tonic. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+


Some are concerned that using a 7:4 (as opposed to 9:5 for example) for the
seventh of a dominant seventh chord, takes most of the dissonance out of the
chord. If you are of that persuasion, then you might find this a good trick,
because the dominant seventh chord with a third at 9:7 and the seventh at 7:4 is
thoroughly dissonant, and resoves nicely to a tonic triad.

This also works fine for the typical V7-vi deceptive cadence as well.


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