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

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Tip #15: |
| 9:7 can also be used as an intermediary in the resolution of scale |
| degree 4 down to 3 in authentic cadence. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+


(John Chalmers pointed this one out to me; thanks, John!) Contrapuntally,
you could present this somewhat like you would suspended fourth. That would be
kind of like suspending the fourth on elastic string! In other words, the
fourth would go down a little bit to 9:7 above the tonic in the suspended chord,
rather than stick at 4:3 like in a true suspension, then finally resolve to 5:4.
I found it more effective, however, to not move the bass up a fourth from
scale-degree five to one until sounding the final tonic triad.

Neither of these two subtly different progressions seems to heighten the need
to resolve as much as does a 9:7 injected into the leading-tone rise path, as
suggested in the previous tip. That's probably because the suspension gives the
sense that the authentic cadence has - conceptually speaking - already taken
place, even though we still have a note left over.

Here's another intriguing and somewhat similar possibility. I won't dedicate
a tip to it because I haven't studied it enough to get a clear feel for its
usefulness. Consider quartal harmony, or in particular, the three-note chord
formed by two 4:3s stacked atop one another. The top note in that chord is a
16:9 minor seventh above the root. It's certainly possible to move that chord
to a dominant seventh (with omitted fifth) by dropping the middle note from 4:3
above the root to 5:4 above the root. That however is a rather weak harmonic
movement, probably because the harmonic tension doesn't really change all that
much.

But what if we make that movement through the 9:7? The tension certainly
goes up. One probably contrapuntally interesting way to do that would be to
have root and seventh first move up by 28:27 to where the 4:3 above the root
becomes 9:7, and then move that middle note down the remaining 36:35 to form the
5:4 against the moved root.


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