BBshop 4tet & 7ths

Yes, without a doubt I don't know much about barbershop quartets, although I
enjoy it. My apparently false impression that most of the chords are dominant
sevenths is based upon a radio interview I heard several years ago with the head
of a barbershop quartet. He described one part as always singing the seventh in
a chord. I presumably misheard him, or misunderstood him. Whatever...

But anyway, my main point, that whether 4:5:6:7 is consonant or dissonant
depends on context, I think is valid.

I suppose that that also partly depends on whether one uses the textbook
definition of dissonance (a chord demands a certain resolution), or the more
common but technically incorrect meaning, that being as a substitute for
"discord". But perhaps that's mostly just a bunch of silly nitpicking.


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Harold Fortunin suggests:
> Do NOT substitute the 7:4 over V for the diatonic scale degree 4--for melodic
> purposes, use 4:3, and for dominant seventh chords, use 7:4 over V. This
> practice will not bother anyone who makes use of the dominant seventh chord in
> the minor scale.

As with your other suggestions, this strikes me as definitely reasonable.
This of course raises some interesting wandering-tonic questions in the case of
common (i.e., held) scale degree 4 between IV and V7 in a typical I-IV-V7-I
progression. Retaining scale degree 4 as a common tone in that progression, if
I recall correctly off the cuff, causes the ending tonic to be 36:35 above the
beginning tonic.

On a related side note, in a recent e-mail conversation with Bill Sethares,
he told me about the work he's done with generalizing his tuning-timbre
interaction discoveries to include dynamically-changing tuning. Or to state it
another way, he's devised algorithms for generalizing the dynamic JI task to
other tuning-timbre combinations. That strikes me as having very exciting
possibilities, but I'd probably better not say much more just in case Bill wants
to keep it quiet until he publishes his results.

But anyway, in that conversation, I noticed a difference in attitude toward
wandering tonics. He viewed them, in essence, as a problem to be dealt with.
By no means do I view that as an inappropriate opinion, but my opinion is
exactly the reverse; I think that wandering tonics have a very fascinating
musical effect.


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