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Seventh chords, intonation, and function

🔗lobawad <lobawad@...>

2/8/2012 9:11:20 AM

Okay, here's a bit of schmalz that illustrates what I've been saying about seventh chords and the difficulty of finding practical collections of pitches when using them as I do.

http://www.mediafire.com/?33t209ph9a71ara

In functional notation it goes as follows. "H" means tuned harmonically, eg, in C, IH7 would be 4:5:6:7 and I7 would be the 5-limit chord with 6:5 above the 3:2. It's in 41, not perfect by any means, but if it's not sufficient the whole business of temperament must be highly suspect (it's sufficient for me and I take a dim view of approximation).

1° phrase:
I, +IVH11, IH7, iiH11, V7, I

2° phrase:
IH7, II9, V

3° phrase: blah blah (ivH9 out to IV)

The +IVH11 is tuned downwards, retaining the pitch of Do (C) as the 11th. I have doubts if considering this an enharmonic equivalence is really proper: it just is what it is. The iiH11 to my ears blends so much with the V7 that the whole thing is a tall dominant.

The distinction between iiH11 and the II9 in the next phrase is significantly more marked than the alteration of the third- to my ears it is clearly V/V so intoned, i.e. Re (D here) meaningfully changes according to whether there is a 5-limit structure above it or a 7 or 11-limit structure above it.

It took 20 irregularly spaced intervals to do these simple things.