![]() Weber himself even commented on this in later editions, saying: In comparison, for the major seventh he uses a similar notation but with a slash through the 7.įrom then on, convention has kept chord symbols mostly the same over the years, with only small changes from what Weber originally used. Later on, when Weber lays out his notation for seventh chords, it's only natural that the dominant seventh (being the "essential" or "principal" seventh chord of greatest importance) is given the simplest designation with just a capital letter followed by a 7 (e.g. Since however, it is very desirable that this particular four-fold chord, at least, should have a distinct name of its own, inasmuch as it is the principal chord of the kind, we will accordingly denominate it the principal four-fold chord. Others have again called it the essential seventh chord. Vogler proposes the name entertaining seventh because the seventh of this chord "agreeably entertains the ear". The first, indeed, (the one that has a major third, a major fifth, and a minor seventh) is often called the dominant chord but this appellation, as we shall see hereafter, has too much of a special relativeness to be duly clear and unequivocal. The four varieties of four-fold chords above enumerated have not, like the three sorts of three-fold chords, each its own particular name. In his treatise Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsezkunst (1817) he talks about categorization of what he refers to as "four-fold chords" (which we know as "seventh chords") saying this (English translation by James F. Gottfried Weber was one of the earliest writers to use what we would recognize as "modern" chord symbols in harmonic analysis (as opposed to the more traditional figured bass or Roman Numerals). The answer is that even though a C major seventh chord would fit more "naturally" in the C major scale, the dominant chord is much more fundamental to our conception of harmony (for example, in the C major scale, G7 is a very important chord because of the tonic-dominant relationship). So why does the dominant seventh get the "default" symbol of C7 whereas we have to qualify the others as CMaj7, CMin7, etc.? Another way of looking at the question is this: we have a number of seventh chords, dominant, major, minor, diminished, and so on. ![]()
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