Dear all,
Next week’s Music History/Theory Workshop features the newest member of the Music Department faculty, Drew Nobile, presenting a paper titled, “Towards a Syntactical Definition of Harmonic Function in Rock and Other Repertoires.” The pre-circulated reading and related media links are available on the “downloads” page, with password “rock” – Sarah Iker will open discussion as this week’s respondent.
Note that the reading is lengthy, so Drew especially directs readers to pages 1–4 and 33–46. Drew writes:
Definitions of harmonic function generally take on two forms: The first, which I will call “function-as-chord-identity,” derives from Riemannian Funktionstheorie and considers a chord’s function to be based on its internal characteristics—for example, IV and II might be assigned subdominant function because they contain scale-degrees 4 and 6. The second, which I will call “function-as-syntax,” considers harmonic function not to be something a chord has but something it represents or functions as in a given musical context. For example, a chord that leads to the tonic to close off a phrase or other formal unit can be said to function as the syntactical dominant. In this presentation, I will argue that function-as-chord-identity definitions are inherently problematic, and that these problems are magnified when these definitions are applied to repertoires outside the common practice. In rock music, for example, many chords—not just V and its variants—can fulfill the syntactical role of dominant, such as IV, II, ♭VII, or even some versions of I. That is, these chords fulfill all the formal and rhetorical functions that we associate with dominant function, even though they may have no tones in common with a V chord. A purely syntactical definition of harmonic function divorced from notions of chord identity is therefore more appropriate to describe the harmonic organization of this repertoire.
The attached document is taken from my nearly complete dissertation. I won’t be talking about the whole thing but will instead focus on the discussion of syntactical dominant function. I would therefore point workshop attendees to the following pages:
Pages 1–4 (the introduction)
Pages 33–46 (on “Dominant Function” and “Prolongation of the Syntactical Dominant”)
I invite readers to pay particular attention to the analysis of “Take Me to the River” on pages 35–39, in which I interpret a I7 chord to function as dominant.
The workshop will take place in the Logan Center Terrace Seminar Room (801), from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 20.
Please join us as we share in discussion, food, and drink!