Here is one of several posts in which I will provide an overview of the information at the beginning of each song post. Eventually, there will be posts about each of these concepts in depth.
A long time ago in a land far, far away… Okay fine, it was 1992 in Germany. I was an exchange student. I had already taken two years of undergrad theory back home and here I was in a Baroque analysis class and a Classical analysis class in German and I was totally, completely, utterly lost. I thought I was pretty good at music theory and that seemed less and less true as the weeks went by. About halfway through the semester, I discovered two things. First, I found a German-English music dictionary in the Musikhochschule library. Second, I found a cassette and accompanying book of transcriptions of various German dialects in the language lab. With these two discoveries, I realized a) the music theory I was learning at home was not the only music theory there was and it wasn't the kind they were teaching in Germany, and b) my Classical analysis professor only spoke the local dialect. And that was why I was so lost. I was listening for numbers — scale degrees that indicated chord function. While there was a tiny bit of that in the Baroque analysis class, it was not the primary way music was analyzed. Eventually, as in years later, I found out about Hugo Riemann, but in the meantime, I dropped the Classical class — because I knew I wasn't going to master both the new theory system and the local dialect by the end of the semester — focused on the Baroque class where the teacher did speak Hochdeutsch (Vielen Dank, Prof. Mahnkopf…), and made a little chart with the new-to-me Riemannian symbols and the familiar Roman numerals, and pressed on. By the end of the semester, I felt like my old self again, at least in terms of my music theory prowess.
There are many ways to look at music. I don't think we necessarily need to master them all,1 but even if we never set foot outside our home country, having even just a passing awareness of these other perspectives is a good thing. There is no absolute, all-powerful, master theory that applies equally to all musics. The very notion that there is one has gotten us in many a bind. We are still working through the reality that music that does not adhere to Western Classical theory concepts is, in fact, music! Valid music. Real music. Not less-than. Just different. Theory is not the way music works; it's just one way of many of talking about patterns and norms in certain musical traditions. That's why it's called "theory."
I find that the different systems for naming chord relationships, or functions, each offer a different sort of insight. The Roman numerals remind you what scale degrees a chord is built upon. The Riemannian names — particularly when you get beyond tonic, dominant, and subdominant — gives you a different perspective on the relationships between chords which have common tones or are related by major-minor tonalities. For example, a deceptive cadence switches out the vi for the I. From a Riemannian point of view, that's possible because the vi is the minor relative (what Germans call the parallel, "Parallele") of the tonic chord. I came, however, to feel that both scale degrees and Riemannian terminology are still very abstract and accessible to students only through rote memorization. Philip Tagg's ideas help a little, but eventually I decided to come up with some "plain English" terms based around some of Tagg's concepts.
Part of the reason for "plain English" is that I have often taught non-native speakers. A term like "counterpoise" is already going to be challenging for native speakers, depending on how well-read, language-oriented, and analytical they are. For some, that word's meaning will be obvious right away, but not the majority of, say, middle schoolers. It's a lovely word! "Tonic" and "dominant" are lovely too, but their use in music is so far removed from their original etymologic meanings ("tonos" = stretch and "domos" = home, so don't look for help there!), that we have to come up with something else anyway to explain what they mean.2 This becomes an absolute necessity when we start looking at Afro-European-American musics. The dominant 7th chord no longer exclusively signals a return to the tonic. There's enough similarity with European musics that much of theoretical structures can hold — not to mention that we just simply have an established habit about naming that isn't always worth fighting — but it now helps to have terms like: home, away, outgoing, incoming. But even with classical music these terms can be useful and enlightening.
The chart at the top of each post lists the following:
The English function names — tonic, dominant, subdominant, subtonic.
Philip Tagg's function names (and the modified ones I made up). These functions usually depend not only on the pitch sets, but also their temporal placement in the phrase. Because we are dealing primarily with two chords (eventually, we'll get to more), we really just have two functions and the placement in the phrase is less pertinent.
Riemannian function names (capital = major chord, lowercase = minor chord) — T or t = Tonika, D = Dominant, S or s = Subdominant, dP = Dominantparalele (d = lowercase because in mixolydian, aeolian, and dorian the dominant chord is minor; P = the subtonic itself is major).
Roman numerals based on scale degrees. I or i is always the tonic. Here, too, I prefer to use capital for major and lowercase for minor. In Schenkerian theory, only capitals are used, regardless of flavor.
The chords themselves.
The whole point of naming the function in addition to the name of the chord is that our brains make sense of the relationships between pitches, not the absolute frequencies themselves. Naming these relationships helps us hear them more clearly.
I can tell you I have certainly not mastered Riemannian theory.
And if anyone wants to pipe in with where terms like "mediant" and "submediant" come from, I didn't take that part of history of music theory.