study-music

Openness of harmonic analysis

Harmonic analysis is a creative reductionism and not a mechanical operation. There’s no single valid harmonic analysis. Different scholars perform harmonic analyses differently, and disagreements arise everywhere:

• V7 or viio, ii6 or IV, IV6 or vi
• I64 or Cad64 or V64 or a functional labelling of passing chords
• cadential I(247 - 35) - triple suspension, a reddit discussion
• should we mark passing harmonies?
• should we mark common-tone chords?
• what’s a root of a non-applied diminished seventh chords, eg. io7 or #ivo7?
• what if a third/a fifth is missing, or there are three consecutive pitches? pic source

• can root be missing/implied, eg. use V7 in place of viio?
• are we overgeneralize Roman numerals as functional analysis labels in ambiguous cases?
• what to do with quartal chords? pic source

See “On the relative openness of syntax” in Mark Gotham’s paper

As a single example, below are three different analyses of the beginning of Beethoven’s op. 2 no. 1 mov. 1 (🎥 audio on YouTube):

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And how it’s annotated in William E. Caplin’s book:

Literature

• DCML’s annotation tutorial

• Papers from the “When in Rome” corpus

• Christopher White, “The Music in The Data”, chapter 3 on harmony

• AugmentedNet paper - also follow other cited works from there