Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: 1] Building on Robert Morris's (1990) research on hexachordal ZC-relations, Stephen Soderberg (1998) identifies a constellation of ten hexachords that embed either one diminished seventh chord or two diminished triads.Soderberg divides the constellation, called MORRIS (or T-HEX), into four overlapping eight-hexachord sub-constellations based on tetrachordal subset content.The first of these sub-constellations, TRISTAN, includes the hexachords that embed two instances of set class 4-27[0258], the set class of the major-minor and half-diminished seventh chords.Similarly, constellations ZAUBER, AGITATION, and BROODING include the hexachords that embed two instances of set classes 4-18[0147], 4-13[0136], and 4-12[0236], respectively.Soderberg characterizes each of these tetrachordal set types as a "warp" of the diminished seventh chord.When the "warp index," w, is 1, the result is set class 4-27-that is, moving any pc of a diminished seventh chord by interval class (ic) 1 creates a member of set class 4-27.Similarly, setting w = 2, 4, and 5 creates set classes 4-18, 4-13, and 4-12, respectively.The article goes on to point out a general property of voice leading: in each hexachord the pair of tetrachords can be connected by holding two pitch classes in common and by moving two others by ±w.The cases involving 4-27 and ic 1 voice leading (TRISTAN) are familiar-ii -V 7 , the Tristan chord with resolution, A 7 -B 7 at the beginning of Debussy's Faune, and others-and have been addressed in the theoretic literature by several authors.(1) Example 1 presents the MORRIS constellation and its four overlapping sub-constellations, henceforth called Volume 17, Number 4, December 2011
Source: Music Theory Online
DOI: 10.30535/mto.17.4.2
Author: Mark Sallmen
Institution: University of Toronto
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1490560422