bIII diminished in classical?

[Christian Miller]

Yes, you’re right. If we think of the ii as a suspended V it makes sense.

Not quite? I mean we wouldn't think of it that way from the perspective of stylistic classical harmony.

Prototypically, the augmented sixth is an alteration of the pre-dominant chord of Phrygian half cadence, which goes iv6 V.

So for example in C minor going Fm6/Ab G, we raise F to F# and we get Ab7#11 G.

I don't think it would generally leap to II in classical harmony I don't think, but happy if anyone has an example. Functionally, I see what you're saying. In terms of the specifics, no I don't think it would do that.

In jazz, sure. Bernie's Tune etc.

[setemupjoe]

Not disagreeing with anything you’re saying. Just saying if the OP is looking for classical examples the augmented 6 has some interesting similarities to our biii°.


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[Christian Miller]

For an illustration of how a Galant era musician would go about dealing with a chromatic b3 degree, here are some descending chromatic basses from the 1824 edition of Stanislao Mattei's Versets collection. No bIIIo7 chord I'm afraid.

The original is from 1788.



We have two versions of the descending chromatic scale. His approach to harmonising these basses in the major key is borrow many chords from the parallel minor mode.

Translating to chord symbols, going from the bar before to the root we have

C/E Cm/Eb D-7 G7/D C
And
Em F7/Eb Bb/D Db7 (no5) C
In the autograph (not shown) we have
C/E Cm/Eb Bo/D C (I think - it's hard to read)

The second one is perhaps even less relevant as it seems to be an omnibus progression sort of thing. But I would say it looks like Mattei is viewing the run down #4-4-3-b3-2 in a similar way as he would the run down from 7-b7-6-b6-5 which you can see from the figures. And in that case, it is quite common to swap out the chromatic degrees for diminished chords…. so maybe?

Make of that what you will lol.

More discussion of the collection here:The 100 Versets by Stanislao Mattei – Essays on Music

[Christian Miller]

By the way, this makes me think of jazz,

Mattei has from #4 going down

D/F# Dm/F C/E Cm/Eb D-7 G7/D
Or
D/F# G7/F C/E F7/Eb Bb/D Db7(#11)

So swing era/GASB progressions like

D/F# Fo7 C/E Ebo7 D-7 G7
Or
F#-7b5 F-6 E-7 Ebo7 D-7b5 G7
Etc

Are really close cousins to these

So I’m looking in the direction of Cole Porter, and thinking about where he got his harmony from … and the internet is coming up with G&S?

EDIT: oh he studied counterpoint in Paris because of course he bloody did.

So that takes us to people like Widor and Faure. And the Paris school.

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[James W]

Ok, so according to a couple of harmony textbooks of a Schenkerian sort I have that I've consulted, this is called a common tone diminished seventh chord, distinguished from the leading tone seventh chord by its lack of a leading tone - it's the presence of the tonic note which give it its name common-tone diminished seventh chord. Its function is to expand the tonic. As this is Schenkerian they are regarded as more apparent than real chords i.e. they are contrapuntal expansions. Specifically a flat 3 chord is labelled sharp 2 in one of these texts.

I've just looked at another text, Harmony In Practice by Anna Butterworth, where it is considered a dim 7 on a sharp 4.

Apologies if this so happens to echo something someone has already previously said on this thread...

[Christian Miller]

Ok, so according to a couple of harmony textbooks of a Schenkerian sort I have that I've consulted, this is called a common tone diminished seventh chord, distinguished from the leading tone seventh chord by its lack of a leading tone - it's the presence of the tonic note which give it its name common-tone diminished seventh chord. Its function is to expand the tonic. As this is Schenkerian they are regarded as more apparent than real chords i.e. they are contrapuntal expansions. Specifically a flat 3 chord is labelled sharp 2 in one of these texts.

I've just looked at another text, Harmony In Practice by Anna Butterworth, where it is considered a dim 7 on a sharp 4.

Apologies if this so happens to echo something someone has already previously said on this thread...

I think a similar term is appoggiatura chords? I mentioned it above and gave an example from Chopin. These chords are not considered to have a function in functional analysis.

Anyway I don’t have a scooby doo about Schenkerian theory… so…

All though these chords are inversions of each other, the specific use of the dim7 chord on the bIII degree is not something I’ve been able to track down yet though it does seem to be something you’d naturally get from adding chromatic voice-leading to typical Galant (ie eighteenth century) harmonisations of the descending chromatic scale bass in Mattei for example.


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