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Re: Alignment in figured bass
From: |
Lukas-Fabian Moser |
Subject: |
Re: Alignment in figured bass |
Date: |
Sat, 12 Nov 2022 11:22:55 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.2.2 |
Hi Jean-Julien,
It's seems to be a very «franco-french» notation but denoting a pretty
important chord in tonal harmony: the dominant seventh.
You can see it on the french wikipedia page (cf
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accord_de_septième_de_dominante_avec_fondamentale#Enchaînement_ordinaire_de_la_septième_de_dominante_avec_fondamentale
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accord_de_septi%C3%A8me_de_dominante_avec_fondamentale#Encha%C3%AEnement_ordinaire_de_la_septi%C3%A8me_de_dominante_avec_fondamentale>
examples A and B). The + sign stands for the leading-tone which
accidental is never indicated (in french notation), it has to be
deduced from the notation.
I also checked in my book « Théorie de la musique » by A. Danhauser
(1994 version) where you can find the attached table (page 130) in
which you will see the + appearing in other chords too (all related to
the leading-tone)
Thanks for you examples. It would be interesting to see where this came
up historically: The old French standard textbooks I have here (Dandrieu
1718, Rameau 1722 or 1726) do not seem to do this yet, although Rameau
interestingly uses a different glyph for i) raising a note in staff
notation and ii) raising a bass figure or a note name (1726, p. 44):
Charles Koechlin (1928) Vol 1, p. 65:
But I'm not yet convinced that your description of the accidental of a
leading tone never being indicated holds true: Koechlin 1, p. 59:
So the + sign seems to be specially reserved for dominant seventh chords?
In Olivier Alain's harmony textbook (1969), the style you describe (+
vs. ♯) seems to be a matter of course (p. 11):
On the other hand, G. Lefèvre's Traité d'harmonie (1889) does not use
bass figures at all.
As you can notice, I'm not an expert at all on the development of French
music theory, but it seems the stabilisation towards the very
standardised harmonic language my French students (at German/Austrian
music universities) have seems to have taken place in the first daces of
the 20th century? Maybe even by Koechlin's textbook (which I seem to
remember was quite influential)?
Lukas