![]() Here are a few common ones, all in the key of D major. We can create secondary dominants for a wide variety of chords, major or minor. When the E major chord appears in the key of D major, we usually call it V/V, pronounced “five of five.” It’s the V chord of the key of V (A major). The way we’ll usually do that is to use it in the context of an E major chord, which is the V chord in the key of A. G# isn’t in the key of D major (D E F# G A B C# D), but we can still use G# in the key of D major to “point” at A. We can also use the leading tone and V chord of another key to temporarily “point” at that key.įor example, V in the key of D major, as we’ve seen, is A. That leading tone will frequently occur within the V chord. In classical music, the leading tone is crucial to our perception of what key we’re in. Here’s where chromaticism comes in: What if we could have leading tones for notes other than the tonic? More generally, we would also want to hear the V chord resolve to I. If we were to hear these chords in the context of a passage that’s clearly in the key of D, our ears would pick up on that C#, and we would want that note to resolve to the tonic. (The same goes for the key of D minor, where C# frequently appears despite not being written in the key signature itself.) Here, for example, we have an A major chord (V) resolving to a D major chord (I). That is, when we’re in the key of D major, we want to hear C# resolve to D. Whether we’re in major or minor, the leading tone will often appear within a V chord, and when we hear it, our ears want the leading tone to resolve to the tonic. The leading tone is a half step below the tonic, so if we’re in D major, our leading tone is C#. Remember all the way back in Chapter 7 when we discussed leading tones? Understanding leading tones can help us understand chromaticism as well. Instead, we’ll mostly use chromatic notes to emphasize existing notes from within the key. The wildness of atonality can be thrilling, but that’s not the approach we’ll take here. One possibility when we’re using notes from outside our major or minor scales is to just ditch tonality altogether and head boldly into atonality. If we use them correctly, these chromatic notes can be quite striking, and perhaps even song-defining. The answer is that by using notes from outside the key, we can point the listener’s ear in directions we wouldn’t have been able to if we only used notes from within it. Why, you might ask, would we want to stray from the key? Many, or even most, great pop songs only contain notes from their original keys. Now we’ll begin to discuss chromaticism, in which we are writing in a particular key and we use notes from outside that key. Most of the concepts we’ve discussed so far allow us to pick a key, remember the notes of that key and stay there. They usually then resolve to x, although sometimes they’ll resolve to a different chord, creating a deceptive resolution. They are the dominant chords of scale degrees other than the tonic, and they’ll typically include at least one note from outside the key. Secondary dominants take the form V/x or V7/x, where x is a normal scale degree.
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