THE PREDOMINANT AREA

This is a supplement to The Complete Musician Chapter 12: The-Predominant Refines the Phrase Model

TONAL AREA RECAP

Remember when we learned about TONIC and DOMINANT areas in Music Theory I and you were probably pretty confused and also didn’t understand why I kept bringing The Lord of the Rings film franchise into it? Well, here we go again …

In Western (tonal) Classical Music, there is directionality to the harmonic progression not unlike a story. In its most straightforward form, the music opens on a neutral, un-energized area that we could consider home base. The music then begins to stray away from home base, straying further and further until there is so much tension and distance that it snaps back and ends where it began - at home base, but (we hope) somewhat transformed and changed.

In this way, Western Classical Music directly reflects the archetype of the Hero’s Journey of Western Classical Literature and Theatre you probably learned about in English class.

In this comparison, our home base is represented by the TONIC area - whether that tonic is major or minor given the tonality. Tonic is essentially just the I chord but we have also learned that other chords can appear in the tonic to expand the area - most especially when they are in inversions and serving as passing chords, neighbor chords, etc.

This leads us to considering the area of tension - the furthest from “home” for the story’s hero, or even their “abyss” - as our DOMINANT area. Dominant chords share little in common with tonic, but the “leading” quality and pull of the chord tones of V and viiᵒ to resolve to I heightens the tension and makes the return to tonic all the more satisfying.

The area we will focus on now is one we haven’t spent much time with to date. This is the area between “home” and “abyss” (point of most tension before the return to home) is the PREDOMINANT area. This area has the most room for color and development because of the strength of the major IV, the presence of minor ii and also the position of vi to serve as a minor substitution for I. We can relate this area to the beginning of the hero’s adventure in the classic literary/dramatic archetype.

To summarize, the standard phrase model in Western Classical Music is TONIC - PREDOMINANT - DOMINANT - TONIC. Not all phrases have predominant areas. Some phrases end intentionally in the dominant. Some start on predominant or dominant just to mess with the listener’s ear and leave them unprepared for a more “surprise” return to tonic. Having a basic understanding of the standard format will help you to understand a composer’s intent when they intentionally obscure the structure.

Here’s another non Lord of the Rings example to help make this make sense:

THE PHRASE MODEL AS DESCRIBED IN THE HERO’S JOURNEY OF TOY STORY

(w/ spoilers)

The easiest chord progression to see a working model of the standard phrase is: I - IV - V - I. If you have taken class piano, you likely have swum up to your eyeballs in I - IV - V - I. While these four chords aren’t always present in a phrase model, they often are, with other “color” chords filling in between to expand the various areas.

EMBEDDED PHRASE MODEL

On some occasions, a composer will create a short and weak phrase model within a larger phrase model. Consider this embedded phrase model PHRASE-CEPTION. Most of the time, the embedded phrase happens during the first tonic area before moving to the full predominant area. You can tell this is happening when the material following the embedded phrase is not starting a new phrase and generally a stronger harmonic area than the previous material.

T - (PD - D - T) - PD - D - T

I - (IV⁶ - V⁶⁴ - I⁶) - IV - V⁷ - I

PHRASE EXTENSIONS

Another common way to elongate a phrase without inserting an entirely complete embedded phrase is to extend the phrase. In a phrase extension, a composer adds material in one of the following ways:

• Adding new material to a tonal area

• Repetition of previous material (either exact repetition or in a sequence starting on a different scale degree)

• Adding a third section of material to an otherwise symmetrical phrase

• Delaying the cadence by drawing out the area immediately preceding the cadence

T - PD - (D - D - D) - D - T

I - IV - (I⁶⁴ - V - I⁶⁴) - V⁷ - I

COMMON PREDOMINANT SEVENTH CHORDS

Now that we know a little more about phrases and where we will encounter different types of chords, let’s look at the various seventh chords we will most likely encounter in the predominant area …

The first type of seventh chord we learned was the most common - the dominant seventh chord. This chord is found most prevalently as a V⁷ which is why it is called dominant (dominant being the area associated with the V chord). We have also learned many other types of seventh chord qualities such as major, minor, half-diminished, and fully diminished. The fully diminished seventh chord is most often found in the dominant area as well as this coincides with the tension-filled viiᵒ⁷ (occurring naturally in minor and occurring in major with the addition of an accidental for the ♭♭7. The chart below shows what typical predominant triads become when transformed into seventh chords.

Out of all the predominant chords, the seventh quality we see most often is the ii⁶⁵ (super tonic seventh chord in first inversion). This places scale degree 4 in the bass (an easy preparation to be followed by a V in root position) and the minor two quality is a much more comfortable sound than the major seventh of IVᴹ⁷ (which has a half step between the chordal 7th and root). Note that just like in dominant seventh chords, we often must use an incomplete chord and omit the chordal 5th to avoid parallel fifths in the voice leading realization.

THE SUBMEDIANT (vi)