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Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  2/15/01; 9:52:53 PM Topic:  Pausing on a V7 chord Msg#:  1412 (in response to 1409) Prev/Next:  1411/1413 Reads:  1538

Hi Chris,

   I was watching your conversation for this over on the JustJazz forum on yahoogroups. The suggestions don't seem right, but I'm not sure I can be any more satisfying.

  I've read theory books that call those stops along the cycle of fourths secondary dominants. Classical theorists who follow Schenker might call those F7's "prolongations" because they delay the arrival of the progression back in Eb. Maybe the term "delayed resolution" describes the situation also.

 In There Will Never Be Another You changes posted on SongTrellis, if you look at the last six bars of the A section (bars 11-16), here's what I see going on. The EbMa7 in bar 11 is the tonic, goal chord for the progression. We've stated it several times as the goal, so we're going to take another excursion which will lead us back to it. It moves to the relative minor of EbMa, the Cmi 7, in bar 12. This Cmi7 is a kind of pun because by the next chord it's also treated as the ii chord in a ii-V that moves to F7. As of bar 13, we've begun a two step chain of  dominants that will lead us back to EbMa7 when we wrap back to the beginning of the form. Your version of the tune simplifies bars 13 and 14 into two chords of F7. By the same logic we could simplify bar 15 and 16 into two bars of Bb7 instead of Fmi7-Bb7. Both the F7 and the Bb7 slow down the harmonic motion and delay our resolution to Eb.  When we wrap back to bar 1, we're back to the tonic Eb Ma7.

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