Talk:Function (music)

message: I removed the following
*Diatonic functionality cannot be defined in pure equal temperament terms, but it can, however, be defined in meantone terms. Diatonic functionality for music tuned to equal temperament can be thought of as deriving from equal temperament as a tuning of logical, or abstract, meantone. That is, it is basic to the diatonic scale and diatonic functionality that four fifths up and two octaves down gives a major third, and that the supertonic or ii chord is both in a relation of a fifth above the dominant, or V chord, and a minor third below the subdominant, or IV chord. This entails the presence of logical meantone, but diatonic functionality does not assume other characteristic structural features of equal temperament.
I don't think this is true or correct, but more importantly I think it is not relevant. Hyacinth 12:42, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed: Meantone

message: *"Generally speaking, the most important notes are the members of the tonic triad: the tonic, the mediant and the dominant. All other notes are understood to have some relation to those notes. The leading tone, for example, the seventh scale degree, has a significance of being a half-step below the tonic and has a tendency to resolve there. The fourth scale degree, the subdominant, has a tendency to resolve to the third degree, the mediant."
I removed the above paragraph as I would argue the most important notes are the tonic, dominant, and subdominant and that, for example, the fourth scale degree relates more importantly and directly to the tonic as the subdominant than to the mediant as an upper leading tone. Hyacinth 12:32, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed

message: For the love of God, separate the explanations of the German and US systems. They shouldn't be constantly compared as they're being explained. Explain each, and then compare. I already know about this stuff and I can't even follow some parts.
:Please sign your posts on talk pages per Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages. Thanks! Hyacinth 20:04, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: German and US systems

message: The article uses the term "diatonic" extensively, but without adequate explanation. This term, along with "chromatic", is the cause of serious uncertainties at several other Wikipedia articles, and in the broader literature. Some of us thought that both terms needed special coverage, so we started up a new article: Diatonic and chromatic. Why not have a look, and join the discussion? Be ready to have comfortable assumptions challenged!
– Noetica♬♩ Talk 22:24, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Diatonic and chromatic

message: Dear all,
I tried to edit the section
"Diatonic functions of notes and chords"
but it was reverted.  
Supertonic 	ii 	Subdominant parallel/Tonic counter parallel 	Sp/tKp
the ii chord (supertonic) is NOT a tonic counter parallel.  From what I understand, a parallel or counterparallel must be a 3rd away from the reference chord, and the supertonic is not a 3rd away from the tonic.  Please let me know if this is correct.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Microcosmmm (talk • contribs) 01:41, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Providing an Wikipedia:Edit summary in the future may help prevent your edits from being undone. If you check the counter parallel article it disagrees with you in regards to minor keys, though it lacks sources. Do you have a source you can cite? Hyacinth (talk) 03:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

text: Major and minor are different. According to counter parallel, the counter parallel of the tonic in major is  iii while the counter parallel differs in minor, being ii. Hyacinth (talk) 08:49, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

text: You're right, I confused sP and Sp. Thanks. Hyacinth (talk) 05:41, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tonic Counter Parallel 

message: The paragraph under this heading should be placed in context. Unfree (talk) 20:18, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Functions in the minor mode

message: I wanted to make a few simplifications in the lead of this article (I fail to figure out what a statement like this: "A fourth feature is the ambiguity that arises from the use of the same terms to describe functions across all temporal spans of a hierarchical structure from the surface to the deepest level, and that the longer term or deeper functions act as a center for shorter higher level ones and that the functions of each tend to counteract each other" might possibly mean), but soon stumbled over another problem.
This article appears to be about what may better be called "harmonic" or "tonal" functions. I don't think that Riemann, who is correctly presented as the originator of the concept, ever spoke of diatonic functions. It is true that the tonality of which we are speaking is diatonic, but it seems to me that "diatonic functions" must be something quite different, that people today may perhaps call "diatonic qualia"...
At any rate, it seems that the article should be renamed either "Harmonic function" or "Tonal function". At present, Tonal function redirects here, but I think that it should be the other way around. Harmonic function (which deals with mathematical functions) refers to Diatonic functionality, which in turn also redirects here. Although I am myself convinced that diatonic functions properly speaking do exist (along the lines drawn by Jacques Handschin in Der Toncharakter, or the medieval descriptions of the qualitas or the mode of notes), I think that the time is not yet ripe for an article on these functions: the references would be missing.
Hucbald.SaintAmand (talk) 10:49, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for bringing up this question. I have been wondering for a long time why the article bears this title, instead of "tonal" or "harmonic" function, which were the only terms I had come across before finding this on Wikipedia. Since "harmonic function" is already taken for the mathematical sense, it seems reasonable to rename this article "Tonal function", unless someone can come up with a strong argument for keeping the current title. As for that impenetrable sentence, it ought to be nominated for some sort of award for obfuscation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:35, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diatonic function, harmonic function, tonal function? 

message: The table has entries like "Dp or [Tg]"; the square brackets are explained a few sentences later, but they made me wonder whether I missed an additional notation. Could this be rewritten as "Dp (or Tg)" - again with an explanation like "the less likely one is shown in parentheses in the table". But parentheses in situations like this have, I think, a common (vague) meaning "not the typical case", so that also a casual reader would gather roughly the correct meaning. --User:Haraldmmueller 10:13, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Square brackets in "German functional theory" 

message: In the second table in the article,
# I do not understand what the "thing" under "English" (and also "German") would be: Being German-speaking I'd say these are the "functions" - but what is then what is indicated below "Function"? Could we have two category names for these classifications?
# the "counter parallel" is not given under "German" - that would be "Gegenklang".
# yet, an abbreviation for it is given under "German abbreviation" - but "Tkp" is, as far as I know, wrong: It should be Tg.
# the slashes for iii are "uninformative"; the word "or" would indicate more clearly that the mediant can be assigned two different ... whatevers.
Am I correct for 2...4.? then I'd change it; re 1., if anyone has a term to write near "English", I'd be happy to hear it. Instead of German, I'd put in the header German "Funktion" if that's ok.
--User:Haraldmmueller 10:23, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tkp? 

message: "Functions in the minor mode" starts with
:"In the US the minor mode or scale is considered a variant of the major, while in German theory it is often considered, per Riemann, the inversion of the major." 
Historically, this is certainly true for "German theory"; but I doubt that "often" is true today. Is there a(ny) source for this claim? --User:Haraldmmueller 10:26, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minor is inversion  of major in German(y)? 

message: Under "Tonicization", it says (for a possibly explanation of the blues turnaround):
:"doubled plagal cadence, IV/V–V–IV–I (IV/V–I/V, IV/I–I/I)".
I would understand this easily if it simply said:
:"doubled plagal cadence IV/V–I/V-IV/I–I/I."
or maybe better
:"two subsequent plagal cadences IV/V–I/V and IV/I–I/I."
(to reduce "symbol confusion"). What is the explanatory value of the "IV/V–V–IV–I" in the current version?
--User:Haraldmmueller 10:35, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unclear double plagal cadence 

message: My revision of the article supressed several links to articles that puzzle me: tonic parallel, dominant parallel, subdominant parallel. Each of these redirects to another artile, parallel and counter parallel, which states that
:In music, a parallel chord (relative chord, German: Parallelklang) is an auxiliary chord derived from one of the primary triads and sharing its function: subdominant parallel, dominant parallel, and tonic parallel.
and refers to Frank Haunschild, The New Harmony Book, 2000. Gjerdingen, however, in his Guide to the terminology of German harmony, states that "the [German] names for the so-called secondary degrees may strike the English reader as foreign in both sound and concept." And indeed I had never encountered the English word "parallel" as a synonym for "relative". "Parallel", on the contrary, usually denotes something different: the chord of the same root but of opposed mode – C major an C minor, for instance, are "parallel chords", e.g. in neo-Riemannian theory, or as clearly described in the article parallel key. 
Oddly, the article parallel and counter parallel does not make use of the German abbreviations (P and G for Parallele and Gegenparallele, but uses the neo-Riemannian abbreviation, L, for Leittonwechsel. It also proposes Cp for "counter parallel" and a fancyful German version, Kp, which does not seem to exist in German. 
I don't know what to do of this... — Hucbald.SaintAmand (talk) 10:47, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Parallel and counter parallel appears to refer only to Haunschild's "The New Harmony Book", which is published by a German publisher and which is not even able to give the contents on that web page in English. I suspect very much that either a German person translated the work (maybe with some last editing by a native English speaker, who might not know enough about music to boldly change "parallel" to "relative"), or by an "average" English translator who also might believe - or have been made to believe - that "parallel" is fine. If someone has access to that book, it would be interesting to find out (by researching the translator/s and by judging the quality of the English text) whether my suspicions do have some basis in fact ... I, personally, suspect very much that this is a book in bad (musical) English, and so the WP article Parallel and counter parallel is simply based on a wrong lemma. --User:Haraldmmueller 09:12, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Parallel or relative? 

message: ... as hinted at by Hucbald.SaintAmand above, I'd say: Delete it. It is, at best, partially based on a single book "The Music of Béla Bartók" - so it is questionable whether this is a theory on its own, or just one for Bartok's music; and even if it is a general theory, just having it supported by a single, specialized work should not be enough to include it in a general article on Function (although WP has this tendency to hunt for and gather everything that might even be remotely linked to a lemma ...). --User:Haraldmmueller 09:32, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I replaced this section with a new one, "Functions in American Music Theory", based mainly on Caplin. Unfortunately, Caplin does not clarify the difference between the function of predominant (as preparation of the dominant; this should be said more clearly in the section) and that of subdominant properly speaking (as in a plagal cadence). I did not (yet) find a reference that makes this difference clear (or that clearly makes it). — Hucbald.SaintAmand (talk) 11:50, 22 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Delete "Functional behaviours"? 

message: I understand functional harmony but am still struggling with the chord function table.  Instead of cryptic 2-letter symbols, why not just use English words in the table, e.g. dominant parallel? Put the German abbreviations in paragraph text.
:I fail to see the problem with this table – unless you cannot read and you only look at the images. The German abbreviations are explained two paragraphs before the table (in the paragraph beginning "In Diether de la Motte's version of the theory"). If there is a problem with these explanations, then that is what must be corrected. The table then shows the meaning of the abbreviations. You suggest to use English words such as "dominant parallel"; but what does this mean? The German parallel means "relative", and the English "parallel" means "of the opposite mode". What do you suggest?
:In addition, there is another table in the section "Comparison of the terminologies" that tries to explain all that. It does not use "parallel" in English, because that is not the name of a function. This table, as indicated, is valid only for the major mode. In minor, the German parallel and gegenparallel would be inversed. The submediant in minor, for instance, would be Tonikagegenparallel (tG) instead of Tonikaparallel (Tp). Perhaps another table should be given for the minor mode.
:There is no point in pretending that something complex is simple. Our aim can only be to make it understandable. I trust that if you read the text (and possibly reread it), you could understand it. — Hucbald.SaintAmand (talk) 06:38, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  German Chord Functions Nearly Unreadable