[atlantaprog] Re: What composers were up to

Brian King wrote:

I wonder what would have
happened if some classical composer could have pushed into jazz voicings
back in 1800-- it'd be a different world.

A lot has to do with those chords' placing in the overall architecture of a piece, as well. Mozart almost had a string quartet rejected by his publisher because of the "outside", chromatic chords in the introduction; to this day it's still called "the 'Dissonance' Quartet". (It sounds pretty true to the time for the rest of it, though.) And listen for a point in the last movement of his Symphony #40 where a unison line goes through ten of the twelve chromatic notes in just a few bars. Our ears tend to impose a chord progression on the line, but that might've taken a while for listeners back then to think to do.

Some of the stuff Franz Liszt wrote for solo piano toward the end of his life was also pretty avant-garde for its time. There's even a piece called "Bagatelle ohne Tonart" ("Bagatelle without Tonality"). It's not "atonal" in the Arnold Schoenberg sense, but it does a good job of avoiding the feeling of a key center, generally by using lots of augmented chords (especially at the beginning and end) and parallel motion.

And OF COURSE there's the "*Tristan* chord", which is made up of F, B, Eb, and Ab; this is, I believe, the first full chord in Richard Wagner's *Tristan und Isolde*, from 1865, IIRC. Maybe not 1800, but, well, it happened when it happened.

Other related posts: