Dr. Kit Music

Reading is going. I feel a little behind, but I’ve gotten good sources for almost everything. There’s always more to read, so I’m trying to do targeted efforts instead of just getting swallowed by sources. In terms of commentary on what I’ve read, I got some interesting notes about Functional and Roman numeral predecessors in the 19th Century from Damschroder’s Thinking About Harmony.

I also found the right place to cite from Charles J Smith’s unpublished textbook,* where he discusses the failings of Roman numerals and what he wants functional bass symbols to show. He has a chart comparing Roman numerals, figured bass, pop symbols, and his own style of functional bass analysis. The different labels are marked as showing or not showing several different pieces of information: diatonic context, modal association, bass, root, inversion/intervals, quality, function. None of the systems he presents can do all of these pieces of information, but I would argue that my flavor of Functional Analysis can.

This morning I also spent a good chunk of time editing the examples for Chapter 3 so that once I get prose edits I can be ready to go with those. Here’s a pdf of an analysis of Mozart’s K 331 Mvt 1 Theme: Theme from K 331 mvt 1

Up this week: more reading, editing examples from 3.5 and hopefully soon getting some edits back.

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*Chapter 6. Thanks to Brian Moseley At University of Buffalo for providing me with links to drafts of this book.