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14b Lesson - Secondary Leading-tone Chords

Class discussion

What do you think is a secondary leading tone of V?

  • It’s a vii0/V! Stretched out, we would say it is vii0 in the key of V. (Remember slashes with Roman numerals = “of.”)

Creating a V7/V

  • Once we figured out our voicing, we changed the V7/V to a vii0/V. This is possible because vii0 is just V7 without the root.
  • We had a lot of problems trying to figure out which tone to double in vii0/V. There’s two tendency tones, and with the voicing we wrote out doubling the third results in parallel octaves. Bad all around, just don’t use these…use seventh chords instead

Using a secondary leading-tone seventh chord

  • You can use vii07 to tonicize major or minor chords, but vii%7 works only with major chords. If you try and tonicize a minor chord with vii%7, things will get really screwed up because of where all the voices want to resolve
  • When trying to correctly resolve a vii07/V, it might be easier to think of the regular vii07 solfege: ti re fa le. This will help you resolve the tendency tones correctly into the next chord. Remember: all you’re doing is thinking of vii07 in the key of V.