How Far Can Rameau Go?: The Breakdown of Historical Strategies for Theorizing Dissonant Chords in Twentieth-Century Tonal Repertoires

Damian Blättler, Rice University

In chapter 7 of his book Audacious Euphony, Richard Cohn discusses how a specific theoretical strategy can be manifested as several distinct theoretical methods (Cohn 2012, 139). The chapter (among other tasks) traces how four different strategies for accounting for dissonant chords within tonal contexts -- deletion, reduction, combination, and substitution -- take various forms in the work of nineteenth-century theorists who grapple with the chromatic music of that century. This paper examines the various ways in which those strategies, all of which stem from the work of Rameau (Christensen 1993, 98-100), are extended in order to accommodate compositional practice in the first half the twentieth century. I ultimately argue that the lush harmonic writing in twentieth-century tonal repertoires overtaxes the general assumptions which define the distinct dissonant-chord strategies, and that the various methods of implementation devised to account for twentieth century's tonally functional dissonant chords start to blur the lines between the strategies themselves.