Sound and Syntax: An Introduction to Schoenberg's Harmony
Edward T. Cone · Perspectives of New Music · 1974
level: the specific chords chosen, the accessory tones decorating them, the voice-leading from one to the next, and the comparative complexity of the sonorities. Let us call this aspect succession. Those familiar with Hindemith's theory will find parallels here: his table of chord-groups is an attempt to classify all possible chordal constructions; his fluctuation is one of the effects of what I have called succession, and his degree-progression links succession with harmonic progression in the larger sense. True, his method of analysis is probably even less in vogue today than his music; yet it can often be helpfully suggestive if separated from the rigid interpretations and applications that Hindemith himself often supplied. My own interest in what I have called chordal vocabulary is not so precisely analytical as Hindemith's. For present purposes I am less concerned with the exact categorization of chords than with a determination of the types of sonorities employed by a given style, with the aim of recognizing the characteristic sound of that style. And I am less concerned with establishing roots for these chords-an essential for Hindemith's analysis of degree-progression-than with discovering