Hi seth, I want to thank you so much for all the time and effort you put into making these videos for such a (how?) small audience. I feel blessed to have access to such professional and comprehensive content for FREE and have learned more about classical theory in a couple of weeks with you than over a year of other methods. Tirelessly searching for videos with the chance that perhaps one of them may give vague answer to one of my numerous burning questions has got me nowhere. I therefore cannot stress enough how appreciative I am for now have everything I need to know all in one place, taught by someone who actually knows their stuff.

Brilliant suff. It's a great help when you're stuck in a composition and offers lots of forks in the road

Thanks so much for this. Your channel is a lockdown theory teaching lifesaver!

I found my new favourite channel 😍

All this is so new and exciting for me ! 😂

Love the way you put I6/4 in it's place! And it makes sense now. Most the lectures I have seen are I6/4 V I; I like looking at it as V6/4 V I - makes more sense since it really does FEEL like a V chord, not a I chord (maybe those overtones coming from the base? :).

Simply amazing! Thanks for this rich content

I came here after seeing a comment under another more recent music theory video that was correcting the very mistake you illustrate at 6:35 made in the video. Your style is very easy for me to grok and I appreciate all the effort you've put into these! Subscribed and I'll be watching the rest of the series from the top. Thank you!

Thank you, Professor Monahan!

That face when you did think 64 was only to show inversions.... going back a video now.

I don't know if you still look at comments for older videos, but I have a question: what is the I6/4 doing at the beginning (and end) of Beethoven's 7th symphony, second movement?!

@SethMonahan

3 жыл бұрын

That's a great question, and I'm not sure there's an easy answer. I've always felt that the opening chord is something of a compromise-as if Beethoven wanted some kind of unstable introductory sonority, but didn't want to be so obvious as to use a V7. So there's this mild tension of the i6/4 that's resolved when the actual theme starts. But that's really just me guessing, 200+ years after the fact. The final chord seems at first to be slightly less perplexing, because there's a tonic note in the bass when it's first articulated. But that bass note dies out almost immediately, leaving the opening sonority hanging in the air, such that i6/4 is the last sound we hear. So it's actually rather *more* perplexing to me. It might be worth asking whether there was some connection in Beethoven's mind between the end of mvt. II and the beginning of the scherzo, which starts in F major. But again-that's only guessing. It may ultimately be one of those wonderfully inexplicable Beethovenian details...

Very professional,thanks a lot

@SethMonahan

3 жыл бұрын

You're very welcome!

25:05 the problem with me is that I've promised someone a slow movement of a flute sonata, and her birthday is on 1st Nov and I've to learn all this and finish the work with at least 3 days to play and review 😂😂😂

Thanks a lot for the excellent lecture, as always in this series! A naive and curios question about the interpretation of the six-four is that in your earlier lectures, e.g., Lec 13, Beethoven, op. 101, you use {I6-4, V4-2,I6} and {I6-4,V7,I} in analyzing the cadence, but in this lecture, it suggests that the NCTs interpretation V6-4to5-3 and V8-6-4to7-5-3 are more natural and preferred. If this is understood correctly, why don't you introduce the preferred interpretation in the first place? Is that because it would make things more complicated for students to learn in the beginning? Then a minor thing, there is a typo in the key signature of the Beethoven, op. 101 piece in this lecture, should be 3 sharps instead of 4?

@SethMonahan

7 ай бұрын

The decision to use "I6/4" initially and then change the notation later was 100% pedagogical. For many years, I taught the V6-4 to 5-3 notation to my first-year students, but would often discover that they didn't really know what it meant, or (more importantly) how it really pointed to a different HEARING than simply using "I6/4." So I decided that the discussion of the proper cadential six-four notation should come after a video (no. 23) explaining more broadly how figured bass could show non-chord tones moving. But that was too much to assign early on. So I used "I6/4," with a dominant function, as a placeholder in the "Big 18." It was a compromise, but I think the right one at the time. And YES (!!!!!) there should only be three sharps in that op. 101 passage. I have no idea how that happened. I tend to make these videos in a real hurry, because I can only do it in the summer.

@meijianli4203

7 ай бұрын

@@SethMonahan Thanks a lot for the reply! I think I get your points : )

Hi Seth, I have a question, though not exactly about the cadential six-four (and I don't even know if it matters). I'm analyzing the II movement of Schubert's piano sonata D. 664. From the opening, the first beat is a B chord that is actually an appoggiatura onto the A (and tonic chord D). What I don't know is how to notate the chord, but this video made me think about it: Would I need to notate the roman numeral (I) under the B chord like this (I 6-5)? or just (I) under the second beat? Same thing for bar 3, I don't know if I should I write V7 -6/5 under the chord with the appoggiatura in the first beat or simply V6/5 under the second beat. I can't type subscript numbers here, so i hope that was clear :) THANK YOU!

@SethMonahan

2 жыл бұрын

Hi Flora! There's no one right answer to this question. Analyses are in many ways acts of communication, a means of sharing information. And how one might do them depends on *what* one wants to convey. If I were analyzing that passage for myself, I'd just write "I" under the first two bars and "V6/5" under mm. 3-4. (Well, at this point in my life, I probably wouldn't write anything under those bars, since they're easy to analyze at sight...but you get the point!) But if I were using the passage to show students, say, how neighbor embellishments work, I might be inclined to use the figured bass to highlight those motions-so "6-5" next to "I" and "7-6" next to "V". Or maybe I'd just circle the NCTs and call it a day. :)

@flopondia

2 жыл бұрын

@@SethMonahan Thank you so much for that answer! I'm starting to get what you say about "what" one wants to convey...but it's hard for me to grasp that harmonic analysis can be up to interpretation! I don't know...The more I learn, the less I feel I understand! I did mark all the appoggiaturas, I just didn't know if that was enough. Thanks! I really appreciate how clearly you explain things, and the sense of humor too. Your students are very lucky!

@flopondia

2 жыл бұрын

By the way, when you have a pedal point, I see that some people still write down every chord, at least for each bar. What do you tell your students? I'm thinking bars 46-49 of that Andante (Schubert's 664)

@SethMonahan

2 жыл бұрын

@@flopondia I usually have my students analyze each chord over pedal points-when there are actual "chords" worthy of analyzing (which isn't always!). The reason is that progressions over pedal points usually follow the normal rules of syntax. In that passage, though, I'd be likely to focus less on the analytical notation per se, and more on the extraordinary SOUND of m. 47, with that wonderful IV chord over the dominant pedal. It's a rare thing to hear before the 1820s, and especially striking coming after the V chord in m. 46. (It's an instance of V going to IV, which is more of an 1890 rather than a 1790 progression.)

@flopondia

2 жыл бұрын

@@SethMonahan thank you! That is an interesting point.