HarmonyRhapsody for Woodwinds and Piano

Waxing Rhapsodic within Tonality

My Rhapsody for Woodwinds and Piano is harmonically adventurous in places, even flirting with exoticisms such as octatonic, but the underlying harmonic motion is a conventional I-V-I progression.  The details of the progression, as outlined in the graph below, are unusual and subtle.

The Rhapsody‘s introductory section (bars 1-15) sets the tonal center clearly on C, but the third is initially omitted from the tonic harmony, leaving the mode (major or minor) ambiguous and lending a misterioso quality to the section. (This introduction has a rather exotic harmonic structure in itself, but I will leave that for a future blog post. 🙂 )  The key of C Major is firmly established only with the entry of the main theme, stated by the bassoon beginning in bar 16.

The Tempo di marcia section begins in G minor, the minor dominant.  But instead of progressing directly to the major form of the dominant, this G minor harmony begins a broad iv-v-V-i progression within a supertonic (ii) secondary tonality.  Relative to this D minor center, the march progresses from G minor (iv) to A minor (v), building and subsiding into a Molto tranquillo section centered on A major (V), which ushers in the fugue in D minor (i).

This tonicization of D minor (ii in the overall key of C major) prepares the move to G major (V7) at bar 182 of the fugue.  The return to C major (I) coincides with the joyous reprise of the main theme in bar 204.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.