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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
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Unresolved Sevenths
Try this at home.
Play a dominant seventh chord – e.g., G –B – D – F, over and over on your piano keyboard or instrument of choice.
Keep playing it for a minute or so. Don’t play anything else.
If you are jumping out of your skin wanting to hear another chord, diagnosis is normal. .
The ear wants to hear that chord resolved somehow.
Why? The reason is embedded in the chord. It’s a dissonant interval called the tritone.
In the case of the G dominant chord, the tritone is B-F. Its tension can be resolved by going to C-E.
Play a tritone and you’ll see what I mean.
Charles Ives had a piece called “The Unanswered Question.” Schumann wrote a piano piece called “Warum?” (Why?) The tritone does with harmonic tension what those pieces accomplish with melody. It makes the listener want to hear a resolution.
Why's it called a tritone? It is three whole tones. (A whole tone is two adjacent keys or either color on the piano keyboard.)
A dominant seventh chord often resolves to the tonic (the home key, in this case, C major or C minor). But a number of other chords serve to temporarily relieve tritone tension; a deceptive cadence in the relative minor (in this case, A minor), for example. (G-B-D-F to A-C-E).
The tritone is at the heart of music. It’s the secret of everything from the cadences of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms to turnbacks in salsa and blues.
The fact that a single interval is so powerful might remind devotees of the market mistress of a classic maxim from the Chair: "Simple questions are best."
Before Laurel Kenner figured out that writing was easier than performing,
her exertions and meager achievements were in the field of classical piano.