You're very welcome!

I make, on average, about three new videos every summer, when I'm not teaching full time. So next summer, you can expect nos. 45-47. (I always hold out hope that I might finish one during the school year, but it pretty much never happens. Making one of these is usually a month of full-time work.)

Glad you like the videos! I'm sorry to say that there aren't any printable supplements for sale. However, if you email me directly, I can share some old pdfs that I made for my students *before* this and other videos existed. There's definitely one for augmented sixth chords. And like a lot of them, it contains interactive media that you can play back in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

@@SethMonahan Thank you so much for your generosity. It is very kind of you. I just emailed you.

Glad that the lessons are helpful! You might be curious to know that electric guitar was my first instrument, and that literally all of the theory I learned in my early years was out of guitar magazines. It was the early '90s, an era where "shredding" was the vogue-which meant that every kid with a guitar was learning modes and arpeggios just to keep up with the competition. :)

@SethMonahan awesome! I'm a big malmsteen fan and wanted to know more about classical theory and composition to understand his work better. Do you think voice leading is helpful for guitar players? I find the concept very interesting but with 4 fingers available to build chords the options are very limited.. Thanks again

@@xavinwonderland My own (unpopular!) view is that there's only one reason to learn 18th-century-style voice leading: if you want to learn to compose or improvise in an authentic 18th-century style. Otherwise, I think it's a waste of time. People teach it because it's how they themselves were trained and because it gives them something relatively easy to grade-lots of objectively "right" and "wrong" solutions. I did it myself for years, and I saw no evidence that it makes students more perceptive or insightful musicians. A harder task, and a more valuable one, is learning to hear and recognize chord progressions and chord functions more broadly (i.e., tonic, dominant, etc.). That's what this series tries to teach from about Video 16 forward-though it does so as a supplement to classes that I teach, not as a standalone course in itself, sadly. But I should say that it's not strictly a "classical" area of learning. A person can find enormous value in learning to hear the harmonic motions of pop music as well. (Can you, for instance, listen to a Beatles or Bob Dylan song and just "know," by ear, what the chords are?) On the shredding front: I was never much of a rebel, but I got into a screaming fight with my high-school vice principal once because she opened my locker and tore down my beloved poster of Steve Vai's "Passion and Warfare," which was my bible in 1991-92. :)

The chord you're referring to fits the definition of a CTo7 perfectly. It contains the root of the chord it resolves to (F), and as usual that common tone is in the bass. When dim7 chords get Roman numerals, that Roman numeral is always viio7. It'll either be viio7 of the tonic note or an applied viio7 of something else (ii, IV, etc.). But in that case, you need to take the spelling of the chord seriously, not just decide to make the bass the root. The chord you're referring to is spelled G#-B-D-F. That makes it viio7 of A, which doesn't make much sense in a Bb-major context. I'd strongly suggest going back and watching the opening of the video again. It covers all this.

@@SethMonahan I understand, thank you professor (Forgive my weak understanding).

THANK YOU so much for putting the Video 43 issue on my radar. KZbin doesn't have the courtesy even to tell me these things. I need to re-cut it with a different recording of this one 30-second Mozart theme that a record label decided was in copyright violation. I should be able to do this by the end of the week.

@@SethMonahan Thank you so much, too! It took me a while to put two and two together, but I figured out that when ads started appearing at the opening of the video, something about the channel had changed!

Wonderful-many thanks! It's always a huge help to have more examples in my quiver for in-class listening exercises.

@@SethMonahan One of the things I love about your videos is that you back up all the points with loads of examples. Best theory videos on KZbin, keep it up!!

You're welcome!

I...think you just did. 😁

Ascending is possible too!

Great question! The issue isn't whether someone in 2024 has a "problem" with an augmented triad. What matters is that composers in the 18th century didn't think of that as an option for a mediant chord. (When you see something that looks like an augmented triad on the mediant, you can be sure that one the notes is going to resolve shortly into the "real" chord tone, making the augmented triad something of an illusion.) Backing up a bit: this series is about the classical style in particular, so I base things on what those composers did. But it's worth pointing out that the augmented triad really did seem to perplex composers for a long time. Even into the mid- and late 19th century, composers who are out on the bleeding edge of harmonic innovation STILL tend to avoid just sitting on an augmented triad for very long. They only sneak "in the back door" later on, when they act as dominants in jazz-style harmony. Always struck me as very interesting.

@@SethMonahan Thank you for that very quick response. I always forget that different styles of music have different customs and "rules", and when you make a video, you have to choose something as a basis rather than everything. Some of the texts I've read tell me to "treat the mediant with care", but they never say how, exactly. It's almost as though it has a dirty little secret that its impolite to discuss :) I'm really enjoying this series, thank you.

Sure: Bill Caplin's "Analyzing Classical Form" and Jim Hepokoski's "Sonata Theory Handbook" are relatively recent publications that are (1) written by leading people in the field and (2) designed for folks who aren't career academics. Neither is perfect, and the two famously disagree on many things. (They used to debate each other publicly for sport, basically.) But each is a solid starting point if you're willing to read and listen a lot.

@@SethMonahan Many thanks!

Thanks for the recommendation, because I'm sorry to say that I don't know this book! It sounds fascinating, and I'm delighted to see that the Yale library has an online copy that I can peruse ASAP. (For context, my textbook comment referred to the half-dozen-or fewer?-mass-market harmony textbooks that U.S. programs tend to use, many of which are close to identical in terms of the topics they cover.)

Hey-wait, that's...(sigh) totally fair. (I actually edited out the line where I called Jim Henson "my hero," thinking it would be too much. Apparently, my zeal is still rather obvious.)

You're the second commenter here to say this. It's fascinating because-I have to admit-I can't hear it at all. Here's my thinking, in all its granularity: Harmonically, the song is fairly conservative. You'd never mistake the harmony for 18th-century classical music, but the basic grammar is still in place: dominant sevenths resolve to their proper destination, chord roots often fall by fifth (F...Bb...Eb...Ab), etc. etc. So I'm not sure what incentive there is to hear the chorus ending with bII going to I, rather than a fairly close simulacrum of the traditional "Phrygian half cadence." The only difference is that the Gb triad would be an Ebm 6/3 chord in Bach or Haydn. (The fact that the song ends on F doesn't mean much, because pop songs end on non-tonic chords all the time. Though if we zoom out, a pop song ending on a Phrygian half cadence would be no more or less unconventional than one that ends with bII-I...by which I mean, neither happens with any regularity.) My two cents, for what it's worth!

@@SethMonahan I'm not sure, but I'd say that actually the ^4 - ^5 (in F, right? b flat to c) in the melody is actually what turns my ear to the bII-I interpretation (instead of what I'd expect in a half cadence, b flat to a, ^1 to ^7 in a half cadence in B flat)

@@maestrodiniente1443 OOF-I need to be more careful about these things! I convinced myself, without listening very carefully, that the top voice was doing something it wasn't. The pattern I would expect at a half cadence in Bb minor is actually Eb to F...but that's plainly not what's going on. I stand by my other points, though: the unlikelihood of a bII-I final cadence has little to do with scale degrees. BUT, that being said, I'd be interested to know of any other pop songs ('70s or otherwise) that end with that progression!