Audacious Euphony Chromatic Harmony and The Triad'... - (3 Reciprocity)

C HA P T E R
Three
Reciprocity
The Historical Emergence of Augmented Triads
Chapter 2 proposed that pan-triadic progressions, exemplified by hexatonic cycles,

arise from the status of consonant triads as minimal perturbations of the perfectly
even augmented triad. Some readers might worry that too much weight is being
placed on a relatively slender shoot. When an augmented triad appears in music
before 1830, its behavior is normally well regulated and unobtrusive, tucked into the
middle of a phrase rather than exposed at its boundaries, passed through quickly
and lacking metric accent. In an 1853 monograph titled The Augmented Triad,
Carl Friedrich Weitzmann portrayed his protagonist as a serf, scurrying in and out
the rear entrance, occasionally showing his face but never intruding on the con-
versation in the salon. After agitating on behalf of “granting [the augmented triad]
an abiding place in the kingdom of tones,” Weitzmann “gave its further fate over to
our enlightened composers” (Weitzmann 2004 [1853], 144, 224; my translations).
Copyright © 2012. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
As if in response, some late-nineteenth-century composers featured augmented

triads as motivic emblems in individual compositions: Brahms in his Alto
Rhapsody (Forte 1983) and Wagner in Siegfried Idyll (Anson-Cartwright 1996)
and his musical portraits of the Valkyries and of Amfortas. Liszt and Wolf acted
more boldly, incorporating augmented triads into their normative sonic core.1
It is nonetheless difficult to make a case that augmented triads ever achieved a
normative, unmarked status.
Charles Moomaw’s 1985 dissertation is the most comprehensive English-
language source concerning the augmented triad’s origins and early history.
Moomaw locates the chord in France as early as 1636, typically when the fifth of a
dominant triad is displaced up a diatonic semitone (Moomaw 1985, 251). He also
reports that figured bass treatises consistently instruct that the +5 figure be
1. On augmented triads in Liszt, see Forte 1987, Todd 1988, and Satyendra 1992. Hantz 1982 analyzes
the augmented triads in Liszt’s “Blume und Duft” in a way that particularly relates to the approach
developed here. On augmented triads in Wolf, see McKinney 1993.
43
Cohn, R. (2012).
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44 Audacious Euphony
rendered with a seventh or ninth above the bass even when the latter is not
explicitly ciphered (128).
Georg Andreas Sorge was evidently the first to recognize the augmented triad
as a primary harmony, although initially in 1745 he did so with great reluctance:
“The best thing about this harsh harmony, if one may speak of it as one, is that it
seldom appears” (Sorge 1980 [1745], 440). In 1760, Sorge upgraded its status
incrementally, observing that the augmented triad is tolerable when it results
from a chromatic passing tone that connects fifth-related major triads (Moomaw
1985, 323). It is in such passing contexts, bisecting a whole step, that the aug-
mented triad most characteristically and frequently occurs in music of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
During the 1770s, French theorists began to accept the augmented triad as a
fundamental sonority, bearing a distinctive character, and even a capacity to sup-
port accretions (Gessele 1994, 84–86). This acceptance becomes evident in a
remarkable D major Minuet that has been attributed to Mozart.2 The short compo-
sition contains seven augmented triads, of which only the first behaves in the
manner sanctioned by contemporaneous treatises. The remaining six dissonances
are anomalously accented in three independent ways: each initiates a phrase,
occurs on a metric downbeat, and is marked sforzando. Howard Boatwright
astutely observed that “each augmented chord has a different melodic origin and a
different harmonic function” (1966, 30) and concluded that the sonority has
motivic value, in and of itself, rather than as a diminutional accretion to some
other formation (also see Sobaskie 1987).
Abbé Georg Vogler’s 1802 Handbuch zur Harmonielehre was the first treatise
to explore the augmented triad’s potential for enharmonic reinterpretation.
Writing that the augmented triad “appears to consist of three similar major
thirds,” Vogler claimed that its proper roost was the third scale degree of harmonic
minor and that “each III chord in minor . . . can be multiply interpreted as a
III chord in three different keys” (1802, 103, 109; my translations). Vogler illus-
trated this potential for Mehrdeutigkeit (multiple meaning) through the progres-
sion given here as figure 3.1, whose anacrusis/downbeat combinations form a
hexatonic cycle. The third beat of each measure hosts some spelling of the
CEGᅊ augmented triad, acting successively as dominant of each triad on the
following beat.
Figure 3.1. From Georg Vogler’s Handbuch zur Harmonie (1802).
2. The Köchel number is K. 355/576b. The attribution, from an 1801 publication, is suspicious on inter-
nal grounds (Oster 1966) and has never been corroborated. In any case, no evidence exists as to date
of composition (Cliff Eisen, e-mail correspondence with the author, 2007).
Cohn, R. (2012). Audacious euphony : Chromatic harmony and the triad's second nature. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.
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CHAPTER 3 Reciprocity 45
Figure 3.2. Schubert, Symphony no. 2, 4th mvt., mm. 300–12.
Vogler’s progression serves as a template for the passage presented in linear

reduction at figure 3.2, from the finale of Schubert’s Second Symphony in Bᅈ major
(1812).3 The core of the development consists of three transpositionally identical
phrases that divide the octave by major thirds, beginning and ending with the
F major that terminates the exposition. Immediately preceding each tonic is a
locally appropriate spelling of the CEGᅊ augmented triad. Prolongation does not
capture the relation of these chords to one another, because the chord functions as
a local dominant to a series of well-articulated tonics. Nor is motivic association
quite adequate; it is too static to capture the phenomenology of the passage. More
than waving their hands and crying, “Remember me, here I am again,” these
augmented triads are also saying, “You thought I was this; well think again, ’cause
I can be that too.”
If prolongation is at work in this passage in any form, then its more plausible
object is the FACᅊ triad that unites the three tonics. In graphs of similar passages
by Beethoven and Wolf, Heinrich Schenker implied that he understood the arpeg-
giated augmented triad as the prolonged displacement, by chromatic neighbor, of
a major triad.4 In figure 3.2, that triad would be F major, which appears as a tonic
at the end of the exposition, returns at m. 352, and ultimately acquires a retransi-
tional seventh (m. 392). When Dᅈ major is tonicized at m. 312, C is displaced by a
Dᅈ neighbor, which continues to be locally supported (qua Cᅊ) when A major is
tonicized at m. 332, and only returns to C at m. 352, when F major is retonicized.
If, as Schenker implies in analogous passages, FADᅈ is the prolonged harmony

from m. 312 to m. 347, then it follows that both Dᅈ major and A major are subor-
dinated to a controlling dissonance. Yet the score contains no vertical slice or con-
tiguous patch, even an egregiously gerrymandered one, to be circled and labeled as
a “controlling harmony.” In passages such as these, then, the augmented triad is
3. Seidel (1963) draws attention to this passage. Wason (1985, 19) speculates on a possible lineage from
Vogler to Schubert. Vogler was a peripatetic, ambitious, and charismatic personality who lived in
Vienna from 1802 to 1805 and later taught composition to such prominent figures as Carl Maria von
Weber, Gottfried Weber, and Meyerbeer (Grave and Grave 1987).
4. See Schenker’s analyses of passages from Beethoven’s “Appassionata” and “Spring” Sonatas and Wolf ’s
“Ständchen” (2005 [1924], 41–64; 1979 [1935]: fig. 100.6). Many scholars (e.g., Slatin 1967; Morgan
1976; Proctor 1978; Stein 1985) have observed that his treatment of middleground equal divisions
cannot be reconciled to his pronouncements elsewhere that only consonant harmonies are suscep-
tible to composing out. What is of primary interest here is that Schenker found dissonant prolonga-
tions aurally and conceptually plausible, even if they “prolong” an idea that dissonates with the
fundaments of tonality.
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not directly available to perception. Its status, as a collocation of bass pitches or

triadic roots or local tonics, is virtual and liminal.
This analysis suggests that the relationship between consonant and dissonant
harmonies is not diodic. Consonant harmonies provide the context in which dis-
sonant harmonies can operate, as a rule. But, as Robert P. Morgan showed in
“Dissonant Prolongation” (1976), there are situations where these priorities are
reversed, and consonant triads subordinate to dissonant ones, not only locally but
across spans of significant duration. The relation between consonance and disso-
nance, then, is fluid in principle. The potential for this fluidity opens up a compo-
sitional dynamic, where a terrain of fixed relations is transformed into a site for
negotiation. Consonant and augmented triads gain the potential, in principle, for
reciprocity.
Consonance/Dissonance Reciprocity
The nineteenth century was familiar with reciprocity as a general cultural condi-
tion. Kant developed it in his influential Critique of Pure Reason (1982 [1787])
as his third analogy of experience. The term was imported into music theory by
Simon Sechter (1853–54), who noted (following Kirnberger 75 years earlier) that,
lacking further context, two fifth-related triads are tonally indeterminate.5 C serves
as dominant to F, which serves as subdominant to C, triggering a recursive circle
whose resolution requires external intervention (see Lewin 2006, 64). A similar
situation arises in the case of diatonic third relations, whether relative major/
minor (C major/a minor) or Leittonwechsel (C major/e minor). Both of these spe-
cies focus their tonal indeterminacy at a single melodic fulcrum, a whole step in
the first case and a semitone in the second. The potential indeterminacy of the
former case is well documented, particularly with respect to Schumann (e.g.,
Rosen 1995, 674). That of the latter case is encoded into its German name. The
modern conception of leading tone is restricted to the relationship between a

tonic and its semitonal lower neighbor. For German theorists of the middle of the
nineteenth century, this relationship captured only one half of a duality: Leitton
applies equally to the relationship of dominant and its semitonal upper neighbor.6
Accordingly, when C major and e minor are juxtaposed, the attraction of C to B
^ ^ ^ ^
(as 6–5 in e minor) is as strong as that of B to C (as 7–8 in C major). The semi-
tonal relation thus projects an unstable force field that pulls simultaneously in
both directions.
Carl Friedrich Weitzmann identified a third type of reciprocity that shared
aspects of those identified above: the relationship between a minor triad and its
major dominant, which he regarded as equivalent to that of a major triad and
5. Kirnberger (1982 [1771–76], 44–45). See also Hauptmann 1888 [1853]. Such bilateralism is also
characteristic of the sixteenth-century view (Dahlhaus 1990 [1967], 241).
6. The conception originates in dualist thinking but was sensible enough that it was taken up by theo-
rists with no commitment to dualism, such as Louis and Thuille 1982 [1913], Kurth 1923, and Lorenz
1933. Harrison 1994 provides an excellent elaboration on these matters.
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its minor subdominant. The reciprocal leading tone energies are divided between
the thirds, which Daniel Harrison (1994) calls the agents: the upward-pressing E,
borrowed from f minor’s parallel major, and the downward-pressing Aᅈ, borrowed
from C major’s parallel minor.7 Although this triadic relation plays a central role
in the writings of many theorists after 1850, it never achieved a stable name. I shall
refer it to using Weitzmann’s term, nebenverwandt, which Janna Saslaw translates
as “adjacency relation” (Weitzmann 2004 [1853]). Of particular relevance for
present purposes is Arthur von Oettingen’s name for the same triadic pairing:
reciprocal, a German/English cognate (Mooney 1996, 56).
The situations examined so far involve a relation between two consonant
triads. Such relations are bilateral in principle, since no consonant triad is more
stable than any other absent a particular context. The reciprocity that we identified
with regard to figure 3.2, however, is of a different kind, as it involves the relation-
ship between a consonant and dissonant triad. The scale is inherently out of
balance and can only be leveled through the application of external forces. In the
crudest cases, such as Schubert’s “Die Stadt”, a dissonant harmony achieves a quasi
stability by squatting like a brute and appropriating the rhetorical garments
normally reserved for consonances (first, last, loudest, longest; see Harrison
1994, 75ff.).
In contrast to such ad hoc solutions, François-Joseph Fétis recognized a way to
override the forces of tonality by cultivating more systematic resources, which he
referred to under the terms uniformity and symmetry. In a passage quoted in
chapter 1, Fétis described the experience of a diatonic sequence in phenomeno-
logical terms: “the succession and . . . movement fix the attention of the mind,
which holds on to the form so strongly that any irregularity of tonality is not
noticed. . . . The mind, absorbed in the contemplation of the progressive series,
momentarily loses the feeling of tonality. . . . The attention of the musical sense is
diverted from the feeling of tonality by symmetry of movement and succession”
(2008 [1844], 27, 30). Fétis writes that a sequence levels the distinction between
consonance and dissonance. A diminished fifth no longer requires resolution; in

this context, its behavior is indistinguishable from that of the perfect fifth.
In a diatonic sequence, the law of uniformity is kept in check by the prior com-
mitment to the diatonic scale. Although each pattern iteration replicates the
generic intervals of its predecessor, its specific intervals are channeled within the
banks of the diatonic scale. The forces that Fétis identifies become more fully
unleashed in chromatic sequences, such as the hexatonic cycles explored in chap-
ter 2 or the Schubertian third-divisions represented by figure 3.2. In these cases,
the law of uniformity has a monolithic force, and the rapid turnover of chromatic
pitch classes ruptures any ability of the diatonic collection to hold a focus on a
particular global tonic.
The binary distinction between diatonic and chromatic sequences is a particu-
lar manifestation of a more general dynamic that arises in many passages that
we would not consider to be sequential per se. Whenever a motivic fragment
migrates across a series of transpositional levels, or a fugal point of imitation is
7. Smith 2006 identifies several Brahms compositions that thematize this reciprocity as an ambiguity.
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replicated on a different degree of the scale, the absolute sizes of the intervals may
conform to the locally governing scale, or they may be preserved at the expense of
subverting or even rupturing that government. The pressures toward uniformity
may be confined within the diatonic channel or may jump those banks and lay
down their own channels. Later theorists formulate this same duality in terms of
diatony versus repetition (Schenker 1954 [1906]) and magnetism versus inertia
(Larson 1994).
To see how this duality manifests in the relation between consonant and aug-
mented triads, consider the following classroom situation. Two students are pre-
sented with a melodic gesture from C up to E and asked to replicate that gesture
beginning on E. One responds with E up to Gᅊ, projecting an augmented triad; the
second with E up to Gᅉ, projecting a consonant one. Both responses are correct,
but one interprets replication as raw uniformity; the other, as tempered to the
diatonic collection. Gᅉ and Gᅊ displace each other across the melodic fulcrum
upon which the diatonality/uniformity tension is balanced, in the same way that
the same two tones constitute the modal fulcrum in the case of an E tonic, or the
melodic fulcrum in a Leittonwechsel relation between c minor and Aᅈ major, or
one of two such fulcrums in the nebenverwandt relation between C major and
f minor.
Two Early-Century Examples: Beethoven and Schubert
Composers of the early nineteenth century sometimes treated this melodic ful-
crum as a site for motivic play. Consider the initial movement of Beethoven’s
f minor Piano Sonata (Op. 57, “Appassionata”).8 A secondary theme in Aᅈ major
(m. 35) has a consequent phrase that mutates to aᅈ minor (m. 42) and remains in
that key until the end of the exposition at m. 65, featuring Eᅈ/Fᅈ motivic play
throughout those measures.9 The motive is raised to a higher power in the devel-
opment, which begins in aᅈ minor, renotated as gᅊ minor, and progresses to
E major at m. 67, saliently featuring the motion from Dᅊ to E on successive down-
beats. Motion continues around the hexatonic cycle, to e minor (m. 79); skipping
over C major, whose status as global dominant requires it be reserved for a later
moment; and proceeding directly to c minor (m. 83) and Aᅈ major (m. 87). The
entire passage prolongs Aᅈ major by displacing its fifth Eᅈ to its augmented fifth
E and then restoring it.
Similar motivic play of the dominant and its upper neighbor is evident in the
first movement of Schubert’s A major Piano Sonata, D. 959. A score of the exposi-
tion and development is available at Web score 3.3 . The dominant reached at
m. 28 of the exposition is prolonged for more than one hundred measures through
two extended expansions, each initiated by a chromatic sequence that arpeggiates
8. The analysis offered here is based on Proctor 1978, 173–74. See also Bribitzer-Stull 2006, 179–80.
9. These echo the Fᅈ/Eᅈ play at m. 23 (bass) and mm. 26 and 29 (treble), which are in turn echoes of
the Dᅈ/C emanations that conclude the initial f minor theme at mm. 10–15.
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downward through the stations of an E augmented triad. Both arpeggiations

involve B → C displacements that, upon resolution, trigger significant motivic
reverberations. The initial major-third cycle, sketched at figure 3.3(a), culminates
at m. 39 when C is displaced back to B in the bass. The bass then isolates and works
over the B → C displacement throughout the subsequent extension of the B major
local dominant (figure 3.3(b)). Similar bass motivic play occurs locally at the
G major fantasy drift (mm. 65–68, figure 3.3(c)), more structurally at the reanima-
tion of the major-third division (mm. 82–91, figure 3.3(d)), and prior to the final
stabilization of E major, where a C major sforzando (m. 103) is not recuperated
until a medial caesura eight measures later.
The apotheosis of this motive occurs in the development section, whose open-
ing measures (figure 3.3(e)) have been the subject of much marvel by performer/
critics. Charles Fisk describes it in the following evocative terms:
The new theme articulates itself as a fantastical ten-measure period: its first phrase
[mm. 131–35] slips away from C major into B major, while its second [mm. 136–40]
slips just as magically back up to C. An even more ethereal variant of the same
phrase pair immediately follows [mm. 141–50], its sixteenths now spun out into
gossamer webs. For these two periods, the music simply oscillates between C and
B, achieving what [Charles] Rosen characterizes as a stasis with a “physical
effect . . . like nothing in music before.” (2001, 216, quoting Rosen 1980, 287)
The oscillation identified by Fisk persists, indeed, through the remainder

of the developmental core, even after escaping the “poised, transfixed stasis”
(Brendel 1991, 126) of its opening musette. The subsequent ten-measure period
(mm. 151–60) modulates from C major to b minor and back. The C → B melodic
arc is then carried by the phrases of the final extended period (mm. 161–80),
which approach a retransitional E major first from c minor, its hexatonic pole, and
then from a minor, its minor subdominant.
The phrase pairings throughout the developmental core suggest that B acts
as lower neighbor to structural C (Jonas 1982 [1934], 92). The key that jointly
provides a context for both harmonies is e minor (see Schenker 1954 [1906],
p. 226; Hauptmann 1888 [1853], 159–60), whose shadow control is indicated by
the phrygian approach to its dominant (mm. 134, 144) and the deceptive return to
its submediant (mm. 139, 149). E minor in turn substitutes for the E major that
frames the development, which opens with a melodic motion from B4 to C5
(m. 129 bis) and concludes with its reversal (m. 179). B thus performs the role
of lower neighbor to its own upper neighbor, magnifying the melodic fulcrum
introduced with the equal divisions of the exposition.
Three Late-Century Examples: Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Fauré
The give and take between consonant and augmented triads becomes foregrounded
in a number of compositions from the second half of the nineteenth century.
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Figure 3.3. Excerpts from Schubert, Sonata in A major, D. 959, 1st mvt.
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Figure 3.4. Liszt, A Faust Symphony, 1st mvt., mm. 1–22.
The opening of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, completed in 1854, famously and explicitly
inverts the values classically accorded these sonorities (figure 3.4). The passage
consists of two slow rotations through three segments of material (marked A, B,
and C in the example), each of which extends approximately four measures.

Augmented triads dominate the surface. Moreover, with the exception of mm. 1
and 13, the pitch-class pool for the entire passage draws exclusively on the CEGᅊ
and FACᅊ augmented triads, which combine to form a hexatonic collection. Of
particular interest are the four boxed figures, whose staggered downward motion
tropes a suspension figure, but with consonance and dissonance inverted with
respect to formal function (but not metric location): the position of preparation
and resolution is occupied by dissonant augmented triads; that of the suspension,
by consonant minor triads (Morgan 1976, 60).
It seems likely that Rimsky-Korsakov had the opening of Faust in his ear when
he wrote the opening measures of his Symphony no. 2 (1868), subtitled Antar
(figure 3.5). Antar, like Faust, begins with two slow rotations through a series of
three texturally differentiated segments, each approximately four measures long.
The second rotation transposes the first segment by a minor sixth (down in Antar,
up in Faust); the final two segments are then transposed upward by major third. As
both compositions combine two augmented triads into a hexatonic collection,
their second rotations recirculate the same tones as their respective antecedents.
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Figure 3.5. Rimsky-Korsakov, Symphony no. 2 (Antar), 1st mvt., mm. 1–24.
Looking back two decades later at the kuchist movement of which he had been
principal in the 1860s, Rimsky wrote that “Liszt was extreme, so was Berlioz,
so was Wagner. And so were we” (Taruskin 1996, I: 70). The opening of Antar
suggests that Rimsky was understating his capacity to nuance that extremism to
artistic ends. Whereas Faust’s opening overturns the asymmetric consonance/
dissonance binary with one swipe of the hand, Antar’s balances an exquisitely
fine point between its terms. Although Antar is stricter than Faust in its
hexatonicism—the passage contains not a single pitch foreign to the collection—
its augmented triads are less apparent. The segment labeled A presents three
minor triads, and the segment labeled C selects one of them for prolongation.
The segment labeled B, by contrast, prolongs the FACᅊ augmented triad, embel-
lishing two of its components with an escape tone that very tentatively suggests a
reconstitution of one of the minor triads.
Whereas figure 3.5 symmetrically segments the opening of Antar into six units,
based on thematic and textural rotation, figure 3.6 asymmetrically partitions the
same music on the basis of harmonic content, splitting the A material into two
segments and fusing the B and C material into a single one. In the first rotation,
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Figure 3.6. Analysis of the opening of Antar.
the A material consists of a box and an oval that respectively enclose fᅊ minor →
d minor and bᅈ minor → fᅊ minor. The remaining material echoes and expands the
initial fᅊ minor → d minor progression, interpolating an augmented triad between
them. The role of the augmented triad, on this interpretation, is to connect the two
more stable consonant triads that flank it, grossly distending a progression that
would have otherwise been at home in the eighteenth century. In effect, the aug-
mented triad staggers the simultaneous semitonal motions of the opening pro-
gression: first Fᅊ → F in the bassus and then, four measures later, Cᅊ → D in the
cantus.10 In transposing its predecessor downward by minor sixth, the second
rotation inverts the function of the two triadic pairings. The bᅈ minor → fᅊ minor
at the interior of the previous rotation is now positioned at the head, and it is this
unit that is subsequently expanded through the same passing augmented triad.
Conversely, the fᅊ minor → d minor that dominates the first rotation is tucked into
the interior of the second one. As a result, the series of four minor triads that opens
the composition, fᅊ minor → d minor → bᅈ minor → fᅊ minor, is expanded in
the progression from one rotation head to the next (fᅊ minor → d minor, m. 1; bᅈ
minor → fᅊ minor, m. 13) and also in the progression from one expansion
(fᅊ minor → Faug → d minor, mm. 4–12) to the next (bᅈ minor → Aaug → fᅊ minor,
mm. 16–24).
Where figure 3.6 presents the augmented triad as prolonging a motion between
its flanking consonant triads, figure 3.7 inverts those roles. The opening gesture in
the first bassoon (= cantus) is a hexatonic spiral that, on the basis of parallelism,
suggests three semitonal pairs: Cᅊ → D, A → Bᅈ, F → Fᅊ. Assuming that we are
inclined to hear parallel passages in parallel ways, we are encouraged to hear the
melodic gesture as unfolding an augmented triad.11 But which one? As the metric
grid does not lock in until m. 4, it is unclear whether the first or second component
of each pair is the accented one, and hence whether it is the FACᅊ or BᅈDFᅊ
10. On staggered semitones in Liszt, see Satyendra 1992, 102–3. A more complete interpretation
would acknowledge the tentativeness of d minor at m. 8. D falls back to Cᅊ throughout the segment
labeled C, at the same time as A escapes to Bᅈ, suggesting a bᅈ minor triad and delaying the ultimate
consolidation of d minor until m. 11, when the sustained Bᅈ finally resolves to A.
11. The “parallel passages in parallel ways” dictum was stated by Gottfried Weber (1846 [1817–21],
365) as “What the ear has once heard in a certain passage, it will not only expect again, on the
recurrence of the same passage, but will sometimes even perceive beforehand,” and reappears
prominently in Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983.
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Figure 3.7. Alternative analysis of the opening of Antar.
augmented triad that is unfolded. The second bassoon (= bass) presents a

similar but complementary problem. It also unfolds the hexatonic collection in
semitonal pairs: Fᅊ → F, D → Cᅊ, Bᅈ → A. Here, too, the floating metrics defeat any
assignment of priority to a component of each pair, and hence to one of the two
augmented triads. Moreover, simultaneous tones in the cantus and bassus belong
to different augmented triads. Even if our ears locked into a particular metric ori-
entation, they would be receiving conflicting information from the outer voices.
Only the inner voice of the opening segment, sounded by the timbrally distinct
horn, has a clear commitment to one of the augmented triads: it sounds A → F →
Dᅈ → A. This ever-so-slight tipping of the balance, in an otherwise austere equilib-
rium, is subtly confirmed by the pitches that are held invariant in the first three
measures as their respective triads are registrally redistributed.
The segment labeled B in figure 3.5 provides clarity, first to the bassus and then
the cantus. In the bass, the arrival of pedal F2 at m. 4 stakes down the metric grid
clearly for the first time, conferring the accent of the Fᅊ → F onto its second term.
Applying this information in retrospect to the opening gesture causes us to hear
the second bassoon line in terms of Fᅊ → F, D → Cᅊ, Bᅈ → A, emphasizing the same
augmented triad sounded in the horn. The subsequent escape-tone figures in the
cantus similarly disambiguate the hexatonic spiral of the previous measures, by
tracing the same melodic course an octave lower. What was metrically flat and
amorphous in the first segment becomes shaped in the second gesture, clearly
thrusting the accentual weight onto the first term of each pair: Cᅊ → D, A → Bᅈ. The
timbral continuity of the bassoon helps to forge this connection and to project this
weighting retrospectively onto the cantus of mm. 1–3, which now is interpreted in
terms of Cᅊ → D, A → Bᅈ, F → Fᅊ. This analysis of the second segment leads us to
hear the opening segment, in each of its three melodic parts, as projecting FACᅊ,
even though its constituent tones are not sounded simultaneously before their
prolongation at mm. 4–8. Through this lens, each of the minor triads sounded in
the opening segment results from displacement of a component of the augmented
triad. This same hearing then extends naturally to the third segment of each rota-
tion, which alternates between two minor triads, in 63 and 64 inversion, respectively,
neither of which projects convincingly as an object of prolongation.
The passage excerpted as figure 3.8, from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem Mass of
1877, provides an instructive comparison. Like much of the d minor Introit/Kyrie
03-Cohn-03.indd 54 10/11/2011 3:35
Figure 3.8. Fauré, Requiem Mass, Introit, mm. 50–61.
movement from which it is drawn, this passage is animated by the tonic’s relation-
ship to an F major triad that consistently functions as dominant. The melodic
fulcrum of this relationship is the Cᅊ that mediates between C and D, and hence
the harmonic fulcrum is the FACᅊ augmented triad that appears at m. 60, just
prior to the cadence. This same augmented triad, spelled variously, also appears
three times in the interior of the phrase, each time as the second component of a
two-chord unit whose first component is a consonant triad: F major at m. 52,
fᅊ minor at m. 54, and bᅈ minor at m. 56. Other features confirm the two-bar
groupings throughout the passage: with the exception of the final cadential pair-
ing, the first measure of each pair descends a melodic fourth on its final beat, and
the second measure of each pair supports an A4 reciting tone.
Our preference for analyzing parallel passages in parallel ways presents us with
a choice similar to the one that we faced in our analysis of Antar: the Exaudi’s
harmony is structured either by the connections between the initial, consonant
measure of each pair or by those of its terminal, dissonant ones. The first of these
options does not present a very coherent species of diatonic tonality: F major is
embellished by fᅊ minor and bᅈ minor before resolving as dominant of d minor. bᅈ
minor is easily reconciled as the minor subdominant of F major. What remains
intractable is the fᅊ minor triad. Perhaps it functions as iii of a D major that other-
wise has no presence in the passage (or elsewhere in the movement)? This feels a
little desperate and, moreover, does not address the enharmonic metamorphosis
of Cᅊ into Dᅈ as fᅊ minor is displaced by bᅈ minor at m. 56. The second option
understands this bouquet of harmonies in terms of the augmented triad to which
each one leads. This alternative places FACᅊ at the conceptual center of the pas-
sage, assigning it the role of a switching station through which the various conso-
nant triads are threaded. We are aware that the augmented triad plays this role
because Fauré shows us, by leading each chord in and out of the switching station,
thereby isolating each semitonal displacement. There is no consistent diatonic
explanation that accounts for the simultaneous presence of this particular group of
triads in a single phrase. What draws them together is their shared status as single
semitonal displacements of FACᅊ.
3-Cohn-03.indd 55 10/11/2011 3:35:49
The same can be said of the opening measures of Antar, where the same collec-
tion of minor triads is no more tonicizing than in Fauré (van den Toorn 1995,
127–28). This is so even though their mutual relationship to the FACᅊ augmented
triad only unfolds slowly, across the entire introduction. The augmented triad can
function as a switching station whether it has the presence of chronological medi-
ator, as in the Exaudi, or chronological consequent, as in Antar, or no role at all,
as in many of the pieces examined in chapter 4. The center of a circle is equally
orienting to a set of dancers, whether marked by a pole, a hole, or the imagination
of the dancers.12
Reciprocity in Weitzmann’s Der übermässige Dreiklang
Carl Friedrich Weitzmann was the first theorist to recognize the compositional
dynamic documented here. Weitzmann’s 1853 monograph on The Augmented
Triad tells three genesis stories about its protagonist, each of which involve the
verb entstehen or its nominal equivalent, Entstehung. Saslaw translates the verb as
“arise,” and the noun as “origin.” An alternative translation, generate/generation,
emphasizes organicist implications that may or may not be nested within
Weitzmann’s conception. Because such an implication is not guaranteed, Saslaw
has done well to avoid them; but nor is it precluded, and it will serve my interest to
pursue it.
The first story occurs in his chapter 2, “Preparation, Origin [Entstehung], and
Introduction of the Augmented Triad,” which offers “a primer as to how this
strange chord could come to life [in Leben treten könne], prepared through major
and minor triads and their inversions” (Weitzmann 2004 [1853], 166; my transla-
tion). The primer presents sixteen ways to connect a consonant triad to an aug-
mented one via semitonal voice leading. The second story occurs in chapter 6,
“Natural Origin [Entstehung] of the Augmented Triad Most Important to Each

Key.” Weitzmann combines f minor and C major triads into a pentachord, FAᅈCEG,
from whose interior he extracts the augmented triad: F[AᅈCE]G. “From the con-
nection of these two nebenverwandt chords arises [entsteht] the augmented triad
most important to the two keys represented by them” (184–85). Weitzmann
explains that even though E is foreign to the key of f minor, and Aᅈ to the key of
C major, each arises as that key’s most important neighbor tone.13 These two tales
relate to each other as specific to general. The first account concerns how an
augmented triad comes into being at a particular moment in a particular composi-
tion. The second deals with the augmented triad’s position in a musical system,
12. The absence of the perfectly even chord about which the nearly even ones circulate is a theme
of Tymoczko 2011b, which shows that it is productive to think of pentatonic and diatonic
collections as circulating about perfectly even, and thus microtonal, collections. See also Douthett
2008.
13. Saslaw translates Nebenton as “secondary tone,” emphasizing that these neighbor tones are
chromatic to the respective keys.
03-Cohn-03.indd 56 10/11/2011 3:35
apart from its particular instantiations. The first is in the sense of “Isaac was born
of Abraham”; the second, in the sense of “invention is born of necessity.”
In chapter 7, Weitzmann explores the augmented triad’s Mehrdeutigkeit, in the
sense that interested Vogler fifty years earlier. He notes that once enharmonic vari-
ants are taken into account, the AᅈCE triad also arises in four other keys, besides
the f minor and C major already explored: “So we find the augmented triad AᅈCE
and its enharmonic equivalents in the nebenverwandt keys F minor and C major,
further in the relative keys of each, in Aᅈ major and A minor, finally in the
nebenverwandt keys of the latter, in Dᅈ minor and E major” (186–87). Although
Weitzmann’s ordering has transformational implications that we will consider in
chapter 4, for him that ordering evidently held no value except as an aid to memory.
On a subsequent page, he lists the same six keys in the format reproduced here
as the first block of table 3.1, writing that CEGᅊ and its enharmonic equivalents
“can appear as the most important [augmented triad] of the following keys listed
under them” (188–89). The remaining eighteen triads are grouped into three anal-
ogous clusters, each headed by an augmented triad and listing the keys in which it
is “the most important.”
Having created this list, Weitzmann’s discourse begins to project a subtle
inversion. Until now, he has viewed the augmented triad as a serf in the employ
of the particular consonant triad from which it arises. But now, having observed
that each augmented triad has multiple patrons, he begins to wonder what life
is like from its point of view. “The closest relatives of an augmented triad,”
he writes, “are thus the major triads on its bass tone, third, and fifth, [plus] the
minor triads to whose roots each of [the augmented triad’s] three voices forms
the leading tone. . . . Its more distant relatives are the minor versions of the
just-designated major chords and vice versa” (188–89). Several chapters later,
Table 3.1. Weitzmann’s grouping of the consonant triads as displacements

of augmented triads
I. {C, E, Gᅊ} (and its enharmonic transformations)

1. C major 2. E major 3. Aᅈ major
4. a minor 5. cᅊ minor 6. f minor
II. {Dᅈ, F, A} (and its enharmonic transformations)
1. Dᅈ major 2. F major 3. A major
4. bᅈ minor 5. d minor 6. fᅊ minor
III. {D, Fᅊ, Aᅊ} (and its enharmonic transformations)
1. D major 2. Gᅈ major 3. Bᅈ major
4. b minor 3. eᅈ minor 4. g minor
IV. {Eᅈ, G, B} (and its enharmonic transformations)
1. Eᅈ major 2. G major 3. B major
4. c minor 5. e minor 6. gᅊ minor
3-Cohn-03.indd 57 10/11/2011 3:35:50
Figure 3.9. From Weitzmann’s Der übermässige Dreiklang. Upper- and lower-case
letters are the roots of major and minor triads respectively.
Weitzmann graphically portrays these relationships in a diagram that is repro-

duced here in translation as figure 3.9.
Each augmented triad is presented at the center of a cluster of consonant triads;
major and minor triads are indicated by large- and small-case roots, respectively.
And here is where Weitzmann’s third genesis tale involving the augmented triad
can be found:
From the following augmented triads . . . arise [entstehe] the [consonant] triads
indicated by the letters next to them. . . . The chords placed immediately next to the
augmented triad are attained through the half-step progression of one of their
voices; the [chords] further away [are attained] through the half-step progression
of two of their voices. (202–5)
With this, Weitzmann turns back the flow of his second genesis narrative.
At the systematic level, it is the augmented triads that are the sources, and the
consonant triads the products.
The first genesis narrative nonetheless remains intact. Immediately following
the passage just quoted, Weitzmann presents seven full pages of examples, com-
prehensively enumerating the ways that an augmented triad can resolve. It is
always the dissonance that is resolving to the consonance, never the other way
around. In a moment-to-moment sense, the relation of consonant triad to disso-
nant augmented triad continues to be diodic. But in a systematic sense, Weitzmann
is able to entertain the possibility that the relation is reciprocal.
These passages from Weitzmann’s treatise are so rich in implication that they
guide the work presented in the next three chapters of this book. Chapter 4 consid-
ers the internal structure of the six-triad pools that are clustered in table 3.1, from
the standpoint of the Tonnetz graphics and triadic transformations introduced in
chapter 2. Chapter 5 uses figure 3.9 as a stage from which to extend the Tonnetz,
and its attendant transformations, so that it breaks out of the augmented triad
boundaries that confined them in chapter 2. Chapter 6 uses that extended universe
as a playing board, or map, upon which to present pan-triadic analyses of extended
passages from the Romantic repertoires, and to assess and categorize those
passages on the basis of the voice-leading strategies that they execute.
03-Cohn-03.indd 58 10/11/2011 3:35

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C HA P T E R

The Historical Emergence of Augmented Triads

Chapter 2 proposed that pan-triadic progressions, exemplified by hexatonic cycles,

As if in response, some late-nineteenth-century composers featured augmented

Figure 3.1. From Georg Vogler’s Handbuch zur Harmonie (1802).

Figure 3.2. Schubert, Symphony no. 2, 4th mvt., mm. 300–12.

Vogler’s progression serves as a template for the passage presented in linear

If, as Schenker implies in analogous passages, FADᅈ is the prolonged harmony

not directly available to perception. Its status, as a collocation of bass pitches or

modern conception of leading tone is restricted to the relationship between a

consonance and dissonance. A diminished fifth no longer requires resolution; in

Two Early-Century Examples: Beethoven and Schubert

downward through the stations of an E augmented triad. Both arpeggiations

The oscillation identified by Fisk persists, indeed, through the remainder

Three Late-Century Examples: Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Fauré

Figure 3.4. Liszt, A Faust Symphony, 1st mvt., mm. 1–22.

and C in the example), each of which extends approximately four measures.

Figure 3.6. Analysis of the opening of Antar.

Figure 3.7. Alternative analysis of the opening of Antar.

augmented triad that is unfolded. The second bassoon (= bass) presents a

Figure 3.8. Fauré, Requiem Mass, Introit, mm. 50–61.

Reciprocity in Weitzmann’s Der übermässige Dreiklang

“Natural Origin [Entstehung] of the Augmented Triad Most Important to Each

Table 3.1. Weitzmann’s grouping of the consonant triads as displacements

I. {C, E, Gᅊ} (and its enharmonic transformations)

Weitzmann graphically portrays these relationships in a diagram that is repro-

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