The Dominant Seventh Chord

- Well, dear friends, thank you so much for coming today. The bravest of you are here because it's such a technical title, you know, for which I have no apologies. The dominant seventh chord, you can see this is the person, Jean Phillipe Rameau, who was the first to describe, theorize it. He called it something else, which I'm going to tell you about a little bit later, but first we're going to hear the dominant seventh chord, and then you will see how exciting it is.("Twist and Shout")(crowd screaming) You see everyone's screaming.(audience laughing) That's how exciting the dominant seventh chord is, right? So what do we do? You know, how do we get this score? Well, you already know the major triad, we were talking about it last time. So...(lush music) That's all lovely. Yeah, that's a major triad. Add another third on top.(lush music) and that makes it a dissonant chord. I can't remember whether I had time last time to discuss consonance and dissonance, but I will be very brief just to mention that consonance intervals, or chords, is something that blends together very well, and dissonant ones don't. So the only consonance that everyone seems to agree on in the world is this one, which is an octave. So we agree on it so much that we consider it the same note. So if it's soprano and the bass, who are asked to sing the same note, they will sing it probably an octave or maybe two octaves apart. So that's the only one we agree on. Then there is this one, the fifth, and that's already a cultural thing, because not every culture would necessarily recognize it as something very pleasant, or as notes blending together. But this note really creates some tension. It creates dissonance, and it seems that we want to do something with this chord. We cannot just leave it hanging. So the moment it was defined was in 1722 in the "Harmonic Treatise" by Rameau, and he defines it immediately as something that has to go to another chord. So actually what he calls it is dominant tonic. It's a very confusing word. All the musical terms are actually quite illogical and confusing, because, so we are going to call it the dominant seventh. The seventh because it has this interval of the seventh between the first and fourth note, and dominant because it's built on the fifth step or fifth note of the scale. So if we can't...(lush music) And why do we call it dominant? Why is it dominant? I've just told you that it's the tonic, which is the most domineering chord in the key. So that is a historical term, and it comes from recitations of biblical texts. So if you have a recitation in a liturgy, you will have it usually on one note, and that note usually was note five of the mode. So traditionally it was called dominant because it was domineering within that passage of recitation. So basically, it's not dominant here, but Rameau inherits the term, so he calls it dominant tonic because it actually has to go somewhere, and he decides that it has to go(lush music) into the tonic. So it's not a chord on its own, it's part of what we call a progression, not even succession of chords, but progression, because there is a need for it to go somewhere. So there is an understanding that because it's so dissonant, it has to resolve. So that's what he does. I'm trying to read what he did here.(lush music) That's what he does. So that his dominant tonic, dominant and tonic, dominant seventh chord with a resolution, or in the minor, it'll be the same chord. Right, so we've got a definition. Now let us hear it in practice. If we take the trio from the minuet of Mozart's Symphony No. 41, which is his last symphony, he plays with that chord and its resolution. So you'll hear it several times very clearly in the horns.(brisk music) Showtime(brisk music) So that's quite easy to hear. So, because we like so much to discover the origins of something, the origins of this chord. So who was the first to use it? So people have been searching and have been very preoccupied by this question, who was the first person to use the dominant seventh? Now if you just think about it without a context just as a combination of notes, you can go back to the 14th century and find that combination of notes, but it won't necessarily resolve into the tonic. So with the context that we are familiar with, we have to go to the beginning of the 17th century to the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, and I'm going to play you an example from a madrigal on the second page of the score, you will hopefully hear that chord appearing, and I'll make some gesture to indicate where it comes. It's a very beautiful piece.(lush music) So this.(lush music) They're singing it on a different key, but nevertheless, you picked up, this is where it appears, and it appears kind of without preparation. Monteverdi actually breaks the rules of counterpoint deliberately and introduces this seventh, this dissonant note on top, with the leap, not even preparing it in any way, and why we know that it actually did cause consternation, because another musician who was called Artusi started criticizing him for that, and saying, you know, you're introducing all these kinds of things, all these strange sonorities that we don't want, they're unpleasant, and Monteverdi republished his madrigals with a note that that's exactly what I mean to do. This is the new style, so tough, basically. Accept this. But you shouldn't imagine that after Monteverdi, then people immediately started using this chord. So it, it happened very gradually, and in fact, in the 17th century, in the middle of 17th century, there's a kind of gap in music history. We're not quite sure what happens and how it happens. But if we go towards the end of the century, we can find that in Lully, for example, in Lully's "Te Deum" there's quite a lot of alternation between dominant and tonic, but not the seventh. So you will hear something like this.(lush music) Yeah, So the bass goes like this. Yeah. 1 5, 1 5. But it's still not the seventh, it's just two triads. So let's hear it.(energetic music) So it's sort of there and the seventh appears.(lush music) They play everything in a different, in a different tuning, so that's why we end up in a different key. So this is the seventh.(lush music) In the end, it ends up just being without the seventh. So he uses it very, very sparingly. But if we go to just a few decades later, so the beginning of the 18th century, and we have Corelli, and here we have it just in plain view, the dominant seventh, at least two on the first page, and I'm going to play this and let you hear it.(lush music) You might might have noticed that he has all these figures in between the musical lines. So what do they mean? Some of them are sevenths, and in fact, the ones that I showed pointed out as the dominant sevenths were also marked by a seventh. So that was the practice of the so-called Basso Continuo, or thoroughbass, or figured bass as it was written in the score. So this practice actually arose in Monteverdi's time, but at first it was just to indicate for, say, an accompanying harpsichord which note they had to add, which note they exactly they had to play, so there were figures like figure 15, and then you would have to cancel 15 notes and play exactly that note, but gradually this practice helps people to think of course, as these abstract units. So if it says seventh, it can be this,(lush music) or it can be this,(lush music) or it can be a...(lush music) Yeah, the harpsichordist can improvise, but it will be still consisting of the same notes, and the main thing is the bass will always be the same, so all the notes are at the disposal of the harpsichordist, but he knows that they have to belong to the seventh. So that practice actually helped established chords as these kind of abstract things that people could think of as, you know, well, despite all the decorations around it, I can still hear that it's the dominant seventh chord. So Corelli, I mean, we don't talk about him that much. We don't remember him as much as we do Beethoven, for example, or Mozart, but at the time, what he did was extremely interesting and pleasing for people, and this is, for example, what Francesco Gasparini said about him, that "This practice followed by the better modern composers is found particularly in the extremely delightful symphony of Arcangelo Corelli, supreme virtuoso of the violin, true Orpheus of our time, who moves and shifts his basses with so much artfulness care and grace using these ties and dissonances so well controlled and resolved and so well interwoven with a variety of themes that one may well say he has rediscovered the perfection of ravishing harmony." So people felt that this was something new and something extremely beautiful. They liked it, what they did. Charles Burney, who wrote his history of music in 1776, and between 1776 and '88, or something like that, he said, "Scarce a contemporary musical writer, historian or poet neglected to celebrate his genius and talents, and his productions have contributed longer to charm the lovers of music by the mere powers of the bow, without the assistance of the human voice than those of any composer that has yet existed." And I think this is a very interesting point."By the mere power of the bow without the assistance of the human voice," which means that Corelli played his role in the development of instrumental music without text. Without the voice, which means without text. So usually, if we have the text, we don't have to worry so much where the music moves because the text binds it all together. We're interested in the text. But if you don't have the text, we need something else, which makes us sit on the edge of our seat, and ask, "What next? What's next? Where are you, where are we going?" So it's the power of this dominant seventh which propels us forward. It's because we want to resolve it. So why indeed we want to resolve it? Why is it if I play this to you(lush music) and just walk off, you will feel unsatisfied. Why is this? People talk about the gravitational pull of the tonic. Somehow it just wants, wants to resolve there. It is a metaphor, obviously, but Rameau actually being one of these great enlightenment scholars believed that he's made a scientific discovery, that he discovered a law of nature, that this is how things are in nature, that the dominant seventh has to resolve into the tonic. Well, this has been disproven, because actually if you play it to somebody who has never heard Western music at all, to some kind of remote, say remote hermit living somewhere in the midst of Siberia, or in the Amazonian jungle, they might not necessarily want to resolve it. So it's really a cultural thing. It's a thing that we developed as a result of practice of Western music. So let's talk about this chord as a questioning chord. For this, I've chosen the small piece here by Chopin, which is very familiar to you. So you will hear the first little phrase, which stops on the dominant seventh, and then it sounds like a question, it sounds incomplete. And then the second phrase which seems to answer it. And then he alternates between them. He keeps sort of asking you questions with music and providing some reassurance, and then towards the end of this little piece, he asks you the question even more intensely by using a dominant seventh, which leads you into a different key, but actually it doesn't go there, but you will see, you will feel this level of intensity rising, and then it all resorts to the tonic. So let us hear it from that point of view.(lush music) Okay. Does it make sense? Yeah? So there's a further level of complexity here that I don't want to go into, it's about that climactic, most intense dominant seventh, but let's stop here for a moment. So now I would like to invite our quartet, the Bodman Quartet, to actually illustrate something for us. So if we can have them, please give them a little bit of applause.(audience applauding) So what I wanted to demonstrate with the help of the Bodman Quartet is we're going to go to the finale of a Haydn quartet, the Opus 9 No. 5, and it's an interesting piece because actually uses this questioning chord on a different level. So you hear quite a long passage of music, which then suddenly stops on the dominant seventh. So if you could illustrate for us just that little passage so that you remember it when you hear it.(lush music) So where do we go from there? Where do we go from there? Well, the first time, yeah, we are actually going to go back to the start, because it's a repeat of that whole section, and the second time when we hear this chord, he will take us somewhere else, because we're going into the development section where he will go to in other keys, and even to the minor. And every time you hear this question, you hear this dominant seventh, you realize that this is another section finished, and eventually we will end up with resolving it, hopefully, in the home key. So now I would like you to perform the whole of the finale. I'm just going to sit down, so let's enjoy a little musical break and listen for this wonderful dominant seventh.(vigorous music)(audience applauding) Thank you very much. Hayden liked inventing these things. You can imagine that he was, you know, when he was working for Count Esterhazy, and he wanted to do something new every single time. So you can imagine people would be sitting there hearing this for the first time and were really excited about these questioning phrases, because nobody had done that before. So stay with us for a little bit. I'm just going to talk a little bit about other pieces which also have these questions. Once we've established that it's a questioning chord, you can use it in a very subtle way in pieces with text, which is what Schumann does in the first song of his"Dichterliebe" cycle, which is "The Poets Love". Yeah, so the poet falls in love and asks this big question,"Will she love me?" And what he does the most amazing thing, he basically centers this whole piece around the dominant seventh and doesn't resolve it. Then of course, the second song will come. So it's not that fatal, right, that it's not resolved, but it gives us a sense that the question hangs in there. The question will be resolved. You can guess it's not going to be good.(lush music)(gentle singing) Literally the question hanging in the air, and association of the dominant seventh with this unquenchable longing might have come from one of the favorite poets by Schumann, ETA Hoffmann, who describes, I'm not sure whether I, yeah, I have it here, sorry. Just lost my place. Where he describes in one of his little novellas, hearing a dominant seventh in nature. The wind is blowing a gale, and he says,"It was in the depth of autumn, and in the calm of the night, wafted in by a light breeze, I could clearly perceive long sustained notes sometimes like a muffled organ pipe at other times like the tolling of a distant bell, I could often distinguish clearly between a low F and the fifth, C, sometimes an E flat was added a third above."(lush music) That's what he's describing."The notes producing piercing seventh chord whose a of deep lament suffused my soul with melancholy and even horror." So maybe bit too much, but if you imagine that if this was a triad, a major triad, and he would've heard it produced by the wind, he would've been delighted, because that's the chord of nature. Everything is good, everything is well, but if nature gives you a dissonant chord then there's something is not good with the harmony of the spheres. Something is really disturbing happening. So this is a kind of romantic attitude to life that Schumann also wanted to portray. But for another example, I wanted to show you another piece which also ends with a dominant seventh, but in a very different way. It's Chopin's "Prelude in F Major", and he adds this seventh, it almost ends like on a normal triad, but he adds this seventh very high up, and if you remember what I was telling you last time about the harmonic series, actually the "Overture No. 7", harmonic number seven is actually very close to the seventh. It's not quite exactly what you get on the piano, but it's close, it's slightly less dissonant than the one on the piano. So I think Chopin is trying to pretend that it's actually a stable chord at the end, because it's kind of harmonic series.(lush music) Yeah? Sounds good? It depends on performance very much. I've chosen the one where it is not too prominent. So he is trying to make it a more kind of natural chord. In another piece, which also ends on the dominant seventh chord, it's a kind of comedy piece by Tchaikovsky, which he tried to represent a peasant playing the accordion, or a very primitive accordion, a concertina. So there are only two chords that he uses there, and he ends on the dominant seventh because, well, maybe he's just moved out of view, you know, or maybe he doesn't realize that he have to resolve it. Right.(energetic music) Right? Now to the next chapter, which is how do you change direction? So if you have just a dominant tonic, which is what you've just heard, it would be a very boring piece, so you need to do something else to create interest and kind of diverse progressions. So if you imagine that our tonality in a piece is like an apartment. Well, for example, this is the plan of Mozart's apartment in Vienna. So there is a central room from which you can go in a number of places. So imagine that you're kind of gliding through these rooms, and you might come back to the central room from a different side. You don't have to to come back the same way. You can see it in 3D as well. So if you imagine that these rooms are different keys, and the central room is our home key, so you will realize this is how modulation works on the piece. So when we want to change direction, we'll go into another room, and the best thing that we can do, the most effective way to move from one room to another is to use a dominant seventh chord that belongs already to the other room. That really sort of shoots us in, because you get the new gravitational pull of the tonic that we haven't yet heard. So what I would like you now to do is to play as the, it'll be from the same Haydn quartet that we have heard, but the first movement, and it's a theme which the first, well the first phrase ends with a modulation, basically ends in another room, and it's precisely, you will hear this kind of slightly alien chord which takes us there. So if you could just play us this first phrase.(lush music) So if we just end it here, although it ends on a major triad, I think you already, you know, should feel a little bit of dissatisfaction. You are somehow not home. You have to get home. And it's the second phrase that is going to reverse the process and get you back in, but before that you will go to some other rooms, before you come back home.(lush music) That's better, isn't it? Yeah. It brings us to the room where we've started out from. Now I'm going to let them go for a moment. They're going to come back in about 20 minutes. So thank you very much.(audience applauding) In the meantime, I'm going to show you another way of playing with this, the same kind of idea. Yeah, so you already heard these notes at symphony, you heard this dominant seventh chord. We'll now see where he goes next. So he goes to another room. Again, to a minor key, it's loud music, and then pay attention to how he comes back. That's very interesting.(energetic music) So I dunno whether you've noticed, but he actually made a few false moves before he came back. He used the same chords, chord progression, dominant and tonic, but in the wrong key, so ended up in two wrong rooms and then finally he gets back.(lush music) Yeah, and he emphasizes this, but using the horns again, so which remind you that this is your home now. Now, here is a another sort of slightly jokey example, but it shows you the power of the dominant seventh and how much we care about harmony. So Stravinsky in around 1944 was given this commission to harmonize the American national anthem and he did it in his own Stravinskian way, right. So it's a little bit maybe jokey at times, but it offended them so much that they actually called the police. So he played it with the Boston Orchestra and then the Massachusetts police were investigating him for misappropriating the anthem. So what did he do? So you will notice that, well you know that the music, so you know when it's supposed to come home. Yes, so you already expect it in a, you know, in a funeral still left, but you already know you're coming home, so you're expecting the harmonic movement towards home, and at that point, you know, he derails it, because he uses the dominant seventh chord from another key, and that pushes us away from the home key and we are horrified because it sounds wrong. So let's test this.(lush music)(energetic music) So that phrase, (singing). Now that the harmony that people didn't expect. So that really was so powerful that they had to call the police because they felt it was wrong. That's how much we care about harmony. Now there is another way to play with this, and imagine that the composer hovers on this threshold between the two rooms, and then decides to do something else, and this chord turns into not just a threshold, but a portal, and takes us to another room, another dimension, you don't expect to get get here. You step over, you are in a magical kingdom, somewhere else where you didn't expect to be. So this is what Hayden, again, Hayden does in his Symphony No. 55, and for that he has to respell this chord. He has to rename one of the notes.(lush music) So he goes on with this, and you expect it to go here.(lush music) And then here it says,"Well this is not actually a D flat, it's a C sharp. It's the same note, yeah, different name, but then it has to go up,(lush music) and it goes into the minor. So you didn't expect this. He was the first person to sort of try these out, and then a few moments later he comes back through the same trick, again through the portal, not through the normal course. This is quite hard to hear, but I will, I'm going to test you anyway.(vigorous music) And he comes back. Yeah. But it's again this, he pauses on this chord,(lush music) and we don't know where it's going to go. It comes back. So, you know, they were playing with us a lot. In the most magical way, Tchaikovsky used this device in his "Romeo & Juliet". So just before the wonderful magical love theme, he establishes this chord, which is the dominant seventh.(lush music) Holds it for a long time. And you know, well you think it's going to go(lush music) in there, but it goes somewhere else. So it goes actually(lush music) in a magical key. He goes through the really magical portal. So it's a wonderful moment.(tense music) So it actually ends up in the key which is a semitone lower, where he was heading, than he was heading, and it feels like you are in another world. You're elevated, because it's a love theme. And what happens next, I don't know whether you've noticed from the diagram, but in the second line of this, there are several of these dominant seventh chords that actually do not resolve at all, but follow each other.(lush music). Yeah, and so on, and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of them, which means that you are not actually, you're just gliding, like through an awful lot of rooms, like in a palace. You just sort of, without stopping, you go through them. So now of course the next thing is how to lose direction with the dominant seventh chord. So imagine that you have two of them and you alternate between them. One pulls you into one place, another one pulls you into the other place, and you are undecided. You have these equal forces pulling you in different directions. So one of the first people to try this out was Mikhail Glinka, and he did it in his opera "Ruslan and Ljudmila", at the moment when the bride was abducted from the wedding feast. So everyone is so flabbergasted by this that they lose, you know, they're under this spell, they lose their sense of direction, and you hear these chords, these magical chords.(serene music) That goes somewhere else. By the time they wake up, the bride is far away, right, so the chord have kept them under the spell. And Mussorgsky, in "Boris Godunov", does a similar thing, but for a different reason. He presents you with a orchestral representation of the bells. Yes, he thinks, "Well how do I present these bells?" Russian bells are not tuned. Deliberately not tuned. It was actually an offense to tune a bell, because it has to have a character, this completely sort of multiphonic, very complex harmonic spectrum. So he presents it with two dominant sevenths, which are also just alternating and not resolving. So for quite a long stretch, you have no key. There is no tonality, and it sounds a little bit foreboding, because this is the coronation scene from "Boris Godunov", and he's not going to end well, right.(sinister music) All that time, there was no key, it was an eternal passage, because you were pulled in two different directions. Now here I would like to introduce the idea of inversion. So the dominant seventh chord, you can do various things with it. So imagine that these are the four notes, and the one at the bottom is the, the black one, is the root, we call it the root. Yeah. Root, the third, the fifth and the seventh. So what if you then take this root and put it an octave up? Is it the same chord or a different chord? And then you can do the same with the next note.(lush music) And again.(lush music) Until you rotate it back to the dominant seventh. Yeah, so it has three different inversions. Again, inversions is not a good term. We should really have called it rotations or something. Like, we have to stick with it. So inversions. Now, the interesting thing is that they form these kind of different, slightly different sound. They have their own character, because if the dominant seventh just have the thirds,(lush music) then the other one, the other the ones all have a second.(lush music) It's a different interval, and actually sounds harshly, and if you have it in the bass,(lush music) it sounds different, it has its own character. So, and again, Charles Burney tells us that somebody who uses or invented inversions of the dominant seventh"Conferred as refreshing a benefit on the craving lovers of music as Moses on the thirsty Israelites in producing water with his wand from the rock on Mount Horeb." So a very lovely kind of description of all the diversity these chords give us. So for example, we can start with the first inversion, and Mendelssohn's "Song Without Words" starts as if we are kind of just walked in on somebody improvising. It starts in medias res. It's as if it's not the beginning of the piece. It's a lovely, lovely device.(lush music) So that was the first inversion. So it also wants to resolve, but it doesn't have this very definite final kind of, you know, move of the bass. It's much gentler, so it leads us into the piece in a very gentle way, but I'm particularly interested in the third inversion, and this is is the one that I played to you.(vigorous music) Because it has a very interesting function in Western music, that of a turning point very often. So, well how to get it? We get basically, at the beginning of Saint-Saens' 1st Concerto, we get first very familiar to you, major triad, and then one note is added to it, but it's added in the bass.(lush music) And the moment you hear it, you almost don't hear it, that's in the strings, but it creates this sense of foreboding and you realize, well we have a long story to tell. Right.(lush music) Great chord to start with. Yeah. As if you're just, you know, entering a new world. A world, yeah. Once upon a time. Again, Haydn did the thing of starting the whole quartet with this chord, in a very, again, witty way, as he always does.(vigorous music) Yeah, so again, a moment of surprise, you don't expect it to be the first chord in a piece. Mendelssohn, in his "Italian Symphony", in the minuet, he actually uses this chord as a kind of focus of attention. He repeats it all the time. It becomes a very romantic question, again, in the sound of the horns.(lush music) Goes back to it. Yeah. So it really features it, and there's a lovely horn sound. Now Beethoven loved using it because it creates a lot of disturbance in the bass, and Beethoven loved this sort of slightly ugly sound, so there is a moment in "Symphony No. 7" when he uses just two notes there, and they create in the bass, they create a moment, you know, he doesn't quite resolve it. He resolves it on a weak beat. So he keeps going to this third inversion dominant seventh, and the sense is that it's like a needle that's got stuck on the record, if anyone of you remembers what that is. So we really feel disturbed. We cannot get off. And the moment then when it resolves properly, we all have a sense of relief.(lush music) Power of home. Do you feel like, you know, you are really stuck in it. Beethoven loves creating these moments of tension. Now, I would say that this chord is particularly typical of recitatives, so if you actually look at various operatic recitatives, or recitatives in oratorio, there's always some kind of question and answer going on. Sometimes the character will talk to themselves, and say,"Well, should I do this or should I do that? Oh, okay, yeah. I'm going to sing an aria." So there's always some kind of inner dialogue going on. Well, in very often this particular chord acts as a turning point, but, however, so I, it didn't take me very long...(lush music) Sorry. It doesn't take me very long to find the moment where it actually accentuates the word but, aber, in Matthew Passion. So with the recitative by Jesus, and he says,"Well, you haven't arrested me so far, I've been sitting there for a long time." But he said, "Aber." Yeah. But it's all how it has to be, how it's written in the scriptures. So let's hear that moment, just a little bit before the aber, and then that chord.(lush music) Yeah, so it's a turning point. And people started using, and Tchaikovsky uses it quite a lot in his operas, as the moment, here's the moment that duet is ending of Olga and Lensky. They are in love with each other, and then the chord warns them that someone else is going to come in. They don't yet see them, but the chord already tells both us and them that someone else is going to enter. Unfortunately the applause interferes here, so it doesn't work quite so well.(lush music)(audience applauding)(lush music) They have to do something, because the chord came in, the third inversion. Now we're still in "The Queen of Spades" when Herman and Liza are singing their duet and everything seems to be fine, and then says,"I will run away anywhere with you, anywhere you like," and he says."Of course, where are we going to go," she says, and he says, "Of course, to the gambling house." And that's a terrible moment because she realizes he's mad, he's kind of addicted to gambling, and she doesn't matter to him.(lush music)(energetic music) That's a really terrible turning point, but that chord again. Right, I'm going to miss that out, because I feel like I'm running out of time, and just a little kind of epilogue to that will be the move against the dominant seventh. So who would want to go against such a lovely chord? So Russian composers, Russian polymath Vladimir Odoevsky felt that for Russian composers, they had to get away from these dominant tonic relationships and especially from the dominant seventh because they wanted to be different from Western composers. So this is where they start to want to be original and he feels that this dominant tonic relationship is already too banal. You have to think of something else. So he says actually that Monteverdi, with Monteverdi, as the seventh chord, removed the firm foundation from music. And he says it's kind of a sign of degradation, rather than progress. So we have to go back to the roots, to the church modes, possibly, and rediscover something that we had lost, and he suggests even, you know, the way to harmonize a scale without it at all.(lush music) Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Avoiding it. Yes, he basically tries to suggest ways of harmonize it without using it, and Glinka does exactly that at the very beginning of his overture "Ruslan and Ljudmila", although the gesture is very much something like,(lush music) but he uses a different chord just to avoid that dominant seventh, and it sounds slightly different, but it passes so quickly you won't even notice.(energetic music) Yeah, it could be the same, but it is different. It's the alternative, it's the Russian chord. Right. We wanted to do things differently. And Mussorgsky again, you know, while harmonizing the tune which could be easily harmonized with the dominant seventh.(lush music) Something like that. In the liturgical music in Russia, this is exactly what would have been used, but he invents a very different...(lush music) Yeah, So he, instead of doing that,(lush music) so he goes,(lush music) something like that. Very unusually, and it creates this very archaic color. And finally, yeah, for our final little recital, I've chosen a movement from Shostakovich's "Quartet", which is very unusual. So Shostakovich, of course, writes already in the 20th century and he uses all kinds of harmonies, so it can be very difficult harmonic progressions, but this chord, this movement is mainly based on this third inversion dominant seventh, and you will hear that three of the musicians will be almost constantly holding it, and the violin will be reacting to it by way of producing her recitative. So it's imitation already, a kind of neoclassical rendition of recitative by a quartet, and you will hear how these chords, familiar from the 18th century, sound very different in this context, and these recitatives become incredibly intense and incredibly moving, and only at the very end, almost going into this kind of churchy mode, he's going to resolve this dominant seventh. It's almost like Amen at the end. So with this, I will finish my story and invite the quartet to play this wonderful movement for you.(audience applauding)(lush music)(audience applauding)- I hope you can all join us for Marina's next lecture in the series, which will be on musical cadences, on 22nd January. Please join me once again in thanking Marina and the Bodman Quartet for such a wonderful performance. Thank you all.(audience applauding)- Thank you.