20: Tendencies

There are two “tendency tones.” It’s really easy to remember where they are, because they both involve the half-steps in the major scale. Further, there’s another thing you can use to remember how they move, based on their positions: the lower one in the scale moves down, and the higher one in the scale moves up.

“Tendency tones” scare people in the beginning, but if that’s you, then take my advice: play or sing a major scale but stop on the seventh degree—whatever you do, don’t finish the octave. Hold the seventh out as long as you possibly can. A battle will go on in your mind: between your conscious desire to follow my instruction and your subconscious desire that really, really wants to hear “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (maximum tension!!!!!) 1 (ahhhhhh now we can relax).”

That’s the obvious tendency tone: the seventh degree of the major scale resolves upward by a half-step to finish the octave. However, there’s another one: The fourth degree, against the tonic, resolves downward to the third. This is what makes the perfect fourth (sometimes, technically) dissonant: that a fourth above a fixed note really  wants to come down just a bit so that there can now be a major third between the moving voice and the static one. There, the two voices will be part of the same chord (and enough to define a chord), whereas only one of those two conditions is met when the voices are a fourth apart.

Here, let me show you what that looks like in actual four-part writing:

A drawing of a line AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The D in the bass of the first chord is the fifth of the chord (this is a special case which we’ll cover very shortly), and the soprano has a G. D-G is not enough information to create a chord on its own. However, conveniently, D-F# (just a half-step down) is enough information for a chord. Since they’re so close, the ear naturally wants the G to come down to the place of sufficient information (and therefore of stability) in the F#. Note that D to G is a fourth, and that D to F# is a third. For this reason, we call this tendency the 4-3 tendency (there’s another name for this, in context, which, again, we’ll cover soon).

The other tendency, is the 7-8 or 7-1 tendency for a similar reason; the seventh degree want to resolve up to what can be called either the eighth degree or the first degree (although I prefer the first degree).

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