77: Tonicization

 














Suppose you didn’t have the context of the rest of this hymn tune, and I gave you only the first two bars of the second line and asked you to identify which key it’s in. You would be totally correct if you analyzed the first 2 chords as I chords which move to a IV, which moves to a I while an F# from the IV hangs around a little later than it should, before actually moving back to IV, then to V, then to I, in the first two bars of that line. If that were your analysis—and it would be absolutely correct—then you’d essentially be arguing that the phrase is in A. After all, that’s the key in which I is A, IV is D, and V is E. 

Allow me to put out what perhaps seems like a radical idea: even if I then show you the whole context, the analysis above remains absolutely correct. Each 2 bars is effectively one musical gesture here, and in the first 2 sets (that get repeated), everything is firmly grounded in D; this is, of course, nothing to write home about, since everthing else about the score tells us that’s what we should expect. 


However, after the repeated phrases, three of the remaining four don’t look like they speak the language of D major—except, naturally, the last one. You would be completely correct if you analyzed the first and third phrases after the repeated ones as in A, and the third one in B minor, leaving only the fourth and last post-repeat phrase as in D. 


It really does feel, for those bars, that we aren’t in D, but rather A or B minor. And when this happens—when the tonic implicitly shifts elsewhere, especially to a place that makes sense in the harmonic context of the original home, even without a declared modulation—we experience a “tonicization.” That is, the implied key really does become home for a while, until that tonicization is either undone (by clearly returning to the home key, or by actually changing the signature to match the new key) or until we tonicize something else. That latter scenario happens in “Salzburg”; it isn’t by a return to D that the tonicization of A major ends, but rather by a re-tonicization of B minor. 

The repeated bars are straightforward—we look like we’re in D, and we sound like that too—and then we have 6 bars of these (totally legal) harmonic shenanigans, and we finally come home in the last 2 bars. 


Bach and his contemporaries wrote hundreds if not thousands of chorale melody harmonizations like this one, and this technique is ubiquitous. Luckily for us, understanding tonicization is the perfect segue between yesterday’s article on functional harmony and tomorrow’s on secondary harmony.



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