ABSTRACT
As several of the examples above have revealed, one particular way in which Grieg articulates the harmonic unfolding of his music is through the shifting between different added-note collections. Typically, this involves replacing one extra-triadic pitch and its characteristic sonority by another, such as is given by the shifts from major+added sixth to half-diminished or dominant sevenths across verses in ‘Ved GjætleBekken’, or the alternating inflections of 6 and 7 in ‘I Ola-Dalom’ (with the varied added-note harmonies they produce). Such techniques constitute a small-set form of what Dmitri Tymoczko has designated ‘scalar modulation’ – the movement from one set of background pitches to another.1 In traditional common-practice music a small number of pitches (normally three) go to form the type of vertical sonority characteristic of the music’s harmonic soundworld, while a larger collection (normally numbering between five and seven) is used for melodic construction. Beyond such harmonic and scale sets lies the idea of macroharmony, which refers to the total number of different pitch-classes in harmonic use within a limited period of time. In simpler harmonic styles the macroharmony may be little more than the scale collection (with the addition, say, of the raised fourth degree or flattened seventh allowing modulation to V or IV), but in the highly chromatic idioms of late-Romantic music all twelve pitches may often be continually recycled.
