ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses nonfunctional harmonic syntax, planning, modality, and new melodic and harmonic building blocks. The natural behavior of the dominant seventh chord is tonicization within the context of functional tonality. Long the stepchild of functional harmony, the augmented triad found a home in Claude Debussy’s music. Again, he tethered its use to planing. Passages such as the next are less tonally anchored than the preceding ones owing to the tonal ambiguity of the augmented triads in the right-hand part. Debussy’s fascination with the Church modes probably helped inform his approach to syntax since modally based music predated major–minor tonality and its associated harmonic functions. During the seventeenth century, Renaissance modal practice gradually gave way to functional harmonic syntax.
