Originally Posted by
Christian Miller
In the case of functions we enter another level of abstraction. What precisely does it mean that Gb6 (or for that matter Gbmaj7#11) retains the function of Gb7?
I suppose one could argue that the removal of the leading tone C# renders the function of the chord to be no longer dominant. subdominant. Em in the key of C is a dominant function according to Reimann and so on (it has the B.)
If I understood, in your example it’s standing in for a dominant so its function is normative. I think most jazz musicians mean function in this sense. It a practical definition, not a closed theoretic one. More like the way grammar of a language evolves rather than some immutable fact of nature the way Rameau and his followers imagined it.
(There’s a lot of this grammatical evolution in jazz that I’d love to track more. How exactly did the maj7 go from being a chord that needed to be prepared and resolved in earlier jazz to being considered a consonant tonic chord for example?)
So it’s not a cut and dried concept. You are distilling some aspect of it being different and another of it being the same. So it’s subjective, not objective. And that’s kind of interesting. I think subjectivity is underrated.
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