The interferences of the cipherings of chord, degree and function in harmonic analysis

Abstract

The paper begins with a short history of harmonic ciphering, as it developed from
the 17th century with the practice of continuo. The signs for the leading note often
were ambiguous and the paper shows the change in meaning of crossed out Arabic
numerals which first denoted a chord including the leading note, then came to denote
a diminished or, at times, an augmented interval. Roman numerals date back to
Georg Joseph Vogler (1802), but were not adopted in France before the second part
of the 20th century. The functional designation with the letters T, S and D is due to
Hugo Riemann (1873).
In France, the ciphering of the morphology of the chords usually is kept distinct from
that of the degree, allowing an easy differenciation between consonances and
dissonances, or stable and unstable chords. Roman numerals indicate the position of
the fundamental in the scale, but this is not always sufficient. The functional
ciphering of Riemann is particularly efficient to mark the role of the chord in the
organization of the sentence. Music analysis has everything to gain in making use of
these three methods.