Major chord
Subdominant major 7th
First play the chord on the left a few times to establish the key. Then play the chord on the right,
and you will notice a sense of wistfulness. Every musical epoch from the Baroque era onward has
taken advantage of this effect.
The subdominant with a
major seventh conveys
wistfulness
by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
or in Elton John’s ‘Your Song.’ In
many pieces, this harmonic device
is a means of generating a sense of
pensiveness.
This chord clearly illustrates that
the emotional effect of harmonies
has remained fundamentally the
same across the centuries. The
subdominant with a major seventh
sounds downright wistful, regardless of whether it occurs in the
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Air, the
choral piece ‘Abschied vom Walde’
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