Haba's field shifting - and the expansion of traditional functional harmony

Hába characterizes the quarter-tone gamut as separated into two fields, one half comprising the twelve conventional pitches, and the other half, shifting all the twelve notes by a quarter-tone, the twelve quarter-tone pitches. In harmony, Passages occur in which chords composed purely of conventional pitches alternate with chords composed purely of quarter-tone pitches. Two fields are not always rejecting each other when he equally divided a perfect 4th (5 semitones)into 2 equal intervals, equal 2.5 for each, the 0.5 quartertones always step into the other field. Sometimes, this fourth interval can be further divided into 2.5+2+0.5 or other permutations. This kind of splitting a fourth can be traced to ancient greek tetrachord, a scale of four notes, bounded by the interval of a perfect fourth.

A chord across both fields, the chord spell like a flatter dominant 7th chord. the 7th harmonic on harmonic series is quite flat (-31cents). This chord combines both fields sounds better according to the harmonic series.

Hába recommends contrary motion in the outer voices to smooth the transition from one field to the other. In other words, the melodies are often not only stepwise or chromatic stepwise, it is often microtonal stepwise. Other traditional nonchord tones, neighboring tone, passing tone, suspension etc are often used to further decorate the melody. V-I motion is also important and the field shifting feature, the harmonic language becomes more colorful and even smoother. 


Haba really tied to the tradition and expanded it to 24-TET system. 

Skinner, M. L.(2007). Toward a quarter-tone syntax: Analyses of selected works by Blackwood, Hába, Ives, and Wyschnegradsky. State University of New York at Buffalo. https://www.tierceron.com/diss/haba/haba.pdf


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