Music theory is often highly focused on concepts, categories, and names. We evidently find them useful in helping to organise our understanding of musical style, structure, and technique (notwithstanding the many complications they can attract).

Musicological textbooks, anthologies, and research articles addressing concepts like ‘augmented sixths’, ‘metrical dissonance’, and ‘sonata form’ provide helpful, illustrative examples, but those examples are usually few in number and without evidence in support of their alleged representativeness.

‘Moments Musicaux’ provides lists of such musical objects at orders of magnitude beyond any existing collections, and combining a range of approaches:

  • collations of existing lists for the Neapolitan- and augmented-sixth chords from music theory anthologies, where they invariably feature;
  • new (manually collected) lists on a comparable scale, but for two objects which are all but absent from textbooks: ‘mixed’ meter (such as 5/4) and the augmented chord.
  • computationally retrieved lists of augmented chords, augmented sixth chords, and the neo-Riemannian L and P relations (R is too common).

This set of example lists provides a kind of proof of concept for a wider project seeking to provide as-comprehensive-as-possible listings, as well as the score examples themselves for a kind of mega-anthology.

Anthology Listings

Corpus Augmented Triads Augmented Sixths Neapolitan Sixths L and P relations Mixed Metre
Existing anthologies (various repertoire) - X X - -
New collections (various repertoire) X - - - X
Scores of Scores Lieder Corpus X X X X ‘Le Colibri’ only
Bach Chorales X - - - -
Beethoven String Quartets X - - - -

Acknowledging ‘Moments Musicaux’

As with all of FourScoreandMore’s offerings, you can use the ‘Moments Musicaux’ lists for any purpose; if you do so, please acknowledge where you got it from. If you use it in an academic context, please cite the academic report:

[Reference to follow].

I also take requests! Let me know if you have a musical object and / or a corpus that you’d particularly like to see represented here.