rssOne might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. - Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
2007, October 08
Cross Relation
A cross or false relation in BWV 40.6?
A cross or false relation may exist between the alto and the soprano between measures 8 and 9 in a chorale from BWV 40.
Listen to the illustration
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Definitions:
False relation: In harmony, the appearance of a note with the same letter-name in different parts (or 'voices') of contiguous or the same chords, in one case inflected with a sharp or flat and in the other uninflected; e.g. E natural and E flat in the same chord or adjacent chords. American term is 'cross relation'. Partly from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, 1980, edited by Michael Kennedy.
False relations may exist (a) between two notes of the same chord; (b) between different parts of adjacent chords; (c) of a tritone between two notes in adjacent chords.
Wikipedia definition
Everything definition
The F sharp in the alto part followed by an F natural in the soprano part in the illustration above would seem to fit all the criteria for a false or cross relation. But, I ask, does it?
The soprano voice has the structure A A B B. Though the soprano exactly repeats the A and B, the harmonization of the repeated phrases is completely different. The alto F sharp is at the end of a phrase, and the soprano F natural is at the beginning of a new phrase, and in fact, measure 8 is the end of the part A and measure 9 is the beginning of the next part B. Thus, though the notes appear in adjacent chords on the paper, musically they seem as separated from one another as the two sides of a river. So I am not sure that these notes really stand in a false relation to one another.
