How do you define Harmonic Retrogression with regard to intensity?

Question

I was doing some practice problems in the AP Barron's Music Theory book, and one of the practice problems asks: “When harmonies within a phrase move from a strong intensity to a less strong intensity [...] it is called:”, and the answer is retrogression.

I'm confused by this definition, as V-I would certainly not be a harmonic retrogression, yet the intensity is decreasing. On the other hand, something like IV-V⁷ would be increasing in intensity, and indeed, typically V⁷ or vii° is the last chord before returning to the tonic.

My question then is: how accurate is the book's definition? Has this sort of definition been corroborated by other music theory texts?

Answer 1

I second @Richard's comment that it's a poor definition. Here is some evidence from other textbooks than AP Barron's.

In Steven G. Laitz's The Complete Musician (which uses the "phrase model" mentioned by @Richard), retrogression is defined as follows:

a backward motion [such as] from D to PD [dominant to predominant] is called a retrogression.¹

This is used to introduce the concept of back-relating dominants, in which a dominant chord serves to expand the preceding tonic harmony but does not itself resolve to the tonic. The example given is from Bach's Prelude in Eb Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 (BWV 876), excerpted here:

X: 1
T: Prelude in Eb Major, BWV 876
T: from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II
C: Bach
M: 9/8
K: Eb
L: 1/8
%%score (V1 V2) | V3
[V:V1 stem=up] B3 z3 z Ge | {e}d3 z3 z FG | ACE
[V:V2 stem=down] G3 z3 z G2 | F3 z3 y3 | y3
[V:V3 clef=bass] z ED EB,G, E, zz | z B,=A,  B,F,D, B,, zz | F,zz
w: I | V7 | ii7
w: Tonic | BRD | PD

Aldwell and Schachter, in Harmony and Voice Leading, devotes a brief section to back-relating dominants, but nowhere uses the term "retrogression."² The Oxford Companion to Music and The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music also do not have entries for "retrogression."

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¹ _{Steven G. Laitz, The Complete Musician, 2nd ed. (2008, Oxford University Press), pages 452-53.}

² _{Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter, Harmony and Voice Leading, 2nd ed. (1989, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), pages 146-47.}

Answer 2

Interesting. I think the problem lies in a pretty poor definition.

As you've said, there are all kinds of ways to understand "intensity," so it's not hard to come up with examples that seem to defy the definition.

It seems that they mean "intensity" as something like "tendency to resolve towards tonic," but presumably the tonic chord isn't included in this set.

Thus V to IV is a retrogression because IV has a weaker tendency to resolve towards tonic (often explained by its lack of a leading tone) than V does.

Of course, the problem with this understanding of the quote is that it's somewhat circular. To understand what a good progression is, you need to understand chordal tendencies to resolve towards tonic. And to understand chordal tendencies to resolve towards tonic, you need to understand what a good progression is.

It also confuses something like IV moving to vi. This, to me, is something of a retrogression, but I can't define "intensity" in any way to suggest that one should come before the other.

A better approach, in my opinion, is that found in several recent textbooks: that of a "phrase model" or harmonic paradigm of distinct zones (tonic, predominant, dominant), and how those zones function with respect to each other (like dominant not typically moving backwards to predominant, etc.).

Answer 3

What they are asking you is how retrogression defined as a weaker root movment has contrast to a progression defined as a forward movement of 5 so depending on the key in which the example is and how the enharmonic indifference marks the intervals count will define weather or not the point of is a forward progression or a contrast retrogression with in the bar phrase