All good things must come to an end. So must all long and arduous ordeals, and it’s a good thing. Today’s question is the one that completes our new music theory quiz for TriviaPark.com and AheadWithMusic.com, and frankly it’s kind of a tough one. But if you don’t know the answer, what better way to hone your intuition than by forging blindly into:
Ice-cream is not the answer
To a classical musician, who or what is ‘The Neapolitan’?
- A celebrated composer, Domenico Scarlatti, born in Naples
- A concert hall in Vienna where Mozart’s greatest works were introduced
- A distinctive-sounding chord, the ‘Neapolitan sixth’
- An opera of Gioachino Rossini, his last, tragically incomplete
The ‘Neapolitan’, or ‘Neapolitan sixth’, chord can be described technically as the first inversion of the major triad on the flatted supertonic. Major triads are the simplest and most familiar kind of chord. The major triad on the first, or tonic, note of a C major scale contains the notes C, E and G. (When a guitarist plays a ‘C chord’, it is a mixture of these notes.) The supertonic is the second ‘degree’ of the scale. In C major, it is the note D. The flatted supertonic is thus Db, and the major triad with that ‘root’ contains the notes Db, F and Ab. (A guitarist would call this a ‘Db chord’.) The first inversion of the chord is produced by using its second note, not the first, at the bottom of the chord. In C major, the lowest note of the Neapolitan chord is therefore F. The distinctive interval of a minor 6th between the F and the Db — a note foreign to the C major scale — is the ‘Neapolitan sixth’, and that name is often applied to the chord itself. Introduced in the 17th century, when it would have sounded dangerously radical, the chord became a favorite harmonic variation of many composers, including Beethoven.
