Sunday, April 12, 2026

Luigi Fragna, "'O Café chantant"

 Luigi Fragna, "'O Café chantant," was written for the 1901 Piedigrotta Festival in Naples. I have written about songs from this long-running event before, in Part 4 of the survey of dominant ninths chords after c1890 (link).





Reduction. If you want a traditional background, it's marked out at the top: a simple neighbor above ^8. As I remember, Arthur Komar was the first to offer the "stationary" ^8 as background focal tone--see my article in Music Theory Spectrum 2009 for details. More notes but equally simple play of neighbors make a controlling middleground.