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Richard Cohn claims that several instances from western art music composed before 1950 associate the hexatonic-pole triadic progression (H) with the Freudian uncanny, when the familiar and the unfamiliar come into uncomfortably close psychological quarters. After 2000, several instances from popular movies and television associate the SLIDE triadic progression (S) with an important subset of the uncanny- the liminal space between life and death. A reimagining of Cohn's method for demonstrating the nonarbitrariness of H's association works to show the same for S by replacing the diatonic scales, central to western art repertoire, with certain non-diatonic scales that occur throughout recent film soundtracks.
Richard Cohn's article on "Uncanny Resemblances" (2004) includes two interwoven claims. First, he claims that a certain triadic progression enjoyed a significant association with an extramusical concept in western art music, citing seventeen examples from Gesualdo to Schoenberg. He dubs the particular progression the hexatonic pole, or H for short, which is the progression between two members of set class (sc) 3-11 (037)-the set of major and minor triads-that together constitute a member of sc 6-20 (014589), the hexatonic scale. As shown in Example 1, a progression from an A-major triad to an F-minor triad is an H, because the six pitch classes (pcs) involved in the progression, when written in scalar order, form an octave-filling pattern of alternating half steps and minor thirds representative of the hexatonic scale: F-Ab-A-C-CS-E. The extra-musical concept that Cohn claims to be associated with H in western art music through text, program, biography, or critical response is a dramatic rendering of Sigmund Freud's concept of the unheimlich, or uncanny. In Freud's uncanny, the boundary between two contraries of human experience-most notably life and death-erodes to an appreciable, and psychologically discomforting, degree (Freud [1919] 1953).
Cohn's second claim asserts a music-structural analogue for the erosion of this binary, which is constituted by the contraries of consonance and dissonance. Cohn considers as consonant all three intervals-register aside-found within a major or minor triad: interval classes 3, 4, and 5. As shown in Example 1, a major or minor triad can progress to its hexatonic-pole partner using semitonal voice leading in all three parts. Such voice leading, if reckoned diatonically, can obfuscate the consonance of the two H-related...