The sound clip below is an exercise to test all the possible resolutions I can justify from a major-minor 7th chord, a.k.a. the “dominant 7th chord (V7)”.  In all of music, probably no chord has had greater harmonic use over the centuries than this particular sonority.  It contains the interval of a tritone, which is quite unstable, giving it the forward-moving sound that the ear expects to resolve into a more stable harmony.

But what is it really capable of?

The vast majority of the music literature resolves this chord back to the tonic, a fifth below.  Thus a V7 built on G will resolve either to a C Major or c minor chord.

Also common are “deceptive” resolutions to the sixth scale degree… C Major allows a resolution to a minor, and c minor can substitute A-flat Major.  Also very traditional.  So, that’s four unique chords that can be resolved by the same major-minor seven chord.

The clip below uses the same seventh chord to resolve to twelve unique chords.

“Modal mixing”, a.k.a. borrowed chords helps to explain why a sound that is not part of the home key can be interjected effectively, as it has the same tonic and is merely borrowing the rest of the chord from the parallel key… C Major and c minor are parallel to each other; same tonic (c) but different harmonies.

So I considered taking the two deceptive resolutions above, and merely substituting the parallel sound.  This allowed a-flat minor and A Major into the mix.  That’s now six chords.

The other six came from the truly wonderful phenomenon of tritone substitution.  This splendid technique, taken to new heights (if not introduced by) the Romantic composers of the 19th century, and enhanced greatly by 20th century Jazz, suggests simply enough that any two chords with the same tritone may resolve identically.  In the dominant 7th case, a chord removed by one tritone thus shares the same tritone… i.e. a G7 chord has the tritone of B-F, and so does a C#7 chord.   The unstable tritone is still present, and thus a sense of resolve is accomplished regardless the other notes of the chord.  Thus the C#7 resolves to all the 6 chords already mentioned.  And our original G7 chord then resolves to a whole new set of 6 chords.

I first starting thinking about this last August when I studied a work by Chopin, and decided last night just to line all the resolutions up in a row to see if in fact they all work.  I think they do, and this opens up a lot of harmonic possibilities.  It basically means that any dominant seventh chord can resolve to half of the keys/chords in tonal existence.  Really, that’s quite amazing, and they don’t usually teach that in college. (There are, in fact, resolutions even beyond these 12 within the literature of Chopin and other Romantics, but I am unable to explain them theoretically at the moment.  One might be tempted to say that they can resolve to truly anything.)

Click here for the string of 12 resolutions using the same V7 chord.  Every other chord will be identical, but each resolution will be unique.