[JonPR]

Originally Posted by DCCougar

I disagree. The dominant chord in a piece contains a lot more meaning than simply knowing its name.

Thats not disagreeing with me at all. Of course the chord "contains meaning". But how can we describe that meaning? How can we explain it? How can we communicate that meaning without just playing the chord?
The word "dominant" tells you nothing about how it sounds or how it works in the music. Its just a label. It's not even "dominant" in the more literal sense that the reciting tone was in medieval modes, which is the where the word comes from.

Originally Posted by DCCougar

Of course, it is a very common "waystation" on the way "home." It leads to home.

Yes, but why? Only because we have heard it doing that so often.

Music theory will tell you that that is the "function" of the dominant chord, for sure. That's the chord's job, its purpose. But theory is not telling you how it performs that function, or how we perceive that it is performing that function.

Originally Posted by DCCougar

If you start stacking dominants -- the dominant of a dominant -- you get very strong anticipated "motion" toward home.

True...

Originally Posted by DCCougar

When I play 12-bar blues, I like to use (what I think is called) the gospel progression -- instead of resolving with IV-V-I, I use VI-II-V-I. Note that each chord is the dominant of the next. I think this resolution doesn't just bring the progression home, it slams it home.

Yes. Again, because we're used to hearing those chords do that.

The "mechanism" is the chromatic voice-leading: 7th to 3rd and vice versa (assuming you use 7th chords). We can at least point to that as some kind of logical process from chord to chord.

But why does chromatic voice-leading work? Why do we like that sound?

My point here is that music theory is not designed to go that deep. I don't have a problem with that - I don't expect music theory to give me those kinds of answers, because I know that's not what it's for. But a lot of people do think that's what it's for. A lot of people think that music theory explains music; and it doesn't. It describes music, in a whole lot of detail, but description is not explanation.

I do understand that that sense of "coming home" that western functional tonality produces - the sense that chord progressions have a "narrative" function - is important. Western music has a similar role to novels and fairy tales in that sense. Western society (at least in certain periods or classes) seems to value arts that represent some kind of narrative in that way. But not all music is narrative. A whole lot of music (in the west and around the world) is more about mood, it's more "static". IOW, there are other kinds of meaning in music beyond (or beneath) those superficial narrative devices represented by cadences and functionality.

What I'm saying is that music communicates all of those meanings to us by its sounds alone. We understand the music perfectly and entirely by just listening to it. Knowing the theory of it does not increase our understanding at all. It can make us feel like we understand something more, but it's an illusion.