History
The concept of the secondary dominant was not widely recognized in writings on music theory prior to the 20th century. Before this time, in music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, a secondary dominant, along with its chord of resolution, was considered to be a modulation. Because the effect of modulation was so short, and did not sound like a real arrival of a new key, the two chords had a special name—"transient modulation"—that is, a modulation in which the new key is not established. Since this was a rather self-contradictory description, theorists in the early 1900s, such as Hugo Riemann (who used the term "Zwischendominante"—"intermediary dominant", still the usual German term for a secondary dominant), searched for a better description of the phenomenon. One method of signifying these chords at the time (used by both Riemann and Ernst Kurth) was by placing the chord symbol in parentheses, thereby indicating that the chord functions only in relation to the chord immediately following it—for example, (VII) V.
In the English-speaking world, the analysis "V7 of IV" was first used by Walter Piston in 1933, in a monograph entitled Principles of Harmonic Analysis. (Notably, Piston's analytical symbol always used the word "of"—e.g. "V7 of IV" rather than the virgule "V7/IV.) In his 1941 book Harmony Piston used the term "secondary dominant" for the first time. At around the same time (1946–48), Arnold Schoenberg created the expression "artificial dominant" to describe the same phenomenon, in his posthumously published book Structural Functions of Harmony.
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