Talk:Parallel and counter parallel

Parallel or parallel?

There is something odd in this article and in the fact that Parallel chord redirects not to this one, but to parallel key. The term "parallel" obviously has two meanings, but this does not appear clearly enough from the two articles.

In German, Parallel means what is called in English "relative", and it is this sense that is described in this article, which could as easily be named "Relative and counter relative".

In English, "parallel" more often refers to what is described in Parallel key, namely two keys or two chords of the same name but of opposed mode, say C major and C minor. Obviously, there is no "counter parallel" in this case.

I don't know to what extent the first meaning, the German one, is common in English. I had never encountered it, even in (or particularly in) neo-Riemannian theory where P ("parallel") refers to what I describe above as the English meaning. It seems to me that the Parallel and counter parallel article concerns a very specific and rare usage in English or, better, a specific German usage, but fails to say so and fails to articulate it with the more common English usage. My own knowledge of English does not allow me to be sure of this, but I thought that the question should be posed.

To this may be added that the English usage of "relative" (or Parallel meaning "relative") does not seem much affected by the dualism that characterizes Riemannian theory. The article alludes to the dualism and to its complexities (in the quotation of Gjerdingen), but the whole affair would remain obscure, I think, for any reader without previous knowledge of the German tradition.

— Hucbald.SaintAmand (talk) 09:10, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(Copied from my comment on Function (music)) This article appears to refer only to Haunschild's "The New Harmony Book", which is published by a German publisher and which is not even able to give the contents on that web page in English. I suspect very much that either a German person translated the work (maybe with some last editing by a native English speaker, who might not know enough about music to boldly change "parallel" to "relative"), or by an "average" English translater who also might believe - or have been made to believe - that "parallel" is fine. If someone has access to that book, it would be interesting to find out (by researching the translator/s and by judging the quality of the English text) whether my suspicions to have some basis in fact ... I, personally, suspect very much that this is a book in bad (musical) English, and so this WP article is simply based on a wrong lemma. --User:Haraldmmueller 09:13, 12 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]