Talk:Secondary chord

Lead section

The lead has a lot of unnecessary information, in my opinion. It spends a lot of time explaining what a key is and what a harmonic function is, which I don't think this article needs to cover. In my opinion, we can safely delete everything up to "Secondary chords are altered or borrowed chords..." Any other opinions? Squandermania (talk) 03:30, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

@Squandermania: Aside from claiming the information is unnecessary you have not explained why it is unnecessary, although you have, as is rare on Wikipedia, suggested an alternative. Hyacinth (talk) 00:42, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

We can either pretend that only musicians read articles about music theory, and thus nothing needs explaining, or we can assume that at least occasionally a nonmusician or untrained musician reads an article about music, in which case they need some context and not a bare bones seven word definition with no explanation. If you check MOS:LEAD it says that the lead should mention the main points of the article, and in an article about key and diatonic function these both seem like main points, and thus deserving of mention in the lead. Hyacinth (talk) 00:46, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

One question is whether it whether (at the start of the lede) it should be called "analytical label [of a chord]" or it is "a chord" -- otherwise everything in music (and most of everything) could be defined as a label of some sort ("A chord is an analytical label given to the simultaneous sounding...", "A cat is a category label given to animals that..."). I don't think Squandermania was proposing an only 7-word definition -- they were suggesting starting with the second paragraph rather than the current first. I think I agree. (It would also be nice not to have the Mozart example squeeze the lede into a tiny gutter paragraph if possible). -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 01:26, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

I did not learn until today that Hyacinth had passed away. I think some editing can now take place here. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 05:46, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Secondary Dominants as Main Topic?

Thanks @Squandermania -- for the excellent cleanup esp. to the lede -- it reads much better. I was going to include "Applied Chords" in the lede since it is an important alternate term (even though I use "Secondary" in my own publishing and teaching). But it occurred to me that there's something weird about the title of the article itself:

Secondary Chords are the more general term, but 99% of the time theorists talk about secondary dominants (V, V7, and chords with dominant function like viio7 etc.). I think that going with WP:COMMONNAME the article should be "Secondary Dominant" with that being the main topic and then a subsidiary topic being "Other Secondary Chords" covering things like IV7/V (almost always on its way to V/V), etc. We can already see that 95% of this article is on secondary dominants and leading tones anyhow, so it would help the article get to the point faster, with just one sentence in the lede "Secondary dominants are the most common example of the general class of secondary or applied chords (see below)." -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 20:53, 3 February 2026 (UTC)