Gregory Martin - paper 2007 - Grieg Society

If we look at the harmonic treatment on a purely vertical level, we see one of Grieg’s
most idiosyncratic harmonic tendencies: the placement of a chromatic scale under a
diatonic melody, and the filling of the space thus created with an harmonic progression
that doesn’t always sound functional. This technique was also employed in the Op. 66
folksong settings, which had a profound influence on Bartok’s setting of folk music.
Witness, for example, numbers 4 and 12 from that collection (Ex. 2 and 3, respectively).
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