:: The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis ::

WebFacts

WebFacts 1
Some textbooks published in the 1940s all the way to the 1970s describe leadingtone triads as dominant seventh chords without a root (see Walter Piston, Harmony [New York: Norton, 1941, 1969]). These chords were labeled V^O7. While this led to jokes about whether or not to double the missing root (!), there is a grain of truth to this view-the leading-tone chord often appears in progressions where a V or V⁷ could have been used instead.

In fact, the idea of vii^O as a V⁷ without a root is an old one-dating back to Jean-Philippe Rameau's theories of chord progression in the early eighteenth century. When he wrote a fundamental bass (an analytical bass line, written on a staff under the music's bass line, that indicated the roots of each chord) for vii^O, he showed the root as

-the root of V⁷.