Passing Diminished Seventh Chords – All the Things You Are

Definition: A passing diminished 7th chord is a non-diatonic fully diminished seventh chord that joins other chords by half-step motion and creates passing motion in the bass.

Passing diminished seventh chords can also appear in progressions only as color chords; they are not really able to be analyzed as secondary dominants. This type of chord mostly appears when the bass line is descending rather than ascending.

Below are a couple of examples of this type of use.

All the Things You Are

The song “All the Things You are” was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein in 1939 for the musical Very Warm For May.

Below is a chords only version of the song and a link to a recording of the song with Ella Fitzgerald singing.

This piece is in AABA form. Let’s look at the last return of the A section (mm. 25-35) of the piece.

The piece is in the key of Ab major. The example below shows an analysis of everything that we can already analyze in this section.

The one chord that is questionable is in measure 32 – the Bo7 chord.

If this chord were a secondary dominant, we would expect it to go to a C chord; B is leading tone of C. However, the chord progresses to a Bb-7 chord instead.

There is no note of the Bo7 that would act as a leading tone to any note in the Bb-7 chord. Therefore, the Bo7 cannot be a secondary dominant of the following chord.

The Bo7 chord here is a color chord. Since the bass line makes a descending line – a passing motion C-B-Bb) – we can just call this Bo7 a passing o7 chord.

Summary

The passing diminished seventh chord is a non-diatonic fully diminished seventh chord that joins other chords by half-step motion and creates passing motion in the bass.

This chord can function as a secondary dominant of the next chord or as a color chord.