creepy chords addendum

I was reading through Ponce's fabulous Guitar Sonata no. 3 last night and realized that in measures 39 and 40 (of the first movement) there is the same chord progression as mentioned in the post on creepy chords. Ponce is in Bb, but the chords qualities are the same: Major 7th +5 and a Minor(Major) 7th:



In this context I wouldn't say that the chords are "creepy", though they are tense. More creepy -- or at least menacing -- are the chords immediately preceding the 2 above (actually starting in measure 35: the structure is repeated):


Here we're really only dealing with one chord per measure: Ponce simply "flips" the outer voices (the 7th and root exchange places) giving him a very nice stepwise-ascending bass line.

And lest we think that these are just contemporary harmonic structures, or something born of jazz, keep in mind that this piece was written in 1927 -- and it's probably a safe bet that Ponce didn't invent this all on his own, so one might be able to trace it back at least to Debussy (maybe even Liszt???)...worthy of investigation.