van Alstyne, "Why Don't You Try"

 Egbert van Alstyne, "Why Don't You Try" (1905). This has a wedge figure with the descending element as primary, not the inner-voice ascent in the cadence. The latter is prominent, however. I don't regard these figures, which happen fairly often, as counter-examples but as additional confirmation that musicians were quite aware of the counterpoint of ascents from ^5 and descents from either ^5 or ^3 and they were willing to exploit them as seemed creatively and expressively appropriate, including by flipping the voices.

Marion Bauer, The Linnet

From March 2026: A post with information and links to galleries of simple ascending lines and to other essays of mine published on the Texas Scholarworks platform: link.

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Marion Bauer, "The Linnet is tuning her flute" (1915). In the beginning, full exploitation of the pastoral ^6. See the long-note pattern in the voice, the ^5-^6-^8 that is then echoed and filled out in the subsequent ascending cadence. The song is brief: this is the first verse of two, where the second has the same music. 

It really is quite remarkable how often one finds a "diversion" from ^7 in the ascent or, of course far more often, from ^2 in the descent, going back at least to the clichéd cadences of the mid- and later 18th century.

Pauline Viardot, two songs from the 1890s

From March 2026: A post with information and links to galleries of simple ascending lines and to other essays of mine published on the Texas Scholarworks platform: link.

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IMSLP page for "C’est toujours lui," VWV 1159: link. From a manuscript in the Houghton Library, Harvard University; obviously a fragment though musically  complete, but I know nothing more about it. The modern notation is by Pierre Girod. A mirror line, beginning from ^8 with a clear descent to ^5 in bars 6-8, then an even more pronounced, direct linear ascent in bars 13-16.

"Bonjour mon cœur!" is decidedly more complicated. Also a fragment, at least in the sense that it sets only the first verse of Ronsard's famous poem, this has one of the most tangled approaches to a structural cadence I have seen in any repertoire. Therefore, I have worked out three readings of the more abstract levels of melodic direction. These are a bit retrogressive as they are the well-worn three possible Schenkerian readings one teaches students to make: from ^3, from ^5, and from ^8--but they do the job for the present purpose. The harmonic reduction is mine. 

Score for page 1. The IMSLP page for "Bonjour mon cœur!": link.

From ^3:

From ^5:

From ^8:

Each reading has its virtues.

Luigi Fragna, "'O Café chantant"

 Luigi Fragna, "'O Café chantant," was written for the 1901 Piedigrotta Festival in Naples. I have written about songs from this long-running event before, in Part 4 of the survey of dominant ninths chords after c1890 (link).

Reduction. If you want a traditional background, it's marked out at the top: a simple neighbor above ^8. As I remember, Arthur Komar was the first to offer the "stationary" ^8 as background focal tone--see my article in Music Theory Spectrum 2009 for details. More notes but equally simple play of neighbors make a controlling middleground.

Song by Pauline Viardot

 Thanks to Poundie Burstein for this one, which he describes as follows:

The piece is "Aime Moi” (1864), a song by Pauline Viardot based on a Chopin mazurka [op. 33 no. 2] to which she added a vocal melody (with text by Louis Pomey). At the end of her song, she superposed a ^5-^6-^7-^8 in the melody above Chopin’s original mazurka (and she does something similar in the key of V twice earlier within the song).   (email communication 22 March 2026)

Here is a comparison of the designs of Chopin's original and Viardot's arrangement.

Chopin's main theme from the first edition:

Viardot's opening. Note the inner-voice potential for ^5-^6-^7-^8 (in magenta).

Same with some parsing of intervals and lines. Note the wedge created by the rising line below and the descending line above.

In the final statement of the theme, clear realization and superposition of the rising line:

An excellent example of a professional musician's frank knowledge--and in this case exploitation--of the rising line from ^5 to ^8.

Two pieces from the 1730s

"La bouillonnante" is a gigue, a lively harpsichord piece by Jean-François Dandrieu, from his Pièces de clavecin, Book 1, Suite no. 3 (1734). Here are the beginning and the end, with the overlappings in the latter marked as they lead toward the final cadence. The example is from Steve Wiberg's edition. (If I were obliged to choose a focal tone, I would take the B4 in bar 3, but that would take quite a bit of time and detail to argue.)

The other example is the sarabande from Telemann, Ouverture à 5 in F major, TWV 44:10. I am using the modern notation by Gabriel Bachmanov, though I've condensed it and--I do apologize--deleted the horn parts.

If you want to think of focal tones and a background, this is obviously not a rising line, but ^8 with some neighboring figures.

Crüger, Jesus, meine Zuversicht

Johann Crüger Praxis Pietatis Melica (1653/1668). The example comes from C. S. Terry, Bach's Chorals, Part II (1917), 412.

Here is a parsing of the intervals and lines. The assumption is Ionian mode with secondary emphasis (I am reluctant to call it dominant or reciting tone) on A (see *).

The strongly defined perfect interval frames for lines are common in modal melodies and in the early Lutheran chorales. If we need a focal tone, it would be C5 in the first phrase, with D5-C5 in the final cadence. The immediately preceding E5 is a simple expressive high note or "one note too far" of the kind I have seen in many 17th and 18th century melodies, songs, and dance-songs.

This is the melody Bach uses for the first movement of Cantata 145, in a four-voice chorale setting that is clearly Easter-related (Terry says the cantata was meant for Easter Tuesday).

There's a bit of Leipziger-style tone-painting in bar 4, where louring chromaticism in the bass is sparked by "Nacht" and "Tode" but note also that Bach really pushes the Resurrection ascent motif in the melody by rewriting it to expand to a 6th in bars 9-10. The chorale in its original text isn't obviously associated with Easter morning though it does mention Jesus as alive; the focus is on our death and on the final resurrection. Still, a setting by Christoph Graupner using the original first-verse text is dated April 1734 and a librarian's note indicates that it is meant for Easter Tuesday (the manuscript is in the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt; see IMSLP for a digital copy).

The melody discussed above is the one Bach uses for the first movement of Cantata 145. Terry gives an alternate version from Crüger (from the 1653 edition? unclear). This was not used by Bach (or anyone else, to judge from scores I've collected so far) but is interesting because of its much stronger emphasis on the Ionian/Phrygian connection.

The last line parsed: