This blog is intended as an off-shoot of my Hearing Schubert D779n13. Recently, posts there have had little to do with the generation of the 1810s and 1820s in Vienna, with the waltz, or with modes of music analysis. I have decided to create this blog to accommodate those "errant" posts and to provide a space to add to them.
The topic is cadence gestures in traditional European tonal music. The great majority of these follow an 18th-century formula that favors a stepwise descent from scale degree 3 (or even from scale degree 5) to the tonic note.
A significant minority, however, follow an upward path from ^5 to ^8, or else plot a mirroring path from ^8 down to ^5 and then back up to ^8. The first substantial numbers of these are the country dances preserved in John Playford's Dancing Master (first edition 1651), which fact suggests that the figures were relatively common in dance-performance practice, including improvisation. After largely disappearing in the 18th century, rising lines again show up in dance music in the early 19th century, Schubert's D779n13 being a prominent example.
The floodgates were opened, however, in French comic opera by the early 1830s (Adam, Auber) and rising cadences remained a factor in the opera bouffe and operettas of Offenbach, Leclocq, and others before finding a niche in the American musical (notably those by Richard Rodgers).
