Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Country Dance "Duke of Edinburgh's Delight"

From John Johnson, "Twenty Four Country Dances" (1766); the PDF file is on IMSLP. The first strain is as clear a descent through the octave as can exist anywhere in the tonal music repertoire: every scale degree on the beat. The second strain is only slightly more complex: the obvious sequence pattern carries B4, not the lower G4, to C5, and then C5 to D5. From there the cadence follows as what I called a ^6-^5-^7-^8 figure in my 1987 JMT article.