Thomas Davis, Country Dances (1748)

I have found very little information about Thomas Davis, except that he was apparently a professional musician active between 1740 and 1760, perhaps a flutist (he published a set of sonatas in 1744), and his work was published by Henry Waylett in London, including a volume of Country Dances (1748). Here is the title page:

Of the twenty four dances, a half dozen have interest for us, even if none offers a simple, direct ascending line in the final cadence. These six are:

Glascon Lasses (p.6)
Kitty's Frolick (p.16)
Leister House (p.5)
Merry Hary (p.4)
Pretty Miss's Fancy (p.22)
Westminster Bridge (p.2)

Of these, Merry Hary comes the closest, managing a simple ^5-^8 line to end the first strain. Because the frame of the melody is most easily heard as the octave G4-G5, however, the ascent sounds like a return to the original position of ^8, rather than an ascent out of the prevailing register.



Westminster Bridge. Note, above, that the second strain of Merry Hary uses the 18th-century cliché of a rising figure above unstable harmony just before the fall to a strong cadence. The second strain of Westminster Bridge does the same, but with stronger harmonies. Note also the relatively simple ascent in the first strain.

Glascon Lasses focuses on ^5 (as C5)—see the circled notes—and rises in the cadence but overshoots its mark in service of the Scotch snap figure (bar 8). It then repeats that F-A-F interval outline three times to open the second strain before ending with paired thirds (boxed) descending to an open cadence (that is, ^3 is balanced with ^1, a curious effect of the Scotch snap is that it's like the spondee in poetry: two equally weighted notes, one accented, the second longer).

Pretty Miss's Fancy has two sections in a dance-trio arrangement, where the trio is in the minor. The second strain of the dance has a rising cadence at (b), but the lower register of the beginning gives priority to the lower voice at (a). The close of the trio reverses the relationship, as the upper voice, rising, has priority at (c) and the lower voice is secondary at (d).

Leister House and Kitty's Frolick are more traditional, with prevailing descending lines in the upper voices and ascending lower voices. See (u) [upper] and (l) [lower} in the first strains of both. In the second strain of Kitty's Frolick, one could stretch the focus of G5 from the first strain across to the end, for an ^8-^7-^8 shape overall, but the steady and continually accented descent from ^5 (circled notes) turns the upper register into covering motion.