On 5-6 figures and sequences

In 2006, David Damschroder published an article on 5-6 sequences in the music of Schubert. These (though not necessarily in Schubert) would seem to be good candidates for participation in rising cadence gestures, since, in the clichéd progressions of the Italian pedagogical (partimenti) tradition, 5-6 patterns rise -- see (a) below --, whereas the complement, 6-5, falls. Here are links to some examples from partimenti rules and exercises: link; link; link.

Example (a) below is reproduced from the article, where it is example 3d. The author takes this as the prototype for a number of diatonic and—his main topic in the article—chromatic figures, including one in which the second chord is in root position rather than first inversion (see Example b, first item below; his 3e). This "thirds and fourths" pattern (or "thirds and fifths,"  if you drop the last bass note an octave) is ubiquitous in historical European musics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so of course one can locate two other foundational voiceleading figures -- see the second and third examples under (b) below. The majority of Damschroder's examples from Schubert actually use these latter between upper voice and bass, and at least two of those that do maintain 5-6 between upper voice and bass have 6/4 chords (!) in the second position of the figure.

 One striking example of the stricter chromatic 5-6 sequence is Damschroder's Example 9, the opening of  Schubert's "Minona," D.152 (see below). This early work (1815) is by no means a Lied; it is a melodrama in the manner of those by Benda and others from the 1790s. Its stylistic foundation is the accompanied recitative, and therefore we might well expect to find a somewhat strange progression at the beginning (and elsewhere, for that matter). The introduction is a music of foreboding and strangeness -- what we hear when the singer enters is an image of darkness, storm, and fear. (Eventually, the young woman is drawn out into the night to find her lover dead at the hands of her father; she decides to take the arrow that killed him and die alongside -- more on that below. If all this seems pretty dismal, in the manner of the early Romantics, recall that early death among all urban social classes had become a serious societal problem by the end of the eighteenth century, especially from syphilis and tuberculosis. The revolution of the Romantics was to draw this sort of tragedy into the present, not keep it more emotionally distant by using ancient stories and characters.)

I have added asterisks to show the striking augmented sixth chords that are responsible for continually shifting the direction of the harmony. At ** and the arrow, Schubert breaks the pattern in order to stay on the dominant of the initial key, A minor.

Returning to the diatonic 5-6 sequence, for my purposes here, example (c) below is the one of interest. I have rewritten and extended example (a) to create an ascending cadence beginning from ^5 over I. This is an extraordinarily easy progression to generate, yet, as I have written on numerous occasions previously, the pressure of musical fashion and practice rooted in Italian models seems to have prevented its common usage. In the eighteenth century (as in the seventeenth), ascending cadence gestures -- though rarely with this progression, it must be said -- are found most often in northern dance musics and the French court music derived originally from those musics. Only near the end of the century, probably under the influence of other dance musics--the waltzing dances of Germanophone countries--did the rising line cadence gesture find its way into symphonic music (in the menuets of the late symphonies of Haydn, notably) and eventually into opera (in the 1830s and again through the importation of the by-then universally fashionable waltz and related social dances).

What is missing, most often is the second chord, vi, which of course undermines the entire notion of a repeated 5-6 pattern. Süssmayr's trio to the tenth of his 12 Menuets is typical. (I wrote about pieces in this set here: link.)

In Hummel's Six German Dances with trios, op. 16, vi is present, but any vestige of a 5-6 figure is really impossible to pull from this. I am, indeed, doubtful even about the rising line I've charted. (On the other hand, the descending 8-line in the first strain is as clear as it could possibly be.)

Reference: David Damschroder, "Schubert, Chromaticism, and the Ascending 5--6 Sequence," Journal of Music Theory 50n2 (2006): 253-275.