Castillon, Valses humoristiques (1871)

Alexis de Castillon followed one of the familiar trajectories for a 19th century musician. From an aristocratic family, he was intended for law or the military but resisted and went into music instead. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Massé and Franck; among his friends was Saint-Saëns. Generally in poor health, he died young.

In de Castillon's 6 Valses humoristiques (1871) the first number is of interest. Its principal strain offers the rising line from ^5 in stark simplicity, including V9:

(Note that the second strain drills in the upper tetrachord, now with a descending scale figure--boxed.)

The design is ABCDAE, where E is a coda whose final phrase is recalls the opening with the melody in the left hand:

New blog: On the Dominant Ninth

The number of blogs I maintain has recently grown to four. Hearing Schubert D779n13 was the first of them: it was (and still is) meant to create rich contexts for that curious A-major waltz that is so out of place in the Valses sentimentales, D. 779 (publ. 1825). As material accumulated on ascending cadence figures (which D. 779n13 offers in the most direct and both structurally and expressively consequential way) and on formal designs in early waltzes and related dances (there also D. 779n13 is an anomaly), two additional blogs emerged as spin-offs, the goal in both being primarily to document occurrences and patterns, primarily in 19th-century music but also in earlier music where relevant. These blogs are the present one and Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850.

Continuing the derivations, On the Dominant Ninth is a spin-off mainly from this blog, given (1) that it was treatments of scale degree ^6 in the major key that enabled the ascending cadence lines that one finds already in Schubert and then more and more often in others as the 19th century moved on; and (2) that in the majority of cases the chord of the dominant ninth was involved. In the new blog, however, the work is not restricted to cadences or to rising figures. Instead, it "is intended to document [the variety of treatments of scale degree ^6 as the ninth of a dominant ninth chord], especially in the essential 19th century European repertoires of the musical stage and music for dance" (quote from the first post to the blog, 21 June 2018).

The new blog has already inspired two publications on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: most recently Dominant Ninth Harmonies in American Songs around 1900; before that Dominant Ninth Harmonies in the 19th Century. A new series on the blog—documenting presentations of the dominant ninth in theory textbooks and treatises in the 19th century—began with a post today on Catel's Traité d'harmonie.