Irving Berlin, "Climbing Up the Scale" (1923)

 Irving Berlin, "Climbing Up the Scale" (1923). I admit this one's a bit embarrassing, but it's nevertheless in good company with "Doe, a Deer" from Sound of Music a few decades later.

van Alstyne, Ypsilanti

 van Alstyine, "Ypsilanti" (1915). Here ^8 is a prominent and expressive cover tone, and the line moves from ^5 in what is ultimately a simple rising line ^5-^8.

Henry Marshall, "Dinah!" (1913)

From March 2026: A post with information and links to galleries of simple ascending lines and to other essays of mine published on the Texas Scholarworks platform: link.

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Henry Marshall, "Dinah!" (1913). At the outset, ^5 is the main inner voice, with ^3 as the upper voice. In the altered repeat ("Dinah!"), ^5 moves up for a while, until the cadence, where it is again in the fourth octave, but as we've seen before, it could easily be shifted up an octave to close a stage performance of the song. As it stands, this is a wedge where the ascending lower voice is set against the upper descent from ^3 (bar 2, returns in bars 10-11), an assumed ^2 with ^3 then substituting in bar 15 before we reach ^1 in bar 16.

C. K. Harris, "Climb a tree with me" (1912)

From March 2026: A post with information and links to galleries of simple ascending lines and to other essays of mine published on the Texas Scholarworks platform: link.

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Charles K. Harris, "Climb a tree with me" (1912). It might not seem very promising to begin a song on climbing with an octave's worth of descending tonic-chord arpeggio, but there is a clue in the answering phrase, "As we climbed long years ago." The lower ^5, as Eb4, goes up to a firmly held ^6, and "all the birds sang" with ^7 suggests going further. In the end, the proto-background interval of the octave (shown with the unfolding in bars 1-4 and again later) maintains Eb5 while its lower element Eb4 closes to Ab4. This is not a wedge--Eb5 stays put and the principal line is the one that proceeds from Eb4.

Given the intervallic frame, it's not surprising that the common expressive ascent in the upper register should be easy to manage. Here is my alternate or second ending, following the model of songs discussed in a previous post: link.