van Alstyne, "Why Don't You Try"

 Egbert van Alstyne, "Why Don't You Try" (1905). This has a wedge figure with the descending element as primary, not the inner-voice ascent in the cadence. The latter is prominent, however. I don't regard these figures, which happen fairly often, as counter-examples but as additional confirmation that musicians were quite aware of the counterpoint of ascents from ^5 and descents from either ^5 or ^3 and they were willing to exploit them as seemed creatively and expressively appropriate, including by flipping the voices.  For a striking example of the latter, see this post on a song by Pauline Viardot based on a Chopin mazurka: link. (Thanks again to Poundie Burstein for telling me about the piece.)

Pauline Viardot, two songs from the 1890s

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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IMSLP page for "C’est toujours lui," VWV 1159: link. From a manuscript in the Houghton Library, Harvard University; obviously a fragment though musically  complete, but I know nothing more about it. The modern notation is by Pierre Girod. A mirror line, beginning from ^8 with a clear descent to ^5 in bars 6-8, then an even more pronounced, direct linear ascent in bars 13-16.

"Bonjour mon cœur!" is decidedly more complicated. Also a fragment, at least in the sense that it sets only the first verse of Ronsard's famous poem, this has one of the most tangled approaches to a structural cadence I have seen in any repertoire. Therefore, I have worked out three readings of the more abstract levels of melodic direction. These are a bit retrogressive as they are the well-worn three possible Schenkerian readings one teaches students to make: from ^3, from ^5, and from ^8--but they do the job for the present purpose. The harmonic reduction is mine. 

Score for page 1. The IMSLP page for "Bonjour mon cœur!": link.

From ^3:

From ^5:

From ^8:

Each reading has its virtues.

Song by Pauline Viardot

 Thanks to Poundie Burstein for this one, which he describes as follows:

The piece is "Aime Moi” (1864), a song by Pauline Viardot based on a Chopin mazurka [op. 33 no. 2] to which she added a vocal melody (with text by Louis Pomey). At the end of her song, she superposed a ^5-^6-^7-^8 in the melody above Chopin’s original mazurka (and she does something similar in the key of V twice earlier within the song).   (email communication 22 March 2026)

Here is a comparison of the designs of Chopin's original and Viardot's arrangement.

Chopin's main theme from the first edition:

Viardot's opening. Note the inner-voice potential for ^5-^6-^7-^8 (in magenta).

Same with some parsing of intervals and lines. Note the wedge created by the rising line below and the descending line above.

In the final statement of the theme, clear realization and superposition of the rising line:

An excellent example of a professional musician's frank knowledge--and in this case exploitation--of the rising line from ^5 to ^8.