more to ^6 and the ninth

Today's entry [update] was originally a link to another web essay of mine, first posted in 2005, edited and reposted in 2008. The material from that essay has since been incorporated into an essay pulbished on the Texas Scholars Works platform: Nineteenth-century polkas with rising melodic and cadence gestures:  ^6 and V9 in early polkas. The waltz hinted broadly at reshaping practice with respect to ^6 and the upper tetrachord; the polka realized and naturalized it.

"Common practice" is a chimera, a vast and convenient reduction that has seen its chronologically early third chopped off by partimento studies and its later half chopped off by the waltz, the polka, and the symmetries uncovered by neo-Riemannian studies. What's left? Music for the bourgeoisie (that's the educated middle class) in barely two generations covering roughly the period 1780-1830 (with possible extension to 1850, in the "mannerist bourgeois" of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and A. B. Marx). This is the period of the turn from patronage to entrepeneurship. . . . See how easy it is to fall back into comfortable narratives? It was the period of the turn from patronage to entrepeneurship in Vienna -- a shift that had been accomplished in the wealthy, trade-oriented commercial cultures of England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and a few other countries starting already in the 17th century.

The Strausses and the androgynous ^5 and ^6

Here are examples from the Strauss clan, not the Johanns, but Eduard and Josef.

The first is a version of Eduard's galop "Über Feld und Wiese" (Over Field and Meadow) published as a polka (schnell) by Herzberg & Greenburgh (New York, 1876). Link to this entry on the LOC site. The tempo of a polka schnell was probably not much less than that of a galop, and therefore one could dance a polka to it, but the musical figures are not at all like those of a polka. (A "slow polka," btw, was called polka française.) Link to this piece published as a galop.

In general, Eduard's music tends to be more conservative in its treatment of musical materials than the contemporaneous waltzes of the other Strausses. The first strain here uses quite conventional harmonic progressions, except to end the first phrase (boxed), where a characteristic figure draws ^7 over V down to ^6, and the resulting V9 resolves directly to ^5 over I.

The trio is similar. Here, a "throwaway" ^6 over I (first circle) becomes the ninth in a V9 that again resolves directly (second circle).

The second strain of the Trio is more adventurous in its cadence, finally taking up the implication of the stolid initial motive (first box) and sending the line up to ^8 in a PAC that is far more emphatic than the quick V-I that follows it.

The second example is "Mein Lebenslauf ist Lieb und Lust," a set of waltzes by Josef Strauss, as published in
Philadelphia by Louis Meyer (1870). Link to this entry on the LOC site.

In the second strain of the first waltz touches on both ^5 and ^6 over I and over V7.

The second waltz makes the play of ^5 and ^6 its main motif.

The third waltz, however, goes all out as ^5 and ^6 permeate the melody, disappearing only with approach of the final cadence (but note the reference to ^5 and ^6 over V7/V -- not marked in the score).

The second strain of waltz 3 uses ^6 and ^5 over I as the melodic answer to ^5 and ^4 over V7, quite common in legato strains. (More common though is ^5 and ^6 over I answering ^7 and ^6 over V7, a favorite gambit of Johann Strauss, jr.)

Recomposition as a polka

As a postscript to Wednesday and Thursday's entries, I have followed a habit common in American sheet music of the mid-nineteenth century, according to which a waltz or other 3/4 meter dance is recast as a polka in the form of an appendix. In the graphic below, I have changed the meter from triple to duple, converting the A Major Waltz into a polka. This waltz works surprisingly well because its eighth-note groups switching between the hands allow one to make very characteristic polka rhythms in the melody (the two eighths plus four sixteenths in bar 3; the two eighths and a quarter in bar 4).

The model for this recomposition is the "Adelaide" polka by D. T. Haraden, published in Boston in 1848. A facsimile of Haraden's polka is available on the Library of Congress American Memory website in the 1820-1860 section: Adelaide.