File separated from "Rising Lines" and updated 4 January 2011.
Go to: -- Another approach to rising lines, using tonal frames.
(RISING FIGURES IN EARLY MUSIC). Rising cadential figures are rare in music before 1800, though in one set (link below) I have posted examples from as early as 1400, and the reader will find additional examples, including sixty tunes from the several editions of Playford's (English) Dancing Master (example below, "If All the World were Paper") in the combined list of pieces with rising urlinie forms (includes some negative examples, also): go to composition lists.
(2) Three instrumental pieces by Praetorius and Demantius.
(3) Go directly to a page with music facsimiles for dances with rising cadence gestures, from Playford's English Dancing Master: Playford.
(4) Go directly to a page with music facsimiles for dances with rising cadence gestures, from Danish collections by Johan Buelow: Buelow.
(RISING FIGURES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY). By 1800, it had become a commonplace to add rising gestures in the coda of a composition (that is, after the most important or "structural" cadence) -- in opera arias, for example, the voice might conclude with a firm, descending figure but the orchestra would add a coda that ends with a prominent rising gesture. Beethoven appears to have been the first composer deliberately to use rising gestures not only in codas but for the structural cadence itself. After him (but almost certainly independently), waltz composers such as Josef Lanner, Franz Schubert, and especially Johann Strauss, sr., occasionally ended strains of their dances with rising figures. Other dances do not seem to have been affected by this practice until the polka, in which rising cadence gestures are more common than in any other repertoire before standards and show tunes in the twentieth century.
Nineteenth-century examples (varied):
(2) Focus on the waltz: Posted on 22-24 July 2005: Three sets:
(3) A set posted on 23 May 2004: 19th century examples. These are additional clear examples of rising urlinie figures from nineteenth-century dances and songs. Includes "Richmond Hill," "The Arrival," "Augustus," "Petersburg Ladies," and Francis Brown, "The Moon O'er the Mountain is Beaming."
(4) A set posted on 18 April 2004, edited 23 May 2005: Polkas and one schottisch. The first of these is another simple example (Emblem Schottisch). After that, Jullien's Drum Polka, Jupiter's Polka, and the Kossuth Polka introduce the notion of paired upper voices (usually as ^3 and ^5). A supplementary file: On ^6 and V9 in early polkas.
(5) A set of scores and graphs posted on 6 April 2004: Three polkas and Nelly Bly. This file includes two simple examples (bayrische polka and Laura Polka) and two others that introduce a "primitive" urlinie form (Adelaide Polka) and that show the way in which small changes can influence background figures ("Nelly Bly").
(6) Negative examples:Posted on 23 May 2005: Fifth set: Contrary examples. This file remains incomplete; it begins with an example from Boehme (he says it might be the earliest polka) that lacks the rising voiceleading patterns that are common in polkas once the dance became popular (as it rapidly did in the late 1830s and early 1840s).
(RISING FIGURES IN MUSICAL STAGE WORKS). In opera, Rossini wrote cadences in such a way as to facilitate rising gestures, although only very occasionally did he exploit the opportunity to transform the structural cadences of arias or ensemble numbers. French composers influenced by him, however, certainly did, in particular Adolphe Adam and Daniel Auber. In the following generation, Jacques Offenbach made frequent use of the rising cadence figure -- his operettas contain more such figures than any other works of the musical stage before the Broadway shows of Richard Rodgers. Below is a piano reduction of the theme for the March in Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker.
Compilation and all original material copyright David Neumeyer 2004-10.