The rise of 6 in the nineteenth century

This paper examines the history of the major scale submediant (6) in both theory and practice. The melodic style of the nineteenth century exhibited an increasingly freer interpretation of scale-degree tendency, which included a subtle but highly significant development in the treatment of 6 suggesting a quasi-adjacency to the upper tonic. The implications of the "non-classical 6," which extend to the realms of harmony, rhetoric, meaning, anf even formal structure, constitute an essential aspect of the history of common-practice music.