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 this “non-classical 6̂,” which extend to the realms of harmony, rhetoric, meaning, and even formal structure, constitute an essential aspect of the history of common-practice music.