ABSTRACT
The musical theorist, desiring to establish the laws of a melodic or harmonic language, should try to deduce a general law from specific occurrences in musical works by composers who were not conscious of following a law. The appearance of a new usage is signalized in most cases by the impossibility of accounting for it except by an exceedingly artificial method. In such cases it is well to form a working hypothesis from repeated occurrences, and then apply it to new cases. A typical case is the harmonization of melodies by major triads, with the outer voices moving in contrary motion, in the melodic positions successively of an octave, a third, a fifth, etc., in rotation. A classical example of this usage is met with in the opening bars of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater. It is revived, for quite different purposes, by Moussorgsky. In the second act of Boris Godounov, in Dmitri’s imperial dream, we have a succession of major chords moving in contrary motion in the following tonalities, quite unrelated from the viewpoint of orthodox harmony: E major, C-sharp major, A major, F-sharp major, and, enharmonically, E-flat major. The melodic positions, that is, intervals between the melody and the root, follow the formula, 8, 3, 5, 8, where 8 stands for the octave, 3 for the third, 5 for the fifth. When a diatonic degree is skipped, a melodic position is skipped as well. In the Moussorgsky example we have the ascending melody B, Csharp, E, F-sharp, and G, corresponding to the series 5, 8, 5, 8, 3. A diatonic degree is skipped between C-sharp and E, and so a melodic position is skipped as well.
