The leading sixth scale degree: A test of Day-O’Connell’s theory

Abstract

Day-O’Connell (2002, The rise of 6 in the nineteenth century. Music Theory Spectrum, 24(1), 35–67; 2007, Pentatonicism from the eighteenth century to Debussy. Rochester, NY: University Rochester Press; 2008, Pentatonic. In D. Root, (Ed.), Grove music online. Retrieved on 10 December 2016.) has suggested that the use of the sixth scale degree in Western classical music changed notably over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, he proposed an increasing use of a ‘plagal leading-tone’ cadence involving the tonic () preceded by the submediant pitch (). Day-O’Connell also proposed that scale degree exhibits an increasingly freer range of tendencies over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this study, several hypotheses arising from Day-O’Connell’s theory are tested using two musical corpora entailing over 16,000 musical passages. Results are consistent with Day-O’Connell’s claims that occurs more frequently in nineteenth-century music, and that motions departing from exhibit greater freedom. However, evidence for the suggestion that there is an increasing use of plagal leading-tone cadences is equivocal. Furthermore, the empirical results suggest that European folk music is less pentatonic than commonly supposed, and that the origin of the plagal leading-tone cadence is not likely to originate in Western continental European folksongs.