Yet Another Galant Schema: The Dominant Pedal Accompanied by a Chromatic Descent

Abstract

Abstract It is now well established that stock voice-leading patterns were an essential component of eighteenth-century compositional and improvisational practices both in Italy and abroad. In this article I focus on one of those patterns, which, as far as I am aware, remains unscrutinized: a dominant pedal point in the bass with a paradigmatic upper voice that descends chromatically from scale steps 5 to 2. In the first two sections, I deal with this pattern successively in eighteenth-century music pedagogy, with special emphasis on the teaching of the Neapolitan maestro Fedele Fenaroli, and in actual galant repertory, thereby exploring both its voice-leading and its syntactic possibilities. In the third section, I compare how this dominant pedal relates to other, already identified pedal-based patterns.