Introduction; work in progress

 Occasionally in my blogs and more often in publications to the Texas ScholarWorks platform, I make use of prolongational analysis, whose original form is Schenkerian analysis and which is sometimes referred to as linear analysis. 

This is a spinoff from two active blogs: Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music and On the Dominant Ninth Chord. The former was started in 2014 (introduction); the latter in 2015 (introduction). Both were themselves spinoffs from my long-running Schubert blog, Hearing Schubert D779n13, begun in 2009 and closed for new content in 2020 after more than 220 posts (link to the blog).

Though I say the two blogs are active, both have largely accomplished their purpose and I feel less incentive to add anything there beyond admin updates. 

Ascending Cadence Gestures reported on and continued a research project that began in the 1990s. To date I have found far in excess of a thousand published pieces of music with primary (structural) cadences where the principal melody rises in the end, where the upper register is the primary one throughout (centering about ^8), and/or where what I call a "wedge" figure combines rising and falling figures in different dispositions. 

On the Dominant Ninth Chord was meant as a historical survey and documentation of the dominant major-ninth chord in European and European-influenced music from roughly 1800 to 1950. My most recent posts on arranging manuals from the 1920s to 1940s seem to me to come close to finishing out the account.