In this instructional video, J. Anthony Allen walks through the seven scale degrees of a major key, using C major as a running example. He defines each degree—tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, and leading tone—explaining the literal meaning behind each name (e.g., “super” meaning above tonic, “sub” meaning below dominant) and how the degree relates to the tonic and dominant. Allen illustrates the functional role of each note, especially the dominant (V) and leading tone, as tendency tones that pull toward the tonic. He demonstrates how the basic C‑major triad is built from tonic, mediant, and dominant, and how the V chord (G‑B‑D) contains the dominant and leading tone, creating a strong drive back to the tonic. The lecture also clarifies the concept of scale degree order, showing that even when a scale is presented out of order, the tonic remains the root of the key. Throughout, Allen uses analogies (e.g., “Super‑tonic” as “above tonic”) and emphasizes that the naming conventions are not value judgments but positional descriptors. The video concludes with a quick recap of the scale-degree sequence and a preview of how these tendency tones function in major-key harmony.
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Okay, here we go. Tonic. I already told you tonic, the first note of the scale, the root of the scale, which could be different. So let's just clarify that this has to do with the root of the scale. So if this is a C major scale, the root of the scale is C and tonic is C. If we did something like this, I'm just going to kind of skew our scale a little bit. Okay, here we have a scale. Tonic is still C. Why is tonic C? There are no accidentals here. So if we counted up all our whole steps and half steps, we would find out that this is a C major scale. Even though it's not starting on C, C is still tonic and it is the root of the scale. So my scale is out of order, basically, is what I'm saying in this case. But tonic is still C because it is a C major scale. Let's undo that so it's less confusing. There we go. Okay, so C is tonic. The second scale degree is called supertonic. It sounds awesome, right? Super tonic. But all that really means is super. Think of super as meaning, like elevated, like. Like Superman is like a man. That is like better, not better. Better is the wrong word. Super. Tonic is not better than tonic. Really. What it's literally saying is it's above tonic. It's 1 higher than tonic. There's actually nothing particularly super about 2. 2 is not an extremely powerful note, but we call it supertonic. The third one we call the mediant. And you might think mediant sounds like it's in the middle, right? Wouldn't that be somewhere around here either our fourth or our fifth? No, because mediant, the reason we call it mediant is because it's halfway to one of our most powerful notes, the fifth. So the median is halfway between tonic and the fifth, which is called the dominant. We'll get to that in a second. So mediant is the third note. Actually, let's go to the dominant. Now. I'm going to come back to four in just a second. So the dominant. You've heard me say this before, when we talked about. In the previous class, when we talked about tendency tones, right? The five, the chord built on five has a lot of special powers, right? It really wants to lead down to tonic. So we call this one the dominant because it supposedly dominates so much of music. The five is what kind of makes the tonic feel like tonic. So it dominates a lot of stuff. So we call that the dominant. So the mediant is halfway between the dominant and the tonic. Another way to think about that is, how do we make a chord? Right? Our most basic triad. We make our most basic triad with tonic mediant and dominant. That makes a C major triad in the key of C, Right? How about four? We skipped right over four. Subdominant, we call it just under dominant. In the same way that 2 was supertonic, 1 above tonic, 4 is subdominant, 1 underneath dominant. And it's kind of like 2 in that it's not a particularly powerful tone. It does have some power, though. All the notes have different tendencies, places they want to go and things like that. We'll talk about that more when we talk about counterpoint. But for now, think of that as a subdominant and we get to dominant, which you already know. Sub. Mediant is 6. So submediant. That doesn't make a lot of sense. It kind of does if you think about it. So three is our mediant, right? This mediant is three scale degrees below tonic in the same way that the mediant was 3 scale degrees above tonic. Submediant is 3 below tonic. Because, remember, this is tonic and this is tonic. These are both Cs. So this is tonic also. So this is 3 above, we call it the mediant. 3 below, we call the submediant. Right? So it's kind of like the under mediant. And this is the over mediant. But don't ever use those words in any kind of music theory class, because they're not. They would not. You would fail. Submediant is what we call that. Okay, this one is another one with a bunch of extra powers. We call this leading tone. This is the leading tone, and it does exactly what it says. It leads up to tonic. So the leading tone always. Not well, not always, but almost all the time, pushes towards tonic. If you hear that note, you want to hear tonic, the same way that when you hear five, you want to hear tonic. So these two together would really push towards tonic, right? And when you think about what notes go into a V chord, it would be G, B and D, right? And there is our B. So this one wants to push up to tonic. Our five wants to go down to tonic. And actually our two wants to go down to tonic quite a bit as well. And those are what make a V chord. So the V chord always really wants to push to tonic. So to review that one more time, from low to high tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading tone, and then tonic again. Now let's talk a little bit more about the tendency of these notes where they feel like they want to lead when we're in a major key.
