J. Anthony Allen explains how each scale degree pulls toward the tonic like a bullseye. The dominant and leading tone have the strongest pull, while the subdominant and submediant are more flexible. Breaking these tendencies deliberately can be powerful, but only if you know the rules first.
This particular example, to think about how all of these want to lead together sometimes, is actually easier to view like this, by putting the tonic in the middle, like I did a minute ago. Okay, let's think about it like this. So here's our tonic, right? Put a big bullseye on that one for a minute. In fact, maybe I'll just do it through some fancy animation here. Okay. What we want to do here is talk about how all the different degrees of the scale either influence or are influenced by tonic. Because all of this has a lot of bearing on something like writing a melody. Think about writing a melody. If you stay on one note, every note that you hit has a feeling it wants to go to a certain place. And you can either do that or you can not do that. And if you not do that, you ought to know that you're not doing what's expected, which can be a very valuable musical device, Right, for writing music. But you gotta know what your. If you're breaking the rules, you need to know what rules have been broken, right? So let's talk about direction that they want to go. So here's our tonic, right? Let's start at the bottom. Here is what one is. This. This is dominant, right? This is five. So dominant wants to go up to tonic. Dominant up here wants to fall down to tonic. Dominant wants to go to tonic, either up or down in most cases. Okay, 6. 6 tends to want to go up to tonic, but it doesn't have a really strong pull. It doesn't have the pull of five or the leading tone. Six is kind of neutral, but in general, it would want to go up to tonic. The leading tone goes up to tonic. It always feels very strongly like it wants to go up to tonic. The supertonic wants to fall down to tonic. In most cases. This will sound good resolving backwards, going down to tonic. Because think about this. Going up to tonic. It would be jumping up a seventh to get up to tonic. So that wouldn't work very well. It wants to fall down. It has. This one has a sensation of, like, falling sometimes. So when you hit that note, you can feel like you're kind of suspended in the air and you want to fall down to tonic. The mediant falls down to tonic. In most cases, the subdominant, like the dominant could go up or down to tonic. But in most cases, it wants to go up actually to tonic. So if F was down here, it would be a better picture for us. So F up to C is a little bit stronger pole than F down to C. Although it can go either way, depending on the context that's happening. F can also have a pull to down to the mediant sometimes. If you do it in certain ways, and this all depends on the context, F can fall down to the mediant, which will then want to fall down to the tonic. That's a thing that you see in a lot of chord progressions sometimes, and in a lot of counterpoint. F can also push up to G sometimes. Or I shouldn't say F and G. That's not a very fair thing to say. The subdominant can push up to the dominant sometimes. So F is a pretty flexible note. It's a lot like the submediant in that it always wants to go too tonic. But there are a couple different ways it can get there. And it doesn't have a real strong pull. The strongest pull is always dominant and leading tone. Those two will always feel good going to tonic afterwards. So those are our main tendency tones. And again, I can't stress enough. There's a lot of this depends on the context, especially for our submediant and subdominant. And to some extent the mediant. Even context can change everything. This is just if we're hearing a solo unaccompanied line perfectly in a key. Those are the tendency tones we want to hear. But once we start adding chords and things like that, everything gets even more complicated. But this is a good place to start, so keep this in mind as we move through different scales and we look at different pieces of music. You'll see how tendency tones work together to make music feel a certain way. This has a lot to do with the feeling, but again, context matters more than anything. Cool, Groovy.
