First of all, HAPPY AUGMENTED SIXTH DAY! If you've forgotten to celebrate, or somehow don't know why today is so special, you can check in on the original "Augmented Sixth Day" post from 2012, plus other past celebrations here:
- Happy Augmented Sixth Day - 8/6/2012
- Happy Augmented Sixth Day! (2016 ed.) - 8/6/2016
- Augmented Reality - 10/16/2021
- An Aug 6 for Aug 6 in an August Sextet - 8/6/2022
- The Augmented Reality Waltz - 8/6/2025
The day is running short, but I do have a quick, new favorite "Augmented Sixth" to share. Our story begins a couple of weeks ago while I was teaching Music Theory at a summer chamber music camp. I was doing some informal class-quizzing using the wonderful exercises found on Musictheory.net, in this case focusing specifically on visual recognition of intervals from 4ths through 7th using this custom-made exercise. The following popped up randomly.
I was pleased when a student correctly identified the interval shown as an "augmented sixth"; and although chromatic harmony is still a far-off topic for most of these students, I was happy to remember that I had pointed out an instance of a very expressive Augmented Sixth just the day before using these same two pitches. It had come up while I was coaching a group playing the second movement of Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in D Minor, so I pulled up the score quickly to show the class. (There's little point in learning music theory if you can't apply to actual music.)
To be clear, AUGMENTED SIXTH DAY has traditionally been about the three famous flavors of harmony which are framed by this interval: the Italian Sixth, the German Sixth, and the French Sixth. The most important characteristic of augmented sixth harmonies is that the two accidentals pointed in opposite directions resolve outward by half-step to an octave. So, the interval above would resolve into two Gs an octave apart. In the Mendelssohn example I shared, these pitches do resolve in this manner, but not as part of the standard Augmented Sixth Chord function in which the lower note of the interval is the lowest note of the chord, and the harmony basically functions as part of a cadence.
To be honest, I only noticed today when returning to the passage that the use here is a bit more unusual. In this case, the two pitches appear as part of a B-flat Dominant Seventh chord leading to an E-flat Major harmony, so the B-flat is the bass note, the A-flat shown is the seventh, and the F-sharp is a voice-leading result of moving up chromatically from F to G. So, on beat three we get a standard V7/IV chord leading to a IV chord, but on the fourth beat, it's a V7 chord with a #5 (so this harmony has an augmented 5th and an augmented 6th) - and instead of leading to cadence, the beautiful, tender harmony arrives at a radiant IV chord (E-flat Major) mid-phrase, where Mendelssohn lets the music float in a treading water manner. (The disappearance of the bass register for the rest of the bar through most of the next bar is a very important part of this effect.)
There are, to be fair, many other subtleties of voice-leading which the hastily made harmonic reduction below does not show, but this video gives you a chance to hear first the underlying implied harmonies and then Mendelssohn's exquisite piano version.
And, you may hear the whole movement, including the beautiful repetition of this passage with violin and cello below. The passage described above begins at about 1:15. Happy Augmented Sixth Day!
P.S. Posting this in a hurry, so I may return next week to clarify a few things. The main thing is...the Mendelssohn.
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