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Can one speak of specifically Russian harmony, as distinct from German, Italian or French harmony? . . . Russian art-music grew up under peculiar conditions, partially isolated from contemporary Western music, mainly in the hands of composers who were (for good or ill) amateurs, closely linked with a folk-music marked by various tonal peculiarities. . . . Apart altogether from the fact that Russian musicians have always shown a peculiar intellectual interest in what we may call the curiosities of harmony and that two or three of them have been revolutionary innovators, it is hardly surprising that the harmonic style of the Russian school in general, and of the "mighty handful" in particular, bears an unmistakable stamp of what we may as well call "nationality."
Thus begins the final chapter, "The Evolution of Russian Harmony," of Gerald Abraham's On Russian Music (1939).1 The quotation is a muted recognition that the music of Glinka and his successors possesses "national" harmonic individualities; few writers, however, have attempted to identify these individualities since Abraham thus made a tentative beginning. The present essay is another such attempt, limited to a single tonal function but exploring its many ramifications. This is the relationship of submediant to tonic, or in the larger sense of relative major and minor. Russian harmony significantiy increases the importance of the submediant function in a major-mode context, by emphasizing the sixth degree as an adjunct harmonic factor to the tonic triad, and by promoting the submediant as an alternative tonal focus to the tonic function, even by merging the relative major and minor into a single superkey with two tonics. So important is this evolved submediant function that it becomes the basis of a prominent stylistic mannerism, even a distinguishing characteristic, in the works of Tchaikovsky and the Five (particularly Balakirev and Borodin) . We can see this mannerism, which I call the Russian sixth, first emerging as an individual phenomenon in Glinka and Dargomizhsky, later achieving full flower in Tchaikovsky and the Five, and eventually moving into Western Europe by the 1890s, at the same time that it disappears from Russia.
1. Tonal and Modal Harmony
In the Western diatonic system the relationship of relative major and minor is as basic and intrinsic as the...