The Monte

Riepel’s “mountain”: a two-chord model — an applied dominant resolving up a fourth — stated and then restated one step higher, so the bass climbs do–fa, re–sol. Each rise is powered by its own dominant seventh, the chromatic tone always inflecting in the voice that had its natural, and the twice-told ascent gives the figure its name and its energy: the same effort, one rung higher.

The Monte raises the temperature after a repeat or at the start of a phrase’s second half — eighteenth-century movements reach for it habitually right after the double bar, where the music must regain height. It teaches applied dominants in their most digestible form: two of them in a row, each doing one honest job, with the sequence carrying the syntax so the chromaticism never sounds like a detour.

• Splitting an inflection between voices — the natural in one part, the sharp in another — instead of raising it in place.
• Letting the sevenths resolve upward or not at all as the model transposes.
• Climbing a third rung, which the classical form does not do — two statements make the Monte; more make a rosalia.
• Losing the model’s voice-leading in the restatement, when the sequence’s promise is exact repetition a step higher.

• Joseph Riepel, Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst, vol. II (Grundregeln zur Tonordnung insgemein) (1755), Grundregeln zur Tonordnung: the Monte — Riepel names the figure and fixes its two-statement rising shape.