The Fonte

Riepel’s “well”: a two-chord model — an applied dominant resolving down into its chord — stated on the supertonic and then restated one step lower on the tonic. The music steps down into minor color and climbs back out into the home major, the chromatic inflections each kept in one voice, and the descent-then-home shape makes it the classic gesture for re-finding the tonic after a double bar.

The Fonte is the standard way down: after the double bar of a binary movement, when the harmony stands away from home, the two-step descent through ii to I re-grounds the key with almost ceremonial reliability. It is also the gentlest introduction to tonicization — the first statement leans on a minor chord, the second dissolves the lean into the home cadence, and the ear learns applied dominants as a pair of steps rather than an alien color.

• Reversing the order and rising, which is the Monte’s shape, not the Fonte’s.
• Failing to keep each chromatic inflection in a single voice across its model.
• Landing the second statement anywhere but the tonic, which forfeits the coming-home meaning the figure carries.
• Adding a third statement downward, diluting the paired shape into an ordinary sequence.

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