Schenker defined an Urlinie as a stepwise descent of harmonically supported tones from a member of the tonic triad to the tonic. Under what circumstances might a reading that challenges one of these conditions provide analytical insight, and how do these insights compare to those yielded by a strictly Schenkerian approach?

Following Neumeyer's (1987) ascending Urlinie, London and Rodman's (1998) "gapped" Urlinien, Martin's (1996) Urlinie incorporating 6̂ (Heyer 2012), and Everett;s (2004) Urlinien that avoid achieving closure on tonic or remain static, I propose the possibility of a fundamental structure containing an unsupported tone, providing as an example a 5̂-line reading of Schubert's Der Doppelgänger using an unsupported 4̂.

I further propose a generalization of the unorthodox Urlinien described above, offering the term "poetic parallelism" to refer to the phenomenon through which one element of a normative fundamental structure might be weakened to parallel lyrical content and/or extramusical factors.