| Contents |
How we got into harmonic tonality, and how to get out. Modality is not the Renaissance version of tonality ; Tonal expectation ; On sixteenth-century listening -- La questione della lingua : transmission and translation of musical style. Popular song. The transmission of Gastoldi's Baletti a cinque voci ; Englishing English, entdeutschen Deutschen ; Sources. An art form meets a commercial enterprise ; Per cantare, sonare, e ballare. Per cantare ; Per sonare ; Per ballare ; Delightful new inventions -- The work of the words. Schematic text-setting ; How to match the measure. Quinari ; Settenair ; Endecasillabi ; Thinking ahead ; German words should be "pronounced daintily and with refinement" ; From text-setting to meter. Minutes and seconds, minims and semiminims -- Halves requiring completion. Phrase structure has a voice problem ; From subsequence to consequence ; What to expect when you're expecting (a cadence) ; A fair divided excellence : how to build a half that requires completion. Paratactic construction ; Exact repetition ; Transposed homophonic blocks ; Sequences ; Action-reaction phrases ; Fullness of perfection -- From phrase structure to form : the balletto. The balletto as miniature ; Italian madrigals Englished. Clear harmonic style ; Morley and his models ; Morley and the minor mode ; Hassler and the German balletto ; Polar and solar tonality. From phrase structure to form -- Tonal orientation : new tools for navigating the formal landscape. Composing comprehensible forms ; Every strain repeated ; Listening to the future ; Rearranging landmarks : deviant forms and meaning production ; Putting form on the map -- Humanism and the invention of homophony. Music made to order : the frottola. Music and poetry in the Este court ; Tonal expectation and the improvisational matrix ; Humanism in theory and practice : musique mesurée. The laws of another measure ; A universal priesthood of all believers proclaims the Word. Why should the devil have all the good tunes? Humanism and the invention of homophony. Invention, innovation, intention. |
| Abstract |
This book examines a repertoire of homophonic vernacular partsongs composed around the turn of the seventeenth century, and considers how these partsongs exploit rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form to craft harmonic trajectories. Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, Thomas Morley, Hans Leo Hassler, and their contemporaries engineered a particular kind of centricity that is distinctively tonal: they strategically deployed dominant harmonies at regular periodicities and in combination with poetic, phrase structural, and formal cues, thereby creating expectation for tonic harmonies. Homophony provided an ideal venue for these experiments: spurred by an increasing demand for comprehensible texts, composers of partsongs developed rigid text setting procedures that promoted both metrical regularity and consistent phrase rhythm. This rhythmic consistency had a ripple effect: it encouraged composers to design symmetrical phrase structures and to build comprehensive, repetitive, and predictable formal structures. Thus, homophonic partsongs create and exploit trajectories from dominants to tonics on multiple scales, from cadence to sub-phrase to phrase to form. Ultimately, this book argues for a model of tonality-and of tonality's history-that centers not pitch, but rhythm and meter. Metrically oriented harmonic trajectories encourage tonal expectation. And we can locate these trajectories in a variety of repertoires, including those that we traditionally understand as 'modal.' |
