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Hearing homophony : tonal expectation at the turn of the seventeenth century / Megan Kaes Long.

By: Long, Megan Kaes [author].
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookSeries: Oxford studies in music theory: Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press, [2020]Description: viii, 288 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9780190851903 (hardback).Subject(s): Vocal music -- History and criticism -- 16th century | Vocal music -- 16th century -- Analysis, appreciation | Vocal music -- History and criticism -- 17th century | Vocal music -- 17th century -- Analysis, appreciationDDC classification: 782.4209
Contents:
How we got into harmonic tonality, and how to get out -- La questione della lingua: transmission and translation of musical style -- The work of the words -- Halves requiring completion -- From phrase structure to form: the Balletto -- Tonal orientation: new tools for navigating the formal landscape -- Humanism and the invention of homophony.
Summary: ""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." ""--

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The question of tonality's origins in music's pitch content has long vexed many scholars of music theory. However, tonality is not ultimately defined by pitch alone, but rather by pitch's interaction with elements like rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form. Hearing Homophony investigates the elusive early history of tonality by examining a constellation of late-Renaissance popular songs which flourished throughout Western Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century. Megan Kaes Long argues that it is in these songs, rather than in more ambitious secular and sacred works, that the foundations of eighteenth century style are found. Arguing that tonality emerges from features of modal counterpoint - in particular, the rhythmic, phrase structural, and formal processes that govern it - and drawing on the arguments of theorists such as Dahlhaus, Powers, and Barnett, she asserts that modality and tonality are different in kind and not mutually exclusive.Using several hundred homophonic partsongs from Italy, Germany, England, and France, Long addresses a historical question of critical importance to music theory, musicology, and music performance. Hearing Homophony presents not only a new model of tonality's origins, but also a more comprehensive understanding of what tonality is, providing novel insight into the challenging world of seventeenth-century music.

Bibliography: (pages 253-270) and index.

How we got into harmonic tonality, and how to get out -- La questione della lingua: transmission and translation of musical style -- The work of the words -- Halves requiring completion -- From phrase structure to form: the Balletto -- Tonal orientation: new tools for navigating the formal landscape -- Humanism and the invention of homophony.

""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." ""--

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • Acknowledgments (p. vii)
  • About the Companion Website (p. ix)
  • 1 How We Got into Harmonic Tonality, and How to Get Out (p. 1)
  • Modality is not the Renaissance version of tonality (p. 13)
  • Tonal expectation (p. 17)
  • On sixteenth-century listening (p. 21)
  • 2 La questione delta lingua: Transmission and Translation of Musical Style (p. 24)
  • Popular song (p. 25)
  • The transmission of Gastoldi's Balletti a cinque voci (p. 26)
  • Englishing English, entdeutschen Deutschen (p. 33)
  • Sources (p. 40)
  • An art form meets a commercial enterprise (p. 44)
  • Per cantare, sonare, e ballare (p. 44)
  • Per cantare (p. 45)
  • Per sonare (p. 48)
  • Per ballare (p. 51)
  • Delightful new inventions (p. 55)
  • 3 The Work of the Words (p. 57)
  • Schematic text-setting (p. 58)
  • How to match the measure (p. 64)
  • Quinari (p. 65)
  • Settenari (p. 71)
  • Endecasillabi (p. 76)
  • Thinking ahead (p. 83)
  • German words should be "pronounced daintily and with refinement" (p. 86)
  • From text-setting to meter (p. 91)
  • Minutes and seconds, minims and semiminims (p. 96)
  • 4 Halves Requiring Completion (p. 99)
  • Phrase structure has a voice problem (p. 103)
  • From subsequence to consequence (p. 107)
  • What to expect when you're expecting (a cadence) (p. 113)
  • A fair divided excellence: How to build a half that requires completion (p. 119)
  • Paratactic construction (p. 121)
  • Exact repetition (p. 124)
  • Transposed homophonic blocks (p. 125)
  • Sequences (p. 129)
  • Action-reaction phrases (p. 134)
  • Fullness of perfection (p. 135)
  • 5 From Phrase Structure to Form: The Balletto (p. 140)
  • The balletto as miniature (p. 140)
  • Italian madrigals Englished (p. 145)
  • Clear harmonic style (p. 148)
  • Morley and his models (p. 149)
  • Morley and the minor mode (p. 154)
  • Hassler and the German balletto (p. 158)
  • Polar and solar tonality (p. 163)
  • From phrase structure to form (p. 165)
  • 6 Tonal Orientation: New Tools for Navigating the Formal Landscape (p. 170)
  • Composing comprehensible forms (p. 176)
  • Every strain repeated (p. 180)
  • Listening to the future (p. 184)
  • Rearranging landmarks: Deviant forms and meaning production (p. 194)
  • Putting form on the map (p. 199)
  • 7 Humanism and the Invention of Homophony (p. 203)
  • Music made to order: The frottola (p. 204)
  • Music and poetry in the Este court (p. 209)
  • Tonal expectation and the improvisational matrix (p. 213)
  • Humanism in theory and practice: Musique mesurée (p. 221)
  • The laws of another measure (p. 227)
  • A universal priesthood of all believers proclaims the Word (p. 233)
  • Why should the devil have all the good tunes? (p. 237)
  • Humanism and the invention of homophony (p. 245)
  • Invention, innovation, intention (p. 247)
  • Epilogue (p. 249)
  • Bibliography (p. 253)
  • General Index (p. 271)
  • Index of Titles (p. 287)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Megan Kaes Long is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Her work explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century secular song traditions, the theories that describe them, and the ways in which they inform the histories of modality and tonality.