Epilogue

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, composers invested in new musical resources, endowing their music with an increasingly robust capacity to support tonal trajectories. It is not a coincidence that, as Daniel Harrison argues, early twentieth-century composers gradually disposed of the very same resources.1...

Humanism and the Invention of Homophony

This chapter takes a broad view of sixteenth-century homophonic genres to argue that homophony is a potent solution for several aesthetic problems motivated by the demands of humanism. The frottola reflects the transformation of an improvised tradition into a literate one: composers designed flexible musical frameworks that accommodated varied courtly poems but that sacrificed musical trajectories for poetic ones. Midcentury musique mesurée arose from a philosophical movement rather than a musical one; its rhythmic experimentation interacts in elegant ways with its harmonic trajectories. The Lutheran cantional brings homophony to the sacred realm; the demands of rote learning and the character of borrowed melodies overrode the development of a metrically motivated text-setting schemes. Though these repertoires set texts in three languages and span one hundred years, they share an interest in vernacular poetry and text comprehensibility. And they encourage the same kinds of listening strategies manifested in the balletto repertoire.

Tonal Orientation

The balletto and canzonetta have highly regulated strophic sectional forms. Three characteristics of these forms facilitate tonal expectation: they are comprehensible, and can easily be segmented by a naïve listener, they are highly repetitive, facilitating statistical learning and directing listener attention toward higher structural levels, and they are predictable, both because they are repetitive and because they manipulate consistent generic norms. Together, these features equipped listeners to attend in meaningful ways to ever more remote relationships between dominant and tonic signposts. In turn, composers exploited the stability of form and tonal structure across the repertoire, manipulating formal norms to create meaning.

The Work of the Words

Composers of homophonic partsongs developed formulaic text-setting schemas that translated poetic meter into musical meter: line lengths determine phrase lengths, poetic accents establish musical accents, and poetic form controls cadences and formal boundaries. Consequently, text-setting establishes an increasingly deep mensural hierarchy. At the same time, schematic text-setting codifies an organizational framework that parallels the way the mind constructs musical meter. According to dynamic attending theory, listener attention peaks in response to environmental regularities; this theory suggests that regular metrical frameworks like those in homophonic partsongs facilitate tonal expectation by drawing listener attention toward metrically accented harmonic events. Regular text-setting contributes to musical meter in a period when mensural structures are giving way to metrical ones. A new metrical style and a new tonal language emerge in tandem in the early seventeenth century, and the balletto repertoire highlights the close relationship between these evolving musical systems.

Halves Requiring Completion

Sixteenth-century theorists did not describe phrase structure; they were concerned instead with counterpoint. But phrase was an unavoidable consideration in the fast-paced, syllabic environment of vocal homophony. Schematic text-setting ensured that homophonic phrases were concise and discrete, segmenting the musical surface into short, symmetrical units demarcated by efficient cadences. Melodic construction changed in turn, as composers focused on getting from cadence to cadence. These early experiments with phrase design had a strong harmonic component: through the analysis of over one thousand phrases, this chapter demonstrates how repertoire-wide norms privilege dominant–tonic relationships at the phrase level. Composers supported these harmonic trajectories with new melodic strategies that emphasized transposition and transformation of goal-directed motives. Ultimately, phrase structure—especially the nascent musical period—encouraged dynamic listening strategies that played a crucial role in the early development of tonality.

La questione della lingua

In 1591, Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi published a modest collection of light homophonic partsongs with fa la refrains: Balletti a cinque voci. Gastoldi’s collection brings together three important stylistic points of reference: homophony, an emerging monodic style, which had always been entwined with homophony, and social dance. The print was an instant success, garnering ten Venetian reprints, eleven editions in other European cities, and a handful of homages and translations, including Thomas Morley’s First Booke of Balletts to Five Voyces (London, 1595). When Morley, and eventually German editors and composers, adopted and adapted Gastoldi’s infectious musical style, they not only translated Gastoldi’s texts, but also his musical idioms. In this process, they participated in a rich tradition of nationalistic identity formation already underway in the robust field of literary translation.

How We Got into Harmonic Tonality, and How to Get Out

Since Alexandre Choron and François-Joseph Fétis coined the term tonalité, the nature and history of the Western “common practice” tonal style has vexed music theorists and historians. This chapter argues for a pluralistic approach to studying tonality’s history, and advocates a model that centers rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form rather than pitch content. Refocusing our attention on parameters that regulate pitch content, rather than pitch content itself, can help us to separate the emergence of tonality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from incremental changes in background scale commonly described as modes and keys. Instead, we might consider how regulatory parameters create expectation: strategicallydeployed dominant arrivals prepare and predict eventual tonic returns.

From Phrase Structure to Form

The balletto unfolds on a uniquely small scale: many balletti can be performed in less than a minute. The genre’s brevity supports a number of perceptual benefits that train listeners to attend to tonal dynamics at multiple scales. The shortest balletti lie at the perceptual limit for entraining hypermeter and within the boundary for remembering tonic. Dynamic attending theory posits that periodic cadences correspond with peaks of attention, facilitating comparison of distant harmonic events. The balletto’s repeat structure fosters a deeper knowledge of tonal and formal procedures, and repetition directs attention to larger groupings. Together, these principles enabled listeners to identify important harmonic events, compare them across broad time spans, and associate them with specific formal units. Furthermore, a comparison of Italian, English, and German balletti reveals important regional differences in tonal and harmonic norms, illustrating how English composers, especially Thomas Morley, maximally leveraged the genre’s profound perceptual benefits.