TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
9th Biennial Conference on Baroque Music
ABSTRACT
L’Uso Moderno: Tonal Coherence in Seventeenth-Century Italian Polyphony
Warren Stewart
Several scholars have recently described a consistent pattern in the eightfold
systems of “tones” presented in Italian theoretical works throughout the
seventeenth century. The evidence of tonally-ordered collections and the
explicit assertions of the theorists suggest that these octonary tonal
systems were not merely theoretical constructs but that they were explicitly
intended to reflect contemporary practice. In my paper, I will consider
the possibility that these tonal systems were just what their proponents
maintained they were: a codification of the "common practice" of
seventeenth-century polyphony. These octonary tonal systems provide
modern scholars with a powerful tool for the analysis of seventeenth-century
music as well as important insights into the way polyphonic music was composed
and heard at the time.
The viability of the octonary tonal systems as an agent of tonal coherence
in the early seventeenth century was dependent on the fundamental concept
of musical space grounded in what Harold Powers has called the “Guidonian
diatonic”. I will argue that the interaction of the Guidonian properties
and the generally-accepted rules of contrapuntal procedure resulted in
practice in aurally distinct tonalities, and that these are the “tones”
described by the octonary tonal systems. Further, I will show that
the general acceptance of normative compositional procedures embodied in
these tonal systems provided composers of the period with a means of organizing
large-scale polyphonic works and a framework of expectations to manipulate
in their setting of poetic texts, particularly in their choice of cadence
structure and location.
Last updated on 22 March 2000 by Yo
Tomita