Modal discourse and fourteenth-century French song: A ‘medieval’ perspective recovered?

Abstract

Writing about a late-fourteenth-century ballade in honour of Mathieu de Foix, Howard Mayer Brown candidly aired his uncertainty about the proper theoretical perspective from which to engage the music. ‘How should we in the twentieth century interpret this music: from the point of view of emerging tonality, as an example of polyphonic modality, or of the influence the extended system of hexachords had on compositional decisions, or should we use some other conceptual framework?’ In his catalogue of choices, Brown alludes to a variegated lot of modern approaches that range across appropriation (sometimes formal, sometimes casual) of terms from functional tonality, modal descriptions founded on octave species and finals, mappings of hexachordal areas, empirical observation of pitch emphases and tonal orientations.