The Controvery over Modality in Classical Vocal Polyphony Within German Musicology

Abstract

Since its revival in German musicology in the 1950s, Renaissance research has been accompanied by a fundamental methodological dispute between Carl Dahlhaus and Bernhard Meier. In his habilitation thesis of 1968, Dahlhaus attacked Meier’s rigorously historical, early studies that were based on the definitive importance of church modes for sixteenth-century composition. Dahlhaus, on the other hand, propagated an authentic-plagal general mode in the development towards major-minor tonality. Meier offered a fundamental critique of this approach in his 1974 publication The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony. Initially exposed not only to objective criticism but also to hostility, its importance as a scholarly treatise, fundamental to the understanding of the sixteenth-century music, only came to be appreciated posthumously.