The Perfections of Modern Music: Consecutive Fifths and Tonal Coherence in Monteverdi

Abstract

According to Carl Dahlhaus,* Monteverdi is able to lay claim to the chord that is the most famous in Western music after the Tristan chord.' This is the socalled 'unprepared dominant seventh' that occurs within a few bars of the beginning of Monteverdi's best-known madrigal, 'Cruda Amarilli', from his Fifth Book of 1605 (Ex. la, b. 13). If this chord has indeed managed to defeat the rival claims of other famous chords Schoenberg's or Scriabin's, perhaps it has done so, as Dahlhaus has pointed out, because Baroque writers, beginning with Artusi,2 traditionally cited this piece to show how Monteverdi's irregular, expressive dissonance treatment differed from the strict style and thus to define Monteverdi's 'seconda pratica' (this was still being done, for example, in the little-known detailed analyses of Monteverdi madrigals by Padre Martini);3 and because the chord came to occupy an important position in nineteenth-century accounts of the rise of tonality. The passage in question (Ex. la) may conveniently illustrate Monteverdi's typical dissonance treatment, which in this instance is not very complicated; the voice leading is indicated in Ex. lb. An F passing note between G and E (b. 13) produces a G-F-E third-progression, which doubles the 3-2-1 E-D-C descent (inner voice, bs 11-14) in tenths: the latter descent governs the cadence onto C. Such doublings in tenths are typical of the two upper voices in the textures of this period, which are generally three-voice in essence. The E-D-C descent has an irregular interpolated F (b. 13, Quinto) as a cambiata-type dissonance, which is also doubled in tenths, producing a leap in the top voice directly from an unprepared ninth (Canto, b.13, the A) to an unprepared seventh (the F in the same bar), which represents the famous 'dominant seventh' (labelled in Ex. la). Dissonance structures do not, however, provide a satisfactory basis for explicating the large-scale aspects of Monteverdi's compositions. They mostly introduce affective contrast, often taking individual words or phrases of the text