Theory Treatise Research Articles

Hexachord Solmization in the Classroom: A Revival of Old Practices

This article proposes the practice of hexachord solmization as a component of a "histor ically informed" theory curriculum for early-music students. Many theory treatises and singing manuals from the sixteenth century and before start with a discussion of the gam ut, hexachords, the Guidonian hand, and solmization syllables. This strongly suggests that hexachord solmization was one of the principles of contemporary music education. Analyses of musical excerpts demonstrate that a hexachord is a meaningful melodic unit rather than a random set of six tones. Its solmization syllables illuminate the inherent tonal relations around the semitone mi–fa ; furthermore, they represent expressive tone qualities in themselves—for instance, the bright mi versus the soft fa. The hexachord sys tem was still in use in eighteenth-century Italy, apart from some adjustments with regard to the emerging major-minor tonality. Most likely, young apprentices at Italian conserv atories learned the syllables before they could read the pitches. Sets of solfeggi produced by the conservatory masters for their pupils show how plain solmization patterns form the basis of the melodic art of the period. In the classroom today, hexachord solmization offers both a useful tool for a non-verbal mode of musical understanding and a starting point for melodic improvisation.

중일(中日) 근대문예론의 형성과 그 이동(異同)에 관한 소고(小考)

This paper attempts to compare the literary theory of Tsubouchi Shoyo(坪內逍遙), which was developed from the 'arts-the arts' examined throughout Wang Guowei's(王國維) literary theory, and Wang Guei's literary theory, which was established as the early modern Japanese literary theory. As Tsubouchi Shoyo's first statement, 'Novels are art(美術)' in 『Shosetsu Shinzui(小說神髓)』 opened the chapter of modern Japanese literary theory, this paper aims to explore Wang Guowei's literary theories in relation to the formation of modern literary theory in China. Therefore, in the case of the formation of Japanese modern art theory, Tsubouchi Shoyo's use of Western literary theory and logic in his own way within the magnetic field of pragmatic thought and literary dance theory that spread throughout Japanese society in the 1880s, while building a literary theory that incorporated the discourse of the Japanese art world at the time, was used as a guide to examine the formation of Chinese modern art theory and Wang Guowei's literary theory treatise. This was further utilized to examine the shifts in the theses that were common to their literary theories. In fact, the formation environment of Sino-Japanese modern literary theory was different in terms of its reception and paragraph situation according to the way the two countries experienced modern East Asia, but there are also similar points. It is also true that Wang Guowei's and Tsubouchi Shoyo's views and arguments on the literary arts developed in very different ways after they published their literary theory works and related papers, depending on their respective life trajectories and the circumstances of their respective countries. Nevertheless, neither Tsubouchi Shoyo nor Wang Guowei built a separate literary theory that completely excluded the dominant discourse in the academic and literary circles of their time. Rather, Wang Guowei, who studied a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics and natural sciences, could be said to have been more attuned to and thought about the axioms of modern China's time and built his literary theories in response to them.

‘A knowledge easely taught, and quickly learned’: learning to sing in Byrd’s England

Abstract William Byrd published his famous eight ‘Reasons briefely set down by th’auctor, to perswade every one to learne to sing’ in his 1588 Psalmes, sonets and songs. The most important reason to learn to sing, according to Byrd, is that ‘it is a knowledge easely taught, and quickly learned, wher there is a good Master, and an apt Scoler’. The ‘knowledge’ of which Byrd speaks is not only the mechanics of singing but also, or perhaps chiefly, the musical knowledge necessary to sing: the rudiments of musical literacy. This article unpacks Byrd’s claims about music education in Tudor England, placing them in the context of print culture and educational practices. It first considers the options for music education available to different social classes and genders, then turns to close study of music theory treatises and other music educational texts printed in 16th-century England. I examine how these printed materials discussed their own role in the process of educating readers, and interrogate their prevailing claims that gaining musical literacy is ‘plain’ and ‘easie’, and possible ‘without any other help saving this booke’.

“A Most Valuable Curiosity”: Music Manuscripts, Authorship, Composition, and Gender at the Ephrata Cloister in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania

AbstractThe 1746 Ephrata Codex, a 972-page music manuscript in the Library of Congress, is the central document of this study, which locates and identifies several eighteenth-century composers who were solitary sisters and brothers of the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Ephrata was an insular, mainly celibate, Pietist, Sabbatarian, ascetic community, which, at its height in the 1740s and 1750s, was home to approximately 300 individuals. Like many German diaspora societies in colonial Pennsylvania, it produced devotional prints and manuscripts. Ephrata is unique because most of its spiritual texts and music were written by and for its inhabitants. More than 130 extant Ephrata music manuscripts in libraries, archives, and collections in the United States and United Kingdom comprise a corpus of over 1,500 hymns, composed according to rules mandated in an original music theory treatise. The concept of authorship at Ephrata was complicated: Communal creative activity frequently existed alongside calls for individual recognition, evidenced by name attributions found in printed hymnals and music manuscripts. The solitary sisters’ agency and creative activity at Ephrata brings an added nuance to the discussion of authorship and credit, drawing attention to the contributions of women as creators, a notable exception to the male-dominated sieve of music history. The 2020 release ofVoices in the Wilderness, an album of new Ephrata hymn transcriptions, is connected to this article. Recorded in the Ephrata Meetinghouse, or “Saal,” the room for which the music was composed, it provides a new perspective on Ephrata's composers, compositional methods, and performance practice.

“¿Enseñar Música a un Ángel?”: The Countess of Villaumbrosa as Sor Juana’s Musical Patron in Romance 21

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Romance 21 “Después de estimar mi amor” sheds light on the author’s musical knowledge with elaborate metaphors that showcase the nun’s theoretical understanding. At the same time, the lyric narrator ironically begs pardon for failing to send her interlocutor a music treatise titled Caracol. While most prior scholarship on Romance 21 focuses on Sor Juana’s engagement with early modern music theory and philosophy, this article addresses the significant but overlooked theme of musical patronage. First, a gendered approach highlights the Caracol as a unique example of a female-authored music theory treatise written for a woman benefactor. Next, an epistolary reading highlights inconsistencies among personal references in the poem and the recipient that its epigraph identifies, the Countess of Paredes. Indeed, details suggest that the addressee is not the Countess of Paredes María Luisa de Lara y Gonzaga, but rather the Countess of Villaumbrosa María Petronila Niño de Porres y Enríquez de Guzmán. For all this, Romance 21 lends notable insight into early modern women’s musical patronage and also advances Sor Juana studies as the first extant communication between the poet and the Countess of Villaumbrosa.

A Chant Treatise in the Service of Two Monastic Traditions of the Modern Era

The present study discusses a chant theory treatise preserved in the Carthusian compilation manuscript (CZ-Pu I F 17) and based on the Franciscan Hermann Mott’s Musices Choralis Medulla (1670). It sheds new light on the background of the Carthusian arrangement and its connection to the Franciscan original by comparing both versions and trying to discover why the Franciscan treatise was chosen as an exemplar, who the author of the Carthusian treatise was, when and where the Carthusian version was written and used, and finally, through a study of its context and the information given in its manuscript source, how it could be transmitted and what it meant for the Carthusian order.

(Not an) ambivalence toward Michelangelo in Federico Borromeo’s De pictura sacra and Musaeum

This article discusses the role of Michelangelo Buonarroti in the Seventeenth-century art theory treatises of Cardinal Federico Borromeo De pictura sacra and Musaeum. In the referred text we can notice an ambivalent approach to the artistic genius of Buonarroti. In several cases Borromeo mentions Michelangelo as an artistic example who equalled or even exceled the great artists of Antiquity, albeit in other paragraphs the author criticises the artist for his aesthetic fallacy. A close reading of De pictura sacra and Musaeum, as well as an analysis of Borromeo’s didactic programme in the newly established Accademia del disegno in Milan allows to heed that Cardinal was rather an admirer of Michelangelo’s personality and talent. In De pictura sacra Buonarroti and other Renaissance Masters serve a rhetoric function and allow to conceptualise the theological and aesthetic framework for a post-Tridentine Catholic religious art.

The emergence of a medieval pitch concept

ABSTRACTThe ninth century witnessed a fundamental change in the way Western musicians thought about music. Before the Carolingians assimilated ancient music theory, they had no functional concept of how the intervals between pitches of the scale differed from one another and how those differences affected melodic structure. The transition to interval-based thinking may be traced in writings about music. The first half of Aurelian of Réôme's mid-centuryMusica disciplinaquotes from Boethius, Cassiodorus and other ancient authors, but fails to make sense of what they say about intervals. The second half describes the rise and fall of chant melodies without reference to intervals. Treatises of the later ninth century (theEnchiriadistreatises, Hucbald'sMusica) are the first to treat music in terms of individual pitches and explain how patterns of whole tones and semitones define modes and scales. However, an early draft ofMusica enchiriadis, theInchiriadon, still displays no awareness of the role that semitones played. A parallel evolution occurred in notation. Neumes, which outline melodic direction but not precise intervals, can be documented from the second quarter of the ninth century and are likely older. They lack pitch content because musicians who invented them lacked a conceptual framework for understanding pitch. Pitched notations do not appear until late in the century and their use is confined to examples in theory treatises.

Didactic images in a thirteenth-century French music theory treatise: theScientia artis musiceof Hélie Salomon

AbstractTheScientia artis musice, a music theory treatise completed in the year 1274 by Hélie Salomon, a cleric from the village of St-Astier (Périgord/Dordogne), covers all the usual topics treated in such sources: letter names, hexachord syllables, the claves (letter + syllable(s)), the musical hand, mutation, staff notation, clef placement and chant genres. It includes an incomplete tonary with representative chant genres together with a commentary on the seculorum (differentiae) appropriate to various chant incipits. A lengthy instruction on the performance of parallel four-voice organum is also included. TheScientiais the only medieval theory treatise whose eight illustrations (called ‘figurae’) include human figures. These images relate directly to matters covered in the treatise and serve to make its main points more easily committed to memory. Of especial interest is the image of an enthroned bishop that serves as the focal point for a novel exposition of the tonal system of chant as (1) a set of logical relations modelled after the Tree of Porphyry and (2) a variant of the tree of consanguinity. Since the sole surviving copy of the treatise is the original, all these details must reflect the author's intention.

ON FEDELE FENAROLI'S PEDAGOGY: AN UPDATE

ABSTRACTAlthough Fedele Fenaroli's partimento and counterpoint pedagogy has been the subject of a number of recent publications, several aspects of its organization and contents require further research. Thanks to the recent discovery of multiple manuscripts, I am able to elaborate on two of them in this article. First I deal with Fenaroli's partimento curriculum. As several manuscripts illustrate, Fenaroli appears to have maintained a progressive method consisting of four parts (or books) almost throughout his entire career. A partimento student had to work through the first three books successively, which served as Fenaroli's basic partimento course. When these three books had been satisfactorily assimilated, the student could proceed with book 4, which was clearly intended by Fenaroli as his advanced partimento course. Secondly, I engage with Fenaroli's views on dissonance treatment and place them in the broader context of eighteenth-century Neapolitan pedagogy, and thoroughbass and music theory treatises in general.

Signposting mutation in some fourteenth- and fifteenth-century music theory treatises

ABSTRACTThe foundation of the solmisation system, attributed to Guido d'Arezzo, is based upon the application of the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, to the musical notes C D E F G A. Later, this system was expanded to incorporate a series of overlapping hexachords made up of these six syllables. These overlapping hexachords could allow a singer to move seamlessly across the regular musical space (the gamut) using only the six syllables (voces) via ‘mutations’. Even though the extent to which this system underpinned diatonic conceptions of musical space is being reconsidered, it seems clear that, at least for some musicians, it played an integral part in music education.Although many theorists discussed the process of hexachordal mutation in their treatises, the approaches towards its exemplification and demonstration were far from uniform, given its conceptual rather than notated function. Johannes Tinctoris's Expositio manus (c.1472) includes a number of musical examples showing hexachordal mutation. His examples, rather unusually, include syllabic annotations to label the points of mutation within the musical notation, a practice that is almost without precedent. This article takes Tinctoris's treatise as a point of departure and compares the approaches taken towards the exemplification of hexachordal mutation in some theoretical texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tracking the influence of their approaches forward into the sixteenth century. It considers what some different approaches can tell us about the conceptual function of the hexachord in pedagogy, and what the motives might have been for adopting specific exemplification practices.

»Kot pravi Boetij …«: Zarlinovi Temelji harmonikein Boetijevi Temelji glasbe

Prispevek obravnava povezave med dvema izmed pomembnejših glasbenoteoretskih traktatov, Temelji harmonike Gioseffa Zarlina in Temelji glasbe Anicija Manlija Severina Boetija. Odgovoriti skuša na vprašanje, v kolikšni meri se Zarlino navezuje na Boetija in prevzema njegove misli ter v kolikšni meri se od njega odmika.

Chanter sur le livre à la Renaissance: Les traités de contrepoint de Vicente Lusitano ed. by Philippe Canguilhem (review)

PORTUGAL Chanter sur le livre a la Renaissance: Les traites de contrepoint de Vicente Lusitano. Edited by Philippe Canguilhem. (Collection Epitome musical.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. [410 p. ISBN 9782503550404. i 80.] Music examples, illustrations, facs , companion Web site, appendices, bibliography, index.The practice of improvised polyphony during the Renaissance has long seemed out of reach to musicologists and performers. Vicente Lusitano, a Portuguese musician born around 1520, is most often recognized as a participant in a celebrated debate with Nicola Vicentino in 1551. Less widely known is that Lusitano is also the author of not one, but two of the most detailed music theory treatises on the practice of improvised polyphony. This volume aims to promote awareness of Lusitano's treatises by making them more widely available and by presenting extensive research on his life and works.The book opens with an essay by Philippe Canguilhem that situates Lusitano's writings within the context of major developments in Renaissance contrapuntal theory. Particular attention is paid to Lusitano's indebtedness to earlier Iberian writings, most notably Matheo de Aranda's Tractado de canto mensurable y contrapunto (Lisbon, 1535). Canguilhem's thorough introduction to Lusitano's writings explains the important concepts of contrapunto suelto, contrapunto concertado, and abilidades. A fascinating discussion of the relationship between counterpoint and composition (pp. 21-23) introduces notions of orality and literacy to the scholarship on the historical meaning of these terms. For Canguilhem, the significance of Lusitano's writings is that they show how central improvised counterpoint was to everyday musical life during the Renaissance. The chapter includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary sources concerning the practice of chanter sur le livre up to the year 1800.An essay by Giordano Mastrocola marks a new height in biographical research on Lusitano. The wide-ranging chapter examines key elements of Lusitano's personal identity: Portuguese nationality, racial and ethnic difference (his father was probably an African slave), cosmopolitanism in Rome, and, toward the end of his life, heterodoxy across Europe. Mastrocola rightly laments the knee-jerk scholarly association of Lusitano with Vicentino. In addition to an extended discussion of their debate (pp. 58-78)-the clearest yet in the secondary literature-the chapter presents intriguing findings that will enable future scholarship to transcend the limiting view of Lusitano merely as Vicentino's nemesis. Among these promising areas of research are his social and geographical mobility, conversion to Protestantism, and later transalpine career (possibly under a different name). Mastrocola's contextualization of Lusitano within overlapping aristocratic networks in Portugal, Italy, and Germany is very useful in this regard.The remainder of the volume consists of critical editions and French translations of excerpts from two treatises by Lusitano. The first, Del arte de contrapunto (ca. 1550), is from a larger manuscript treatise preserved in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, shelf mark Espagnol 219. Although the Spanish-language manuscript is anonymous, the editors follow Robert M. Stevenson in attributing its authorship to Lusitano, and take a further step in asserting its status as an autograph (pp. 119-20). A short linguistic analysis by Marie-Francoise Deodat-Kessedjian establishes the influence of Portuguese and Latin on the Spanish orthography in the manuscript; this contributes additional security to the manuscript's attribution to Lusitano. Clearly, the manuscript was a work in progress. The editors preserve the flavor of its development by indicating additions, cancellations, and marginalia where they occur.Lusitano's Del arte de contrapunto is a systematic discussion of ways to improvise counterpoint against a given voice. The first chapter proceeds logically in the manner of species counterpoint, considering in turn one, two, four, and three notes against one note of a cantus firmus. …

Tiling in My Music

Rhythmic canons and other one-dimensional tiling techniques dominated my composing for two or three years, and a number of instrumental pieces, both solo and ensemble, evolved during this time. With numerous examples, I have put together a little survey of different ways in which I have done this, often leaving holes and using other procedures not normally considered correct. It must have been 1999 when Moreno Andreatta gave me a copy of Dan Tudor Vuza’s landmark essay Supplementary Sets and Regular Complementary Unending Canons (Perspectives of New Music, 1991-92), because already in 2000 its influence on me became clear with a Canon in 3, 6 or 9 voices, written for an installation of Martin Riches in Berlin. When the MaMuX meetings at IRCAM began in 2001, I was able to hear regularly the mathematical music theories of Guerino Mazzola, Thomas Noll, Emmanuel Amiot, Franck Jedrzejewski and Harald Fripertinger, as well as Andreatta himself and many occasional visitors, and this information stimulated me more and more. My composing time during the year 2002 was devoted almost exclusively to fitting together little rhythmic tiles, and early in 2003 I brought out the edition Tiilework : 14 Pieces for 14 Solo Instruments. Later that year I wrote Tilework for String Quartet, and Tilework for Piano, though by the end of that year my concentration was already turning more toward combinatorial designs, which is quite a different topic. I recently reread the Vuza essay, and it seems all the more clear to me that this text has been important for all the mathematicians and music theorists cited above, not to mention for Jon Wild and other North American music theorists, and for quite a few composers. I now consider this work the most important music theory treatise of the last 20 years, particularly since it is one of those rare cases where music theory has preceded musical practice. Harmony and counterpoint books, essays on serial techniques, manuals for figured bass, and music analysis texts have generally dealt exclusively with musical procedures already practiced by composers. Only in rare cases like Vuza, Leonhard Euler, and Hugo Riemann have theorists preceded composers, though Henry Cowell’s 1930 book New Musical Resources should also be mentioned. This highly original text never circulated much in Europe, but it was widely read in the U.S. The author never followed up on these theories much in his own music, but John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow both sited this as a seminal influence on their music, and younger American composers such as Kyle Gann, Larry Polanskyn, David First, and John Luther Adams also acknowledge the

Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman Kitâb el Edvâr

Collections of Ottoman music theory treatises dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries include Edv rs,2 also common to the traditions of Arab and Persian musics. The study of such treatises often ensures the link between the past and the present. Due to their interdisciplinary nature, Edvdrs invite philosophical/cosmological discussions, merging theoretical knowledge and aesthetic/ethical views by covering such diverse domains as music, language, poetics, astrology, theology, spirituality, numerology, and psychology. The present article examines a Kitdb el-Edvdr (Book of Cycles), a treatise on the theory of Ottoman-Turkish art music dating from 1477, housed at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Deansgate, as Turkish MS. 148. This three-part study includes: (i) an exploration of the relevant socio-cultural background by briefly commenting on the literary and musical cosmography of Ottoman tradition; (ii) a presentation of a bibliographical description of the manuscript; and (iii) a consideration of the treatise from the perspectives of form and content. Inviting discourse on Ottoman-Turkish music, the article ultimately attempts to connect these areas by drawing together various aspects of context and idea.

Medieval music and the art of memory

Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables List of Music Examples Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Prologue: The First Great Dead White Male Composer Part 1. The Construction of the Memorial Archive Chapter 2. Tonaries: A Tool for Memorizing Chant Chapter 3. Basic Theory Treatises Chapter 4. The Memorization of Organum, Discant, and Counterpoint Treatises Part 2. Compositional Process in Polyphonic Music Chapter 5. Compositional Process and the Transmission of Notre Dame Polyphony Chapter 6. Visualization and the Composition of Polyphonic Music Conclusion Bibliography Index

Reading Renaissance music theory: hearing with the eyes

List of illustrations Foreward Ian Bent Preface Part I. Beginnings: 1. Prologue: Exempli gratia ... 2. Music theory incunabula: printed books, printed music Part II. 1520-1540: Pietro Aron and Seybald Heyden: 3. Pietro Aron and Petrucci's prints 4. Music anthologies, theory treatises, and the Reformation: Nuremberg in the 1530s and 1540s Part III. The Polyphony of Heinrich Glarean's Dodecachordon (1547): 5. Exempla, commonplace books, and writing theory 6. The polyphony of the Dodecachordon Part IV. Gioseffo Zarlino's Le Istitutioni Harmoniche (1558): 7. Composition and theory mediated by print culture 8. 'On the modes': the citations of Le Istitutioni Harmoniche part IV Part V. Readings Past and Present: 9. Exempli gratia: a reception history of Magnus es tu Domine/Tu pauperum refugium 10. Epilogue: reading theorists reading (music) Bibliography Index.

The Polyphony of the Spheres

"The Polyphony of the Spheres." Every student of music history learns that the earliest extant description of the polyphonic performance of Western music is found in an anonymous Carolingian music theory treatise, Musica enchiriadis, from around A.D. 900. What seems to have gone unnoticed, however, is that the procedure is also mentioned in Remigius of Auxerre's contemporary commentary on Martianus Capella's encyclopedic work that has come to be known as De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. The reference does not occur, as one would expect, in the section containing glosses of Martianus's book on harmony, but in the commentary on the sustained allegory, informed by Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean metaphysics, that Martianus presents in books 1 and 2. The identification of a contemporary practice in the performance of liturgical music as an exemplum of one of Martianus's most striking metaphors is explained as a polyphonic variation on a theme first stated 1500 years before Remigius undertook the exposition of De Nuptiis the Pythagorean-Platonic theory of the harmony of the spheres.

Thomas, Christensen. Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, no. 4. Cambridge: University Press, 1993. xviii, 327 pp. ISBN 0-521-42040-7 (hardcover)

Thomas, Christensen. Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, no. 4. Cambridge: University Press, 1993. xviii, 327 pp. ISBN 0-521-42040-7 (hardcover). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 17, numéro 1, 1996, p. 1-155) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.