Conference Agenda

There are numerous studies that highlight the connections between keys and characters in Romantic opera. But to speak of keys assigned to characters in Baroque opera is rarely done, which is what makes Francesca Caccini's and de la Guerre's operas so revolutionary. Little work has been done on de la Guerre’s Procris et Cephale, but important work has been done on Caccini’s use of keys in Ruggiero by Suzanne Cusick. The conclusion she reached was that male characters primarily use sharp keys, the female characters primarily use flat keys, and the androgynous Melissa sings primarily in C major. However, when considering the cadences associated with each of the main characters in Ruggiero, and with the major plot developments in Procris, a clear alignment between mode and character emerges. In Ruggiero, G is the consistent final note for all of Alcina's phrases when speaking of her love of Ruggiero, but it moves to F for a single phrase when she speaks of her habit of looking at herself in the mirror: "Parli lo specchio mio, là doue impressa d'ogni bellezza priua ho per costume di mirar me stessa." She goes right back to concluding her phrases on G after that moment, but the F on this rare moment of self-focus is not forgotten. In her battle with Melissa at the end of the opera, when she gives up on winning back Ruggiero and reveals her true selfish motives, calling upon a collection of monsters to assist her in defeating Melissa, the phrases of the monsters and Alcina consistently end on F, recalling her earlier moment of selfishness. Her spell is in G, but her true self is in F. Meanwhile, in Procris, dialogue on the love between Procris and Cephale primarily appears in D, while F is the mode associated with the rejection of that love, appearing when the Priestess forbids the match in Act I and frequently thereafter. This paper will outline the various links between modes and characters in these two operas and reflect on the use of this innovation by two of the earliest female composers of opera.

Cipriano de Rore’s Primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1542) is a collection of madrigals ordered primarily by mode setting texts—mostly Petrarchan sonnets—that speak of unattainable love and anguish in pastoral and metaphorical terms. Owing to its ordering and overarching unity of subject matter and poetic language, the book has become central to recent studies of both mode and narrative coherence in late-Renaissance music books. Some of these studies, in turn, have had an outsized influence on the perception of mode in music scholarship today, despite dealing with modal behavior typically in cursory and superficial fashion—for example, by observing only the superficial features of system, clefs, and ending sonority.

In his formative essays questioning the “reality” of mode, Harold Powers, for instance, goes only so far as to cite the “tonal type” (system-cleffing-final) of Rore’s modally ordered collections, without engaging with their internal workings. Powers argues that the works were designed expressly to serve as outward “representations” of the modes within/for the modal arrangement of the book, and therefore that mode is not an intrinsic quality not only of Rore’s works specifically, but of pre-tonal music at large. Such studies, however, seem to approach the music with predetermined conclusions and, hence, select aspects of the pieces and contemporary theories that support this particular view. Powers, for example, relies almost exclusively on the early and problematic theories of polyphonic modality of Pietro Aron, while overlooking the more influential, practical, and sound teachings of Rore’s contemporary in Venice, Gioseffo Zarlino.

This study offers a long-overdue exploration of Rore’s madrigals on their own terms to shed a deeper light into their individual internal workings and into the potential musical–textual ties that reach between works to impart a sense of unity across the book as a whole. These findings offer valuable new insight not only into this influential collection, but also into the nature of mode itself and its role in the musical work, thereby challenging skeptical views of mode accepted in mainstream musicology today, as well as the framing of Rore’s book as evidence for this position.

When explaining why Jennie Lee Riddle’s “Revelation Song” (2004) remains popular over fifteen years after its conception, worship leaders and congregants point to its rich lyrical imagery, its verbatim usage of Bible passages, or the eschatological vision it evokes. Certainly, these factors contribute to the song’s efficacy, but none of these elements distinguish “Revelation Song” from other songs within the contemporary worship music (CWM) genre since both foretastes of heaven (Ingalls 2018) and Scripture-infused lyrics (Kelman 2018) abound in this realm. From the musicologist’s perspective, the uniqueness of “Revelation Song” comes from its tonality. Whereas CWM typically operates within a major tonality (Thornton 2015), “Revelation Song” is unmistakably mixolydian thanks to its consistent harmonic progression: I-v-♭VII-IV. This abnormality presents both a stylistic hurdle and an experimental opportunity to the worship leaders and volunteer musicians tasked with its performance. Without clear templates for how to do so, worship leaders must decide for themselves how the mixolydian mode fits into the patterns of tension and release that typify the congregational experience of contemporary worship music.

What follows in this paper is an analysis of the solutions to this mixolydian problem developed by several well-established CWM artists. More specifically, this paper focuses on the presence or absence of the lowered scale degree seven within areas of the song where CWM’s genre conventions afford musicians and vocalists the freedom to incorporate original material: instrumental links, breaks, solos, countermelodies, and ad-libbed vocal fills. By doing so, this paper demonstrates that the lowered scale degree seven—the defining characteristic of the mixolydian mode—occurs more often in high-intensity moments therefore suggesting that it carries an ethos of power within CWM communities. Conversely, the absence of the lowered scale degree seven during pensive, low-intensity portions of the song implies that the mixolydian character is incommensurate with such an affect. By tracing the mixolydian mode’s relationship with sonic intensity, this study identifies this use as an example of Meyer and Verrips’s (2008) “sensational forms” within CWM, thus adding to the list of elements already identified as such by Busman (2015): musical density, volume, and textual complexity.