A precursor of the madrigal, the frottola is an ideal early genre for investigating how pitch structures common to both modality and tonality can be employed in ways that seem distinctly tonal. Recently, Megan Long (2020) has called attention to dominant–tonic cadential relationships between phrases as important features of tonal expectation, extending her research on light genres around 1600 to address the frottola.

This paper builds on Long’s work by explicitly probing the relationships between cadence pitches and cadence types in the frottola. Focusing on two under-theorized cadence types, namely plagal and what I call ascending whole step (both characterized by specific voice-leadings), I investigate the degree to which rhetorically weaker cadences might be understood as tonal half cadences through their pairing with subsequent rhetorically stronger cadences on pitches a fifth lower. I argue that a corpus study of cadential relationships among adjacent phrases can contextualize the frottola’s use of dominant–tonic trajectories and help understand how this repertoire engenders expectation.

I collect cadence data for roughly fifty settings of barzelletta texts drawn from Petrucci’s first three books of frottole (1504, 1504, 1505). These compositions’ tendency towards schematic text setting, regular phrase length, and consistent cadence placement suggests that adjacent phrases can gain interdependency through strategic selection of cadence pitches and cadence types.

My findings reveal much variety in the trajectories of both pitches and cadence types between paired phrases. I show that while local dominant–tonic pitch trajectories are one of the most frequent types of pitch trajectories in this repertoire, they occur relatively infrequently in absolute terms, competing with many alternative pitch trajectories. Additionally, cadence type alone is insufficient in anticipating half-cadential function, which emerges in conjunction with the additional parameters of pitch and formal location. In sum, while dominant–tonic pitch trajectories and the voice-leadings associated with tonal half cadences are both present in this repertoire, these two features generally do not yet exhibit the same degree of colocation as in later repertoires.

This paper addresses cadence patterns in Palestrina’s music that contravene a rule widely taught in music theory textbooks today: that the resolution of a syncopated dissonance should not be anticipated in another part, either at the unison or the octave (the “anticipation ban”). Palestrina normally observes the anticipation ban, but his violations are frequent enough to belong to the style of sixteenth-century sacred polyphony and stand in need of explanation. By examining a selection of cases from Palestrina’s music, I will show how these anticipated resolutions originate compositionally and how they should be understood analytically.
My analyses are informed by Peter Schubert (2007) and Julie Cumming (2013), who provide a rationale for dissecting the music into structural duos of very short duration that shift between voice pairs. These authors slice the texture horizontally instead of vertically, giving criteria for identifying the structural pair around which other parts accumulate. This is more a matter of “conceptual priority” (Bent 2009) than the order in which the parts are actually composed. Parts may be added to a structural duo above, below, or between the notes of the core dyad. When a structural duo contains a ninth—the sole exception to the anticipation ban, a dissonance whose resolution is doubled by definition—an added part below will convert the structural notes into a simultaneous third and suspended fourth (eleventh). I describe the resulting highly dissonant configuration as an “embedded ninth” (after Braunschweig 2023).
I argue that Palestrina’s embedded ninths make the most sense when analyzed in terms of voices piling up around (and beneath) a dyadic core, rather than as a dissonant decoration of an underlying consonant homophony. This conceptualization points to a concrete theoretical difference between the suspension as presently understood and the syncope as it was understood by musicians of Palestrina’s time (Artusi 1598). As a basically dyadic figure, the syncope does not restrict the content of the added parts so long as they are consonant with the agent. This has the surprising consequence of permitting anticipated resolutions, thus making possible the intense dissonance of the embedded ninth.

Lassus's explicitly colorful text-painting of "Carmina chromatico" in his Prophetiae Sibyllarum's prologue and its continued chromaticism inspired many researchers to investigate the composer's unorthodox harmonies. Schenkerian sketches, Tonnetz paths, and Roman numeral motive mappings revealed some foundational patterns, but they also depicted a work that defied complete explanation (Mitchell, 1970; Jones, 2007; Lake, 1991) . In addition, Lassus is only one of many Late Renaissance composers who embraced chromatic text expression, standing alongside the likes of Rore, Luzzaschi, Vicentino, Marenzio, and Gesualdo; heavily chromatic Renaissance music thus appeared to be an obscure series of triadic relations with neither tonal function nor complete modal cohesion. Kyle Adams's 2006 dissertation alleviated a substantial amount of the analytical fog, showing that chromatic Renaissance compositions were, structurally, diatonic florid counterpoint once non-essential chromaticism was removed. However, working Adams's process in reverse can produce an unidiomatic chromatic composition despite its correct reduction. This corpus study uncovers that idiosyncratic chromaticism also stems from an imbalance, one where lowered inflections are under more restrictive practice than raised inflections.
This study focuses on the intervals into and away from inflected notes within the vocal lines of Late Renaissance chromatic madrigals. These motions are documented as vectors in a diatonic inflection space along with the associated diatonic members. The analysis shows that lowered inflections remain firmly rooted in fourths and fifths relations while raised inflections can move somewhat liberally among other raised members. Rare exceptions arise in cases of tritone avoidance accumulation and hocketed circle-of-fifths patterns. This substantial dichotomy holds for all aforementioned composers' works analyzed, including within some of Vicentino's microtonal compositions (Wild, 2014). Lowered inflections thus seem to remain firmly coupled to their vox fa, even in the Late Renaissance (Bent, 2002). Among every recorded inflection within the corpus, only five moments broke this norm without supporting hockets or general accumulation; all appeared at moments of extreme text-painting in Gesualdo's late madrigals. The study therefore not only shows the persistent structural relation of lowered inflections to fa, but also Gesualdo's notable experimentation with divorcing lowered inflections from this structural association for the sake of expression.