Conference Agenda

Few facets of medieval Western music theory have elicited more sustained modern skepticism than the doctrine of modal ethos. Music theorists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, following ancient authorities, described modes as possessing distinctive affective properties—an “ethos”—capable of shaping listeners’ dispositions or emotions. Medieval theorists accordingly prescribed modes for setting texts of corresponding affective characters. Modern scholars, however, have tended to be skeptical of these ethos attributions, and modal ethos is now generally regarded as a series of inert theoretical clichés rather than a meaningful reflection of or influence on musical practice, especially with respect to polyphony.

Such skepticism has crystallized most decisively around the Phrygian mode, with its final tone on E. Whereas medieval theorists consistently associated the Phrygian with anger, madness, and warlike violence, modern scholars have observed that the texts of polyphonic songs classifiable as Phrygian overwhelmingly express sadness, grief, and lament. This apparent contradiction has established the Phrygian as the example invoked most often to refute the practical and thus hermeneutic relevance of ethos doctrine. This, in turn, has contributed to broader doubts about the compositional reality of mode itself.

This paper reopens the question of modal ethos through close study of historical writings and of Phrygian polyphony from the fifteenth century. Pioneering Phrygian works by Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Okeghem, and their contemporaries reveal recurrent evocations not of lament per se but of indignation—anger rooted in perceived mistreatment or unjust injury. In this corpus, martial topics likewise appear as figures of an aggrieved psychic state. When read alongside coeval descriptions of the Phrygian as provoking anger and violence, the affective field registered by these E-final chanson texts evinces not a contradiction but a close correspondence to theoretical accounts of the mode’s ethos and tonality.

Through this analysis, modal ethos emerges as an historically operative dimension of late-medieval musical thought and practice. This paper thereby restores Phrygian ethos doctrine as a viable framework for present-day hermeneutics and opens new pathways for inquiry into the expressive use of the other modes across the premodern West.