Conference Agenda

A little-known compositional treatise from seventeenth-century England, Elway Bevin’s A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke (1631; Bevin and Collins 2007), presents imitative canonic techniques as the ultimate musical achievement: a marriage of symbolic patterns with notated sound. Bevin’s canons are representative examples of musical riddles, an Early Modern subgenre consisting of performable pieces imbued with esoteric significance. The significance of a riddle is not conveyed through sound alone: insiders can only discern it by puzzling over the score and related text. Musical riddles, then, are oriented toward players rather than toward an audience, flouting the dominant listener-focused aesthetics of the period.

This paper demonstrates how insights from current philosophies of games can shed light on the Early Modern practice of musical riddling. In particular, C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art (2020) offers a flexible theory of games within a player-centric aesthetic framework, which is not provided by Early Modern music-theoretical writings. Indeed, Zarlino—a strong influence on all early theorists and practitioners of musical canons, including Bevin—had argued that compositional “intricacies” which do not appeal directly to an audience’s sense of hearing “have no value at all” (Zarlino et al. 1983, 263). As this dismissal is echoed by most of Bevin’s contemporaries (Schiltz 2015), the persistence of musical riddles throughout the Early Modern period is difficult to account for on seventeenth-century terms. However, by applying aspects of Nguyen’s approach in an analysis of Bevin’s “Five Wounds” canon, this paper explains the appeal of musical riddles: these puzzling objects afford players an aesthetic experience of their own agency, engaging performers’ senses and imagination as they struggle to complete in-game goals. Layers of significance in “Five Wounds” are hidden to listeners, apparent only to performers—an outstanding example of how sensory and intellectual dimensions come together in the participant-focused aesthetics of this genre. Adopting Nguyen’s framework, this paper guides its audience through the game of Bevin’s “Five Wounds” canon, showing how Early Modern musical riddles offer players a powerful experience of music-making that transcends the sonic and opens interpretive possibilities for performers past and present.

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.

As most of us know, the theory of "modes, which are also called τρόποι or τόνοι," presented in Boethius's De institutione musica shortly after 500 CE, became the foundation for the medieval and Renaissance theory of the church modes: protus, deuterus, tritus, tetrardus, and later Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian and their plagals. As we also know, however, the mature system of the church modes was actually founded in part upon a misunderstanding of Boethius´s presentation of the ancient Greek τόνοι or modes by the principal author of the ninth- or early tenth-century treatise Alia musica. But was it really?

This paper will demonstrate that the main author of the Alia musica, and indeed other authors of music treatises from the ninth century of the Common Era onwards, could not have understood the τόνοι as presented by Boethius. Boethius simply did not give them enough information to do so.

Boethius begins his treatment of the modi or τόνοι in Book IV, chapter 15 of his Musica with the famous statement: "Out of the species of the consonance of the diapason arise what are called modi, which are also called τρόποι or τόνοι" - a clear reference to the theory of the τόνοι presented by Klaudios Ptolemaios in Book 2 of his Harmonicá (2nd century CE), a treatise Boethius knew well; the fifth book of his Musica is a translation of the first book of Ptolemy´s work. Ptolemy's theory is based on the species of the diapason displayed between fixed pitches by transpositions of the ancient Greek systema teleion, and depends upon the distinction between thesis and dynamis to orient the reader. While Boethius does present the theory of the τόνοι or modi as transpositions of the systema teleion, he does not explain how to identify the τόνoς of each transposition via species of the diapason, despite his assertion quoted above. Had he done so by taking two simple steps, the history of the modes in Western music would be completely different from the one we have known for over a thousand years.