Renaissance Formalisms in the Cultural Archive of Tonality

This dissertation examines the history of certain pitch processes in the musico-poetic praxis of Italian vernacular song during the first century of music printing. It focuses on two such processes: one involved generating simple three- and four-voice homophonic textures from a single line; the other involved generating cadential patterns that alternated between two pitches maximally distant within the diatonic collection. Both processes have previously been linked to the “unwritten tradition” of improvised or extemporized song that was widespread throughout the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but for which scant documentation has survived. Here, however, I argue for situating that tradition within a broader culture of declamatory song that comprehended written and “unwritten” forms of transmission alike. Each chapter of this dissertation traces the making and remaking of that culture by attending to replications of pitch processes in connection with the formal, generic, and stylistic concerns of different repertories. I show that in fact the surviving repertories of the period constituted a rich cultural archive, and I explore some general implications of this approach for the historiography of tonality.

The focus of Chapter 1 is the frottola, an otherwise heterogeneous group of song genres that shared what I call the “song principle,” adapting this term from Alfred Einstein. Einstein coined the term to describe the close relationship between musical form and poetic form that the madrigal seemingly abandoned after the 1520s; my investigation of frottole explores its centrality to that repertory in connection with arie, simple formulas for declaiming poetry in song. In Chapter 2, pace Einstein, I argue that the song principle did not completely disappear from written Italian song with the rise of the madrigal, and indeed that it was not necessarily antithetical to madrigalian priorities. Here I reconsider those priorities by foregrounding the madrigal’s intersections with arie in settings of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516). Chapter 3 investigates the use of arie in Neapolitan circles throughout the sixteenth century and the unusual three-voice style of song cultivated there in such genres as the villanesca and villanella. Finally, Chapter 4 reconsiders how a particular aria, the romanesca, emerged from the cultural archive described in the preceding chapters. I link the changing conception of that aria in the decades around 1600 with new paradigms of musical works and their authors, which brought to the surface the issue of common musical ground, a history that offers us new ways to approach the matter of tonality.