Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Re: Modality, Tonality, Transpositions, and Tunings (II of II)

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Modality, Tonality, Transpositions, and Tunings
Gorzanis (1567), Cima (1606), and Bach (1722)
Part II of II
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3. Does Manneristic modality favor an even temperament?
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Having identified the dog -- or domesticated Wolves -- which didn't
bark, we may ask why something like a 12-note well-temperament of the
Bach era was in demand in 1572 or 1622, as opposed to 1722.

Here I would like to suggest a possible answer which might link two
interestingly "synchronous" events: the rise of the major/minor key
system around the epoch of Corelli (say 1680), and the description of
well-temperaments by Werckmeister (1681 and later).

In a Manneristic setting, there may be two factors together helping to
account for the general disinterest in 12-note well-temperaments.
First, even with a standard meantone range of Eb-G#, the fluid system
of 12 modes offers enough musical variety (including some striking
chromatic progressions) that more remote inflections or transpositions
seem more of a special or experimental effect than a routine
imperative.

Secondly, given the largely homogenous texture of smooth tertian
sonorities, with bold dissonances used as a special or poetic effect,
the more tense thirds and sixths inevitably introduced by a 12-note
circulating temperament would clash with the sonorous ideal of the
music. One might say that the acoustical dissonance introduced would
be in tension with the stylistic aesthetic of concord/discord.

In contrast, the circulating 19-tone and 31-tone keyboards of the era
fit this tertian/modal ethos while expanding it to encompass chromatic
or enharmonic nuances. Vicentino thus includes in his treatise not
only a description of his archicembalo and some examples of chromatic
and enharmonic composition, but also a presentation on typical
four-voice progressions in the usual modes.[14]

In discussing this modal common practice, as well as his chromatic and
enharmonic innovations, Vicentino notes that modes may pleasingly be
mixed in a composition, for example to express the sense of the words.
He compares such artfully commixed modes to the pleasing mixture of
Doric and Attic styles in architecture.[15]

Not only the variety of the modes, but the variety of vertical
progressions, contributes to the fluidity of this music. These
progressions between saturated tertian or 5-limit sonorities
(Zarlino's "third-plus-fifth-or-sixth") are guided by a diverse set of
directed two-voice resolutions, with traditional trinic[16] or 3-limit
resolutions "to the nearest consonance" (e.g. m3-1, M3-5, M6-8) being
adopted to the new tertian setting. Not only a conventional
16th-century theorist such as Zarlino (1555), but a Late Manneristic
exponent of the new continuo techniques such as Agazzari (1607), takes
as basic this principle of "moving to the nearest consonance."[17]
The resulting variety of progressions, with bass motion by a second or
third nicely balancing that by a fourth or fifth, is a great resource
of this music.

Further, the fluid degree inflections routinely occurring within a
mode (e.g. B/Bb, C/C#), as well as the direct chromaticism possible in
theory and practice on a 12-note meantone keyboard with its engaging
contrast between large diatonic and small chromatic semitones (in
1/4-comma meantone, respectively about 117.11 and 76.05 cents),
enhance the variety of the system in pieces ranging from the
conventional to the highly experimental.

A keyboard with 31 notes, of course, would multiply such creative
possibilities already available on a standard 12-note keyboard; but in
either case, transposing the same mode to different steps is only one
of many resources open to the composer or performer.

On a 12-note keyboard, where a meantone range of Eb-G# nicely
accommodates the 12 modes and their usual accidental inflections,
compromising the uniform smoothness of thirds and sixths within this
gamut for the sake of some more remote inflections or transpositions
would seem a very dubious musical proposition.

By around 1680, however, both musical factors had changed. The
fluidity of the Manneristic 12-mode system was largely replaced by the
constraints of the major/minor key system. The new system treated bold
dissonances not as special effects, but as basic elements in defining
a key, dramatically raising the level of routine concord/discord
contrast.

In this new setting, transposition shifted from one of many resources
to an imperative source of variety in a system with only two basic
modes (major and minor) and a more narrowly channeled set of vertical
progressions and relations.

At the same time, the shift in vertical aesthetics toward a
fundamental contrast between concordant and boldly dissonant
sonorities defining a key might make the graduated acoustical
"dissonance" of the thirds and sixths in a 12-note well-temperament
a less obtrusive compromise.

In fact, a theorist such as Kirnberger (1771) sees this contrast as a
positive virtue. In a discussion of the older modal system and its
treatment in some works of Bach, Kirnberger reflects that "the old
style of writing has real advantages which are missing in the new
style." In the latter system, "where the keys are divided into twelve
major and twelve minor ones," the modes are reduced to two,
restricting many "expressive" possibilities of the older system.[18]

"However, as we shall see below, each of the
twelve major and minor keys has its own
character as the result of temperament."[19]

Thus an unequal well-temperament of the kind introduced by
Werckmeister and very likely applied to Bach's WTC in 1722 not only
made free transpositions available as a prime element of variety in
the new key system, but augmented that variety by lending contrasting
acoustical "colors" to these transpositions of what appeared on paper
to be identical intervals, scale patterns, and key progressions.

The Manneristic approach offers the radical alternative of a system of
12 modes and 31 steps, combining modal flexibility, full circulation
if desired, and chromatic and enharmonic nuances making the meantone
diesis a high artistic resource as well as a mathematical necessity.

To conclude, both the meantone keyboard tunings of the Manneristic Era
(including those for 19-note and 31-note instruments), and the 12-note
well-temperaments of Bach's era, may reflect as well as reinforce the
stylistic preferences of these eras. Each system has its own unique
possibilities.

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Notes
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1. Giovanni Paolo Cima, _Partito de Ricercari & Canzoni Alla Francese
(1606)_, ed. Clare G. Rayner, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music 20,
gen. ed. Willi Apel (American Institute of Musicology, 1969). See
pp. 63-71 for the original piece and its 11 transpositions, each
transposition prefaced by Cima's instructions for retuning, pp. 62 for
his general remarks on such transpositions, and pp. 89-90 for English
translations.

2. See, for example, "The Question of Mannerism" in Glenn Watkins,
_Gesualdo: The Man and His Music_ (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1973), ISBN 0-8078-1201-3, pp. 95-110; and Maria Rika
Maniates, _Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530-1630_ (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 1979), ISBN 0807813192.

3. On Nicola Vicentino (1511-1576), see his treatise _Ancient Music
Adapted to Modern Practice_, tr. Maria Rika Maniates, ed. Claude
V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), ISBN
0-300-06601-5; Bill Alves, "The Just Intonation System of Nicola
Vicentino," originally appearing in _1/1: Journal of the Just
Intonation Network 5(No.2):8-13 (Spring 1989), available at
http://www2.hmc.edu/~alves/vicentino.html; Henry W. Kaufmann, "More on
the Tuning of the _Archicembalo_," _Journal of the American Musico-
logical Society_ 23:84-94 (1970); and Marco Tiella, _L'Archicembalo_,
http://www.infosys.it/pamparato/ima/ma/ma81/Tiella.html. On Fabio
Colonna (c. 1567-1640), see his treatise_La Sambuca Lincea, overo
Dell'Istromento Musico Perfetto, con annotazioni critiche manoscritte
di Scipione Stella (1618-1622)_, ed. Patrizio Barbieri, Musurgiana 24
(Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1991), ISSN 1121-0508, ISBN
88-7096-026-9, including a facsimile edition plus a very helpful
commentary in Italian and English. On Guillaume Costeley (c. 1531-
1606), see Kenneth J. Levy, "Costeley's Chromatic Chanson," _Annales
Musicologues: Moyen-Age et Renaissance_, Tome III (1955), pp. 213-261.

4. Georg Reichert, "Giacomo Gorzanis' `Intabolatura di Liuto' (1567)
als Dur- und Molltonarten-Zyklus," in Heinrich Hu..schen, ed.,
_Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum Sechzigsten Geburtstag am
7. Juli 1962_ (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1962), pp. 428-438;
and Arthur J. Ness, "Gorzanis, Giacomo," in _New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians_ ed. Stanley Sadie. Washington, DC: Grove's
Dictionaries of Music. ISBN 0333231112.

5. Here I use the adjective _Setharean_ to refer to interactions
between tuning, timbre, and perceived concord/discord of a kind
explored by William Sethares. "Sethareanism" might be described as the
fortuitous or deliberate use of timbre making a given tuning of an
interval more felicitous for a given style than it might otherwise be.

6. On the advantages of equal semitones for the lute, see Vincenzo
Galilei, _Fronimo_, trans. and ed. Carol MacClintock, Musicological
Studies & Documents 39, gen. ed. Armen Carapetyan (American Institute
of Musicology, Ha..nssler-Verlag, 1985), 154-164. On the acoustical
factors that may make the equal temperament of the lute displeasing on
keyboard instruments, see his _Dialogo della Musica Antica et della
Moderna: A Facsimile of the 1581 Florence Edition_ (New York: Broude
Brothers, 1967), pp. 47-48; and Karol Berger, _Theories of Chromatic
and Enharmonic Music in Late Sixteenth Century Italy_, Studies in
Musicology 10 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980), ISBN
0835710653, pp. 71, 149 n. 57. Galilei considers both the more
"violent" manner in which the strings are struck on a keyboard
instrument as opposed to the lute, and the material of the strings.

7. Cima, n. 1 above, pp. 62, 89.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid. p. 71.; this is Example 12, the last of the series, which
proceeds by semitones from D to C#.

10. Ibid. Here I translate the directions for the fifth example with a
final of F# (p. 66), to which tuning Cima refers the reader for this
final example also (p. 71).

11. Ibid. pp. 62, 89.

12. Watkins, n. 2 above, pp. 198-199, and n. 49; Gesualdo's passage
appears as Ex. 52, p. 199.

13. Colonna, n. 1 above, pp. 103-110, with 110 numberd as 100
(facsimile) and pp. LVII-LXII (transcription).

14. Vicentino, n. 1 above, pp. 173-180.

15. Ibid. pp. 149-150: "It is with such architectural variety that
composers adorn the building of their composition, as do good
architects..."

16. Here I use the term to describe the complete three-voice Gothic
sonority of outer octave, lower fifth, and upper fourth
(e.g. D3-A3-D4), a term suggested by the Latin _trina harmoniae
perfectio_ or "threefold perfection of harmony" described as
manifested in this sonority by Johannes de Grocheio (c. 1300).

17. Agostino Agazzari, _Del sonare sopra il basso_ (1607), excerpted
in Oliver Strunk, ed. and annotator, _Source Readings in Music
History: The Baroque Era_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), SBN
393-09682-3, pp. 64-71, at 67: "... I take for granted a certain
numbers of principles and terms; for example, that imperfect
consonances progress to the nearest perfect ones..."

18. Johann Philipp Kirnberger, _The Art of Strict Musical
Composition_, tr. David Beach and Jurgen Thym, intr. and notes by
David Beach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 314-335, at
319-320. Interestingly Kirnberger, ibid. at 330-331, like Vicentino,
takes an interest in the variety of steps on which internal cadences
may occur within a given mode.

19. Ibid. p. 319.

Most respectfully,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net

Re: Modality, Tonality, Transpositions, and Tunings (II of II)

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