Bruce,
If you're interested in lots of nitty-gritty details of the way
Renaissance composers thought about writing music, the (relatively)
new book by Jessie Ann Owens: Composers at Work. The Craft of Musical
Composition 1450-1600 (OUP 1997) is pretty good.
Eric
************************************************
Habsburger Verlag Frankfurt (Dr. Fiedler)
www.habsburgerverlag.de
eric.f.fied...@t-online.de
e.fied...@em.uni-frankfurt.de
************************************************
On 20.06.2009, at 21:56, Bruce Clausen wrote:
John: I'm in the middle of transcribing a far amount of early
music (Machaut through A. Gabrieli) for horn choir (four parts).
I'd like a better understanding of the music itself but am at a
loss to find any in-depth analysis of any particular piece. If I
had my druthers I'd really like to take apart some of the music of
Josquin. Do you have any recommendations for a book or article
that examines any of this music according to its own rules of
counterpoint, Renaissance theory, etc.?
Much obliged,
Bruce Clausen
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Howell" <john.how...@vt.edu>
To: <finale@shsu.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 9:54 AM
Subject: Re: [Finale] Modes & keyboards
At 7:38 AM -0400 6/18/09, dhbailey wrote:
Which is because they're all based on the old Greek tetrachords,
which were tuned (as I remember from theory class) as whole-step,
whole-step, half-step. The keyboard has two of these separated by a
whole-step, which completes the octave.
Whether subsequent research (in the 38 years since I had that class)
has proved that wrong, I can't say.
Not wrong, but perhaps incomplete. Yes, the Greeks based their modes
on conjunct and disjunct tetrachords, and one 9th century Carolingian
notational system THOUGHT it was duplicating that, although it really
didn't. (And thank goodness THAT system never caught on!!!) But the
Greeks also recognized both major and minor (large and small)
semitones, which never got built into the medieval system. I too
learned all that in theory 55 years ago, but I've never used it since
and I skip over it in my Music History Survey class AND my Early
Music Literature class.
The problem was that Boethius, a Roman aristocrat who served the
first non-Roman Emperor in the late 5th and early 6th century,
thought he was writing a description of the Greek system, but he
messed it all up, and when medieval church musicians developed their
own system of modes around the beginning of the 11th century they
thought they were following Boethius and therefore following the
ancient Greeks, but they weren't and they didn't!
I'm not sure about the half- and whole-steps in the Greek scales, and
I'm too lazy to look it up, but that turned out to be the key to
Guido's system of hexachords in the early 11th century, with a
half-step between mi and fa in the middle of each hexachord and all
the rest of the intervals whole-steps. And teaching his choirboys
(not to mention the reigning Pope) to identify the half-steps was the
key to learning to read music from the page.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:john.how...@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's
definition
of jazz musicians.
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