[LUTE] Re: [OT] Tonality in the Baroque
RalfD wrote: > > ??? Whut? That system was widely used well into the 19th (!sic) > century. It's just that a lot of researches tend to skip the > early chapters of contemporary manuals. Just have a look at some of > the most important instruction manuals and how much (expensive!) > space they dedicate top proper solmization teaching. > Ha! Thank you for the explanation and the pointer. IMSLP coughed up a copy of Morley's "A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music" (modern spelling :-) ) where he says: Master: But have you learned nothing at all in Music before? Student: Nothing. Therefore I pray begin at the very beginning and teach me as though I were a child. M: I will do so: and therefore behold, here is the Scale of Music which we term the Gam. ... Then must you get it perfectly without book, to say it forwards and backwards. Secondly, You must learn to know wherein every Key stands, that is in rule or in space. And thirdly, How many clefs and how many notes every Key contains. Huh. Lots of fun stuff here! Thanks again. .. m. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
[LUTE] Re: Tonality in the Baroque
> On Jan 9, 2019, at 3:53 PM, Ralf Mattes wrote: > >> although, like a lot of Fux’s book, it was very old fashioned in 1704. > > ??? Whut? That system was widely used well into the 19th (!sic) century. It's > just that a lot of researches tend to skip the > early chapters of contemporary manuals. Just have a look at some of the most > important instruction manuals and how much (expensive!) space they dedicate > top proper solmization teaching. I’m aware that Gradus ad Parnassum hung around for a long time. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t old fashioned when it was written. Fux was up front about it. The counterpoint section of the book is a dialog between Aloysius the master and Joseph the student, and Fux says in his Author’s Foreword that Aloysius is Palestrina, who died 130 years before the first (Latin) version of the book was published (in 1725, not, as I wrote earlier, 1704). Fux was ignoring Monteverdi and the seconda prattica, not to mention Vivaldi, Fux’s attitude about whom might be gleaned from his statement in the Foreword that he did not think his book “can call back composers from the unrestrained insanity of their writing back to normal standards.” Consider that Gradus ad Parnassum, full of statements like “the counterpoint must be in the same mode as the cantus firmus," was first published three years after Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony, which gave names to the concepts of tonic and dominant. To return to the original question, Fux took the triple-naming of notes for granted and did not explain it. In Alfred Mann’s translation, The Study of Counterpoint (my paperback copy of which is starting to like it was Fux’s personal copy) Mann adds a footnote on page 31 explaining it, much as Ralf did, but with examples in staff notation. You can find a pdf of the book here: http://www.opus28.co.uk/Fux_Gradus.pdf To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
[LUTE] Re: [OT] Tonality in the Baroque
Am Mittwoch, 09. Januar 2019 23:42 CET, Mark Probert schrieb:
[LUTE] Re: [OT] Tonality in the Baroque
Am Donnerstag, 10. Januar 2019 00:03 CET, howard posner schrieb: > > > On Jan 9, 2019, at 2:42 PM, Mark Probert wrote: > > > > And I am, sad to say, ignorant of the actual meaning of "D la.sol.re". > > I believe it’s just a convention of combining varying names for one note: D > might be la, re or sol depending on which > hexachord you assume, so it became standard to use all three names, The important part to understand is: notes where named using some kind of "coordinate" system. One "axis" is what we today call "note name" (or "pitch class" if you are hipp :-), which was back then called "claves" (lit. the name of the key). The other axis was the hexachord syllable (then called "voces"/"voice"). Pretty much the first thing students learned was the name/voice of all existing notes. Knowing all the possible "voices"a note can be was very important for proper "mutation" (i.e. knowing on what notes you can change from one hexachord into another). So, in your example, a student singing a 'D la sol re' in the durum hexachord would know that he could change to the natural hexachord by making a D->sol to D->re mutation. The nice thing about such a system is that those "voces" give you a lot of extra context. Seeing an e-fa will tell you what notes can be found on both sides of that note. This is _very_ helpful for playing basso continuo, esp. from sparsely figured basses. For example, the 65-chord over a mi will have a minor sixth and a diminished 5 while the 65 over a fa will have a perfect 5etc. > although, like a lot of Fux’s book, it was very old fashioned in 1704. ??? Whut? That system was widely used well into the 19th (!sic) century. It's just that a lot of researches tend to skip the early chapters of contemporary manuals. Just have a look at some of the most important instruction manuals and how much (expensive!) space they dedicate top proper solmization teaching. Cheers, RalfD > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
[LUTE] Re: [OT] Tonality in the Baroque
> On Jan 9, 2019, at 2:42 PM, Mark Probert wrote: > > And I am, sad to say, ignorant of the actual meaning of "D la.sol.re". I believe it’s just a convention of combining varying names for one note: D might be la, re or sol depending on which hexachord you assume, so it became standard to use all three names, although, like a lot of Fux’s book, it was very old fashioned in 1704. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
[LUTE] [OT] Tonality in the Baroque
Hi, all, and my apologies if I open a can-o'-worms here. I have recently been reading, as you do, an early English translation of Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum" (from around the 1740s) and, early on, it contains the line: See the following Example in D. la.sol.re. Now this edition is a reduction of the original and skips the early part on theory and takes out the dialogues leaving the essence of compositional techniques (it is titled, "Practical Rules for Learning Composition"). Which means there is some assumed knoweldge about theory going on here. And I am, sad to say, ignorant of the actual meaning of "D la.sol.re". Can anyone please point me in the direction of a primer or similar that goes through how the English might have described tonality in the Baroque? Many thanks .. mark. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
