Denis Collins

So you want to write a canon? An historically-informed new approach for the modern theory class

Canonic writing has been part of the education of music students for centuries. Considered a routine means of elaborating primary musical material in the Renais sance,2 it maintained an important place in the didactic writings of later periods. Yet perusals of historical treatises as well as modern counterpoint texts usually reveal very little information about how to compose a canon apart from a step-by-step approach involving writing a short amount of material in one part, copying it into a second part after a predetermined time distance, finding suitable material to continue the first part, and repeating this process until the end of the piece. This general prescription for writ ing canons has survived intact in many historical sources3 and in pedagogical texts up to the present day.4 In most cases, little additional assistance is offered to students apart from general comments on common difficulties encountered in strict imitative writing, such as the potential for monotony in canons at the unison or octave, crossing of parts in unison canons, exact versus inexact intervallic imitation in non-unison canons, and forming cadences. Modern authors often provide surveys of the different subtypes of canon and include a wide range of repertoire examples.5 While such surveys are very useful to students in situating canonic writing in the history of Western music and demonstrating some of the levels of complexity and ingenuity within this tradition, they do not provide structured teaching material for guiding students through the processes and difficulties involved in writing different kinds of canon. It is reasonable to believe that composers of canon in earlier periods must have engaged in more sophisticated compositional strategies even though these are not im mediately clear to us from most surviving theoretical documents. This belief is con firmed by a small number of treatises from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that, indeed, provide much more detailed information on how to write a canon. This informa

Discomfit them, O Lord, that trust in their own multitude: a new editorial approach to the Tallis-Byrd Cantiones sacrae

The contents of the Cantiones sacrae, published by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd in 1575, have been edited, performed and recorded numerous times, yet John Milsom’s contribution to the Early English Church Music series is the first attempt to bring all of the works of this volume together in a single edition. Unlike other studies of this music, Milsom employs a system of parallel scores whereby variant states of each work, where they exist, are placed side by side in the edition with the version published in 1575. An introductory essay and detailed critical notes to each work and its variants preclude the need for detailed commentaries and notes at the end of the book, while footnotes to the musical editions are kept to a minimum. In the general introduction to the volume, Milsom takes issue with several tenacious views about the circumstances surrounding the publication of the Cantiones sacrae. Most contentious are his arguments that it was a book intended for a primarily Continental readership and that it was not necessarily a financial failure. The present article assesses the merits of Milsom’s editorial approach and contextual discussions and their likely impact on the field of early music scholarship. In his edition of the monumental Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, published in 1575 as a joint venture between England’s two most eminent English composers, John Milsom presents the entire contents of the volume (hereafter CS1575) in their published order side by side with revisions and adaptations of individual works by Tallis and Byrd or by other hands. The result is a volume that departs significantly from prior editorial practice in the Early English Church Music series and indeed from many commonly encountered approaches to editing early music. Milsom’s aim is to put the book itself at the centre of his enterprise. As Magnus Williamson points out in his Foreword, Milsom considers CS1575 ‘as part, perhaps the central part, of a dynamic process of creation and adaptation’ which is illuminated by a detailed investigation of the reception history of CS1575 by way of its copies and contrafacta (p. v). The result is a book of nearly 500 pages, with no effort spared by the editor or publisher to gather in one place critical editions of each of the compositions in CS1575 and their variants until approximately the time of Byrd’s death. Milsom’s exemplary attention to editorial methodology along with his imaginative and frequently provocative assessments of historical and contextual issues will provide both novice and seasoned readers

Towards a Global Music Theory: Practical Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Music across Human Cultures

In Towards a Global Music Theory, Mark Hijleh presents a method for analysing examples of repertoire from across any of the world’s musical cultures. Although he acknowledges that he is not presenting a theory for all music, he asserts that his method adopts a practical approach which can offer insights into very different kinds of music and can also capture commonalities between seemingly diverse examples. He claims that

The transmission of Zarlino's canonic theory in seventeenth-century organ chorale settings

Abstract While the importance of Gioseffo Zarlinos treatise, Le istitutioni harmonkhe (1558, rev. 1573), and its influence on music theorists of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is well documented, his position in relation to actual compositional practice of this period has not yet been fully investigated. This paper explores how Zarlinos codification of counterpoint formed part of the training of certain later composers and how it is reflected in their compositions. Specifically, a repertoire of seventeenth-century organ chorales by six composers is compared to the very detailed set of voice-leading rules for two-part, cantus firmus-based composition found in the revised 1573 edition of Le istitutioni harmonkhe. Consideration is also given to similar but much less detailed rules provided by later theorists. The results show a high degree of consistency between Zarlinos rules and compositional practice, suggesting that Zarlinos discussion is fundamental to understanding how musicians of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries approached canonic composition.