Sarah Fuller

Defending the Dodecachordon: Ideological Currents in Glarean's Modal Theory

Although Heinrich Glareans assertion of a twelvefold modal system is well known, the diverse ideological forces that guided his inquiry into the nature of mode and its presentation to the public have been only partially explored. Assessment of Dodecachordon from an ideological perspective reveals a remarkable symbiosis among rationalist, religious, and humanist currents, a marked concern for religious orthodoxy, and a strong advocacy of traditional plainchant. A universalist view of the concepts defined in music theory guides Glareans interpretations of ancient Greek theory and Latin plainsong alike. Cultural factors had a decisive impact upon the exposition of theory in Dodecachordon.

On Sonority in Fourteenth-Century Polyphony: Some Preliminary Reflections

Introduction. Harmonic aspects of Guillaume de Machauts music have long kindled the interest of music historians, as is evident from such classic contributions as Gilbert Reaneys inauguratory essay on fourteenth-century harmony, H.H. Eggebrechts thorough analysis of Motet No. 9, and Wolfgang D6mlings concise monograph on the secular songs.1 The last two in particular assign significant structural purport to sonority in individual compositions. More recently, Ramon Pelinski and Hellmut Kiihn have pressed the general thesis that sonority assumes a structural role in Machauts music, Kiihn extending it to the fourteenth century at large.2 Invaluable as they have been in broadening musical perspectives beyond narrow confines of rhythmic pattern, motive, and reiterative form, these studies are marred collectively, and to varying degrees individually, by insufficient grounding in a settled domain of primary theoretical concepts. They lack consensus on such fundamental issues as nomenclature and classification of sonorities, assessment of relationships between sonorities, and designation of basic syntactical processes. The individual authors (Kiihn excepted) tend to assume a shared understanding with the reader and neglect the admittedly tedious business of justifying first premises. Some among their manifold observations

Hidden Polyphony, A Reappraisal

THE MS PARIS, BIBLIOTHiQUE NATIONALE, fonds latin 1139 is doubly renowned as the oldest known source of Aquitanian polyphony and the earliest extant collection of Aquitanian verse song.1 The main collection recorded-and perhaps also assembled-by the original scribe is a virtual compendium of types of sacred music composed in the I th century. Its miscellaneous content, meticulously arranged by genre,2 includes liturgical plays, troped Epistles, Kyrie and Agnus tropes, a fragmentary Office for the Feast of Innocents, and chants for the Benedicamus Domino, with and without tropes. The major portion of the collection, though, consists of 56 Latin verse songs.3 Like the plays and the troped Mass items, most of the verse songs are monophonic. A few, however, are set for two voices. These two-part songs constitute the earliest known repertory of Aquitanian polyphony. The actual size of the polyphonic repertory in Lat. 1139 cannot, for the moment, be defined. An unusual manner of notation obscures the