Hearing Homophony

Book excerpt: ""This book examines a repertoire of homophonic vernacular partsongs composed around the turn of the seventeenth century, and considers how these partsongs exploit rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form to craft harmonic trajectories. Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, Thomas Morley, Hans Leo Hassler, and their contemporaries engineered a particular kind of centricity that is distinctively tonal: they strategically deployed dominant harmonies at regular periodicities and in combination with poetic, phrase structural, and formal cues, thereby creating expectation for tonic harmonies. Homophony provided an ideal venue for these experiments: spurred by an increasing demand for comprehensible texts, composers of partsongs developed rigid text setting procedures that promoted both metrical regularity and consistent phrase rhythm. This rhythmic consistency had a ripple effect: it encouraged composers to design symmetrical phrase structures and to build comprehensive, repetitive, and predictable formal structures. Thus, homophonic partsongs create and exploit trajectories from dominants to tonics on multiple scales, from cadence to sub-phrase to phrase to form. Ultimately, this book argues for a model of tonality-and of tonality's history-that centers not pitch, but rhythm and meter. Metrically oriented harmonic trajectories encourage tonal expectation. And we can locate these trajectories in a variety of repertoires, including those that we traditionally understand as "modal." ""--