Le 1er juillet 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3208
Séance - Analytical Methodologies and the Music of the 17th Century
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Michael Dodds
Developing a model for modal analysis in early music is a deeply fraught enterprise. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has shown, both historicist (emic) and presentist (etic) approaches to artistic interpretation present hermeneutic pitfalls. In music, the often discrepant relationship between theory and practice—two distinct but commingled creative spheres—is further complicated by the many genres and activities subsumed under our words “theory” and “practice.” Modal parameters, terminology, and classification schemes originating with one repertoire or theoretical agenda are applied with peril to another. Mere contemporaneity is no guarantor of relevance, veracity, or analytical helpfulness.
A newly developed model for change in modal theory and practice furnishes a helpful etic framework for relating emic modal concepts. We can make sense of the chaotic state of late Renaissance and Baroque modal theory by recognizing that it was shaped by the ongoing interplay of three historical layers or theoretical polarities: (1) the tonus-modus continuum within medieval chant theory; (2) monophonic vs. polyphonic modal traits articulated in Renaissance theory; and (3) vocal vs. keyboard ways of organizing tonal space arising with the introduction of basso continuo c. 1600. These layers in historical theory in turn furnish a useful analytical framework. This paper applies this framework to selected psalm settings and motets of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers—a stylistically diverse but delimited repertory within which to test this rapprochement between etic and emic approaches. This three-fold model both clarifies the modal particularities of Monteverdi’s Vespers and illumines the forces that later in the 17th century produced the two-mode system.
