Le 30 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3203
Séance - New Technologies and Analysis (II)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Reiner Krämer
According to Burmeister (Musicapoetica), the supplementum is a passage two or more measures long, expanding on a “primary” (finalis) or “secondary” pitch (perfect fifth above finalis) after the final cadence to emphasize its finality. Burmeister clarifies that the supplementum is an “elaboration of a final pitch in a stationary voice,” and that added pitches in other voices should create “consonances.” The supplementa of Renaissance motets, however, are quite varied.
I examined a corpus of 4,000 motets written by numerous Renaissance composers (c. 1470 to 1600). The pieces are encoded as symbolic music notation files, readable by computer software, and the extracted catalogue of supplementa was placed into a database, from which the corpus could be queried with questions such as: What are the most common contrapuntal patterns found in supplementa? Are the pitches of the cadential arrival and the final sonority the same? To what extent are these issues coordinated with mode?
The process of teaching the computer to identify and compare supplementa provides a large-scale, rigorous understanding of this important element of Renaissance polyphony. The paper shows: there are at least three different types of supplementa; supplementa can occur at the end of any section of a motet; supplementa vary in length; the pitch of the cadence leading into a supplementum is not necessarily the pitch of the lowest note in the final sonority, and that the interval between these two pitches varies with the mode of a composition.
