Description
From the early sixteenth century, lutenists, guitarists, and keyboard players understood chords and how to use them. These instrumentalists understood what we now call functional harmony and used it in practice long before it was codified by theorists. In the same way that the unwritten practices of singer-songwriters throughout the sixteenth century have have not been accommodated into the historiography of renaissance music, the practices of musicians who thought in chords have not been assimilated alongside those whose understanding of the inner workings of music was based on counterpoint. Composers of polyphony appear to have period remained largely impervious to the notion of aggregated harmonic structures, sometimes trying to explain more complex vertical relationships using the language of counterpoint. It was as if two musical worlds existed alongside one another, independently.
Amid the musical innovations of the early seventeenth century, previously undefined notions of chords and harmony began to solidify. The triad was defined by German theologian and music theorist Johannes Lippius in his Synopsis musicae novae (1612) just after Italian guitarist Girolamo Montesardo established the guitar’s alfabeto chord system in his Nuova inventione d'intavolatura (1606). Instead of looking forward, the purpose of this paper is to initiate new discussion of what came before, using the broader methodological trends of contemporary musicology. This study commences from a sociological base that explores institutions, musical employment, education and other areas that can help us understand more about the ways in which two largely discrete musical cultures coexisted during the sixteenth century. It moves from the sociological to the musical, attempting to make sense of a dual system of music theory that is neither documented in writings from the period nor acknowledged in contemporary studies but that is abundantly evident in the musical legacy of the period.
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