""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." ""--

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

It is the reproduction of the old book published long back (1923)

False relations remain one of the great enigmas of English Renaissance musical culture. Contemporary theoretical treatises explicitly discouraged their use, and yet these deliberate dissonances are hallmarks of English Renaissance music. Over the centuries they have accumulated a surfeit of subsequent connotations that have obscured how they once functioned, yet they have never been fully critically explored or elucidated in an English context. In Syrene Soundes, author Eleanor Chan excavates beneath strata of accumulated meanings to uncover the way that false relations delighted and confounded their original listeners and performers. The book offers a holistic investigation of the false relations phenomenon, examining the cultural, literary, visual, and material understanding of such dissonances in relation to the broader culture of incongruity, surprise and error, and metaphors of harmony that captured the imagination of the English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chan argues that interdisciplinary angles can galvanise understanding of technical musical theoretical tropes like the false relation. She demonstrates that the false relation and its graphic ephemerality can productively be explored through the lens of English Renaissance visual culture and its idiosyncratic representational strategies. By anchoring it within the milieu of the English Reformation, burgeoning aspirations towards empire, and the increasing need for a self-fashioned collective English identity, Chan reveals that the false relation was key to the mythology of an inherited English tradition of music-making. Syrene Soundes concerns itself not just with the notes on the page, but with the way that they influenced the broader culture of the time, both as the performable music they represented, as the idea of music, and as the visual, inky marks they are made of. It provides an accessible introduction to false relations which will be of use to musicologists and non-music specialists alike. Ultimately, Chan argues for the value of integrated interdisciplinary analysis in exploring the musical culture of the English Renaissance and embraces the blurring of musical, visual, material, and literary forms of expression that fed contemporary understanding of music, harmony, and falseness.

2023 marks 400 years since the death of English renaissance composer, William Byrd. Byrd's rich musical oeuvre and storied career has long captured the attention of audiences and scholars alike. This all-new collected edition marks his anniversary with thirteen brand-new essays from leading scholars on Byrd's musical life and legacy.

Open Access Musicology (OAM) publishes peer-reviewed, scholarly essays primarily intended to serve students and teachers of music history, ethno/musicology, and music studies. The constantly evolving collection ensures that recent research and scholarship inspires classroom practice. OAM essays provide diverse and methodologically transparent models for student research, and they introduce different modes of inquiry to inspire classroom discussion and varied assignments. Addressing a range of histories, methods, voices, and sounds, OAM embraces changes and tensions in the field to help students understand music scholarship. In service of our student- and access-centered mission, Open Access Musicology is a free collection of essays, written in an engaging style and with a focus on modes of inquiry rather than coverage of content. Our authors draw from their experience as scholars but also as teachers. They not only make arguments, but also describe why they became musicologists in the first place and explain how their individual paths led to the topics they explore. Like most scholarly literature, the essays have all been reviewed by experts in the field. Unlike most scholarly literature, the essays have also been reviewed by students at a variety of institutions for clarity and relevance. These essays are intended for undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers without any particular expertise. They can be incorporated into courses on a range of topics as standalone readings, used to supplement textbooks, or read with an eye to new scholarly insights. The topics introduce and explore a variety of subjects, practices, and methods but, above all, seek to stimulate classroom discussion on music history’s relevance to performers, listeners, and citizens. Open Access Musicology will never pretend to present complete histories, cover all elements of a subject, or satisfy the agenda of every reader. Rather, each essay provides an opening to further contemplation and study. We invite readers to follow the thematic links between essays, pursue notes or other online resources provided by authors, or simply repurpose the essay’s questions into new and exciting forms of research and creativity. Volume 2 of OAM expands the disciplinary, topical, and geographical ranges of our endeavor, with essays that rely on ethnographic and music theoretical methods as well as historical ones. The essays in this volume touch on music from Europe, South America, and Asia, spanning the 16th century to the present. Throughout, the contributing authors situate music in political, religious, racial, economic, and other cultural and disciplinary contexts. This volume therefore expands what scholars generally mean when they refer to “musicology” and “music,” always with an eye toward relevance and accessibility.