Tonal Orientation
Megan Kaes Long · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020
The balletto and canzonetta have highly regulated strophic sectional forms. Three characteristics of these forms facilitate tonal expectation: they are comprehensible, and can easily be segmented by a naïve listener, they are highly repetitive, facilitating statistical learning and directing listener attention toward higher structural levels, and they are predictable, both because they are repetitive and because they manipulate consistent generic norms. Together, these features equipped listeners to attend in meaningful ways to ever more remote relationships between dominant and tonic signposts. In turn, composers exploited the stability of form and tonal structure across the repertoire, manipulating formal norms to create meaning.