Tonal Types and Modal Equivalence in Two Keyboard Cycles by Murschhauser
Cristle Collins Judd · 2014
To the aspiring church musician around 1700, the many ways of thinking about tonal structure in music must at times have seemed bewildering. There were the traditional eight modes; various incarnations of the twelve-mode systein; the set of keys arising from polyphonic psalmody; and an emergent system of only two modes, often still conceptualized in terms of solmization-based Ut and Re (or La) tonalities, that could each be situated on any chromatic degree. The young musician&s;s task was made somewhat easier by correspondences between certain modal systems and musical repertories-such as that between the eight-mode system and plainchant-but such correspondences were hardly exclusive: some theorists, for example, thought there to be twelve modes in plainchant. It is plausible that four randomly selected musicians, asked to name the mode of a given polyphonic composition, might have invoked four different modal systems.