Author: Samuel Howes

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

"This dissertation compares snapshots of seventeenth-century harmonic practice in 142 instrumental works by three northern Italian composers: Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690), and Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713). All three composers wrote large amounts of music in trio-sonata texture, i.e., two melody instruments plus basso continuo. I explore how tonality is expressed in this iconic genre and how that expression changes over the course of the seventeenth century. I group each composer's works by tonality (according to final and signature) and use custom-built music analysis software to observe the distribution and syntactic behaviour of chords in each tonality. I compare statistical representations of chord distributions (histograms) and chord progressions (n-grams) to determine how closely tonalities resemble one another both within and between the oeuvres of the three composers, working under the assumption that some tonalities are transpositions of others. This project engages with existing research on seventeenth-century conceptions of mode and key (Allsop 1999; Barnett 1998, 2002, 2008; Bonta 1984; Dodds 1999; Lester 1977, 1989; Long 2020; Pedneault-Deslauriers 2017; Powers 1998; Stein 2002) and provides new empirical input by looking at how tonalities can be differentiated using their chord content. By examining chord progressions, I am responding to Lester, who calls for a "study of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century theories of harmonic progression" (Lester 1989). My work also engages with data-driven studies of tonality (Albrecht & Huron 2012, 2014; Quinn 2010; Quinn & White 2013; Tompkins 2017; White 2015), applying tested methodologies to new repertoire. Throughout the project, I wrestle with the notion of the incomplete key signature, which has been problematised by several theorists including Allsop (1999) and Barnett (2002, 2008). My findings corroborate theories of key in French and English music put forward by Pedneault-Deslauriers (2017) and Long (2020), respectively. I show that while signatures that we might call incomplete often do appear in bona fide major or minor tonalities (e.g., G major with an empty signature), there are still measurable differences between some incomplete keys and their "complete" forms (e.g., between G minor with one signature flat and G minor with two signature flats). Ultimately, this dissertation shows that while the number of available finals increases over the course of the seventeenth century, and the number of distinct tonalities (defined by chord content) decreases, there is still not a universal major or minor mode by the time of Corelli, whose tonalities are not perfect transpositions of one another. We observe that all three composers have different conceptions of tonality and that each of them seeks to differentiate the tonalities they use in a unique way"--