TONAL TYPES IN THE KEYBOARD MUSIC OF FRESCOBALDI …
Transcript of TONAL TYPES IN THE KEYBOARD MUSIC OF FRESCOBALDI …
TONAL TYPES IN THE KEYBOARD MUSIC OF FRESCOBALDI
The following is a scan of the original, unpublished English
text of a presentation I gave (in an Italian translation) at
the 1983 Frescobaldi Conference in Ferrara. The Italian
version was published in 1987 in the Report of the Conference.
Following the Conference I continued working on the project,
applying the same analysis to a large number of musical
repertories from the late sixteenth- to the late seventeenth
century, including works by Giovanni Gabrielli, Gesualdo,
Michelangelo Rossi, Monteverdi, Froberger, Stradella, and
Buxtehude. My hope was that the results would reflect the
transition from a “modal” to a “tonal” idiom. I also developed
a quantitative indicator, the “beta factor,” to show the place
of each body of works along this path. Its theoretical value
for a purely “modal” repertory would be 0, and its value for a
pure “tonal” repertory would be 100. In fact, the value for
Frescobaldi’s 1615 Recercari e Canzoni publication, with their
almost artificial modal language, turns out to be
approximately 3, and the value for all his published keyboard
works is approximately 12, whereas the value for Corelli’s four
collections of trio sonatas is 99!
The data were generated by means of a Basic program that I had
developed on an Apple 2e computer, and the tables and graphs
shown in the handout were produced automatically upon inputting
the values. In spite of these promising results, I had to halt
the project after my move to North Carolina in 1984 due a
number of other commitments, and I never returned to it. In
the near future I hope to self-publish here a few more details
on this further work.
Alexander Silbiger
March 2010