“Towards an Understanding of Tonal Design in the Music of Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677)”
In attempts to understand tonality in seventeenth-century music, scholars have used markedly different analytical methods. Determining what methodological approaches are appropriate for music that is essentially “tonal,” but might not function in precisely the same manner as eighteenth-century tonal music can be difficult at best. Recently, several scholars have explored using Schenkerian and other tonal theories to analyze mid-seventeenth-century music. In this paper, I will present a tonal analysis, including modified Schenkerian graphs, of the lament/cantata “Lagrime mie” from Strozzi’s opus 7 (1659), in order to demonstrate its tonal design. “Lagrime mie” is a cantata in the Baroque sense: a multi-sectional secular work in which the sections or “movements” vary in meter, tempi, and key signatures. Despite these variants, symmetrical tonal areas are common in the work, on local levels as well as on a larger scale. In such a long and dramatic piece, this can only be evidence of a background harmonic plan. In my presentation, I will highlight specific moments in the piece that contain similar organizational characteristics and compare them to the large-scale harmonic plan, offering a possible method with which to analyze and therefore better understand the tonal designs in Strozzi’s larger works.
“Rosalia, Aloysius, and Arcangelo: A Genealogy of the Sequence”
The sequence is a well-known device of late baroque harmony, appearing with remarkable suddenness in the Italian instrumental repertory of the 1680s. What were its sources? This paper traces these to two independent compositional procedures from the turn of the 17th century. One was the polychoral and echo effects used so spectacularly by the Gabrieli’s in Venice, which involved the serial repetition of motivic material of moderate length, sometimes in transposition by fifth or by second. The other source was the development of dissonant suspension chains used to build drive towards cadence, a technique the paper calls cadential prefixion. Both of these devices are frequently found in the works of Arcangelo Corelli. But more significantly, Corelli also developed techniques for combining the two types, so that the unprolonged suspension chains were decorated with the more expansive motivic material typical of the Venetian style. Because of Corelli’s immense international popularity, his sequence technique—especially the combined verson—was widely imitated and became a common harmonic practice, enduring with very little change until late in the nineteenth century. The paper documents the entire contrapuntal apparatus used by Corelli and his contemporaries to develop the combined sequence and, as a result, builds a family tree for all the sequence types used in the common-practice era.