Sunday,
9:30–11:00 a.m.
Room 2330
Through “Unknown Tracts and Precipitate Cliffs”: Analysis and Performance of an Enharmonic Madrigal by Nicola Vicentino
Nicola Vicentino proposed a radical tuning system of thirty-one tones per octave in his 1555 treatise L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica. This paper explores the ramifications of that tuning system as he applied it to vocal music, culminating in an analysis of the pitch structure of the enharmonic madrigal Madonna il poco dolce. For a 21st-century music theorist grappling with sixteenth-century debates on vocal tuning, being able to hear what was at stake is crucial—and so as part of the presentation I will demonstrate a novel means of rendering a performance of Vicentino’s microtonal madrigal, starting from a recording of an early music group and applying post-production software to retune each note precisely to the pitch required.
Several of the madrigal’s melodic lines contain segments of Vicentino’s enharmonic modes. These modes are built from his enharmonic and chromatic species of fourths and fifths, obscurely derived in L’antica musica by transforming the abstract intervallic templates of diatonic species of fourths and fifths. A number of the exotic harmonic shifts in the piece can be explained by the need for triadic accommodation of melodic successions derived from these enharmonic and chromatic species. Additional analytic topics involve the novel proximate voice-leading possibilities between triads in this tuning system, and microtonally altered cadential relationships.
A Case for Prolongation of Tonic Harmony in the Quarter-Tone Music of Ivan Wyschnegradsky
To justify a prolongational analysis in a post-tonal work, one must establish clear criteria for distinguishing chord-tones from non-chord tones. In his quarter-tone work 24 Préludes dans l’echelle chromatique diatonisé à 13 sons, op. 22, Ivan Wyschnegradsky generates pitch content through a technique that he names “diatonicized chromaticism,” whereby he creates a new quarter-tone scale that shares a number of significant properties with the conventional major scale. From this scale, Wyschnegradsky derives a quarter-note chord that functions like a conventional tonic, and embellishes this chord with non-chord tones in configurations that mimic conventional passing tones, neighbor tones, arpeggiations, voice exchanges, and unfoldings. In the Préludes, one can further observe a succession of chords that appears to mimic the circle-of-fifths progression, and the large-scale expansion of the tonic chord across an entire prelude.