Contrapuntal Direction and the Diagnosis of Compositional Relationships in Fifteenth-Century Masses

Abstract

Contrapuntal direction—the principle that certain progressions may only occur through the motion of the contrapuntal voice towards a stable tenor—is a previously unrecognized implication of the teaching of the theorist and composer Johannes Tinctoris. Although Tinctoris’s interval successions are commonly the same whichever voice is the tenor, Tinctoris omits a small number of oblique progressions where the tenor would move. Although I will not investigate possible reasons for this omission, examples will show that when the missing progressions occur in repertoire, these can be explained by a reappraisal of the contrapuntal functions of the voices. The results extend Julie Cumming’s concept of the “movable module” and demonstrate its presence in music of the 1460s and 1470s. This principle emerges directly from a computer-assisted attempt to connect Tinctoris’s counterpoint with late-fifteenth century composition. Through its ability to recognise tenor function within a voice pair, to identify instances where the tenor function may have moved, or to mark voices that do not form a contrapuntal pair, directional analysis is able both to identify faulty analytical assumptions around voice pairing and to act as a validator of general theories of fifteenth-century compositional structure.