On Compositional Process in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

The change from "successive composition" to "simultaneous conception" is one of the great turning points in the history of music. The latter term, derived from Pietro Aaron's allusion to the method of composition used by modern composers, does not correctly convey Aaron's meaning. He said that modern composers "take all the parts into consideration at once," disposing them in different ranges and thus allowing the avoidance of awkward clashes between the inner voices. This more harmonic orientation finds confirmation in the writings of Giovanni Spataro, whose theory of harmony, later developed by Zarlino, contradicts a current view of fifteenth-century music as purely intervallic counterpoint founded on a superius-tenor framework in which the bass is nonstructural and nonessential. The theory is grounded in the functional role of dissonance, adumbrated a century earlier in the treatise by Goscalcus. Discussion of the new compositional process can already be found fifty years earlier in the writings of Johannes Tinctoris. That this has not been recognized is due to persistent confusion over the term res facta. The key to comprehending this term lies in a correct understanding of what Tinctoris meant by counterpoint: it is not what we today call counterpoint but successive composition. Res facta differs from counterpoint in that each voice must be related to every other voice so that no improper dissonances appear between them. This method, "harmonic composition," could be quasi-simultaneous or successive; the criterion is the ultimate result-the finished work of art. Res facta is both a method of composition and a term that denotes a work composed in this manner, analogous to Listenius's opus perfectum et absolutum. The musica poetica of the sixteenth century is the legacy of res facta, and the two terms are indirectly connected. The new process of composition is the foundation for Tinctoris's delineation of an ars nova beginning about 1437, a date that may have been chosen in recognition of its first great representation in Dufay's Nuper rosarum flores.

The roots of music: Emotional expression, dialogue and affect attunement in the psychogenesis of music

“…These distinctions require a sense of a verbal self, with the mastering of language that the verbal self implies, and also what we may call a verbal sense of music , enabling verbal specifications and theoretical distinctions of what we hear. Paraphrasing Dennett, whom I quoted earlier, we may say that the Western cultural custom to posit a “work” as the objective source for various similar performances of music is a result of a verbal urge to posit a center of narrative gravity – in this case the narrative can be historically traced to the renaissance composition of res facta and the “equiparation” of artists with the holy Pope, assumedly enabling artistic creation ex nihilo (see Blackburn, 1987; Kantorowicz, 1961; Volgsten, 2012).…”

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

“…This aim was based on Tinctoris's own assertion that formal composition (res facta) depended on the same technique as singing super librum (Tinctoris 1477, II, xxi), a point made by theorists as distant as Prosdocimus and Lusitano (Prosdocimus [1412(Prosdocimus [ ] 1984Canguilhem 2011, 94). While relative definitions of res facta and cantare super librum have been extensively debated (Bent 1983;Blackburn 1987;Canguilhem 2015), more important here was the a empt to test for a shared basis in the simple counterpoint of Book I of De arte contrapuncti. [2.2] Central to this testing was a simple software tool of my own design (Daly 2020, 69-76).…”

The Image of Music and the Bodies of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages: Rhythmic Procedures as Cultural Representations

“…The fourteenth century saw the earliest attempts to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate points in musical space where one can allow the insertion of harmonic dissonance. B. J. Blackburn has called attention to the Berkeley treatise of 1375 -which, unlike most of the fourteenth-and early-fifteenth-century treatises, included an extensive and detailed discussion of dissonances (Blackburn 1987). He observed that the author of the treatise advanced a new regulative principle for handling dissonances based on time/space considerations.…”