Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-09(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Daniel Harrison.

This dissertation explores the stylistic language of the English madrigal, situating the repertoire at the forefront of the emergence of a new tonal language in England. The first half of the dissertation investigates genre and style by interrogating contemporary concerns in rhetoric, aesthetics, and music and literary theory. Close analysis of hundreds of madrigals reveals that the repertoire divides into two style categories based on affect, categories that are more compositionally salient than the six madrigalian sub-genres. The affective categories derive from the rhetorical conceit of decorum and govern harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, contrapuntal, and textural aspects of composition as described in the theoretical writings of Thomas Morley, Charles Butler, and others. While Chapters 1 and 2 explore schematic and topical aspects of light and grave composition respectively, Chapter 3 investigates hybrid works that juxtapose conflicting affective worlds.

The second half of the dissertation situates the light, homophonic balletts--a small but important subset of the madrigal repertoire--in terms of the emergence of a tonal language in seventeenth-century England. In Chapter 4, I consider Thomas Morley's recompositions of Italian homophonic works and determine that Morley's works are more tonal than his models. Yet, Morley's harmonic language incorporates unique native harmonies and syntactical progressions. These works suggest that English music manifests a characteristic tonality in contrast to a textbook tradition of "common practice" tonality. That is, English music is recognizably tonal, but also recognizably localized and English. Chapter 5 examines the history of key in England from a theoretical perspective, considering discussions of pitch organization in dozens of theory treatises spanning the seventeenth century. I argue that because English theorists addressed audiences of musical amateurs and wrote pedagogical rather than speculative treatises, they developed a discourse of key decades before similar terminology appeared on the Continent. Chapter 6 draws on the data of the previous chapters to explore more precisely how tonality is manifested in homophonic music. To this end, I compare the homophonic ballett with the French air de cour, a contemporaneous repertoire. This comparison reveals the crucial role played by meter and phrase structure in articulating early tonality that is emergent from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century consonant counterpoint. Ultimately, I suggest that by investigating tonality through non-traditional geographical and chronological lenses we can defamiliarize the problematic notion of a "common practice" and replace this with a more nuanced picture of a fluid network of tonal systems.