14th-16th Centuries Counterpoint

En 1482, el músico y teórico Ramos de Pareja, publicaba en Bolonia el primer tratado musical impreso de un autor español, titulado Musica practica. Ramos, nacido en Baeza unos cuarenta años antes, debió cursar estudios en la Universidad de Salamanca, donde viviría los turbulentos años finales del reinado de Enrique IV de Castilla, antes de que le sucediese en el trono su hermanastra, la infanta Isabel. Una sucesión complicada por la Este artículo presenta un nuevo tratado musical español del siglo XV escrito por Pedro Martínez de Osma, catedrático de Teología en la Universidad de Salamanca. De esta obra se tenía noticia por referencias coetáneas debidas a su colega Ramos de Pareja, pero hasta ahora no se había identificado. Este texto, escrito en 1465 y conservado en la Biblioteca Nacional de Nápoles, permite obtener nueva información de un periodo muy poco ex-plorado en cuanto al pensamiento musical en España, precisamente por la ausencia de fuentes documentales. Analizando su contenido se detalla el ambiente reformista y pre-humanista que se vivía en esos años en el Estudio salmantino y se perfila la corriente de pensamiento que, pasando por Ramos y otros autores en torno al 1500, llevarán al flore-cimiento de los insignes autores del quinientos, en especial Francisco Salinas. Palabras clave: Pedro Martínez de Osma, Universidad de Salamanca, Ramos de Pareja, teoría musical, Renacimiento español, Humanismo.

This article presents a new fifteenth-century Spanish music treatise written by Pedro Martínez de Osma, Professor of Theology at the University of Salamanca. This text was known through contemporary references by his colleague Ramos de Pareja, but had not been identified until now. Written in 1465 and preserved at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III in Naples, the text provides new information from a very little explored period in Spain in terms of music philosophy, precisely because of the lack of documentary sources. By analysing its content, the author explains the reformist and pre-humanist climate that characterized those years in Salamanca, and outlines the school of thought that would allow distinguished theorists of the sixteenth century century to flourish in the wake of Ramos and other composer-theorists around 1500, especially Francisco Salinas.
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The homophonic passages usually found in fifteenth-century motets to be sung at the culmination of the mass, the elevation, play a paradoxical role in modern scholarship. On the one hand, these passages serve to identify the liturgical function of the motets and the cycles surrounding them; on the other hand, they are hardly ever analyzed in detail, not only because their homophonic austerity seems to be of little interest, but also because they defy normal analytical procedures. To explain what happens when ‘nothing’ happens, this paper gathers a repertoire of contrapuntal-harmonic stock formulas distinguishable as clausulae, gymel, and tabula naturalis progressions. These progressions can be seen working in very different ways in elevation motets. To imagine composers with these polyphonic complexes at their disposal is to imagine theoretical and practical ways beyond a simple dichotomy between ‘counterpoint’ and ‘harmony’. In the discussion of elevation motets, questions of compositional design, of theoretical context, of performance, and of cultural context coalesce.

This study situates theories of movable counterpoint by the Russian composer and theorist Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (1856–1915) against current scholarship on Renaissance music. Analytical approaches that draw upon Taneyev’s theories can lead to rich insights into the inner workings of Renaissance counterpoint, most especially processes that have hitherto escaped attention. Through reference to specific repertoire examples discussed in recent scholarship, the present study demonstrates how Taneyev’s methodology and terminology can provide a basis for systematic identification of key procedures prevalent in Renaissance music. This study also considers how knowledge of Taneyev’s work can inform an approach that points to new possibilities for analyzing contrapuntal processes that operate across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music.

The motet Laudate Dominum de caelis, copied in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Cappella Sistina 42 c. 1509-12, is distinctive in Brumel's output, bearing many of the hallmarks of the so-called 'Milanese' style. This article addresses its sources, style, and technical construction in the context of some of Brumel's other motets and of Joshua Rifkin's recent research on the French-court motet around 1500, as exemplified by the motets of Josquin and Mouton. Analyses of local contrapuntal structures and of the motet's overall form offer a view of Brumel's working methods. These considerations lead to a picture of the motet as a product of Brumel's engagement with a French-court motet repertory in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to produce a rigorous methodology for distinguishing between the contrapunctus structure and its elaboration in performing structural analysis of fourteenth-century diminished counterpoint. This methodology is based on historical thought by carefully analyzing contemporaneous treatises and their musical examples in order to better understand the compositional process conveyed both explicitly and implicitly in the treatises. In Chapter 1, I examine the various uses of the phrase “fundamentum discanti” (“foundation of discant”) in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century treatises and discuss its connection to contrapunctus as the structural foundation to support its embellishment, demonstrated through analysis of the musical examples in De diminutione contrapuncti and the Compendium de discantu mensurabili by Petrus dictus Palma Ociosa. Chapter 2 further contextualizes this argument by illustrating the significant conceptual shift regarding the relationship between tonal structure and elaboration from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century. I then consider the relationship between theory and practice in Chapter 3 through a detailed analysis of dissonance treatment in the treatise examples and contemporaneous repertoires in order to determine which repertoires most relate to the teachings of contrapunctus treatises. Finally, Chapter 4 presents structural analyses of fourteenth-century motets and motet-style liturgical polyphony. First, I build upon the analytical methodology presented in Chapter 1 by presenting a number of analytical criteria for determining the contrapunctus structure. Then, I discuss the prevalence of particular elaborative figures and their implications for structural analysis. Finally, I demonstrate how my analytical methodology may be used in conjunction with other methodologies of sonority and cadence to analyze large-scale tonal structures, illustrated with an analysis of Machaut’s Motet 17 as well as a comparison of Vitry’s Flos/Celsa and Gloria Ivrea 64.