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“In Their Own Native Keys”: Tonal Organization in William Byrd’s Published Motets
- Author(s):
- Mark Yeary (see profile)
- Date:
- 2010
- Group(s):
- American Musicological Society
- Subject(s):
- Musicology, History, Music, Early works
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Historical musicology, Early music
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6WP1G
- Abstract:
- William Byrd’s three published motet collections (1575, 1589, 1591) offer a tantalizing point of entry to the study of Byrd’s harmonic practice: while Byrd grouped many of his motets according to their final bass pitches, it is unclear what these groupings reveal about his concepts of tonal organization. Though ordering by final is a hallmark of continental motet publications, recent scholarship has argued that modal systems held little influence among English composers and theorists; and though analysis of Byrd’s practice may reveal elements suggesting tonality, concepts resembling major/minor tonality do not appear until well after Byrd’s time. In this article, I propose the concept of triadic key as a means to understand the specifically non-modal aspects of Byrd’s tonal organization; the concept is developed from the treatises of English theorists Thomas Morley and Thomas Campion, both of whom refer to the bass voice as the “key” and primary marker of tonal organization. Triadic key identifies a common form of pitch organization within and among Byrd’s proto-tonal motets while permitting the possibility of modal influences, and this concept may be used to assess the presence of similar tonal organization in the further works of Byrd and his contemporaries.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Online publication
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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