The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance

Knud Jeppesen

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486442686
• eBook ISBN: 9780486171623
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

The greatest Renaissance creator of liturgical music, the revered sixteenth-century composer known as Palestrina wrote works that served for centuries as models of counterpoint. Until The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance, theoreticians seldom closely analyzed the composer’s work to discover its fundamental elements, including the handling of rhythm, line, and harmony.
Beginning chapters discuss the standard use of rhythm and mensuration in Palestrina’s time, the ecclesiastical modes, and treatment of words. Author Knud Jeppesen proceeds to explore Palestrina’s music in terms of the elements that constitute his personal style, isolating unusual vertical lines and establishing common and uncommon interval skips and rhythmic accents.
The heart of the book presents a modern empirical treatment of dissonance. Palestrina's contrapuntal technique forged new harmonic devices, placing dissonance on unaccented beats and highlighting text in very unorthodox ways for his time. These new uses of dissonance and resolution are explored in meticulous detail. In addition, Jeppesen includes a complete history of the evolving concept and treatment of dissonance before Palestrina, including quotations from the earliest theoretical works and numerous musical examples that illustrate the practices of Palestrina’s predecessors.

Dissonance

Phases of Dissonance Treatment

In the history of dissonance treatment we recognize three phases of decisive importance:

1. Dissonance as a secondary phenomenon, (melodically induced accidental dissonance).

2. Dissonance as a primary phenomenon (“musical” dissonance in conscious, deliberately stressed contrast to consonance).

3. Dissonance employed as a means of poetical expression.

Though the order of succession in the disposition made here is contingent upon time, it must not be understood that the one of these phases definitively supersedes the other. What has once been attained is retained and employed co-ordinately with the new. Nor may we venture to mark the divisions of the periods too exactly. Although the beginning of the first phase may be put as simultaneous with the earliest regulated polyphony, the second phase at about the year 1400, and the third at c. 1600, still the germs of the later phases may be traced back quite naturally to the earlier. At the periods mentioned, the characteristic instances increase so inordinately, both in number and distinctness, that the basis of a historic division seems to be present.

In the first phase, the dissonance has merely the character of an accompanying phenomenon,—what might be called a melodic function. It is tolerated out of consideration for melodic development, but no stress of significance is attached to it. Consonance is preferred upon all accented points; dissonances are, as far as possible, packed together upon unaccented beats. In its most highly developed form, this order of dissonance becomes the passing note (or passing discord). This rather negative sort of dissonance conception leads, in the highest phases of dissonance treatment, to the strict execution of the principle of the passing, or conjunctly moving, dissonance.

In the second phase the dissonance is desired for its own sake, and it is consciously employed as a co-equal contrast to consonance. The practical consequence of this highly developed conception is the dissonance of the syncope—suspension.

Finally, in the third phase, dissonance is employed as an expressional factor, most often to symbolize painful or pathetic emotions.

These three phases are all represented in Palestrina’s compositions, though instances of the third phase are very rare. In an account of the relation of the Palestrina style to the dissonance, it would therefore be quite natural to classify the material according to these phases,—which classification indeed has been made the basis of the following treatise.

Dissonance as a Secondary Phenomenon

a). The Passing Dissonance

One of the oldest notations of West European polyphonic music that come to light up to the present seems to be found in the tract “Musica enchiriadis”,¹³⁵ commonly ascribed to a monk from a Flemish cloister, St. Amand, by the name of Hucbald (d. c. 930). However, this tract dates from such a late part of the 10th century that it is more likely that a younger theorist, and not Hucbald, was its author.¹³⁶ The musical examples contained in “Musica enchiriadis” demonstrate the so-called “Organum”—2-part compositions that, according to Hucbald, may be extended to 6 parts by doubling the octaves—which is produced by setting a lower voice to a Gregorian melody, the counterpoint accompanying this melody mainly in similar motion with fifths and fourths. In the earliest Organum, however, there is a preference for fourths above all other intervals, while later fifths predominate. It is thought by some that this music is not to be taken seriously at all. Raphael Kiesewetter’s remark as to its “moral impossibility” is a classic expression of this view.

But more recent scholars also express the supposition that “Organum” merely represents rather awkward theoretical efforts according to antique theoretical recipes.¹³⁷ which aimed at the correction of the current musical practice, that is supposed to have taken quite another and freer form in popular use, far removed from all the anxious clinging to parallel motion, and moreover with a probable preference for thirds and sixths. Since then, however, the rather new branch of Comparative Musical Science has really rendered these interpretive efforts superfluous by proving that fourths and fifths are commonly used by races in a primitive stage of musical development, for example by certain negro tribes of East Africa,¹³⁸ the Burmese¹³⁹ and the Chinese.¹⁴⁰ The Icelandic “Tvisang” too bears significant testimony in favour of the theory of the living force of “Organum”.¹⁴¹

Should there, consequently, be little reason to doubt that singing in fourths and fifths existed also as a musical reality in Western Europe, the problem of the origin and antecedents of this form of song is one of high interest. Assuredly it must have been preceded by an extended period of freely improvised polyphony, which has been designated, by a term borrowed from Plato, as Heterophony.¹⁴² In this, a kind of pseudo-polyphony arises through all the voices singing what is really the same melody, only with variants in the different voices. Naturally these voices often move in unison or the octave, and continue in these intervals at great extent, likewise generally beginning and ending with them. But it often happens also that one or another of these parts leaves the beaten path, and proceeds in notes diverging from the leading melody. As a rule, however, they do not venture very far from the terra firma of this tune, but commonly keep within a prudent proximity to its borders.

Polyphony of this sort may be found among many exotic nations, for example among the Chinese, Siamese, and Javanese; according to the testimony of Plato and Aristoxenos of Taranto, it was known also in ancient Greece.¹⁴³ Indeed, it is said that music of this kind is still to be heard in Greece, and heterophony plays an important role at all events in Russian folk music.¹⁴⁴

Concerning the transition from heterophony to parallel singing it is difficult to form an opinion. It may be that the sense of hearing notes together was developed through heterophony. After singing heterophonically during centuries—probably mostly occupied with the individual singer in his ornamental extravagances, (though perhaps also with appreciation of the rhythmic variety), it probably occurred one day to some ingenious soul that the combination of this and that musical note in itself had a striking effect. This item was t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Table of Contents
• Table of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Foundations of Style
• The Style of Palestrina
• Dissonance
• Conclusion
• Appendix - Concerning the treatment of perfect consonances in Palestrina
• Table of References