Adrian Willaert and the Theory of Interval Affect

The Musica nova Madrigals and the Novel Theories of Zarlino and Vicentino

Timothy R. McKinney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317185314
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In the writings of Nicola Vicentino (1555) and Gioseffo Zarlino (1558) is found, for the first time, a systematic means of explaining music's expressive power based upon the specific melodic and harmonic intervals from which it is constructed. This "theory of interval affect" originates not with these theorists, however, but with their teacher, influential Venetian composer Adrian Willaert (1490-1562). Because Willaert left no theoretical writings of his own, Timothy McKinney uses Willaert's music to reconstruct his innovative theories concerning how music might communicate extramusical ideas. For Willaert, the appellations "major" and "minor" no longer signified merely the larger and smaller of a pair of like-numbered intervals; rather, they became categories of sonic character, the members of which are related by a shared sounding property of "majorness" or "minorness" that could be manipulated for expressive purposes. This book engages with the madrigals of Willaert's landmark Musica nova collection and demonstrates that they articulate a theory of musical affect more complex and forward-looking than recognized currently. The book also traces the origins of one of the most widespread musical associations in Western culture: the notion that major intervals, chords and scales are suitable for the expression of happy affections, and minor for sad ones. McKinney concludes by discussing the influence of Willaert's theory on the madrigals of composers such as Vicentino, Zarlino, Cipriano de Rore, Girolamo Parabosco, Perissone Cambio, Francesco dalla Viola, and Baldassare Donato, and describes the eventual transformation of the theory of interval affect from the Renaissance view based upon individual intervals measured from the bass, to the Baroque view based upon invertible triadic entities.

Chapter 1

Contexts

He who has no imagination for such things has no understanding of the meaning, the purpose, and the very life of the madrigal.

Alfred Einstein¹

In the writings of Nicola Vicentino and Gioseffo Zarlino, two of the most significant music theorists of the sixteenth century, we find for the first time a systematic means of explaining music’s expressive power based upon the melodic and harmonic intervals from which it is constructed. This “theory of interval affect” originates not with these theorists, however, but with Venice-based Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, and receives its clearest expression in the madrigals of his Musica nova, as I shall show in the current study. The title of Willaert’s legendary collection of motets and madrigals refers not as much to music that is new as to a new approach to composing music. Though completed by the 1540s, it was kept from public view before its eventual publication in 1559 and was first known and understood only by its intended audience, the cognoscenti of the Venetian intellectual circles in which it was performed and discussed.² The madrigals of the collection have become famous for their coupling of serious poetry of high quality with a grave musical style—characterized by meticulous text setting, dense polyphony, restrained melodic and rhythmic writing, and unusually low voicing—and for the relatively sophisticated readings of the poetic texts they embody, in comparison to the madrigal repertoire up until that time. Significant in these readings were the musical analogues Willaert forged for the frequent antitheses encountered in the sonnets by fourteenth-century poet Francesco Petrarch, which provide all but one of the texts for the 25 Musica nova madrigals. In crafting these analogues, he established two broad categories of musical affect that segregated major and minor interval qualities. As has often been suggested, Willaert’s affective categories may have been influenced by literary theorist Pietro Bembo’s similar categories of expressive quality in poetry, called gravità and piacevolezza, which Bembo based upon his studies of Petrarch’s vernacular works.³ Willaert’s compositional and pedagogical practice in turn was influential on the sudden appearance of systematic theories of interval affect in two of the most important treatises devoted to music theory in the sixteenth century, Vicentino’s L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica of 1555 and Zarlino’s Le istitutioni harmoniche of 1558.⁴

While much of this has been more or less assumed for some time now, several questions remain unanswered: How highly developed was Willaert’s own theory of interval affect? What was the precise nature of his influence upon Zarlino and Vicentino in this regard? How does the theory of interval affect interact with the pitch system and principles of counterpoint in use by mid-sixteenth-century composers, and how deeply did Willaert ponder these matters? Through what specific means did Willaert emphasize certain intervals, and how might these means affect the flow and course of a composition? Did he apply the affective use of intervals only to individual words or phrases on a local level, as commonly thought, or might he wield it to project a broader-arching reading of a text in part or in whole?

Because Willaert left no theoretical writings of his own as far as we know, evidence pertinent to addressing these questions must be recovered from his compositions. In this book I reconstruct from Willaert’s music traces of his innovative theorizing concerning how extramusical ideas might be communicated, and examine the influence of this theorizing on the way he wrote music and on the work of subsequent theorists and composers in his circle of influence. Using the Musica nova madrigals as my nexus and working outward from there, I shall demonstrate that Willaert’s new music articulated a new theory of musical affect more complex and forward-looking than currently recognized. I shall uncover specific details of compositional technique demonstrating that the madrigals of Musica nova comprise a grand experiment in writing music that seeks both to project the composer’s reading of a text and to move the listener’s affections by utilizing inherent properties of musical sound as well as affective conventions. I shall show that these madrigals represent a proving ground for testing theories about music’s expressive effects, and that they do indeed instantiate a new way of writing music in which harmony steps closer to the fore and influences melodic and contrapuntal techniques to an unprecedented degree.

The Principal Players and a Venetian Backdrop⁵

Adrian Willaert lived from around 1490 to 1562 and in many respects was the most influential composer of the post-Josquin generation.⁶ Although northern-European by birth, as with so many of his Franco-Flemish musical brethren, he spent most of his professional life in Italy. Probably born in Bruges or Roulaers, both now in modern-day Belgium, he first studied law in Paris before switching to music and studying composition with Jean Mouton. He may have been in Rome by 1514 and, beginning around 1515, served the influential d’Este family in various capacities in Ferrara and Hungary. In 1527, Willaert obtained the office of maestro di cappella at San Marco cathedral in Venice—at this time one of the more important musical posts in Europe—and held it until his death in 1562.

Willaert was renowned as a composer and as a teacher both during his lifetime and by subsequent generations. Though it is difficult to establish precise relationships in many instances, in addition to Zarlino and Vicentino, his pupils are thought to have included significant figures such as Cipriano de Rore, Girolamo Parabosco, Perissone Cambio, Baldassare Donato, Costanzo Porta, and Francesco dalla Viola, among many others. His extant works encompass most of the principal genres of his day, including motets, masses, psalms, hymns, chansons, madrigals, lighter Italian genres such as the canzona villanesca, and instrumental ricercars, and he was responsible for significant stylistic advances in many of these. In the proem of Le istitutioni harmoniche of 1558, arguably the most significant treatise devoted to music theory in the sixteenth century, Zarlino styles Willaert as a new Pythagoras who corrected many errors in the art of music.⁷ Zarlino’s homage in such an influential theoretical work helped to extend Willaert’s reputation well beyond his lifetime and well after performance of his works largely had ceased, and cemented his historical position as a leading figure of the sixteenth century. Writing in defense of his famous brother Claudio in the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy some 45 years after Willaert’s death, Giulio Cesare Monteverdi credited Willaert with having perfected the compositional style (and Zarlino the theoretical rules) of the prima prattica, the older “first practice” gradually supplanted by the more modern “second practice” stemming from Rore and mastered by Claudio Monteverdi.⁸

In her City Culture and the Madrigal in Venice, Martha Feldman has traced the weave of the rich tapestry of vigorous humanistic discussions taking place in Venetian academies and the influence of trends in literary theory upon Willaert’s music.⁹ We know of his interest in more arcane music theoretical matters from two primary sources: (1) his enigmatic setting of Quid non ebrietas (probably written by 1519 and thus predating his time in Venice), which ends on a notated seventh that actually sounds as an octave due to successive hexachordal mutations that eventually lead to enharmonicism;¹⁰ and (2) his apparent participation in a discussion of the genera of ancient Greek music theory, along with music theorists Giovanni del Lago and Giovanni Spataro, at the house of the Venetian ambassador of English king Henry VIII, Giambattista Casali, in 1532.¹¹ His humanistic pondering of the more esoteric theoretical aspects of his craft, which would have included the legendary ability of ancient music to move the human soul, coupled with his immersion in a Venetian culture fascinated with questions of style and decorum, gave birth to the Musica nova madrigals and the theory of interval affect they embody.

Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–90) was a native of Chioggia, located on a island in the Venetian Lagoon less than 20 miles south of the city proper. Other than what has been gleaned from surviving archival documents and the occasional autobiographical comment in his writings, most of the sketchy details we know of his life come from a biography written by mathematician Bernandino Baldi, who claimed the facts therein were told to him by the theorist himself.¹² Zarlino remained in Chioggia until 1541, receiving his early training from Franciscans there and earning a series of promotions in his studies toward the priesthood. He is known to have been a singer at the cathedral in 1536 and its organist from 1539 until 1540. In 1541 he moved to Venice and sometime thereafter began study with Willaert, though we do not know precisely when or for how long. He eventually succeeded Willaert and Cipriano de Rore as maestro di cappella at San Marco in 1565, and remained in that post until his death in 1590.¹³ Although Zarlino composed both sacred and secular music, continually served the church, and pursued scholarly interests in other disciplines, by far his most significant accomplishments were as a music theorist. When one surveys the history of the field, Zarlino stands out as a giant who produced a corpus of theoretical works of immense value; few theorists before or since approach his influence on the subsequent flow of theoretical discourse.

Active on the Venetian intellectual scene like his mentor, Zarlino sought to position himself as Willaert’s successor and thus as the leading musical authority in the city, a quest in which he ultimately succeeded; between the two of them, Willaert and Zarlino held the principal musical post in Venice for sixty years. Zarlino’s monumental Le istitutioni harmoniche of 1558 may have played a pivotal role in his ascension. Cristle Collins Judd suggests several career-related reasons why the treatise emerged when it did and was then reissued in 1561 and 1562: (1) Willaert took a leave of absence at San Marco in 1556 in order to return to Flanders and was known to be in poor health, raising the possibility that he would not return and a successor might be needed (exacerbated by the fact that he overstayed his leave), (2) Zarlino needed to respond more generally to the threats posed by fellow Willaert disciples Rore and Vicentino, the former for his success as a composer and the latter for the appearance of his L ’antica musica in 1555, and (3) Zarlino’s affiliation with the Accademia Veneziana della Fama, in which he had assumed a leadership role by 1560.¹⁴ In the treatise he sought to display his erudition and to unite speculative and practical theory in one volume on an unprecedented scale, with its first two parts being devoted to mathematical, philosophical, and historical considerations, and the third and fourth parts to the practical concerns of counterpoint and mode.¹⁵ He continued to pursue theoretical matters throughout his lifetime, and, though later editions of Le istitutioni harmoniche were produced with some revision in 1573 and 1588–89, refinements to his ideas and responses to his critics appear principally in two further treatises, Dimostrationi harmoniche of 1571 and Sopplimenti musicali of 1588.¹⁶ Because it remained Zarlino’s principal statement on compositional practice in general, and on the theory of interval affect in particular, and because of its closer temporal proximity to his studies with Willaert, the 1558 edition of the Istitutioni will be the principal source for Zarlino’s ideas used in the cu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Musical Examples
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Contexts
• 2 Definition, Evaluation, and Validation of the Theory of Interval Affect
• 3 Expressive Functions of Harmony in the Musica nova Madrigals
• 4 Willaert’s Other Madrigals and the Theory of Interval Affect
• 5 The Compositional Legacy of Willaert’s Theory of Interval Affect
• Select Bibliography
• Index