The shaping of time counted among the highest priorities for seventeenth-century musicians. Of course, temporality always qualifies as a fundamental dimension of music making. But in the 1600s, composers sought to produce radically new, frequently extravagant experiences of time, alternately expanding and contracting, rushing impetuously forward only to hover in a state of apparent motionlessness. The arrangement of elements we recognize as tonality figured among these, but it often operated within contexts that also encouraged erratic fluctuations or nearly flat, virtually minimalist options. In this chapter, I wish to asknotwhy musicians persisted in using perverse procedures (the focus...

I could easily scroll through the seventeenth century, cherry-picking instances of the particular process discussed in chapter 1, thereby offering an argument for linear historical development. In doing so, however, I would not only falsify the way things actually happened but also impoverish the very rich array of procedures explored in different repertories during this period. Recall that the examples analyzed in the previous chapter all involved the expansion of a bare diapente descent, and they thereby sacrifice for strategic purposes most of the sophisticated ambiguities afforded by sixteenth-century modal structures. Of course, later composers learned how to infuse those...

In 1580 Duke Alfonso d’Este designed a genre of entertainment for his fifteen-year-old bride, Margherita Gonzaga; as his third wife, she was his last hope for producing an heir and thus securing the estate at Ferrara for his family for generations to come. Eager to entertain his young spouse while sheltering her from the customary revels of his courtiers, Duke Alfonso recruited a small cluster of accomplished female singers to serve as an ensemble for performances in Margherita’s private chambers, concerts that came to be known asmusica secreta.¹ The duke never achieved his ultimate goal: his wife—however royally...

Until a few years ago, Shakespeare specialists acknowledged the fact that boys had acted the roles of all the Bard’s heroines, but they tended to get cranky if anyone tried to make anything of that fact. Without fail, generations of students have found this morsel of information highly titillating; and, just as inevitably, they have been shamed into accepting it as a mere convention. For their teachers insisted that they learn to see “straight” through this historical aberration to the natural binary oppositions of male and female that Shakespeare doubtless intended to represent, however skewed those intentions may have been...

Decades ago, when I was a graduate student, I supported myself playing the organ for a large Catholic church in the Boston suburbs. Vatican II had occurred shortly before that time, and my principal task was to teach these recalcitrant Catholics—most of them immigrants from Calabria—to perform hymns. Except for the few Marian anthems they had learned as children, they knew nothing of congregational singing. I persisted in trying; they persisted in sitting with buttoned-up mouths, glowering at this Protestant abomination. But except for being saddled with that singularly futile task, I was left more or less to...

The texted pieces discussed in the previous chapter were able to press their cultural agendas quite explicitly. With their lyrics as anchors, composers could to move far away from standard practices to explore ways of being that were diametrically opposed to principles of linear reason. If musical grammar counts as the socially agreed-upon basis for transparent communication, then it must—by very definition—find itself warped, pushed aside, or violated in the interest of simulating phenomenologies of divine love.

In this chapter I want to turn to the genre of the keyboard toccata. Except for the subgenre of toccatas expressly...

Most of the formal processes discussed in the previous chapters have taken their structural principles from modal practice: in some the bare diapente descent provides background coherence for extensive expansion; in others—including the multisection composites discussed in chapter 2, as well as expressions of divine love (chapter 5) and the toccata (chapter 6)—the complex compositional formal characteristic of madrigals continue to operate, despite the expansionist techniques that frequently dilate moments on the surface. As I have indicated, important aspects of tonality emerge from both.

But another practice also contributes significantly to the development of harmonic tonality: the procedures...

Dance figured prominently among social activities in the seventeenth century, as in most other periods in human history. But the cultural meanings attached to dance—even to a particular genre of dance— varied considerably from place to place. Some Protestant denominations banned the practice along with the music associated with it (I was raised within one such sect and only started trying to move my body to music after most of my contemporaries had decided they were too old for such nonsense). During this period Catholic communities tended still to revel in dance; recall, however, that the pope tried to...

In a classic essay from 1973 art historian Michael Fried focused on a quality he had discerned in French eighteenth-century painting, a quality he called “absorption.”¹ The paintings he examines in the course of the article depict individuals so immersed in meditation that they seem withdrawn from the world. Those artists who excelled in this genre rarely chose heroic figures as their subjects; Jean-Baptiste Greuze, for instance, often preferred to present pretty children quietly pondering their dead canaries or gazing in distraction away from their books. Today these paintings may strike viewers as precious and sentimental—certainly not the stuff...

In the previous two chapters I dealt at length with issues of energy control in music of the French court. In contrast with the desire-driven trajectories of Italianate procedures, most French music of this period strives to produce a condition of timelessness—or at least a phenomenological state governed by moderation and reason. Literary sources abound with stories of individuals who did not manage to keep themselves bridled, and operas often present characters who must be chastised for their failure to keep their emotions in check.

In Jean-Baptiste Lully’sPersée,for instance, the character Mérope persists in expressing her desire...