Modulatory Techniques in Seventeenth-Century Music

In his recent review of the English translation of Bernhard Meier's pioneering study, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony, Anthony Cummings raises the question of tonal coherence in sixteenth-century polyphony. 'Certainly in most pieces', he observes, 'there is no tendency whatever to explore independent tonal areas, and therefore no tonal movement - no modulation - from one such area to another. He then goes on to refer to large-scale tonal coherence as a familiar property of eighteenth-century music. My intention here is not at all to argue with such remarks, but to draw attention to a lacuna in discussions of tonality or tonal coherence. That lacuna is the seventeenth-century. Establishing a tonal centre by modulation - moving away from and returning to a primary 'key' by activating related or even remote tonal areas - is by no means foreign to the harmonic language of the seventeenth century. Although assigning a seventeenth-century piece to a particular mode in a closed modal system may not yield 'a normative background of expectable musical relationships', as Harold Powers puts it, since 'modality is not a precompositional assumption for Renaissance polyphony in the way in which tonality is precompositional for 18th-19th-century art music',' one nevertheless finds harmonic behaviour and modulatory techniques in seventeenth-century music in general and Schtitz's music in particular that presuppose the modal system. What places some 'modulations' within the realm of pre-tonal music is precisely the lack of expectable musical relationships. A clarification of the term 'modulation' is in order here. The seventeenth century still used the term in the classical sense of linear exposition of melody or motive. It is not that our modern concept of tonal movement - modulation - did not exist; theorists merely referred to it by different names. They do not elaborate, however, on how to move from one tonal region to the next. It is often only through passing references in their work that we can infer ways of moving away from the central mode or tonal centre. In his Tractatus compositionis augmentatus Christoph Bernhard discusses

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