Authors such as Knud Jeppesen, with his work on Palestrina (The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance), and Harold K. Andrews (The Technique of Byrd’s Vocal Polyphony) have proposed taxonomies for Renaissance music, based primarily on dissonance treatment. However, there has been much less discussion in the literature of formal issues in Renaissance music: which types of musical material characterize openings, and which suggest development or continuation. This approach recalls William Caplin’s analytic method in Classical Form, in which he shows how each small musical unit has a particular formal function in creating the overall shape of a composition. Peter N. Schubert’s work in this area, in his article “A Lesson from Lassus: Form in the Duos of 1577,” and his text, Modal Counterpoint: Renaissance Style, is a point of departure for the current study. In his text, Schubert identifies “presentation types,” brief imitative or non-imitative musical units that characterize openings, loosely analogous to Caplin’s “basic idea.” In Schubert’s article, he describes how Renaissance composers employed varied repetition of these openings to create longer formal units. Similarly, Jessie Ann Owens, in Composers at Work, has noted how Renaissance composers design short, multi-voiced “modules,” around which they construct longer formal units (such “modules” recall Joseph Kerman’s notion of “cell technique,” first expounded in “Old and New in Byrd’s Cantiones Sacrae”). These authors proceed from the assumption that Renaissance composers did indeed concern themselves with form, insofar as they strove toward designing long, musically unified sections from a brief opening idea. Schubert’s work focuses on presentation types that are possible in a thin texture, namely, the imitative duo and the non-imitative module. Schubert also discusses imitative presentation in three or more voices, which he defines as a canon (an imitative duo with extra voices added at a consistent time interval of imitation). However, Schubert domits certain other possibilities in three or more voices, in which characteristics of the imitative module and non-imitative duo are blended into a hybrid presentation type. This paper, extending Schubert’s principles, proposes additional presentation types with which Byrd can begin a formal unit. These types, beginning with Schubert’s original three (imitative duo, non-imitative module and canon), will be examined, starting with presentation types in two voices, and proceeding through more intricate types in three and four voices. To list two of many possible hybrids that blend features of Schubert’s three presentation types: in a three-voice texture, two of the voices could form an imitative duo while a third voice provides homophonic support (semi-imitative presentation). Similarly, in four voices, a supporting part could underpin a three-voice canon (accompanied canon). After introducing these presentation types, I will demonstrate how William Byrd distinguishes between opening gestures of varying musical weight and formal location in a composition by the kind of presentation type he uses to begin a formal unit. Byrd uses a limited number of presentation types at the beginning of a composition, but permits a wider range of initiating possibilities later in a work. Still other presentation types are unlikely to occur as beginnings at all, but rather arise from later variation and development of material whose initial presentation had been straightforward. A feature of hybrid presentation types that is significant for their formal shape is their tendency to combine elements of presentation with elements of development. For example, a three-voice canon could combine the presentation of an imitative duo (formed by the first two entries) with its immediate transposed repetition (created by the second and third entries). This blending of beginning and middle (development) characteristics is a unique feature of Renaissance style that makes problematic the establishment of fixed categories of presentation and continuation, a problem that less often arises in post-Renaissance music. In Byrd’s music, and by extension, that of his contemporaries, the musical surface demands a more flexible approach in determining points of demarcation between formal building blocks: often, the opening presentational unit will blend imperceptibly with its subsequent continuation. Finally, I will show how the developmental procedures inherent in hybrid presentation types points toward certain variation techniques (transposition, invertible counterpoint, textural thickening) that Byrd employs to develop his musical ideas. Using examples from Byrd’s three sets of Cantiones Sacrae (published 1575, 1589 and 1591), I will illustrate how a Renaissance composer can vary and expand initiating units to create a long span of musical material. I will furthermore show how this progression of material divides into presentation, continuation and conclusion units, based on the contrapuntal techniques that the composer uses in each of these three formal locations.

The homophonic passages usually found in fifteenth-century motets to be sung at the culmination of the mass, the elevation, play a paradoxical role in modern scholarship. On the one hand, these passages serve to identify the liturgical function of the motets and the cycles surrounding them; on the other hand, they are hardly ever analyzed in detail, not only because their homophonic austerity seems to be of little interest, but also because they defy normal analytical procedures. To explain what happens when ‘nothing’ happens, this paper gathers a repertoire of contrapuntal-harmonic stock formulas distinguishable as clausulae, gymel, and tabula naturalis progressions. These progressions can be seen working in very different ways in elevation motets. To imagine composers with these polyphonic complexes at their disposal is to imagine theoretical and practical ways beyond a simple dichotomy between ‘counterpoint’ and ‘harmony’. In the discussion of elevation motets, questions of compositional design, of theoretical context, of performance, and of cultural context coalesce.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to produce a rigorous methodology for distinguishing between the contrapunctus structure and its elaboration in performing structural analysis of fourteenth-century diminished counterpoint. This methodology is based on historical thought by carefully analyzing contemporaneous treatises and their musical examples in order to better understand the compositional process conveyed both explicitly and implicitly in the treatises. In Chapter 1, I examine the various uses of the phrase “fundamentum discanti” (“foundation of discant”) in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century treatises and discuss its connection to contrapunctus as the structural foundation to support its embellishment, demonstrated through analysis of the musical examples in De diminutione contrapuncti and the Compendium de discantu mensurabili by Petrus dictus Palma Ociosa. Chapter 2 further contextualizes this argument by illustrating the significant conceptual shift regarding the relationship between tonal structure and elaboration from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century. I then consider the relationship between theory and practice in Chapter 3 through a detailed analysis of dissonance treatment in the treatise examples and contemporaneous repertoires in order to determine which repertoires most relate to the teachings of contrapunctus treatises. Finally, Chapter 4 presents structural analyses of fourteenth-century motets and motet-style liturgical polyphony. First, I build upon the analytical methodology presented in Chapter 1 by presenting a number of analytical criteria for determining the contrapunctus structure. Then, I discuss the prevalence of particular elaborative figures and their implications for structural analysis. Finally, I demonstrate how my analytical methodology may be used in conjunction with other methodologies of sonority and cadence to analyze large-scale tonal structures, illustrated with an analysis of Machaut’s Motet 17 as well as a comparison of Vitry’s Flos/Celsa and Gloria Ivrea 64.

The importance of an oral and aural understanding of counterpoint in the fifteenth cen- tury has been widely recognized by both scholars and performers of early music. In this essay I reflect on the way I have attempted to ‘reconstruct’ an itinerary for teaching the skill of extemporizing simple two- and three-voice types of fifteenth-century counterpoint, based on a close reading of Guillelmus Monachus’s treatise De preceptis artis musicae and a comparative analysis of extant compositions. De preceptis informs us that the learning of counterpoint can start from the singing of simple parallels in imperfect consonances, called gymel. These gymels can be combined into dierent types of sim- ple three-voice counterpoint (fauxbourdon) or in a horizontal way, alternating between dierent parallels. To this technique of ‘mixed gymel’ elements of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century discantus teaching, such as stepwise contrary motion, may be added to achieve a freer type of counterpoint.