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Cipriano de Rore proved a restless tenant of Adrian Willaert's and Gioseffo Zarlino's neomodality. We know very little of his life, save for his early years in the Netherlands, his move to Italy, and his string of professional appointments and publications. This chapter examines Cipriano's work in order to understand both why he resisted the procedures he and his mentor had brought to a kind of perfection and also how to make sense of the compositional choices he made. It starts with a madrigal that establishes itself complacently within an orthodox modal framework before it begins to act out against it. A late work, “Da le belle contrade d'oriente,” appeared in the Fifth Book of Madrigals of 1566. Cipriano's compositional choices reveal much about his notions of modality and its relationship to avant-garde experimentation. Yet although he sets two discursive options in opposition to each other in this madrigal, he does so not only for the sake of pushing the boundaries of accepted musical practice, but also as the means of configuring particular models of human subjectivity.

Mode first developed as a pragmatic means of sorting into categories the liturgical music that had long circulated through the oral tradition. At the same time that scholastic music theorists were formulating modal theory, their colleagues were embarking on a new set of practices involving two or more simultaneously sounding voices: polyphony. The next generation of music theorists, however, began to interrogate the music composed by their own contemporaries. As free composition came to the fore, theorists returned to the question of mode, now explicitly as it pertained to the musics of their own moment. Three theorists of polyphonic mode—Pietro Aron, Heinrich Glareanus, and Gioseffo Zarlino—do not concur on all details: Aron persists with the traditional eight categories, Glareanus increases the number to twelve, Zarlino adopts (without citation) Glareanus's twelve but changes the principle of numbering. This chapter examines the various modes individually, following the lead of Renaissance theorists in offering a smattering of pieces belonging to each of the modes—in this case, the very madrigals tackled earlier.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the debates on the new cosmology involved musical issues at several points. The disputed order of the planets paralleled questions about their correlation with musical modes. The practice of musical change of mode implicitly paralleled the change of center required by heliocentric cosmology. This chapter considers Josquin des Prez’s motet De profundis as a path-breaking example of such change of modal center noted by Heinrich Glarean. Copernicus and his early advocates, such as Rheticus, used “harmony” and music to justify their views; Vincenzo Galilei phrased his advocacy of heliocentrism in terms of its parallel in the ordering of musical modes. He may have drawn his awareness of Copernicus from his teacher Gioseffo Zarlino, who, though no heliocentrist, was one of the few in Italy who acquired the first edition of Copernicus’s book. Vincenzo’s son Galileo also used the language of harmony to express his adherence to the new cosmology. Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).

Writers on music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized meter through motion. Their primary mode of theorizing meter was through the physical act of beating time. Although today the English term 'beat carries two separate meanings' the one a strike, the other an interval of time, these meanings were not at all separate for thinkers before the eighteenth century. Time for these thinkers was a way to count or number motion, as the Aristotelian commentators put it. Writings on time in natural philosophy and writings on meter were part of a group of knowledge relationships grounded in the Scholastic concept of motus (which meant both motion and change). This chapter examines how these relationships were created, sanctioned, and controlled in the period's music theory, providing close readings of texts by Ornithoparchus, Zarlino, Lippius, and Loulié.

This chapter aims to flesh out the early modern, motion-driven theory of the beat through a focus on the act of beating itself and the conceptual work it accomplished. It argues that the beat should be understood as a technical and physical solution to an ongoing problem in the conceptualization of temporal continuity. The physical act of the beat, a motion with its own continuity, provided a scaffold upon which to construct the continuity of musical time. As such, the beat served as a kind of tool or technique for those who aimed to explain the tenets of practical music theory. A concept with material and physical heft, the beat is an important part of the history of musical technologies. The chapter concludes with a careful rereading of Zarlino, paying particular attention to the medical and philosophical discourses he cites in his chapter on the beat in Le istitutioni harmoniche.

By the middle of the sixteenth century humanist writers had begun to raise serious questions about music as a sounding manifestation of number. Faced with a growing body of empirical evidence, particularly from the realm of astronomy, they could no longer accept the Pythagorean-Platonic model of the cosmos. This in turn created a demand for explanations of music’s power that went beyond the principle of isomorphic resonance. In the period between roughly 1550 and 1850, the most important of the qualities used to explain the connection between the nature and power of music were expression, form, beauty, autonomy, and disclosiveness. Theories of expression centered at first on the setting of texts to music. In the eighteenth century, music came to be thought of as a wordless language in its own right, a “language of the heart.”