Renaissance music theory in practice, polyphonic reconstruction as pedagogical tool for the study of counterpoint

Abstract

This thesis looks at sixteenth-century primary sources, such as music treatises and music manuscripts, as witnesses to Renaissance music pedagogy, and at how these are implemented in the teaching of early music in the contemporary undergraduate curricula. It aims to investigate the pedagogical implications of implementing polyphonic reconstruction as a research- and practice-led approach for the consolidation of counterpoint skills. The thesis is divided in two parts. The first part proposes a taxonomy of music learning, which was devised drawing from studies on early music pedagogy and illustrated through the close reading of selected passages from Thomas Morley’s A plaine and easie Introduction to Practical Musicke. This taxonomy serves as a reference point throughout the thesis that highlights the threads that bind musical learning in the early modern period and today. The first part of the thesis also offers an overview of challenges, approaches, and purposes of early music studies in today’s music curriculum at university level. Morley’s comprehensive treatise is the chosen pedagogical source for this study for its pedagogical features, structure, and literary form of dialogue. All characteristics that ensured its consistent use within pedagogical practices for the study of counterpoint composition until today. The second part of the thesis focuses on polyphonic reconstruction. It starts with a source study of a Ferrarese set of partbooks from the sixteenth century: Royal College of Music MS 2037 (RCM2037). This is an incomplete source, from which the bassus and tenor books are missing. This manuscript presents a wide number of Maistre Jhan’s unica, from which I selected and reconstructed a group of motets with Horace lyrics. These reconstructions form the basis of and are implemented in my teaching material for the series of workshops in polyphonic reconstruction conducted within a Stage 2 module on Historical Techniques of Composition. These workshops are the fieldwork for the pedagogical Case-Study of this research. The workshops were organized with a research-based approach, in which the students were introduced to current projects on polyphonic reconstruction ii (i.e., The lost Voices Project, The Tudor Partbooks Project), and they were asked to interact creatively with incomplete music sources, following a problem-based approach for the task of reconstructing the missing parts. For the Case-Study of the research, I have implemented qualitative methods such as observations and interviews with a small group of students enrolled on the module to collect data and inform my findings.