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The Spanish Baroque Guitar and Seventeenth-Century Triadic Theory

1992; Duke University; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/843908

1941-7497

Thomas Christensen,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

In searching for the origins of harmonic tonality, the historian must be careful not to fall into the trap of fallacious geneticism by anachronistically interpreting some musical event or theoretical formulation in the light of later tonal theory. For example, because a harmonic progression in a 16th-century madrigal might look like a tonal authentic cadence, it does not follow that the progression actually fulfills such a tonal function in context. Likewise, when a theorist from the same time notes that in practice the fourth scale degree of a Lydian mode is often lowered through musica ficta, it would be Procrustean for us today to interpret his observation only as an adumbration of the modern major/minor key system. Any sophisticated theory of tonality, as Carl Dahlhaus has shown us, must be a dynamic one comprising a nexus of features that cannot be facilely reduced to a composite of individual constituents, however critical any one of these constituents may be to the theory.1 In this regard, the question of triadic theory in the 17th century stands as a paradigmatic test case. It is easy for us to project back-