Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

By Susan McClary

In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians—whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice—were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780520952065

Susan McClary

Susan McClary is Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of many book including Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal, both from UC Press.

Book preview

Desire and Pleasure in

Seventeenth-Century Music

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support

of the Sonia H. Evers Renaissance Studies Endowment Fund

of the University of California Press Foundation.

Desire and Pleasure in

Seventeenth-Century Music

Susan McClary

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McClary, Susan.

Desire and pleasure in seventeenth-century music /

Susan McClary.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978–0-520-24734-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Music—17th century—History and criticism.

I. Title.

ML194.M35 2012

780.9'032—dc23                    2011041887

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally

responsible and sustainable printing practices,

UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100,

a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified,

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with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free

and EcoLogo certified.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prelude: The Music of Pleasure and Desire

PART I. THE HYDRAULICS OF MUSICAL DESIRE

1.  The Expansion Principle

2.  Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject

PART II. GENDERING VOICE

3.  Soprano as Fetish: Professional Singers in Early Modern Italy

4.  Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in the Operas of Cavalli

PART III. DIVINE LOVE

5.  Libidinous Theology

6.  Straining Belief: The Toccata

PART IV. DANCING BODIES

7.  The Social History of a Groove: Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and the Chaconne

8.  Dancing about Power, Architecture about Dancing

PART V. LA MODE FRANÇAISE

9.  Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-Century French Music

10.  The Dragon Cart: The Femme Fatale in Seventeenth-Century French Opera

Postlude: Toward Consolidation

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Machaut once wrote, My end is my beginning. But in my case, the beginning turned out to be pretty nearly the end. For although the ideas that form the core of this book first appeared in my 1976 dissertation, it has taken me a full thirty-five years to develop a scholarly terrain within which these ideas might seem to make sense.

Anyone familiar with my work might find it difficult to believe that all of it stemmed from those initial inquiries into seventeenth-century musical syntax. Indeed, when I first set out to try to explain how music of the seicento works, I could never have imagined that my path would lead me through feminist theory, popular music, and a deconstruction of the European canon. But baffled by readers’ reports advising me to abandon this project because this music does not work, I found it necessary to figure out what precisely it might mean to say such a thing about a repertory, especially one that includes the likes of Monteverdi. If a belief in eighteenth-century tonality and its masterworks grounds our discipline, implicitly dismissing all Others (early music, women’s music, postmodernist music, world music, African-American music, pop music, etc.) as unworthy of serious consideration, then that belief itself begs to be dismantled.

To be sure, no one much cared then about the no-longer-modal-not-yet-tonal repertories I deal with in this book. But plenty of people responded to the vade mecum I extended in the context of those other Others. Along the way, I gained enough gravitas to persuade University of California Press to take a chance on my latter-day formulations of my earlier ideas.

A project that has taken thirty-five years to reach fruition owes too much to too many individuals for me to name them all. Virtually all my colleagues, friends, and students have contributed to its present formulation. My late father, Dan McClary, blasted me with classical music when I was still in the crib, with the hope that I would grow up with the canon as my vernacular. I am, consequently, his Frankenstein monster.

As an undergraduate piano major at Southern Illinois University, I learned from Robert Mueller and Steven Barwick how to link scores and history with performance decisions, while Wesley Morgan instilled in me my obsession with seventeenth-century music. During my graduate training, Anthony Newcomb showed me how to teach effectively, and Earl Kim encouraged me to theorize about temporality in music. At Harvard I also met my former husband, Daniel Garber, who had to endure the period during which I was deep in the abyss of working out the theoretical models I introduced in my dissertation and now present here in somewhat more refined versions. A scholar of seventeenth-century philosophy and its quirks, Daniel helped me find ways of thinking about early modern Europe.

When Daniel moved to the University of Chicago in 1975 to take up his first job, I went along as a faculty wife. While finishing my dissertation in Chicago, I had the privilege of hanging out in Regenstein Library with a host of graduate students who have gone on to become stars in their fields and close friends, among them Bill Caplin, Peter Burkholder, Jann Pasler, Ellen Harris, and Louise Stein. I also met and worked with the late Howard Mayer Brown. Although I resented it mightily at the time, Howard gave me the much-needed kick in the pants that made me stop moping around as a faculty wife, even if the alternative was a commuting marriage. He and the late Leonard B. Meyer championed my theoretical models when few others gave them a second look.

In 1975 I met Rose Rosengard Subotnik who was just starting her career at Chicago, and it was she who first suggested that I read Adorno and Foucault, both indispensible thinkers for all my subsequent work. Together with Richard Leppert, who became my principal source of intellectual sustenance during my years at the University of Minnesota (1977–94), and Lawrence Kramer, we forged what we prefer to call critical musicology, better known by the name given by our detractors: New Musicology. Dissatisfied with the methods and historical narratives then dominant in musicology, we sought to find ways of opening the field. I could never have survived without their support and friendship.

At the University of Minnesota, I encountered two other groups that changed the course of my project. First, I became involved with feminist theory and criticism, which was then transforming most disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The questions feminists were asking at the time seemed to me remarkably like those I was posing in my studies of music. I owe particular thanks to Naomi Scheman, Nancy Armstrong, and Ruth-Ellen Joeres for welcoming me into their community and helping me in my struggles to bring feminist theory into musicology. When I began presenting some of these ideas in the context of musicology venues, I found nurturance and intellectual support from Catherine Clément, Eva Rieger, Ruth Solie, Judith Tick, Ellen Koskoff, and Jane Bower.

While at Minnesota, I also allied myself with the newly formed Center for Humanistic Study, which brought to campus figures only starting to be known in North America: Derrida, Foucault, Ricoeur, Said, Kittler, and many others. Lindsay Waters and Terry Cochran, who directed the University of Minnesota Press while I was there, brought out the first English translations of several of these cultural theorists. Lindsay commissioned me to write the afterword to Jacques Attali’s Noise, which appeared as my first publication, as well as the foreword to Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women. A bit later, Terry dared to publish Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Donna Przybylowitz founded the journal Cultural Critique, which published some of my most important early pieces.

Most important, I met Robert Walser at Minnesota at the moment when I first decided I should incorporate jazz and rock into the twentieth-century segment of the music history survey. I had managed to live the previous forty years of my life without paying attention to pop music, and I relied on Rob to teach me how to do this without making a total fool of myself. We have been together since 1986 and have blazed many new trails we never could have foreseen.

I cannot leave my Minnesota phase without mentioning the colleagues who worked with me as performers. Chris Kachian, Merilee Klemp, Randall Davidson, and I formed an early-music ensemble we called Antiquarian Mofos. Strangely enough we stopped getting gigs when a hapless interviewer on NPR asked what a mofo was—and we answered her question. To my great surprise, I also got swept up in the experimental theater scene in the Twin Cities. Matthew Maguire of Creation Company invited me to serve as dramaturg for his Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, and Patty Lynch guided me through the stage direction for my Susanna Does the Elders, underwritten by the Minnesota Composers Forum in 1987.

In the late 1980s I met Philip Brett, Joseph Kerman, and Richard Taruskin, the Berkeley trio who have stood as crucial interlocutors for over twenty years. Philip Brett was trying to formulate gay music criticism when I was struggling with feminist theory. I was privileged to have him as a colleague at UCLA only one year before his premature death. He is my model for humane political activism. I am grateful to the Berkeley faculty for inviting me to deliver the Bloch Lectures in 1993, and the ideas developed in Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form permeate this present book.

Rob and I moved to California in 1994. At UCLA I had the privilege of working with Peter Reill, then director of the Center for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Several of the chapters included in this book started life as presentations at the Clark Library, and even those written first for other venues received intellectual inspiration from the Center’s conferences. A year after I arrived at UCLA I was the happy and surprised recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. The resulting boost in confidence gave me the courage to return to my long-abandoned work on modal theory and seventeenth-century music.

I was sustained by many colleagues and friends in Los Angeles: Mitchell Morris, Roger Bourland, Joanne Jubelier, Sara Melzer, the late Robin Shlien, and Nicholas Entrikin. In July 2011, I joined the faculty at Case Western Reserve University, where my new intellectual community includes Georgia Cowart, Ross Duffin, Daniel Goldmark, and David Rothenberg.

My ideas concerning seventeenth-century music have benefited greatly from exchanges with other scholars working in this same area, especially Gary Tomlinson, Wendy Heller, Martha Feldman, Kate van Orden, Georgia Cowart, Eric Chafe, Louise Stein, Suzanne Cusick, and Ellen Rosand. Quite recently I have found myself welcomed into the music-theory community, and I owe much to intense theory conversations I have had over the years with Leonard Meyer, David Lewin, Bill Caplin, Michael Cherlin, Robert Gjerdingen, and Thomas Christensen. Both the Orpheus Academy in Ghent and the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory have invited me to present my theoretical work in residencies, and Wayne Alpern has included me among the workshop leaders for the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory.

Whereas many scholars teach to support their research, I have always written in order to have the privilege of teaching, and I have developed most of my ideas though interactions with students. I cannot mention all the students who have influenced my work over the years, but I will list at least some without whom I could not have formulated this book: David Ake, Paul Attinello, Kate Bartel, Marcel Cobussen, Stuart De Ocampo, Barbara Engh, Daniel Fritzen, Daniel Goldmark, Namhee Han, Gordon Haramaki, Marischka Hopcroft, Ljubica Ilic, Christopher Kachian, Loren Kajikawa, Maiko Kawabata, David Kopplin, Julia Koza, Erik Leidal, Julianna Lindberg, Jeremy Mikush, Elizabeth Morgan, Thomas Nelson, Stephan Pennington, John Richardson, Marianna Ritchey, Ryan Rowen, Grace Tam, Janika Vandervelde, Eric Wang, Jacqueline Warwick, Bruce Whiteman, and Lawrence Zbikowski.

University of California Press has published two of my previous books, and I cannot imagine trusting anyone but Mary Francis with my efforts. Infinitely patient and encouraging, though stern when she finds it necessary to curb some of my impulses, Mary has taken a chance on this, yet another of my tomes. My readers, Georgia Cowart and Robert Gjerdingen, offered sage advice and helped me to eliminate at least some of the gaffes it had in its prior versions. I was fortunate to have Kate Warne, Sharron Wood, and Eric Schmidt working closely with me on production.

. . .

Over the course of the last fifteen years, I have had the honor of counting the late Christopher Small among my dearest friends. I wrote much of this book in Sitges, Catalonia, where Chris lived with his partner, the late Neville Braithwaite. Like many musicians concerned with the endeavor Chris termed musicking, I have been greatly influenced by his work and humane example, which deepened the philosophical and ethical dimensions of my work. I dedicate this book to the memory of Christopher Small—a great thinker, educator, musician, and mensch.

Cleveland Heights, October 2011

Their world fell into disarray. An earlier generation had acted out impudently against what it had dismissed as stifling but immutable certainties. Now such certainties as they could muster had to be fabricated out of rhetorical gesture. Assurances of continuity evaporated, replaced by feeble assertions linking cause with effect, God with Man, ruler with ruled. They pinned their hopes on air by means of sound, the most ephemeral of media. But the arcs they created between agitation and delayed repose traced patterns to which they clung when all else so evidently failed. The seventeenth century sustained itself on gossamer threads of its own manufacture, a network reliant for its power on simulations of pleasure and desire. We—their children who still inhabit the modern world they ushered in, with all its arrogance and anxiety—prefer to hear their devices as natural and universal. I understand them as smoke and mirrors, the scant comforts of a society grown too cynical for the fairy tales (scriptural or scholastic) of its forebears. This book concerns some very sophisticated whistling in the dark.

S.M.

Prelude

The Music of Pleasure and Desire

Historians like to study blocks of time demarcated in terms of centuries. To be sure, political and cultural events rarely accommodate themselves to the arbitrary rolling over of a fresh set of zeroes. Yet our love for this mode of classification leads us to accept as reasonable such unlikely designations as the long eighteenth century—a period that lops past its proper edges to colonize the late 1600s and early 1800s; it also predisposed many of us to approach with apocalyptic dread the advent of the year 2000.

Early modern music history, however, graciously obliged this craving for tidy calendrical boundaries, for right on the downbeat of the year 1600—as though motivated by digital clockwork—the priorities of European musical processes changed radically and permanently. The ensuing aesthetic debates and the fierce quarrels over rightful claims to invention testify to the fact that musicians recognized immediately at least some of the profound implications of these innovations. But even the most prescient of cultural observers in the early seventeenth century could not have anticipated that audiences four hundred years later would still reside comfortably inside the genre labels—opera, sonata, symphony, concerto, cantata, oratorio—that suddenly popped up like mushrooms after a rainstorm; nor that music theorists would come to construe their still-controversial rhetorical devices as, quite simply, the way music is supposed to go; nor that a culture industry (e.g., sound recording, motion pictures) based on technologies unimaginable at the time would thrive on the musical language and marketing strategies they first developed.

On The Jackie Gleason Show, comedian Frank Fontaine used to play an intelligence-challenged character named Crazy Guggenheim. In one of his sketches, Crazy impersonated Columbus as a schoolboy, boasting in response to queries about his career aspirations, When I grow up, I’m gonna ’scover ’merica! Pseudo-Columbus then went on to describe in enthusiastic detail the United States of the 1950s, which served as Crazy’s only point of reference. To latter-day music lovers who treasure Mozart’s enactments of Enlightenment reason, the motivation for the sudden changes in musical style in 1600 may seem self-evident: the madrigal composers of the late Renaissance had decided they wanted to ’scover tonality, as though they could discern already in their minds’ ears the monuments of Lutheran faith produced by J. S. Bach, the tumultuous symphonic narratives of Beethoven, the ravishing bel canto arias of Bellini, the heartbreaking leave-taking of fin de siècle Mahler.

But no more than the young Columbus could Jacopo Peri or Claudio Monteverdi have foreseen the eventual consequences of their relatively slight shifts in emphasis. Indeed, far less than Columbus (who at least knew of the riches potentially awaiting him in Asia) did these composers concern themselves with the possible long-term ramifications of their explorations. If a teleological version of music history tends to distort the motivations and accomplishments of these heroic innovators, it damages even more the denizens of the following few generations: those who inhabited a time frame we have long characterized as no longer/not yet, who had at their disposal all the tools they needed to create the Brave New World but who somehow failed to ’scover ’merica—to produce tonality as we know it today. We sigh impatiently at the primitive imperfections of pieces that continue to fall into modal potholes, that cannot sustain a key area for more than a couple of measures, that still rely on verbal texts to provide them with their formal structures. And we long for the appearance of repertories with sufficient tonal integrity to allow for genuine analysis.

This book offers another set of approaches to the music of early modern Europe. Those antiquarians who have read my very old dissertation will recognize many of its themes: a belief in the efficacy of modal theory for the analysis of sixteenth-century and much of seventeenth-century music; a concern with accounting for the precise changes that took place between repertories based on modal syntax and the logic of seventeenth-century musical procedures; and an overriding insistence on the historicity of tonality.1 At the time I wrote my dissertation I prided myself on the hard-core theoretical orientation of my work, and I worked hard to present my findings in the objective style then de rigueur for academic success.

But, as Petrarch writes at the beginning of his Rime sparse, I was then in part another man than I am now.2 Beginning with my introduction (thanks to Rose Rosengard Subotnik) to the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault, I learned ways of addressing questions concerning the kinds of relationships between culture and music that had hovered beyond my methodological grasp. A bit later, feminist theory offered me many of the techniques I needed to interrogate such obvious (if still unspoken) dimensions of seventeenth-century repertories as desire, pleasure, gender, sexuality, the body, and emotions—all of them now widely understood as culture-specific rather than trans-historical, all of them now fundamental terrains for scholarly research rather than subjective distractions. The late poet and theorist Audre Lorde claimed that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.3 I didn’t plan to bring down the house, but I did want to gain access to some of its cordoned-off rooms. The tools made available by feminism helped me to unlock the doors.4

I already had some inkling, however, of what I would find behind those doors. Long before feminist theory bestowed legitimacy on the study of pleasure and desire, I had resolved to focus my efforts on seventeenth-century music precisely because it was quite simply the sexiest music I had ever heard. Of course, my musicological training prohibited me from speaking publicly about such matters: the sensual power of this music had to remain the big unstated motivation behind all my quotations from Zarlino, my theoretical formulations, my desiccated charts that intended to capture the Syntactical Essence of those overheated madrigals and operatic duets. It was because I had experienced the music’s extravagant power that I cast aside all advice or readers’ reports cautioning me that this music does not yet work. Together with my graduate school colleagues Melissa Black Cox and Lisa Goode Crawford I could revel in the astonishing eroticism of Schütz or Frescobaldi; at the typewriter, however, I pulled the requisite long face and wrote of diapente descents. So here is the book I wanted to write, with all the music’s graphic imagery discussed without apology.

Still, I am not so entirely different a man that I want to leave theory and analysis behind. A large part of my purpose here involves trying to account for the procedures of unfamiliar repertories and the mechanics of style change. To be sure, others have addressed such issues. When I first embarked on this project a good forty years ago, I had close at hand Carl Dahlhaus’s then-recent book on the emergence of harmonic tonality.5 For all its obvious erudition, Dahlhaus’s project seems to me teleological in its approach; it presupposes eighteenth-century procedures as the goal toward which European music was developing and attempts to find similar configurations in earlier repertories. Such an approach may appear to find evidence of progress in one piece but then must consider those on adjoining pages in the same manuscript as incoherent. I have never found this method satisfactory.

The late Harold S. Powers, long regarded as the principal authority on modality, also dealt extensively with questions of this sort. He did not, however, acknowledge modes as viable compositional frameworks for sixteenth-century polyphony and offered in their place his own theory of tonal types for purposes of consistent classification.6 Yet tonal types get one no further than the ability to label a particular composition as belonging to one category or another; they may help explain the rationales behind modally arranged collections, but they do not allow for the analysis of a piece as an internally coherent entity; indeed, Powers rejected quite vehemently the possibility of engaging critically with music from before the later seventeenth century.

As was evident from my previous book, Modal Subjectivities, I disagree fundamentally with Powers’s premises—as, indeed, he did with mine.7 I regard the versions of mode presented in Renaissance treatises as providing a more-than-adequate basis for critical analysis and interpretation of the music they seek to illuminate, and I do not believe we can account for the developments manifested by repertories of the seventeenth century without having a firm grasp of sixteenth-century practice as coherent for their own cultural purposes. Nor does Eric Chafe, whose work on Monteverdi closely resembles my own in many respects.8

At the same time, I am not offering here a study in the history of music theory, even though I have the highest respect for that enterprise.9 For seventeenth-century treatises do not address most of the questions I wish to pose—questions undeniably related at least as much to present-day cultural concerns as to those of the past. Gary Tomlinson has warned us (and sometimes me specifically) of the ethical problems involved with interpreting the work of those who can no longer answer for themselves, and many scholars of seventeenth-century music avoid dealing with the music at all.10 In their preface to the recent Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, for instance, Tim Carter and John Butt explain that their invaluable resource of nearly six hundred pages has no music examples or analyses, in part to conform to the other volumes in this series, but also to open this period to the cultural conversations of its time and of ours.11 The treasure trove of information and insights in Carter and Butt’s collection testifies to the efficacy of this approach, as do the insights presented by Tomlinson and many others, and the chapters in this volume will also necessarily grapple with contextual issues.

But my chapters concentrate as well on the music itself, which has long posed difficulties (sometimes unacknowledged) in our ability to assess and understand seventeenth-century repertories. I engage in analysis not for the mere sake of analysis, but rather because I believe that musical scores qualify as crucial repositories of evidence for anyone seeking to understand the people who lived in another time and place. More concretely than verbal documents, music can grant us at least provisional access to a period’s assumptions concerning temporality, affect, the body, the divine, sexuality, sociality, ethics, and selfhood. In short, taking such traces seriously is my way of honoring the Other. Those bizarre pitch configurations and erratic shifts between open-ended sections that consternate latter-day musicologists are not simply perverse displays of baroqueness; they were calculated to produce immediate and powerful effects in listeners of their own time.

Inasmuch as some (but by no means all) of the experimental structures of feeling developed during this period eventually became solidified into something we call tonality, then it behooves us as cultural historians to grasp how these functioned when they first appeared and why they mattered. But we must also attend seriously to contemporaneous compositions—often by the same composer and within the same collection—that pursue strategies significantly different from those that sound tonal to us. I hope to be able to offer theoretical models that allow for a consistent approach to a wide variety of styles.

I also engage with analysis because of my long-standing concern with performers, who need to be able to deal critically with scores as they go about their business of converting the dots on the page into dynamic sound. I have spent much of my career as a coach, pointing out in rehearsal which configurations qualify as normative within a given style and which count as disruptive, thereby helping interpreters to arrive at effective renditions. As we shall see, many features that strike us as unusual to us today—for example, the absence of consistent leading tones—were standard practice at the time, whereas a cadence on the dominant in an Aeolian piece (a maneuver we now accept as perfectly ordinary) often qualified as violent transgression. I spend a good deal of this book discussing musical details of this sort because musicians at the time produced their meanings and rhetorical effects through such strategies, many of them no longer legible to us today.

My broader claim is that the history of musical syntax cannot be understood apart from the effects it was designed to produce at various moments in history.12 During the seventeenth century, pleasure, desire, and the body became crucial preoccupations in most cultural enterprises, and the music of this period yields innumerable simulations of precisely these qualities, even if treatises do not address them (the silence of seventeenth-century writers concerning these issues should not seem surprising; after all, musicologists only began acknowledging these elements in the 1990s). Yet such simulations cannot be treated as essences to be perceived directly from the notated scores that bear their traces; they stand rather as highly mediated cultural configurations, themselves further mediated by the properties of the styles through which they receive their particular articulations. Thus, for instance, Monteverdi’s swerve into Marinist decadence is relevant not only to the poetry he chose to set but also to the grammar of his compositions (see chapter 2). In other words, when it comes to accounting for seventeenth-century music, no sex without theorizing—but also no theorizing without sex.

Or at least desire. I will argue over the course of this book that the single most important technological innovation in music of the seventeenth century—in Italy and all its international copycats, at any rate—involves the simulation of desire. This is not to suggest that desire entered into music only around 1600. It stands as one of the priorities of the sixteenth-century madrigal, for the classic polyphonic madrigal treats desire in myriad ways in the contexts of intricate tailor-made allegories.13 As I demonstrated in my chapter The Desiring Subject, or Subject to Desire in Modal Subjectivities, Jacques Arcadelt single-handedly produced many different versions: O felic’ occhi miei construes desire as a passion that causes lofty reason to collapse in response to the demands of the lower body, while Ahime, dov’ è ’l bel viso grounds its universe on a pitch that (like the deceased beloved) remains permanently beyond reach.14 Yet none of these corresponds to the teleological urges whipped up to simulate desire in later musics, beginning quite abruptly around 1600. Why did cultural notions of desire change so radically and so quickly? If we cannot easily answer that question, we can certainly trace the ways musicians worked to produce this sudden transformation in their responses to texts or dramatic situations.

As is the case with most apparently cataclysmic shifts in culture, the radical style changes in seventeenth-century music involved the subtle redeployment of elements that had been lying close at hand for generations. Foremost among these was the leading tone, the artificially raised scalar seventh degree that enhances the expectation of and longing for cadential arrival. Over the course of the seicento, composers converted this mechanism into the very foundation of their musical language, thereby ushering in new desire-saturated conceptions of the self, the body, sexuality, religious devotion, and—perhaps most important—temporality. Eventually this procedure would inform all Italianate music, whether the lyrics refer to love or not. Indeed, it made textless instrumental music viable, and it would eventually come to sustain the nineteenth-century symphony as well as our present-day vernacular musics.

The history of the leading tone remains somewhat clouded by its long-term status as musica ficta, a theoretically irrational inflection not designated in the written score but added on the basis of oral tradition by knowledgeable performers per causa pulchritudinis, for the sake of beauty. The musicological search for the elusive leading tone encounters many frustrations, including the fact that different regions evidently held different standards of pulchritude: Renaissance Spaniards seem to have adored sticking such spiky ornaments all over their music, while Germans proved stingy, reserving their sharps for the purpose of marking only the strongest cadences.15 Because these inflections rarely show up in part-book notation, they went undetected in preparations of the first musicological editions, and old performances of Renaissance music often sounded the uninflected seventh degrees of the original scores, producing the archaic sound still beloved of period-film soundtracks, folk revival ballads, and even heavy metal.16 But European musicians had made regular use of leading tones at cadences at least as far back as the fourteenth century, when they preferred even to double their pleasure with raised seventh and fourth degrees: a singularly astringent sound that urgently catapults all musical activity onto the awaiting perfect consonances of the open fifth and octave.

Thus although the leading tone itself counted as nothing new by 1600, it still appeared only when the contrapuntal configuration announced an impending cadence. Yet far from betraying a faulty sense of musical propriety, the restriction of leading tones to cadences allowed for the greater cultivation of simultaneous multiple meanings than is typical or easily achieved within standard tonal practice. As I argued throughout Modal Subjectivities, the superimposed linear patterns characteristic of sixteenth-century composition operate with tremendous subtlety to draw the ear here, then there, constantly suggesting but rarely divulging their allegiances until absolutely necessary. It could be argued, in fact, that the continual presence of leading tones in subsequent musics betrays an intolerance on the part of later composers and listeners for ambiguity, paradox, and shaded nuance. Tonality insists that we must mean what we say,17 in contrast with the veiled utterances cultivated in the aristocratic hothouse environments of the Northern Italian courts within which the polyphonic madrigal flourished.

The question I want to pose is not why it took so long for musicians to figure out how to discover tonality, but rather why—given the extraordinary sophistication of their musical procedures—they suddenly decided to alter their orientations so radically. What, precisely, did the consistent leading tone offer that it managed to displace the complex practices of the High Renaissance? I do not believe that it makes sense to imagine these musicians and their audiences sacrificing their own modus operandi in the interest of later generations of Mozart lovers who would called them blessed; not until well into the twentieth century did composers posture as research and development agents, experimenting for the future good of humankind.

Except in very rare situations, we should assume that musicians produce the kind of music that appeals to them and those for whom they write and perform. It is the job of historians to reconstruct the contexts within which those preferences prevailed and made sense. And no one in the early seventeenth century sought to invent a new theoretical abstraction. I would go so far as to assert that the principal motivation behind most of the innovations we will examine is not pitch per se but rather temporality; pitch may supply the materials needed for sculpting new ways of experiencing time and affect, but it might be better compared with the marble from which Michelangelo worked than with his astonishing artistic effects.

Put quite simply, composers in the early seventeenth century harnessed the leading tone in order to create extended trajectories of desire. If the leading tone heralds expected closure, then damming up that expectation can produce a