At 5:53 AM -0500 11/20/07, dhbailey wrote:
But if someone would know the false relationship is a common feature of this style of music, they would very likely also know that the F would be lowered on the descending melodic line after having been raised on the ascending line.
OK, several people (well, at least two!) have brought up this "descending melodic line" and I haven't commented, but I really have to. The ascending and descending thing simply wasn't a rule in renaissance music. They would have been trained in hexachordal analysis and in the rules of ficta, and those would have guided their realization of a melodic line. (Although I do appreciate that people have recognized the alto line as an independent melodic line.) The F# has nothing to do with an ascending line. It is raised by ficta because the alto line forms a cadence with one of the other lines (I didn't save the example, but that's what I recall looking for and finding). If it did appear in the copy source (which i assume it did), it was probably because it was a passing cadence in the middle of a line of text and the singer could have been uncertain.
"Because it's a descending line" is NOT sufficient reason in renaissance theory, at a time when the melodic minor scale was not even invented yet. (And that's actually where the idea came from, I'm pretty sure.)
John -- John R. Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
