> On Jan 9, 2019, at 3:53 PM, Ralf Mattes <r...@mh-freiburg.de> wrote: > >> although, like a lot of Fux’s book, it was very old fashioned in 1704. > > ??? Whut? That system was widely used well into the 19th (!sic) century. It's > just that a lot of researches tend to skip the > early chapters of contemporary manuals. Just have a look at some of the most > important instruction manuals and how much (expensive!) space they dedicate > top proper solmization teaching.
I’m aware that Gradus ad Parnassum hung around for a long time. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t old fashioned when it was written. Fux was up front about it. The counterpoint section of the book is a dialog between Aloysius the master and Joseph the student, and Fux says in his Author’s Foreword that Aloysius is Palestrina, who died 130 years before the first (Latin) version of the book was published (in 1725, not, as I wrote earlier, 1704). Fux was ignoring Monteverdi and the seconda prattica, not to mention Vivaldi, Fux’s attitude about whom might be gleaned from his statement in the Foreword that he did not think his book “can call back composers from the unrestrained insanity of their writing back to normal standards.” Consider that Gradus ad Parnassum, full of statements like “the counterpoint must be in the same mode as the cantus firmus," was first published three years after Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony, which gave names to the concepts of tonic and dominant. To return to the original question, Fux took the triple-naming of notes for granted and did not explain it. In Alfred Mann’s translation, The Study of Counterpoint (my paperback copy of which is starting to like it was Fux’s personal copy) Mann adds a footnote on page 31 explaining it, much as Ralf did, but with examples in staff notation. You can find a pdf of the book here: http://www.opus28.co.uk/Fux_Gradus.pdf To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
