TONAL TYPES IN THE KEYBOARD MUSIC OF FRESCOBALDI

The following is a scan of the original, unpublished English

text of a presentation I gave (in an Italian translation) at

the 1983 Frescobaldi Conference in Ferrara. The Italian

version was published in 1987 in the Report of the Conference.

Following the Conference I continued working on the project,

applying the same analysis to a large number of musical

repertories from the late sixteenth- to the late seventeenth

century, including works by Giovanni Gabrielli, Gesualdo,

Michelangelo Rossi, Monteverdi, Froberger, Stradella, and

Buxtehude. My hope was that the results would reflect the

transition from a “modal” to a “tonal” idiom. I also developed

a quantitative indicator, the “beta factor,” to show the place

of each body of works along this path. Its theoretical value

for a purely “modal” repertory would be 0, and its value for a

pure “tonal” repertory would be 100. In fact, the value for

Frescobaldi’s 1615 Recercari e Canzoni publication, with their

almost artificial modal language, turns out to be

approximately 3, and the value for all his published keyboard

works is approximately 12, whereas the value for Corelli’s four

collections of trio sonatas is 99!

The data were generated by means of a Basic program that I had

developed on an Apple 2e computer, and the tables and graphs

shown in the handout were produced automatically upon inputting

the values. In spite of these promising results, I had to halt

the project after my move to North Carolina in 1984 due a

number of other commitments, and I never returned to it. In

the near future I hope to self-publish here a few more details

on this further work.

Alexander Silbiger

March 2010