Hearing Counterpoint Within Chromaticism: Analyzing Harmonic Relationships in Lassus’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum

Score and Recording 1. Lassus, Prophetiae Sibyllarum, Prologue, score and recording(click to open score and listen)[1.1] Orlandus Lassus's cycle Prophetiae Sibyllarum (1550s) is simultaneously familiar and unsettling to the modern listener.(1) The Prologue epitomizes its challenges; see Score and Recording 1.(2) It uses apparent triads, but their roots range so widely that it is difficult to hear them as symbols of an incipient tonality. The piece's three cadences confirm, in textbook style, Mode 8,(3) but its accidentals complicate a modal designation based on the diatonic octave species. The individual melodic lines in the opening phrase are awkward, often avoiding parallel fifths and octaves only through large leaps, but at the same time it is difficult not to hear in them a sense of coordination and, perhaps, even progression. What principles underlie this odd Prologue, and the Prophetiae Sibyllarum as a whole? How might we understand this chromaticism? Are different techniques used in different locations, or does the cycle represent simply a long wash of consistently strange music? Finally, a seemingly necessary question that I will soon argue we must put aside-what key/mode/diatonic system is it "in"?[1.2] To address these challenges, some of the first published analyses of Prophetiae Sibyllarum took extreme positions, emphasizing either randomness or absolute order.(4) After describing the opening of the Prologue, Edward Lowinsky declared, "From the F major chord in measure seven, the harmonic progression might just as well switch to F major, B-flat major, D major or D minor, or E-flat major-it would make little difference," and he called its apparent randomness "triadic atonality" (1961, 39). A decade later, in contrast, William Mitchell refuted Lowinsky with a Schenkerian sketch to demonstrate that "stressing linear and broad structural values" could, in fact, clearly establish "G major, minor, or Mixolydian" (1970, 266). While Lowinsky and Mitchell disagreed in fundamental ways, they both examined the piece's relationship to a diatonic norm (here, a key), and this has been the focus for later scholars as well.[1.3] Most theorists of the late sixteenth century did display a distinct preference for diatonicism.(5) But two problems arise for modern scholars who wish to apply this preference in their analyses. First, it is difficult to distinguish between various usages of the term "mode," as a set of learned Classical associations, as a means of referring to basic diatonic collections, or as a post-compositional classification scheme.(6) Perhaps more important, modern labels such as "atonal" and "G major" tend to be applied to an entire piece or large section of a piece, rather than to notes, sonorities, or sonority-to-sonority relationships.[1.4] In contrast, this article will model the listening process more directly by describing Lassus's use of counterpoint. It is certainly possible for a listener to hear a surprising sonority's relationship to an underlying diatonic system, but counterpoint describes those elements most immediately perceptible to the listener: the surface-level relationships between tones.(7) As surface complexity rises-as more accidentals are added and as they change more quickly-a diatonic system becomes more and more difficult to extract from the musical surface. Thus, when describing how one might hear the many surprising moments of this piece, it makes sense to describe them with the language of surface relationships.[1.5] Several scholars do allow for some degree of local change in their diatonic analyses. Karol Berger (1980, 489-90) quotes from Nicola Vicentino's discussion of the "mixing" of modes to suggest that a piece may instantiate a hierarchy of modes.(8) Berger represents these modes as triads and labels them with Roman numerals. William Lake (1991) also uses Roman numerals, but analyzes triads on multiple "key levels" to show that the Prologue "modulates" through descending-fifth progressions and a few stereotyped chromatic progressions. …