"To Discourse Learnedly" and "Compose Beautifully": Thoughts on Gioseffo Zarlino, Theory, and Practice

The present text is a slightly modified and updated version of the keynote address I presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Minneapolis, October 29, 2011. I have maintained the somewhat informal tone of the text while adapting the presentation for a digital medium. I am grateful to the members of the program committee for the 2011 meeting who invited me to deliver the keynote address (Byron Almen, Chair, Richard Ashley, Julian Hook, Jocelyn Neal Wayne Petty, Robert Wason, and Lynne Rogers, ex-officio) and to Scott Burnham for his generous introduction at the meeting. I am particularly grateful to the ensemble Singer Pur, and especially Marcus Schmidl and Martin Stastnik, for their collaboration on a recently released recording of Zarlino motets which made the publication of this keynote address possible (Singer Pur 2013). I would like to acknowledge a publication subvention from the Society for Music Theory, which supported the recorded examples of this address. I would also like to thank Michael Noone for his collaboration on the recording of another group of Zarlino motets (Ensemble Plus Ultra 2007). I am grateful for permission from each of these ensembles to reproduce audio excerpts from these recordings in this article and commend the full recordings to the attention of readers.[1] A keynote address such as this faces many challenges and expectations, which include, but are not limited to: connecting to the broadly diverse audience of a plenary session of the Society for Music Theory; saying something meaningful that is at the same time memorable; provoking, perhaps; and, of course, all the while adopting a delivery that is humorous, witty, and urbane tempered by an appropriate air of humility. Heady-even intimidating-expectations that I will do my best to live up to![2] Before beginning in earnest, I will observe, with no little irony, that when one looks at the etymology of the word "keynote" in English, the pointer is to Charles Burney's translation, in his General History of Music, of clavis as the "keynote" of a mode. . . . When you're in my field of research, sometimes it seems not to matter what you are working on at a given moment, you somehow will never escape the modes! And as you'll see, modes and modal theory will indeed make an appearance in the course of this lecture.[3] With all that in mind, I initially considered several possible directions this keynote might take. The first might be described as the "grand theory" keynote in which I intended to wax eloquent on the metaphysical questions attending to our discipline while offering broad prognostications about where our discipline has been and where it should go. All in all it felt a bit pretentious (maybe even preposterous), given the many distinguished colleagues in the audience.[4] I then swung to the opposite extreme, considering the autobiographical tack and reflections on how I got into the field and some of the unusual twists and turns my own career has taken, going right back to a quiz I took on the greater perfect system of Greek theory in an 8 a.m. freshman theory class in 1978, an event that must have scarred me for life since I recall it so clearly. But ultimately, that, too, seemed a bit pretentious and preposterous, but more in the "so what?" vein of why any of you should care.[5] And then there was the potential address on the big project I continue to work on, related to a whole range of texts from classical Arabic writings about music to nineteenth century translations of theoretical texts by women, and how we might begin to include these writings in our thinking about history of theory. But that work is still far from fully baked, and I felt a certain audacity at skirting the program committee while landing on the biggest venue of the meeting without anyone having vetted my abstract.[6] Ultimately, from those various attempts I did identify a series of threads that I think may be of interest and that I hope will spark dialogue into the future, or at least at the bar after this talk. …