seventeenth-century harmonic theory and practice in “Composition Before Rameau: Harmony, Figured Bass, and Style in the Baroque,” College Music Symposium, 24/2 (fall 1984):

How did tonal music originate? An investiagion of the form and tonal structure of some early Baroque keyboard works suggests some insights not only into one of the primary questions of historical musicology but into how we understand tonality itself. Italian composers of the early seventeenth century recognized that the stile moderno and the seconda pratica stood in contrast to older types of composition. Yet, while the new manner of counterpoint was essential to certain genres, such as monody and the continuo madrigal, composers seem to have made no fundamental break with the past in their conceptions of the theory and practice of composition. The methods of composing (and improvising) polyphony that had been codified by Zarlino in the sixteenth century continued to form the basis of musical training, despite the innovations in dissonance treatment found in the seconda pratica. While later treatises like Christopher Simpson’s Division-Violist (London, 1659) eventually provided instruction in the improvisation of variations over a basso ostinato—a technique essential to Baroque variation forms, including the keyboard partita and the strophic aria—it seems clear that for musicians of the early seventeenth century most of the musical innovations that we recognize as typically Baroque, such as the harmonic basis of the new approaches to counterpoint, remained unarticulated intuitions hidden beneath the official doctrines of Renaissance theory.