Lasso’s motets: A case study in different layers of tonal type problematic nature*

1.1. The concept of mode in Renaissance polyphony has been widely criticised in the last thirty years. However, many musicologists still believe that it cannot be completely dismissed, because the process of ascribing a given composition to a specific mode (no matter how difficult it might prove to be) can have an epistemological/hermeneutical value in itself, and because, all things considered, the idea that Renaissance composers, when they were to compose a piece of music, were concerned with the modes only a posteriori – i.e. they did not have in their mind any criterion with which to organise the tonal space – seems still really hard to believe (not to say utterly unbelievable). Discovering such organisation in actual pieces, however, can be (and really is) controversial. To cope with the issue, the principle of ‘tonal type’ as defined by Harold Powers is therefore of invaluable help, as it permits to work sensibly with the music without blurring at the very first step of the examination the distinction between the individual features of a composition and the modal categories of the theoretical tradition(s).