¹ Facsimile edn (Bologna, 1970); chs. 1–7 are translated in Strunk, O., Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), pp. 205–18Google Scholar. The translations in this article follow Strunk unless otherwise indicated. The most comprehensive overview of Aron's theoretical writings remains Bergquist, E. P., ‘The Theoretical Writings of Pietro Aaron’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1964)Google Scholar. For biographical information and speculation on the two spellings of Aron's surname, see A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians, ed. Blackburn, B. J., Lowinsky, E. E. and Miller, C. A. (Oxford, 1991), pp. 74–100Google Scholar.

² Perkins, L., ‘Mode and Structure in the Masses of Josquin’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 26 (1973), pp. 189–239CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bergquist, P., ‘Mode and Polyphony around 1500’, Music Forum. 1 (1967), pp. 99–161Google Scholar.

³ Powers, H., ‘Is Mode Real?: Pietro Aron, the Octenary System, and Polyphony’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 16 (1992), pp. 9–52Google Scholar.

⁴ For summaries of Aron's means of modal categorisation, see Powers, ‘Is Mode Real?’, and Judd, C. C., ‘Modal Types and Ut, Re, Mi Tonalities: Tonal Coherence in Sacred Vocal Polyphony from about 1500’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 45 (1992), pp. 428–67 (p. 430)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ For an overview of ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ reading and the significance of appropriation of texts, see Chartier, R., ‘Texts, Printing, Readings’, The New Cultural History. ed. Hunt, L. (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 154–75 (pp. 156–8Google Scholar and passim).

⁶ On interpretative communities, see Chartier, R., The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Cochrane, L. (Stanford, 1994), pp. 1–23Google Scholar.

⁷ See, for example, Ong, W., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York, 1982), pp. 156–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. With specific reference to ‘print culture’, see The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Chartier, R.. trans. Cochrane, L. (Princeton, 1989), pp. 1–10Google Scholar and passim.

⁸ See, for example, Boorman, S., ‘Petrucci at Fossombrone: A Study of Early Music Printing, with Special Reference to the Motetti de la corona’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1976)Google Scholar. As I will show below, music prints in partbook format have erroneously been assumed to stand outside the domain of ‘silent reading’, supposedly demanding aural realisation.

⁹ Thoscanello de la musica (Venice, 1523); rev. edn with Aggiunta published as Toscanello in musica (Venice, 1529, 1539 and 1562); facsimile of 1539 edn, edGoogle Scholar. Frey, G., Documenta Musicologica, ser. 1, 29 (Kassel, 1970)Google Scholar; trans. P.Bergquist, Colorado Springs Music Press Translations 4, 3 vols. (Colorado Springs, 1970).

¹⁰ Margaret Bent recently completed a close reading of the Aggiunta examples (‘Accidentals. Counterpoint, and Notation in Aaron's Aggiunta to the Toscanello’, Journal of Musicology, 12 (1994), pp. 306–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar) analogous to Powers's reading of the Trattato examples (‘Is Mode Real?’); I am grateful to Professor Bent for making available a typescript of that article before its publication. Bent notes the difficulty that Aron encounters in describing accidentals and comments on his convoluted language. It is only at these moments (discussion of mode and accidentals), when the gulf between the theory Aron articulates and polyphonic practice is greatest, that he refers to specific polyphonic compositions.

¹¹ ‘And note that all the songs and composers mentioned here, one by one, are found in a book called One Hundred Songs Printed in Order [i.e. Odhecaton A]. I have taken some trouble so that you may more easily reach the goal of this understanding’(Toscanello, trans. Bergquist, , iii, p. 19)Google Scholar.

¹² Ibid., p. 17.

¹³ Had Aron not explicitly cited Motetti C one might have questioned his access to this source, since he cites only three motets from this collection, far fewer than from any of the other prints he uses in the Trattato and Aggiunta.

¹⁴ Although Aron never explicitly names Canti B, the order of his selections as well as composer indications suggests this as one of his primary sources.

¹⁵ Three masses which appear in this print are cited, but there is no way of positing this as Aron's source with absolute certainty; several works from the first volume of Josquin's masses printed by Petrucci are cited more specifically in the Aggiunta, which offers circumstantial evidence that Aron probably had access to both volumes.

¹⁶ Strunk, , Source Readings, pp. 205–6Google Scholar, lists sources for most of Aron's citations, but makes no distinction between those sources which Aron undeniably used and those which may or may not have been available to him. Table 1 encloses uncertain sources in square brackets, along with additional references to manuscript sources or lost works. Strunk's list is alphabetical, obscuring many of the relationships observed below and, with the exception of the Odhecaton, does not indicate the placement of examples within source prints. Bergquist, ‘The Theoretical Writings’, also follows Strunk's list. Citations for five works for which Strunk cited no source are given here, along with minor corrections to his list.

¹⁷ Three of the works cited in this chapter are unknown in any printed source, but one — Busnoys's Pourtant si mon — is mentioned in the so-called Spataro correspondence (A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians, ed. Blackburn, , Lowinsky, and Miller, , pp. 350 and 832)Google Scholar, and may have been known to Aron through those circles. Similarly, Multi sunt vocati (cited in ch. 7) was mentioned by Aron in a letter to Del Lago Ibid., p.707) and was frequently cited in the correspondence.

¹⁸ The two motets are Hue me sydereo and Ave nobilissima which share the same mode 4 tenor with A final and flat signature. However, Aron need not have consulted Motettide la corona III in the writing of this chapter. The tenor of Miserere mei Deus, with its ascending and descending ‘miserere’ ostinato, is precisely the sort of tenor that Aron might have recalled, rather than looked at, for his modal classification.

¹⁹ Bergquist, ‘The Theoretical Writings’, p. 286.

²⁰ Rather than suggesting a kind of musical incompetence. Aron's ‘misreading’ may simply be indicative of the way in which the repertory of the Odhecaton, already retrospective at the time of its initial publication in 1501, was understood twenty-five years later. In the Aggiunta Aron distinguishes between the ‘moderns’, represented by the Motetti de la corona repertory, and the ‘ancients’ represented in the Odhecaton (Toscanello, trans. Bergquist, , iii, p. 19)Google Scholar.

²¹ Unlike in ch. 4, and to a slightly lesser degree ch. 5, Aron is no longer concerned here to instantiate every possible termination; see, most notably, his treatment of endings on A la mi re.

²² Powers, ‘Is Mode Real?’, p. 39. ‘Onde gli presenti canti cioe Mes pensies di Compere, Madame Helas, Cenent peult di Josquino, et Mittit ad virginem no altrimenti chedel settimo son chiamati, et Je vide sece tamps, & t Loserai dire del tuono ottavo et non settimo come la sua forma et continuo processo ti dimostrano &c.’

²³ ‘Thus “Mes pensées” by Compère, “Madame hélas” and “Comment peut” by Josquin, and “Mittit ad virginem” can be assigned only to the seventh tone. But “Je cuide si ce temps” and “Ne l'oserai je dire” will be of the eighth tone and not of the seventh, as their form and extended downward procedure will show you' (Strunk, , Source Readings, p. 218)Google Scholar.

²⁴ The Sanctus and Agnus Dei are cited as examples of mode 5 on F fa ut; the Gloria is cited for mode 7 on G sol re ut.

²⁵ It is notable that two of these mass citations, as well as the reference to Del Lago's Multi sunt vocati, also outside the Petrucci repertory, occur among the citations for mode 7 on G sol re ut where Aron relies, at most, on a single Petrucci exemplar. Indeed, even that work, Hylaere's Ascendens Christus in altum, may have been ‘remembered’ or been taken from some other (manuscript) source, since Aron makes no other citations from the Motetti de la corona anthologies in this chapter. This suggests the possibility that he was no longer referring to those partbooks (although he certainly had them four years later when he prepared the Aggiunta to the Toscanello). The relatively few citations for mode 7 on G also suggest a dearth of settings that would qualify for that mode in the repertory he had to hand.

²⁶ Two other motets in which the tenor extends cadences on E to a termination on B might also be added to this group: Jacotin's Interveniat pro rege nostro and Carpentras's Cantate Domino. See the discussion of Interveniat pro rege nostro below. I have maintained the generic distinctions suggested by the prints in the discussion which follows; thus, the seven works with Latin incipits in Odhecaton and Canti B have been counted among the ‘chansons’ as a reflection of the print titles.

²⁷ It is striking that Aron refers only to the earliest of his Petrucci prints in this chapter: he may well have viewed the three anthologies which first appeared between the years 1501 and 1504 as a related series since his citations also reflect the order of publication.

²⁸ See, for example, Bergquist's discussion of Se mieulx in ‘The Theoretical Writings’.

²⁹ Powers, ‘Is Mode Real?’, hastened to point out that the assignments are more revealing of Aron's theorising than representative of the music.

³⁰ See Powers, ‘Is Mode Real?’, pp. 30–1, on Aron's use of the term processo.

³¹ Ibid., pp. 32–4.

³² Ibid., p. 34; however, on confinality, see the discussion of Benedic anima mea and Interveniat pro rege nostro below.

³³ Judd, C. C., ‘Aspects of Tonal Coherence in the Motets of Josquin’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College London, 1993, UMI 9501876), pp. 42–4Google Scholar.

³⁴ E.g. Compère's Se pis ne vient. I am grateful to Mary Kathleen Morgan for bringing this relationship to my attention.

³⁵ On Aron's use of psalm-tone pseudo-finals, see Powers, ‘Is Mode Real?’, p. 35, and Judd. ‘Aspects of Tonal Coherence’, p.46.

³⁶ Strunk, , Source Readings, p. 205Google Scholar, misidentifies this work, citing Motetti de la corona II. There is no known Laetatus sum attributed to Eustachio; the only setting of Laetatus sum in the Petrucci prints consulted by Aron is attributed to Andreas de Silva, and fits the tonal profile of the motets he discusses here. The attribution to Eustachio(de Monteregalis) belongs properly with the third motet cited in this list, Benedic anima mea Dominum. For the purposes of the following discussion I will refer to the setting of Laetatus sum by Andreas de Silva, while acknowledging that Aron may have been referring to another setting of this text.

³⁷ ‘And if sometimes, as has become the custom, the composer prolongs his work, amusing himself with additional progressions, you will, in my opinion, need to consider whether the final, as altered by the composer, is suited to and in keeping or out of keeping with his composition, for if reason guide him in what is suited to the tone he will at least see to it that some one part (namely, the tenor or cantus) sustains the final, while the others proceed as required by the tone, regular or irregular, with pleasing and appropriate progressions like those shown below, or in some more varied manner according to his pleasure and disposition’ (Strunk, , Source Readings, p. 212)Google Scholar.

³⁸ However, the same logic would have suggested that Miserere mei Deus concluded with an extended cadence on E; see Judd, ‘Aspects of Tonal Coherence’, pp. 61–4.

³⁹ On the meaning of such sharp signs, see Bent, M., ‘Diatonic Ficta’, Early Music History, 4 (1984), pp. 1–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Accidentals, Counterpoint and Notation’. Aron's visual orientation is also evident in early citations of the Aggiunta, where he seems to be collecting examples in much the same way as he concludes the Trattato, although as Bent suggests in some of the later Aggiunta examples he does apparently mentally reconstruct the entire musical texture.

⁴⁰ This may be more a reflection of Aron's chronological promixity to repertory than distinct (mis)treatment of genre. The Odhecaton and Canli B are the earliest prints to which Aron refers and the most retrospective in the repertory they convey. He cites only three motets from the contemporaneous Motetti C, relying instead on the Motetti de la corona anthologies of ten to fifteen years later, two volumes of which anticipate the publication of his treatise by only six years.

⁴¹ Powers seems to have read Aron too literally here, implying that he cites Rogamus te/O Maria as an example with a flat signature: ‘When there is a flat signature, however, a la mi re cannot be a psalm-tone pseudo-final; in principle, chant theory does not provide for “transformed” psalm-tones. In a piece with a b-flat in the signature where the species mi/fa/sol//re/mi — (a/b-flat/c//d/e) — and mi/fa/sol/la — (e/f/g/aa or E/F/G/a) — are associated with a termination at a la mi, an assignment to mode 3 or mode 4 would be appropriate “because its regular composition is clearly seen;” since the processo [of a tenor] is not likely to extend up through the higher species of the fourth, however, it is the degree of extension in the lower part of the compass only that will determine the choice between authentic or plagal for such a tenor. According to Aron, it should usually be mode 4, and his citation is an anonymous O Maria rogamus te from Petrucci's Motetti C (Powers, ‘Is Mode Real?’. p. 35).

⁴² See Judd, ‘Modal Types’, pp. 437–41, and ‘Aspects of Tonal Coherence’, pp. 68–92: and Powers, ‘Is Mode Real?’, p. 21.

⁴³ With Glareanus's recognition of A as the final of the Aeolian modal pair, these pieces are all subsumed by that modal category, and indeed Glareanus does cite Josquin's Miserere as an example of the Hypoaeolian mode.

⁴⁴ It is precisely this lack of overlap which is responsible for the unique feature of mi tonality works. See Judd, ‘Aspects of Tonal Coherence’, pp. 206–36.

⁴⁵ That is what Aron describes, but does not actually cite examples for, in ch. 5.

⁴⁶ This is a configuration Aron implicitly recognises in works with a D final and flat signature, but in Aron's modal terms the mi-la fourth is subservient to the re-la fifth.

⁴⁷ Psalm motets are prominent in the most ‘modern’ of Aron's repertory, the Motetti de la corona anthologies (each volume concludes with a psalm motet in addition to several scattered through the volume), and the generic and tonal distinctions represented by Aron's citations may also reflect the chronological distance of the chanson prints he cites. On text types in the Motetti de la corona anthologies, see Gehrenbeck, D.. ‘Motetti de la corona: A Study of Ottaviano Petrucci's Four Last-Known Motet Prints’ (S.M.D. dissertation. Union Theological Seminary, 1970, UMI 7112440), pp. 234–56Google Scholar. In a forthcoming study of motets in German prints 1537–50, I argue for the special association of psalm motets with mi tonalities; see also Judd, ‘Aspects of Tonal Coherence’, pp. 206–36 and 256–82.

⁴⁸ Aron's working method in relation to his sources in the Trattato seems quite transparent, and suggests a shift from the methodical, even systematic approach of ch. 4 to the sorts of cursory ‘glances’ reflected in ch. 7. These latter citations suggest minimal revision, juggling or re-ordering in the preparation of his text as a whole. This style of reading – glancing and collecting – initiates the citations of the Aggiunta, but then again changes to suit his particular purposes as Aron progresses (see Bent, ‘Accidentals, Counterpoint and Notation’).

⁴⁹ Chartier, ‘Texts, Printing, Readings’, and The Culture of Print, ed. Chartier.

⁵⁰ Boorman, S., ‘Early Music Printing: Working for a Specialized Market’, Print and Culture in the Renaissance, ed. Tyson, G. P. and Wagonheim, S. S. (Newark, DE, 1986), p. 222Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 227.

⁵² Ibid., pp. 242–3, n. 26.

⁵³ A discussion of these possibilities is beyond the scope of the present article, but will be considered in a forthcoming monograph, which will explore the issues raised here in the larger context of the relationship of theoretical sources and printed repertories from Aron to Zarlino.

⁵⁴ The exception which proves the rule is Josquin's Miserere, which Glarean says he will not reprint since it is in everyone's hands.

⁵⁵ On Aron's training (or lack thereof) and his apparent inability to obtain positions of any substance, see A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians, ed. Blackburn, , Lowinsky, and Miller, , pp. 74–100Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ ‘Al venerabile Petro non voglio scrive[re] de tale cosa, perché lui è al tuto sdegnato con me. et que[sto] nasce perché io asai cercai retrarlo de la impresa de quello suo tractato de tonis ultimamente da lui impresso, el quale è reuscito proprio come io li scripsi. cioè senza ordine et verità, contra el quale ho scripto apresso a cento foglii, li quali scripti sono apresso di me’ (Ibid., p. 374); ‘I don't want to write to Aaron; he is sore at me because I tried to dissuade him from publishing his treatise on the modes. I wrote him 200 pages about it: just as I predicted, it came out without order and truth’ (Ibid., pp. 375–6).

⁵⁷ ‘One can easily see that Aron, in such varied ways as his use of the vernacular, his desire for a consistent indication of accidentals, his disapproval of conflicting signatures, and his emphasis on a practical terminology, proves himself a Renaissance man in touch with the progressive music thinking of his day’ (Reese, G., Music in the Renaissance, rev. edn (London, 1954), p. 183)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ That is, he apparently lacked access to both the materials and the training, musical and otherwise, available to his theoretical peers.