Music Practice Commons^™

Improvisation In Vocal Contrapuntal Pedagogy: An Appraisal Of Italian Theoretical Treatises Of The Sixteenth And Early Seventeenth Centuries, Valerio Morucci

Performance Practice Review

The extemporaneous application of pre-assimilated compositional paradigms into musical performance retained a central position in the training of Medieval and Renaissance musicians, specifically within the context of Western polyphonic practice. Recent scholarship has shown the significance of memorization in the oral transmission of plainchant and early polyphony. Attention has been particularly directed to aspects of orality and literacy in relation to “composition” (the term here applies to both written and oral), and, at the same time, studies correlated to fifteenth and sixteenth century contrapuntal theory, have mainly focused on the works of single theorists. The information we possess regarding improvised …