Cadential Syntax and Tonal Expectation in Late Sixteenth-Century Homophony

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the emergence of tonal languages in late-sixteenth-century homophony by considering the ways in which phrase structure, meter, and cadential rhetoric produce trajectories of expectation. Focusing on the English ballett and the French air de cour, two homophonic, secular, vernacular genres produced according to wildly different aesthetic criteria, it demonstrates how composers’ regulation of harmony and syntax transformed contrapuntal languages into tonal ones. Early tonal languages are thus defined here by the trajectories of expectation that such regulation establishes.