of “closure,” or phrase-ending in polyphonic music, the necessary determiner of cadences, and eventually
the primary shaper of musical form. As befits something so important to musical structure and perception
—to musical “language,” in effect—it was eventually standardized in practice, and particularly in
teaching, as “laws of counterpoint.”
Still and all, the note-against-note harmony of the earliest surviving three-part discants, like Verbum
patris humanatur, is the kind of harmony that is easily worked out in the act of “harmonizing”—that is, by
ear—and depicts in writing, like a kind of snapshot, an informal oral practice of evident long standing,
and with many descendants in today’s world. There is no telling how far back in time such practices may
extend.