HOW CONTROVERSIES ARISE (AND WHAT THEY REVEAL)
The essential difference between these two concepts of pitch organization, the radicalness of the change
from the one form of cadential articulation to the other and the implications of that change, remain matters
of debate among historians. They can be (and have been) tendentiously exaggerated, and also
tendentiously minimized. Clearly, though, whatever the eventual implications of the V–I bass, its fifteenth-
century introduction (like many other retrospectively momentous turning points in music history) was no
conscious revolution. To call “tonality” a radical break with past thinking, an inspired invention, or (most
telling of all) an unanticipated, world-transforming discovery is clearly to borrow without critical
reflection from that all-embracing concept of the “Renaissance” that, unless vigilantly examined, can all
too easily prejudice the study of fifteenth-century music.
Thus to look for a musical “Age of Discovery” to match the near-contemporary exploits of Columbus
and Magellan is attractive but facile, just as it is facile to compare the “discovery” of “tonal” harmony
based on the circle of fifths with the “discovery” of perspective by the painters of “Renaissance” Italy. In
neither case was something discovered. Both discoveries were inventions. The invention of techniques
for rendering a three-dimensional perspective by locating the viewer’s eye in space is easily explained,
moreover, as an attempt to imitate nature—that is, our natural way of seeing. That way of seeing existed
before there was a technique for representing it on canvas. But what is the comparable preexisting natural
model for tonal harmony? Natural acoustical resonance, some have argued, with reasonable but limited
justification.
Yet it would be equally tendentious to minimize the difference between a harmonic syntax based on
the concept of occursus—“closing in” on a unison or octave—and one based on fifth relations. On the
basis of virtually all the music that we hear in daily life, we have learned to assign implied hierarchical
functions to chords as well as to scale degrees. Composers have long since learned how to establish these
harmonic (or, as we call them, “tonal”) hierarchies, as well as dissolve them, and to move from one such
ordering (through a process called modulation) to another.
These habits of the musical ear, and the techniques to which they gave rise, were a long time taking
shape. A fully elaborated tonal system was not in place until the other end of the two-century time frame
initiated by the change in cadential norms. By the late seventeenth century, the V–I close was only the
most decisive member of a pervading system of fifth relations (the “circle of fifths”) that governed
harmonic relations at many levels. Equally important (and equally different from earlier practice), the
tonal system was no longer dependent for its effects on strict linear voice leading.
For us, who live more than five hundred years later, what was for the fifteenth century the distant
future has become the distant past. We are therefore much more fully aware than anyone could have been
at the time of the range of implication the new cadential structure carried within it. And so we are
justified in seeking the origins of modern harmonic practice at a period when that practice could not yet
be predicted. The fact that some of the questions we now ask about fifteenth-century harmony would not
have been meaningful to fifteenth-century musicians does not lessen their interest or their meaningfulness
to us.
It should be clear, then, that to deny the perceptual reality of functional harmonic practice simply
because it originated “unintentionally,” as an incidental contrapuntal formula, is to commit the “genetic
fallacy,” as it is called, a rather hackneyed logical error that equates origins with essence. (According to
the genetic fallacy no contrapuntal combination can ever become a harmonic norm, no drinking song can
ever become a national anthem, no Russian composer can ever write an Italian opera, no African can ever
become an American.) Committed innocently, an error is something from which one can learn; committed