EX. 15-12D Passamezzo modernoEX. 15-12E RuggieroUntil Ortiz published his handbook in 1553, all of this activity had gone on behind the curtain of the
unwritten. Ortiz brought it comprehensively into the visible world of notation for the first time, whence it
proliferated hugely in ways that would in time utterly transform literate practice. We have only to observe
that the Italian word for poetry sung over a ground bass like the Romanesca (Ex. 15-12b) or the Ruggiero
(Ex. 15-12e) was aria, or that the harmonic scheme itself was then called an aria per cantare (literally a
“space for singing”), to realize the extent of that transformation, since from the seventeenth century
onward the aria has been one of the ubiquitous genres of “art” music in the West.
But the creation of new genres is only a part, and not even the most important part, of the revolution in
Western music-making wrought by the use of grounds. For grounds are the first indisputably harmony-
driven force in the history of Western music-making. They are the first musical frameworks, in other
words, to be defined a priori in harmonic and cadential terms, hence the first musical structures to which
the modern term “tonal” can be fairly applied. Their tonality in the mid-sixteenth century was not yet
precisely congruent with modern major-minor tonality. The passamezzo moderno progression employed
by Ortiz in his Recercada segunda (Ex. 15-13) is still unmistakably “Mixolydian” in its use of a triad
built up over F, a note that is not even part of the modern G-major scale. And yet it makes its cadence
through a modern G-major dominant chord (even preceded by the subdominant), for which purpose a
leading tone (F#) had to be imported from outside the “pure” modal scale. Ex. 15-13 shows the first two
of six run-throughs of the ground.
EX. 15-13 Diego Ortiz, Recercada segunda (on the passamezzo moderno)