is the old Guidonian hexachord. And sure enough, Sennfl pitches his entries so that they alternately count
off the notes of the “soft” hexachord on F and the natural one on C. And then, when the Stollen or opening
phrase is repeated, we see the reason for the odd contrivance: the poem spells out the actual voces of the
hexachord—ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la—each syllable assigned to the proper note. A “literary” device if ever
there was one, it nevertheless could only have occurred (or appealed) to a practical musician. But it’s just
a little joke, and Sennfl apparently did not mind that on all the subsequent stanzas of his song, the rising
scale is detached from its textual referent and no longer has any illustrative role to play. The fast
descending scales in the accompanying parts, some of which are in the same hexachord positions as the
thematic ascending scales, also stop being illustrative after the first stanza, becoming instead one of many
superb craftsmanly touches in the consummately worked-out texture.
EX. 17-6 Ludwig Sennfl, Lust hab ich ghabt zuer Musica, mm. 1–15