s below and above
middle C). The occurrence of notes other than these rendered a mode artificial.
Marchetto cited specific melodies to illustrate all these types.(fl 1305–19). Italian music theorist and composer. In his Lucidarium in arte musice plane he developed the theory of ‘permutation’ to account for the chromatic progressions common in music of his time, proposed a division of the whole tone into five equal parts that proved a milestone in the history of tuning, and developed a comprehensive theory of mode that accommodated melodies irregular in range or construction. His Pomerium in arte musice mensurate, the earliest major treatise dealing systematically with a mensural system that permitted a duple as well as a triple division of the breve, became the foundation of the mensural theory of the Italian Trecento.
There is documentary evidence that a ‘Marchetus’ was appointed teacher of the boys at Padua Cathedral early in 1305, held that office still in July 1306, and donated the income from a benefice to the cathedral in the summer of 1307. According to colophons of the treatises, he began the Lucidarium in Cesena and completed it in Verona; he completed the Pomerium in Cesena. On the basis of circumstances and persons mentioned in the dedications of the treatises, Strunk determined that Marchetto wrote the Lucidarium in 1317 or 1318 and the Pomerium shortly thereafter but no later than 1319; these dates stand despite alternate proposals by Vecchi and Gallo. The date of the Brevis compilatio, an abridgement of the Pomerium, is not known. Gallo attributed the motet Ave regina celorum/Mater innocencie/[Ite missa est] (ed. in PMFC, xii, 1976) to Marchetto on the basis of the acrostic MARCVM PADVANVM in its duplum; attributions of other compositions to him on the basis of stylistic similarity to this motet or correspondences with theories expounded in his treatises are conjectural.
The Lucidarium and the Pomerium are cast in a scholastic mould, with their statements qualified and elaborated through dubitationes, responsiones, contradictiones, solutiones and dilatationes. The Lucidarium surveys the theory of musica plana taken in the broadest sense of the term: the gamut and its registers, the fundamentals of non-mensural notation, mutation, permutation and chromatic signs, intervals and their ratios, counterpoint, tuning, the modes, and philosophy of music. Although conventional in many ways, it is boldly innovative in others. Marchetto was the first medieval theorist to discuss chromaticism, introducing the term ‘permutation’ to account for the chromatic progressions that flourished in Italian polyphony of the early Trecento and could not be accommodated by the conventional system of mutation between hexachords. Marchetto proposed dividing the Pythagorean whole tone (represented by the ratio 9:8) into five equal parts (comprising the diesis, 1/5 tone; semitonium enarmonicum, 2/5 tone; semitonium diatonicum, 3/5 tone; semitonium cromaticum, 4/5 tone). This procedure was impossible within the scope of Pythagorean arithmetic, which did not allow for the geometric division of any superparticular ratio. Marchetto's proposal avoided the complex ratios of the Pythagorean major and minor semitones and provided a conceptual representation of a pair of semitones more markedly different in size from these. Marchetto claimed his division could be used where musica ficta rules demanded the closest approach to a perfect consonance; he indicated its use by a special chromatic sign called falsa musica.
Marchetto
developed a doctrine of mode flexible enough to encompass chant melodies
irregular in range or construction. He regarded pentachord and tetrachord
species, and their intermediations (interruptiones), as of greater
importance in determining mode than final or range. A mode, he claimed, is
either perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, or mixed depending on whether its range
is respectively normal, narrow, wide in the direction away from the mode's
authentic or plagal partner, or wide in the direction of that of the partner. A
fifth category, ‘mingled’ (commixtus), applied where the mode in
question showed qualities of a mode other than its authentic or plagal partner.
Marchetto described a mode as either regular, irregular, or ‘acquired’
according to whether its pentachord and tetrachord species were orientated
respectively towards the final, the cofinal (the note a 5th above the final),
or some other note; the species could be orientated towards any note so long as
they were constructed using the regular notes of the gamut (the naturals plus
the Bs below and above
middle C). The occurrence of notes other than these rendered a mode artificial.
Marchetto cited specific melodies to illustrate all these types.
The Pomerium is significant as the earliest major treatise dealing systematically with a mensural system which permitted a duple as well as a triple division of the breve. After discussing the qualities of downward and upward tails, rests, the dot, and the chromatic sign he called falsa musica, Marchetto showed how a breve could be divided into two to twelve semibreves in tempus perfectum, downward and upward tails being attached to the semibreves where necessary to differentiate them in length. In tempus imperfectum a breve could be divided into two to eight semibreves, their lengths again differentiated by tails where necessary. Though Marchetto cited Franco frequently throughout the treatise, the Franconian background of the Pomerium is especially evident in the closing discussions of discant, ligatures, the plica and the rhythmic modes. Marchetto, however, expanded on Franco by describing modes of imperfect time alongside those of perfect time (even allowing for the alternation of perfect and imperfect longs); his description of what has come to be called the ‘same-pitch’ ligature (see Long's emendation of Vecchi's Pomerium text; see also Nádas) demonstrated the possibility in Italian Trecento notation of syncopation not only within but across breve units. Marchetto's discussion in the Pomerium of the differences between French and Italian practice provides crucial information for deciphering the rhythm not only of Italian music of the early 14th century but of contemporaneous French music as well. The Brevis compilatio covers the same material as the Pomerium, but more succinctly and without its scholastic refinements.
The Pomerium became the foundation of Italian Trecento mensural theory, which over the next 100 years developed along the lines set down by Marchetto. Although Italian mensuration was moribund by the early Quattrocento, at least four of the seven surviving copies of the Pomerium date from that century, one of them copied by Gaffurius as late as 1473, another owned by Giovanni Del Lago.
The Lucidarium, on the other hand, survives complete or nearly so in 15 manuscripts (truncated in three more), the latest dating from 1509. These include the manuscript copied by Gaffurius and that owned by Del Lago; the latter made corrections in his, and quoted from it in letters of the 1520s, 30s and 40s. The wider distribution of the Lucidarium was certainly due in part to theorists' interest in Marchetto's epochal division of the Pythagorean whole tone into five equal parts: the division showed that Marchetto had ceased to regard the whole tone as a ratio (and one impossible of geometric division) and had begun to regard it as a quantity, divisible in several ways. Had this departure from the strictures of Pythagorean arithmetic not been made, the manifold experiments in tuning and temperament that flourished over the next centuries would not have been possible. Indeed, the conservative Prosdocimus de Beldemandis (Tractatus musice speculative, 1425) complained that Marchetto's doctrine of tuning had spread throughout Italy and beyond its borders; Italian theory manuscripts of the 14th and 15th centuries include many references to dieses of 1/5 tone and enharmonic, diatonic and chromatic semitones; Tinctoris defined these intervals in his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium; 14th-, 15th- and 16th-century theorists followed Marchetto's lead, proposing other fractional divisions of the whole tone (e.g. the Berkeley Anonymous, Ciconia, Gaffurius, Burzio, Aaron, Vicentino). But by far the most influential of Marchetto's theories was that of mode. The Lucidarium had spawned two digests of its modal doctrine by the end of the 15th century, each of which developed its own manuscript tradition; Marchetto's complex of perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, mixed and mingled modes surfaced in dozens of later treatises (e.g. those of Prosdocimus, Ugolino, Tinctoris, Burzio, Gaffurius, Bonaventura da Brescia, Wollick and Lanfranco); the doctrine of mixed and mingled modes proved particularly useful to those theorists who attempted to explain polyphonic music in terms of mode. On the basis of his doctrines of tuning and especially of mode, Marchetto must be considered the most influential music theorist in Italy between Guido of Arezzo and Tinctoris.
Lucidarium in arte musice plane (MS, 1317/18), ed. in GerbertS, iii, 64–121; ed. and trans. J. Herlinger (Chicago, 1985)
Pomerium in arte musice mensurate (MS, c1318), ed. in GerbertS, iii, 121–87, and CSM, vi (1961)
Brevis compilatio (MS, after 1318), ed. in CoussemakerS, iii, 1–12; ed. in Vecchi (1956)
Grove6 (‘Mode’, H.S. Powers)
SpataroC
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N. Pirrotta: ‘Marchettus de Padua and the Italian Ars Nova’, MD, ix (1955), 57–71
K.W. Niemöller: ‘Zur Tonus-Lehre der italienischen Musiktheorie des ausgehenden Mittelalters’, KJb, xl (1956), 23–32
G. Vecchi: ‘Su la composizione del Pomerium di Marchetto da Padova e la Brevis compilatio’, Quadrivium, i (1956), 153–208
F.A. Gallo: La teoria della notazione in Italia dalla fine del XIII all’inizio del XV secolo (Bologna, 1966)
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I. Adler: ‘Fragment hébraïque d’un traité attribué à Marchetto de Padoue’, Yuval, ii (Jerusalem, 1971), 1–10
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J. Herlinger: ‘Marchetto's Division of the Whole Tone’, JAMS, xxxiv (1981), 193–216
M.P. Long: Musical Tastes in 14th-Century Italy: Notational Styles, Scholarly Traditions, and Historical Circumstances (diss., New York U., 1981)
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J.L. Nádas: The Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony: Manuscript Production and Scribal Practices in Italy at the End of the Middle Ages (diss., New York U., 1985)
K. Berger: Musica Ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflections in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge, 1987)
D. Pesce: The Affinities and Medieval Transposition (Bloomington, IN, 1987)
J. Rahn: ‘Marchetto's Theory of Commixture and Interruptions’, Music Theory Spectrum, ix (1987), 117–35
J. Herlinger: ‘What Trecento Music Theory Tells Us’, Explorations in Music, the Arts and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. E. Narmour and R.A. Solie (Stuyvesant, NY, 1988), 177–97
H. Ristory: Post-franconische Theorie und Früh-Trecento: Die Petrus de Cruce-Neuerungen und ihre Bedeutung für die italienische Mensuralnotenschrift zu Beginn des 14. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1988)
J. Herlinger: ‘Marchetto's Influence: the Manuscript Evidence’, Music Theory and its Sources: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. A. Barbera (Notre Dame, IN, 1990), 235–58
JAN HERLINGER