A term used to describe the harmonic syntax of some 15th-century music in which the vertical interval of a 4th does not appear except as a discord. Non-quartal style is common in three-part music of the generation from about 1450 to 1500, and may be seen as providing a strong contrast with the fauxbourdon style which is made up largely of parallel 6-3 chords (see Faburden and Fauxbourdon).
While the elimination of vertical 4ths may be seen as a novel and revolutionary phenomenon in the second half of the 15th century, it is really a result of the contrapuntal ideals of the 14th- and 15th-century composer combined with the spread of the total ambitus. Fundamental to the music of this period is the counterpoint between the tenor and the discantus: these parts must always form a satisfactory whole, obeying the laws of discant as explained by the theorists. In any 15th-century music the contratenor can be taken away and the remainder is contrapuntally self-sufficient. So the tenor and the discantus could rest on the octave or 5th and move in parallel 6ths or 3rds. A vertical 4th, however, was a discord and could appear only between the contratenor and one of the other parts; if the contratenor lay above the tenor note it would inevitably often form a 4th with the discantus. But after 1450 composers began increasingly to keep the contratenor in a range below that of the tenor while nevertheless retaining the basic discant relationship between tenor and discantus (see ex.1). In such circumstances the contratenor could not form a 4th with either part without producing a second-inversion triadic form – something that was unacceptable in 15th-century music. Essential vertical 4ths are therefore entirely absent. Such music consequently contains no first-inversion triads except in open position (e.g. at the cadence marked in bar 2 of ex.1).
In the 16th century three-part music became rarer and the importance of the contrapuntal self-sufficiency of the discantus–tenor duet was soon forgotten. But when Reese remarked that without the altus Isaac’s Isbruck, ich muss dich lassen ‘would be entirely non-quartal’ he meant simply that the discantus and the tenor retained their 15th-century relation.
ReeseMR
C.W. Fox: ‘Non-Quartal Harmony in the Renaissance’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 33–53
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