Mapping the Gamut: Solmization Pedagogy, Tonal Compass, and 16th-Century Counterpoint

Renaissance musicians learned to sing using hexachordal solmization, a precursor to our modern solfège systems. Solmization instruction books often describe their goal as building “musical understanding” in their students—something deeper and richer than merely training singers to sight-read eQectively. This talk explores what musical understanding might have looked like in 16th-century polyphony, arguing that solmization represents implicit knowledge about tonal space and how to navigate it. Using examples drawn from Palestrina’s masses and motets, we will see how attention to solmization makes Palestrina’s tonal strategies transparent, and how solmization shaped the tonal system of 16th-century music more broadly.

Megan Kaes Long is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin Conservatory. Megan’s research focuses on sixteenth-century vocal music and the discursive context that surrounds this repertoire; much of her work engages with the history of pitch and pitch structures, broadly construed. Her book Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectation at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century was published by Oxford University Press in 2020, and won the Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award. Megan’s articles have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, and Open Access Musicology, and her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Megan is also the outgoing editor of SMT-V and serves on the editorial board of JMT.