Two-part didactic music in printed Italian collections of the ...

1. THE DIDACTIC DUO: AN OVERVIEW
This brief chapter outlines the main arguments that will be expanded in my thesis. Listed
here are the topics I shall discuss and the questions I shall try to answer:
• The didactic function of the duo
• Why were two-part structures preferred in early didactic music?
• The consistency of duo production throughout two centuries
• When and why were duo collections first printed?
• Vocal and instrumental performance
• The duo as composition exercise
• The relationship between the duo and other forms of didactic music.
1.1. THE DIDACTIC FUNCTION OF THE DUO
During the Renaissance and Baroque two-part music had an important role in
didacticism. 1 In fact it was used for all the necessary tasks in training both professional and
amateur musicians. We may summarize these tasks in order of importance thus:
• Teaching note values and solmization
• Practising both vocal and instrumental music, on whatever instrument
• Teaching modality and composition.
Nowadays these tasks are neatly separated and they can even be taught independently. It
is not unusual to find composers who have poor performing skills or, more frequently,
performers with very little knowledge of compositional criteria. During the Renaissance, on the
other hand, the pupil after first learning the staff, clefs, and the Guidonian Hand, started to
sing, possibly two-part music, solmizing, while the teacher performed the other line. In that
way the teacher could follow the pupil’s artistic and technical progress using minimal means,
since two-part music contains all the necessary melody and virtually all the necessary harmony.
The path from first principles to the performance of duos and further is thoroughly described in
1 The first modern scholar to show interest in the didactic function of the duo was Alfred Einstein, in
‘Vincenzo Galilei and the Instructive Duo’, Music & Letters, 18 (1937), 360-68. The first scholar to give a list,
though not exhaustive, of didactic duo collections was Oscar Mischiati, in ‘Saggio di un elenco cronologico della
musica a due voci con scopi didattici stampata nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII’, in Gli insegnamenti del corso fondamentale
nei conservatori di musica: Documento conclusivo del convegno nazionale di studio (Bologna 25-29
aprile 1967) (Rome: Centro Didattico Nazionale per l’Istruzione Artistica, 1968), pp. 33-40. Other important
studies on the subject are the chapter ‘Musica a due voci’ in Dietrich Kämper, La musica strumentale nel
Rinascimento (Turin: ERI, 1976), pp. 101-28 (original edn.: Studien zur instrumentalen Ensemblemusik des 16.
Jahrhunderts in Italien (Köln: Böhlau, 1970)); Paolo Emilio Carapezza, Scuola polifonica siciliana: Musiche
strumentali didattiche (Rome: De Santis, 1971); Howard Mayer Brown and Edward E. Lowinsky, Eustachio
Romano: Musica Duorum: Rome, 1521, MRM, 6 (1975); Lawrence F. Bernstein, and James Haar, Ihan Gero: Il
primo libro de’ madrigali italiani et canzoni francese a due voci, MMR, 1 (1980); and last but not least, the
chapter ‘Sixteenth-Century Madrigalian Duos’ in John Whenham, Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi
(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1982), pp. 49-68 which was the immediate inspiration for my thesis.