Another lesson from Lassus: using computers to analyse counterpoint

• Published in: Early music 2015-11, Vol.43 (4), p.577-586
• Main Authors: Schubert, Peter, Cumming, Julie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computers; EARLY MUSIC AND MODERN TECHNOLOGY II; Electronic music; Interval arithmetic; Musicology
• ISSN: 0306-1078; 1741-7260
• DOI: 10.1093/em/cav088

The authors report on experiments they have run using the computer to search a small corpus of Renaissance pieces (the famous Lassus duos of 1577) for recurring contrapuntal combinations. They liken these combinations (or 'modules' as Jessie Ann Owens has called them) to words in a text, and the process of finding them, to work done by linguists such as John Sinclair on large corpora of text. The program used was devised by a team at McGill University as part of the ELVIS ('Electronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions') project. The interval successions are identified by the vertical intervals and the melodic motions that connect them, in the manner of Tinctoris's counterpoint treatise (1477), which illustrates most of the possible ways two vertical intervals can be connected. The authors find that some short interval successions appear, as we would expect, in repetitions of thematic material (i.e. as parts of soggetti associated with specific text phrases). Others, however, occur in apparently run-of-the-mill counterpoint: in the middle of words, in the middle of melismas, across phrase boundaries and embellished in a variety of ways. These often exhibit surprising consistency as to semitone position and possible modal associations.