Abstract In his formative essays questioning the “reality” of mode as a precompositional framework, Harold Powers goes only so far as to cite the “tonal type” (system, clefs, and ending sonority) of his many examples without engaging with the internal workings of the pieces. Powers argues that the works—most of them from modal cycles—were designed expressly to serve as outward “representations” of the modes, and that mode is not an intrinsic quality. These studies, however, seem to approach the music with predetermined conclusions and, hence, single out aspects of the pieces and contemporary theories that support this particular view. Powers relies almost exclusively on Pietro Aron’s problematic theories of polyphonic modality, while overlooking the more practical and sound teachings of Aron’s predecessors and contemporaries. Nevertheless, Powers’s work has had an outsized influence on the perception of mode in music scholarship in recent decades, despite its dealing with modal behavior typically in a superficial and sometimes misleading fashion. This study offers a reevaluation of Powers’s analytical judgments and reasonings on mode to shed a deeper and less partial light on the internal workings of several of his principal examples, including Palestrina’s Vergine bella cycle (1581), Tylman Susato’s Le premier livre des chansons à deux ou à troix parties (1544), Cipriano de Rore’s First Book of five-voice madrigals (1542), and other works by Isaac, Compère, and Josquin. These findings offer valuable new insight not only into these specific pieces and Powers’s portrayal of them, but also into the nature of mode itself and its role in the musical work, thereby challenging skeptical views of mode accepted in mainstream musicology today.
Seth J. Coluzzi (Thu,) studied this question.