1

Studies in the History of the Cadence

Caleb Michael Mutch

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2015

2

2015

Caleb Michael Mutch

All rights reserved

3

ABSTRACT

Studies in the History of the Cadence

Caleb Michael Mutch

This dissertation traces the development of the concept of the cadence in the history of

music theory. It proposes a division of the history of cadential theorizing into three periods,

and elucidates these periods with four studies of particularly significant doctrines of musical

closure. The first of these periods is the pre-history of the cadence, which lasted from the dawn

of medieval music theory through the fifteenth century. During this time theorists such as John

of Affligem (ca. 1100), whose writings are the subject of the first study, developed an analogy

between music and the classical doctrine of punctuation to begin to describe how pieces and

their constituent parts can conclude. The second period begins at the turn of the sixteenth

century, with the innovative theory expounded by the authors of the Cologne school, which

forms the subject of the second study. These authors identified the phenomenon of musical

closure as an independent concept worthy of theoretical investigation, and established the first

robustly polyphonic cadential doctrine to account for it. For the following three centuries

theorists frequently made new contributions to the theorizing of the cadence in their writings,

as exemplified by the remarkable taxonomy of cadences in the work of Johann Wolfgang

Caspar Printz (1641-1717), the subject of the third study. By the early nineteenth century,

however, cadential theorizing had largely ossified. Instead, authors such as A. B. Marx (1795-

1866), on whose writings the fourth study focuses, only drew upon the concept of the cadence

4

as was necessary in their treatments of newly emerging theoretical concerns, especially musical

form.

In order to elucidate and corroborate this historical framework, the dissertations

chapters undertake close readings of the doctrines of musical closure put forth by John of

Affligem, the Cologne school, Printz, and Marx. The theoretical contributions contained in

these sources are interpreted and contextualized in light of the non-musical discourses upon

which they draw, and through interrogation of the relationship between the cadential ideas

they espouse and contemporaneous musical practice. In doing so, the dissertation reveals

discontinuities in the concepts and functions of cadential doctrines in historical music theories,

and provides new possibilities for understanding and experiencing musical structure.

i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF EXAMPLES ................................................................................................................................ iv

LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................................... vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................................................... vii

INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1. MUSICAL CLOSURE, GRAMMATICO-RHETORICAL DOCTRINE,

AND CHANT: JOHN OF AFFLIGEM ..................................................................................... 14

1.1 The Analysis of Speech Structure in Classical Rhetoric ........................................................ 16

1.2 The Grammatical Doctrine of Punctuation in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages ......... 24

1.3 Grammatical and Rhetorical Elements in Musical Discourse before John of Affligem ....... 34

1.4 John of Affligem and the Application of the Distinctiones to Music ....................................... 46

1.5 The Transmission of the Doctrine ................................................................................................ 66

1.6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 70

CHAPTER 2. POLYPHONIC CLOSURE IN THE RENAISSANCE:

THE COLOGNE SCHOOL ........................................................................................................ 72

2.1 The Term Clausula Formalis ........................................................................................................... 75

2.2 Precedents of the Cologne Schools Theory ............................................................................... 85

2.3 The First Stage: Three-voice Cadences in the Opus aureum and Musica ................................. 91

ii

2.4 The Second Stage: Four-voice Cadences in the Musica and Tetrachordum musices ............. 102

2.5 Triadic Tonality and Cochlaeuss Sixth Rule ........................................................................... 106

2.6 Cadential Doctrine and Compositional Practice ..................................................................... 122

2.7 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 137

CHAPTER 3. MID-BAROQUE CLAUSULA DOCTRINE:

PRINTZ AND HIS PREDECESSORS ..................................................................................... 140

3.1 German Cadence Theory before Printz .................................................................................... 142

3.2 A Ramist Theory of Cadence ...................................................................................................... 154

3.3 Printzs contribution .................................................................................................................... 165

3.3.1 Voice-specific Cadences ....................................................................................................... 166

3.3.2 Cadence and Mode: Propria/Peregrina .............................................................................. 171

3.3.3 Perfect/Imperfect Cadences ................................................................................................. 175

3.3.4 Totalis/Dissecta ...................................................................................................................... 177

3.3.5 Desiderans/Acquiescens....................................................................................................... 181

3.3.6 The Sedes ................................................................................................................................. 192

3.3.7 An Inchoate Theory of Phrases ........................................................................................... 199

3.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 202

iii

CHAPTER 4. A. B. MARX, BIOLOGY, FORM, AND CADENCE .................................................. 205

4.1 The Roles of Cadence in Music-theoretical Discourse before A. B. Marx ............................ 206

4.2 A. B. Marxs Conception of Cadence ......................................................................................... 216

4.3 Form and Cadence in Marxs Music Theory ............................................................................ 225

4.4 Organicism and Marxs Theory of Form .................................................................................. 238

4.5 Changes in the Nineteenth Century .......................................................................................... 247

4.6 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 258

BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................................... 264

APPENDIX .............................................................................................................................................. 283

iv

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example 1.1 Tribus miraculis ornatum diem, antiphon for the feast of Epiphany ................... 44

Example 1.2 Petrus autem servabatur, antiphon for the feast Vincula Petri ............................... 53

Example 1.3 Homo quidam erat dives et,

antiphon for the feast of the second Sunday after Pentecost ................................................ 59

Example 1.4 Erat Petrus dormiens inter, antiphon for the feast Vincula Petri ............................ 61

Example 1.5 Transeuntes autem primam et, antiphon for the feast Vincula Petri ...................... 64

Example 1.6 Ecce nomen Domini, antiphon for the feast Nativitas Domini ................................ 67

Example 1.7 Melodic ending formulas from Wollick, Opus aureum, f. F4v ..................................... 69

Example 2.1 Three-voice clausulae from [Cochlaeus], Musica (ca. 1505), f. C5r ............................. 96

Example 2.2 A two-voice clausula from Ornithoparchus,

Musice active micrologus, IV.4, f. L4v ......................................................................................... 97

Example 2.3 Clausulae on mi ............................................................................................................... 100

Example 2.4 Four-voice clausulae from Cochlaeus, Musica (1507), f. F4v ..................................... 103

Example 2.5 Cochlaeuss Sixth Rule ................................................................................................... 107

Example 2.6 Additional type of mi cadence from Galliculus, Isagoge, f. C3v ................................ 121

Example 2.7 Schlick, Mein Lieb ist weg ......................................................................................... 126

Example 2.8 Isaac, I[nn]sbruck, ich muss dich lassen .................................................................. 130

v

Example 3.1 Four-voice clausula from Johannes Cochlaeus,

Tetrachordum musices, f. F1r (1512) ........................................................................................... 143

Example 3.2 Ramus, Dial. lib. duo, x. (Cambridge: John Hayes, 1672 edition) ............................. 158

Example 3.3 Printz, Phrynis Mitilenaeus, I.8 (from the 1696 edition) .............................................. 164

Example 3.4 A Cadence on mi, from Phrynis, I.8, 43, p. 31 ............................................................ 174

Example 3.5 Phrygian-related cadences ............................................................................................ 185

Example 3.6 Heinrich Schtz, Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, SWV 235 (Dresden, 1661) .... 191

Example 3.7 The Sedes Subintellecta, from Phrynis, I.8, 31, p. 29. .................................................. 194

Example 3.8 Caesuras, from Phrynis, I.8, 57, p. 33. ......................................................................... 200

Example 4.1 Marxs Two Harmonic Masses ..................................................................................... 217

Example 4.2 Marxs Trugschluss .......................................................................................................... 221

Example 4.3 A synopsis of Marx's theory of form ............................................................................ 227

Example 4.4 Marxs Satz and Periode .................................................................................................. 229

Example 4.5 Marxs Period and the Piece in Two Parts .................................................................. 231

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1 Cadence Categories in Precursors of Printz .................................................................... 144

Figure 3.2 Ramus's Cadential Types.................................................................................................... 163

Figure 3.3 Clausulas with respect to mode ....................................................................................... 171

Figure 3.4 Totalis and Dissecta cadences ........................................................................................... 177

Figure 4.1 Marxs Fourth and Fifth Rondo Forms ............................................................................ 232

Figure 4.2 Marxs Fourth and Fifth Rondo Forms ............................................................................ 233

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Of all the help and encouragement I have receive along the dissertating road, David

Cohens has been the most formative. He has been a sage guide to the recesses of historical

music theory, lavish with his feedback, and selfless with his time. My thanks to him are many,

and profound. Benjamin Steege has also been a great help in my latter years of graduate school,

and Ive benefited from his graciousness, attention to argumentation, and perspective on the

field. Im very grateful for his support.

There are many other people from the Columbia community I wish to thank. Joseph

Dubiel and Ellie Hisama, for guiding my way through the program; Elaine Sisman and Susan

Boynton, for their support and their feedback on my work; Anne Gefell and Gabriela Kumar,

for their unfailing goodwill in the departmental office; and Elizabeth Davis and Nick Patterson,

for their consummate librarianship. To Kate Heidemann, David Gutkin, Nicholas Chong, Ben

Hansberry, Will Mason, and the rest of my grad school colleagues, thanks for your camaraderie.

Id also like to acknowledge the valuable experiences I had outside the walls of my

school. The classes I took with William Rothstein inform me both as a historian and an analyst,

and my dissertation is much the better for his presence on my committee. Nathan Martin has

been a wonderful mixture of mentor, colleague, and friend, and I thank him for his

encouragement and generosity. Thanks, too, to Richard Kurth for piquing my interest in the

history of music theory, and for his mentoring over the years.

To my family, both by birth and marriage, my deepest gratitude for your unflagging

support and encouragement. Most of all, to my wife, Sarah Godbehere, thank you for your

steadfast loving-kindness. Your forebearance these last years has meant the world.

1

INTRODUCTION

Of all the uses to which humans have put music, of all the qualities and potencies they

have imputed to it, there is perhaps no attribution loftier than the traditional doctrine of the

music of the spheres. Beginning with Platos famous Myth of Er in his Republic and lasting even

until Keplers day, philosophers, astronomers, and musically inclined scholars held that the

celestial bodies emit sounds which create a harmonious concord.1 Since the deity was held to

motivate the spheres revolutions in their fixed, sempiternal courses,2 the celestial bodies

supposedly sounded their music endlessly, ever moving seamlessly from the end of one orbital

revolution to the beginning of the next. Yet this eternal, immutable perfection cannot be

experienced in the sublunary realm. As the fifth-century B.C.E. philosopher-scientist Alcmaeon

put it, Humans perish on account of this: they are unable to connect the beginning to the end.3

At the end of the course of our allotted years of life, we are unable to return to infancy and

begin again. Similarly, all music here on earth must come to an end.4

1 Plato, Republic, 617b.

2 . . . summus ipse deus, arcens et continens ceteros in quo sunt infixi illi qui uoluuntur stellarum

cursus sempiterni (Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, IV). All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

3 ,

(Alcmaeon, frag. 2 [H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1, 6th

edn. {Berlin: Weidmann, 1951}, 215]).

4 It is worth noting that even the musical performance that may come closest to escaping the

bonds of finitude, the rendition of John Cages As Slow as Possible being performed in Halberstadt,

Germany, is invariably described in the popular press in terms of when it will conclude (see, for instance,

Maura Judkis, Worlds longest concert will last 639 years, The Washington Post [November 21, 2011],

and Daniel J. Wakin, John Cage's Long Music Composition in Germany Changes a Note, The New York

Times [May 6, 2006]).

2

This dissertation takes as its subject musical closure, and the diversity of ways in which,

over the centuries, writers on music have engaged with the phenomenon of the conclusions of

musical pieces and their constituent parts. It proposes a new narrative of how conceptions of

the cadence developed from the eleventh through nineteenth centuries, by drawing upon

detailed analyses of crucial doctrines of cadence found in music theory texts, and by comparing

those ideas with contemporaneous musical compositions. In doing so, it presents material that

will be of interest to a range of scholars. Those who focus on the analysis of compositions will

gain fresh insights into past conceptions of musical closure that may provide access to new

possibilities for hearing a compositions musical structure and sectional divisions. For

historians of theory, the dissertation offers a new interpretive framework for the concept of

cadence, comprising three previously unidentified periods of cadential theorizing with

important discontinuities of doctrine and practice separating them. As for modern Formenlehre,

many recent theories of form refer back to eighteenth and nineteenth-century doctrines of

formal design, either to demonstrate the superiority of contemporary perspectives, or to

challenge current theory to take into consideration historically-sensitive ways of understanding

formal types.5 Yet these sorts of appeals to the past have not occurred with respect to the

concept of cadence. To crafters of modern theories of form, this dissertation presents

opportunities both to be challenged by older conceptions of closure and to make well informed

decisions about when to depart from those conceptions in favor of modern understandings of

5 James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2006), 605; Scott Burnham, The Second Nature of Sonata Form, in Music Theory and Natural Order

from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117, n. 8.

3

cadence. Discussion of the broader intellectual contexts of these cadential doctrines shows how

the latter have not depended solely on developments in musical practice, but were also

influenced and shaped by concepts and methodological procedures drawn from their wider

intellectual environment.

Before proceeding further, a few words about the terminology of cadence and closure

are in order. The meaning of the words cadence and closure (and related terms in other

languages) varies significantly in different periods and places, and one of this dissertations

endeavors is to tease out the nuances of such terminology in different texts. For now, however,

let the term musical closure provisionally be understood to refer to the general function of

marking the conclusion of a formal unit (or other stretch of musical utterance) and establishing

to some degree a definite impression of arrival and/or conclusion, by whatever means are

appropriate to the style of the music in question.6 Cadence, in contrast, here refers to a

stereotyped succession of at least two sonorities, normally composed of three or more voices,

that produces the effect of closure, as just defined. Thus, monophonic chant cannot have

cadences, but does have musical closure. The related idea of ending will be used to

differentiate a conclusion that is not motivated by the music before it from the concepts of

closure and cadence, which are understood to close off some amount of preceding material

(though the precise amount that is thereby concluded is often ambiguous).

That is not to say, however, that all theories of cadence advance this understanding of

the concept. Indeed, many cadential theorists focus either on characterizing the function of

6 My understanding of closure here is similar to Mark Anson-Cartwrights first definition of

closure, but without his restriction to the tonal repertoire (Concepts of Closure in Tonal Music: A Critical

Study, Theory and Practice 32 [2007]: 3).

4

concluding formal units, or on describing the musical configurations which constitute cadential

progressions. That is to say, they dedicate their attention to the questions of where cadences are

made, or how they are constructed. Our provisional definition of the cadence encompasses both

of these facets, of course, but it is important to note that most innovative cadential doctrines

show signs of originality in only one of these two areas, and leave the other either unstated or in

an entirely traditional form. Thus, the questions of how and where cadences are made can cast

significant light on theorists priorities and contributions, and we will return to them as we

consider different historical theories of cadence.

The contribution I seek to make in this dissertation will become clearer in the light of a

review of the scholarly literature of the past few decades that has addressed the concept of

cadence. The vast majority of this literature may be fruitfully analyzed as falling into three

broad categories: wide-ranging encyclopedia articles, analyses of musical closure in a given

repertoire, and studies of cadential doctrine in particular periods. The most thorough example

of the first category is a pair of related articles on Clausula and Kadenz by Siegfried

Schmalzriedt in the Handwrterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie.7 Schmalzriedts purpose is to

describe all the ways in which the given terms have been used over the centuries. The

crowning achievement of his articles is a table of 81 terms in Latin and Italian, followed by an

exposition of what the terms mean and who employed them. His treatment offers a valuable

overview of a great number of the meanings with which the terms clausula and cadence

(and their cognates) have been associated over the centuries, and he does not neglect peripheral

7 Siegfried Schmalzriedt, Clausula and Kadenz in Handwrterbuch der musikalischen

Terminologie, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1972).

5

uses of the terms, such as the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century tendency to describe a

trill-like melodic ornament as a cadence.8 Yet the concision of Schmalzriedts articles entails

several deficiencies: his focus on providing definitions for terminology minimizes the extent to

which the conception of a single term, like clausula formalis can change over the course of the

nearly three centuries in which the phrase was used. Additionally, Schmalzriedts articles are

unreliable witnesses to matters of chronology and intellectual priority: the sources Schmalzriedt

cites to demonstrate his terms often transmit the cadential doctrine of earlier theorists in nearly

identical form, yet Schmalzriedt rarely acknowledges the antecedent sources, resulting in a

misleading impression as to just when the usage in question first appeared.9

The second category of literature consists of a few works that seek to theorize the

practice of musical closure in particular corpora of compositions. One example of this approach

is an article by Kevin Moll, in which he proposes a list of ten defining elements of cadences in

French mass settings of the fourteenth century.10 He considers aspects of the music such as text

setting, pulse, counterpoint, and consonance. By appealing to his defining elements, Moll

makes claims for where and whether one should understand cadences to occur in this music.

His criteria also allow him to apply the label of cadence to progressions that are not normally

identified as fourteenth-century cadences by modern scholars. Based on this, Moll concludes

8 See, for example, Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, III, 137-9, and tienne Louli, lments

ou principes de musique, 67.

9 Schmalzriedt often cites Walthers Lexikon to define terms first proposed more than fifty years

earlier by Printz in his Phrynis Mitilenaeus, and also cites Ornithoparchuss nearly verbatim version of

Schanppecher and Wollicks cadential doctrine with no reference to the latter.

10 Kevin Moll, Voice Function, Sonority, and Contrapuntal Procedure in Late Medieval

Polyphony, Current Musicology 64 (Spring 1998): 32.

6

that musical closure in that corpus is more flexible than is commonly acknowledged, though it

still adheres to an easily discernible set of music elements.11

Jennifer Bain theorizes how cadences work in a yet more restricted repertoire: the music

of Machaut. Her central contribution, like Molls, is to broaden the notion of what serves as a

cadence. She emphasizes progressions that occur at conclusions of textual units, and argues

that they should be considered as cadences even if they come to rest on imperfect sonorities.

These imperfect-sonority cadences are at once points of provisional arrival and cues

indicating that a more complete, perfect-sonority cadence is required at a later point in the

piece.12 Bain also argues for a more inclusive approach to the definition and identification of

cadences in Machauts music than is provided by the standard theory. The latter stipulates, as

required features of a cadence, a progression of imperfect to perfect dyads exhibiting conjunct

and contrary motion, and thus effectively limits cadential progressions to three: minor third to

unison, major third to perfect fifth, and major sixth to octave. Bain, however, points out several

examples in Machauts oeuvre in which both structural voices leap, or move in some other

unusual way, to a perfect consonance which is the final sonority of a whole piece, arguing that

such cases prove the existence, in this repertoire, of a broader range of cadential possibilities

than that allowed by the standard theory.

Such studies of cadential practice in specific bodies of music are mostly limited to pre-

tonal music. When it comes to music of the common-practice period, recent and current

11 Ibid., 37-40.

12 Jennifer Bain, Theorizing the Cadence in the Music of Machaut, Journal of Music Theory 47, no.

2 (Fall, 2003): 343-346.

7

theoretical and analytical work does not usually attempt a redefinition of the cadence; rather,

most such work adopts without question those prevailing concepts of cadence that are the

result of a centuries-long development. One exception to this is William Caplin, who has

dedicated a substantial article to theorizing the classical cadence.13 Yet his work is markedly

different from the projects of Moll and Bain: rather than offering a novel theory of how cadences

function in a given musical repertoire, Caplin articulates how he believes the concept of the

cadence should function in discourse devoted to classical music, a functioning largely

instantiated in the theory of form published earlier in his book Classical Form.14

Two fine examples of the third category, studies of cadential doctrines of particular

authors or eras, are Elisabeth Schwinds monograph Kadenz und Kontrapunkt: Zur

Kompositionslehre der Klassischen Vokalpolyphonie, and Markus Walduras tome Von Rameau und

Riepel zu Koch.15 Schwind takes as her focus sixteenth-century polyphony, but, rather than

deducing cadential function from the repertoire, she undertakes a close reading of

contemporaneous theoretical texts to gain insight into how composers may have conceptualized

musical closure. Walduras text is less oriented towards compositional practice. Instead, he

13 William E. Caplin, The Classical Cadence: Conceptions and Misconceptions. Journal of the

American Musicological Society 57, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 51-118.

14 Idem, Classical Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

15 Elisabeth Schwind, Kadenz und Kontrapunkt: Zur Kompositionslehre der Klassischen Vokalpolyphonie

(Hildesheim: Olms, 2009); Markus Waldura, Von Rameau und Riepel zu Koch: Zum Zusammenhang zwischen

theoretischem Ansatz, Kadenzlehre und Periodenbegriff in der Musiktheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts.

Musikwissenschaftliche Publikationen, ed. Herbert Schneider, no. 21 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag,

2002).

8

aims to elucidate eighteenth-century ideas of cadence and phrase structure by investigating a

wide range of contemporaneous music-theoretical texts.

Poundie Bursteins work includes an example of a very different kind of study of the

concept of the cadence.16 Rather than surveying the dicta of multiple theorists, Burstein here

elucidates one aspect of cadence in a single theorists work, to wit, Heinrich Schenkers

auxiliary cadence (Hilfskadenz). He thoroughly investigates Schenkers texts and analytic

examples and offers a compelling interpretation of a concept that previously had been poorly

explained by commentators. Burstein finds that the essence of the auxiliary cadence is a

cadential progression in which the tonic harmony, which in Schenkers view normally initiates

cadences, is omitted. One major difference between Bursteins project and those of Schwind

and Waldura is that he aims explicitly to change analytic practice. His article contains

numerous examples of Schenkers use of the auxiliary cadence, and he structures his argument

in such a way that Schenkerians can easily put his conclusions to work in their own analyses.

The present dissertation differs significantly from these three categories of cadence-

related literature. In that it evaluates the concept of the cadence over a broad chronological

sweep, it bears resemblances to the first category, encyclopedia articles. Yet the significantly

greater depth of inquiry found in this work leads to substantial differences from such articles,

including more accurate accounts of historical precedence, concern for the relationship between

theory and practice, and scrutiny of the ways in which cadential theorists drew on non-musical

discourses. In that its primary object of study is cadential doctrine, this dissertation does not fit

16 L. Poundie Burstein, Schenkers Concept of the Auxiliary Cadence, in Essays form the Third

International Schenker Symposium, ed. Allen Cadwallader (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 2006), 2-6.

9

the second category, in which authors try to infer cadential functioning in a given musical

corpus. The third category is the closest match, yet this works investigation of cadential

doctrines from many different centuries results in several characteristics which are significant

departures from other examples of that category. The most notable of those characteristics are

this dissertations analysis of the history of cadential discourse into three previously

unidentified periods, and the attention paid to conceptual similarities and discrepancies

stretching across centuries. The first of these three periods comprises the pre-history of the

concept of the cadence, and it extends from the dawn of music theorizing in the West (ca. 900

CE) to the start of the sixteenth century. The second period begins with the earliest texts to

present a theory of the cadence proper (understood as a polyphonic progression) in the early

sixteenth century, and lasts about 300 years, until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The

final period stretches from the nineteenth century to the present. Thus, this dissertation

features both scope and depth of investigation in a way unmatched by previous studies of the

concept of the cadence, and consequently is able to offer new insights into the object of its

inquiry.

The methodology of this work centers upon close analysis of primary texts. The

foundational body of material for this study consists of written accounts, belonging to what we

now call music theory, that theorize musical closure, and, in particular, selected texts which I

consider to be particularly noteworthy instantiations of trends in that theorization. These texts,

however, are clearly not the only sources relevant to the study of the cadence.

Contemporaneous compositions can provide important an important resource both for

clarifying ambiguities in a given text, and also for testing the degree of fit between theoretical

10

pronouncements and actual practice; while they are not central to this dissertations project,

they will be drawn upon when helpful. Nor is consideration of primary texts limited to musical

texts. From their earliest appearances in medieval texts, discussions of musical closure have

been informed by other areas of knowledge, such as the trivial arts of grammar, rhetoric, and

dialectic. Consequently, this dissertation examines the intellectual traditions upon which music

theorists drew, and considers the concept of cadence in relation to developments in the broader

intellectual life of Western Europe.

The first of this studys four chapters examines the first period of theorizing musical

closure, during which a concept of a robustly polyphonic cadential progression had not yet

arisen. Focusing on the conceptualization of closure in medieval chant, it finds that discussions

of the subject from the earliest centuries of this period are limited to brief analogies between

segments of pieces and the idea of punctuation. It was not until the turn of the twelfth century,

in John of Affligems De musica, that a substantial theory of musical closure arose, in which

three different concluding phenomena are aligned with three degrees of syntactic closure in a

given chants text. We will see that Johns breakthrough is due to his adaptation of the full

conceptual richness of the late classical doctrine of punctuation, in which there are three types

of marks with different syntactical and performative implications. This chapter contextualizes

Johns ideas within that grammatico-rhetorical tradition, and also demonstrates the significant

ways in which Johns theory of closure surpassed that of his musical predecessors. It then

proceeds to consider the problematic relationship between Johns doctrine and actual chant

melodies, before concluding by tracing the centuries-long survival of Johns ideas in later

theoretical texts.

11

The second chapter considers a little-known cadential doctrine that established our

second period, and the first epoch of theorizing the cadence proper. In the first period, accounts

of closure had only discussed concluding formulae being constituted of one or two independent

voices, even when three- and four-part compositions had become common. In contrast, a new

body of doctrine, of nebulous authorship, arose in early-sixteenth century Cologne that treated

what it called the clausula formalis as a simultaneous conjunction of three or even four

melodic gestures, each of which was stereotypically associated with a particular vocal part.

This conception of the cadence proved very attractive, and persisted in the German tradition for

the next two hundred years. Even longer lasting, however, was the period of cadential

theorizing that the Cologne school initiated. As we will see, a confluence of significant factors

accounts for the disjuncture separating the texts in the Cologne orbit from earlier theories of

closure. One such factor is the identification of the cadence as an important, self-standing object

of theoretical study: conclusive progressions are no longer discussed in the context of long lists

of contrapuntal possibilities, but instead have entire chapters dedicated to their explication.

Another significant factor is the aforementioned insistence on theorists part on describing

cadences as being constituted of three or four voices, even as they struggle to account for the

behavior of these newly added voices. Another significant feature is the imputation of the idea

of structural closure to contrapuntal progressions through the adoption of the term clausula (or

close). Yet in spite of the implications of this onomastic choice, the Cologne school theorists

also initiated a long-lived relational ambiguity between the function of musical closure and

those musical successions which qualify as clausulae formales. This ambiguity results from the

Cologne schools lack of articulation of an explicit connection between the clausula progression

12

and the structure of an accompanying text. The second chapter tests different possibilities for

interpreting the link between the clausula formalis and the function of closure by applying them

to contemporaneous compositions; it then proposes a flexible approach to engaging with this

ambiguity that builds upon a rarely noticed contemporaneous division of clausulae progressions

into two classes: those capable of ending entire pieces, and those which are not.

The third chapter delves into the most elaborate efflorescence of the type of cadential

theorizing initiated by the Cologne school: that of Johann Wolfgang Caspar Printz. In the last

quarter of the seventeenth century Printz proposed a system of nine polyphonic cadential types,

and developed a detailed conceptual apparatus to support them. As this chapter elucidates,

part of the motivation for the profusion of cadential types in Printzs system was his tacit

adherence to pedagogical principles that trace their origin to the educational reform movement

established in the mid-sixteenth century by Petrus Ramus. Printzs doctrine also contains many

features with rich musical implications which this chapter teases out. These include one of the

earliest articulations of the idea that listeners can understand one progression to be implied,

even as they hear another (as in an evaded cadence), a related emphasis on the role of the bass

line in cadential functioning, and an incipient theory of hierarchical formal structure.

The final chapter turns to the significant change in cadential theorizing that occurred

around the turn of the nineteenth century. Ever since the days of the Cologne school, authors

had treated the cadence as an important element of music theory, devoting chapters to its

nature and proper compositional disposition. By way of a comparison of the writings of H.C.

Koch and A.B. Marx, this chapter contends that by the turn of the nineteenth century the

concept of the cadence ceased to function as an autonomous element of theoretical concern, and

13

instead became subordinate to the newly ascendant concept of musical form. This change was

due in part to a growing predilection for organicist metaphors in music theory, which gave rise

to a new focus on formal concerns, and an attendant reformulation of the role of cadences in

that discourse. This chapter argues that at the end of the eighteenth century, music theory

underwent a transition analogous to the contemporaneous transformation of natural history

into biological study. By examining cadential discourse in light of this analogy, new insight will

be gained into the decreasing prominence of cadential theorizing in this third period, and the

related elevation of musical form into a central element of music-theoretical study, a status

which it continues to hold nearly two centuries later.

14

CHAPTER 1

MUSICAL CLOSURE, GRAMMATICO-RHETORICAL DOCTRINE, AND CHANT:

JOHN OF AFFLIGEM

Musical discourse in the West has drawn heavily upon the disciplines of grammar and

rhetoric from the time of its medieval revival in the ninth century. Today the most famous

appropriation from these disciplines for musical ends is likely the seventeenth centurys

development of a doctrine of musical figures (Figurenlehre), borrowing from a tradition in

rhetoric.1 Yet in earlier centuries writers on music instead drew primarily upon methods of

analyzing and demarcating the structure of prose, methods which developed during Antiquity

in the disciplines of rhetoric and grammar. Rhetorical theorists focused on developing a

vocabulary for analyzing speech into its constitutive phrases and sub-phrases, whereas

grammarians formulated a system of punctuation marks to assist the parsing of written texts.

Both of these approaches proved useful to medieval music theorists as they attempted to

describe chant melodies in terms of phrases, their component parts, and their conclusions.

This chapter elucidates the first sophisticated theory of musical closure by

demonstrating its dependence on much older theories of prosal phrase structure and

punctuation. To do so, we will begin by examining accounts representative of the state of

rhetorical and grammatical theory in Antiquity, and will consider how the early medieval

reception of these ideas combined the two into a somewhat uneasily conglomerate theory of

1 See, for example, Patrick McCrelesss survey of music-theoretic appropriations of rhetorical

ideas (McCreless, Music and Rhetoric, in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas

Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 847-79.

15

punctuation. Thereafter our attention turns to medieval discussions of music. We will see that

writers from the early centuries of the medieval efflorescence of music theorizing did not draw

upon the full apparatus of punctuational concepts and terminology available to them, tending

instead to use that apparatus merely to refer to phrases or phrase demarcations in general

terms. Indeed, it was not until the De musica of John of Affligem (ca. 1100 C.E.) that the full

conceptual power of the ancient worlds rhetorical and grammatical doctrines of phrase

structure and punctuation were put to use in the field of music, giving rise to a number of ideas

about music that continue to resonate today. Particularly noteworthy examples include

discussion of the role of performance in the delineation of musical structure, the question of

what constitutes a complete musical thought, and the earliest articulation of the idea that a

musical event can feign closure, a musical phenomenon which later developed into time-

honored progressions such as the deceptive and evaded cadences. I therefore offer a careful

consideration of Johns treatment of grammatico-rhetorical concepts and musical closure,

examining the particular strands of thought upon which he drew, the alterations he made to

those ideas, and the innovative development in the theory of music which resulted; the

relationship between Johns theory and musical practice is also examined. The chapter

concludes with a demonstration of the surprising longevity of the analogy between different

forms of punctuation and musical endings first developed by John of Affligem, finding that

theorists were still articulating variants of it as late as the middle of the eighteenth century.

16

1.1 The Analysis of Speech Structure in Classical Rhetoric

Given the connotations of duplicity and self-serving manipulation of the audience that

the term rhetoric invokes today, it may come as a surprise that the origins of the field of

rhetoric are inextricably linked to pedagogy. The first practitioners of rhetoric for whom

historical attestation exists were itinerant wise men, or sophists ( [sophistai]), who

traveled the Greek-speaking world of the fifth century, B.C.E., and were famously critiqued and

lampooned by Plato in many of his dialogues. Because they were not natives of the cities to

which they traveled, they could not seek direct political power. Rather, they delivered show

piece speeches in public, in which they attempted to attract paying students, and instructional

speeches in private to those students.2 A recurring claim of many of these self-proclaimed

sophoi, such as Protagoras and Gorgias, was that they could convincingly argue either side of an

argument, and, thus, that they could teach their students to deliver compelling speeches and

gain political power.3

This first generation of rhetoricians seems to have guarded the secrecy of their teachings

for reasons of financial self-interest, and this appears to have been the governing model well

2 On the pedagogical and commercial orientation of the sophists, see Laurent Pernot, Rhetoric in

Antiquity, trans. W. E. Higgins (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 12-15.

3 Indeed, many of the show piece speeches demonstrated the orators skill by attempting to

accomplish the seemingly impossible, often by facetiously rehabilitating the image of reprehensible

characters or casting aspersions on heroes. This genre of praising or blaming came to be known as the

genre of epideictic, or display, oratory. For more contextualization of the early sophists and their

thought, see George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1994), 17-21.

17

into the fourth century B.C.E.4 Indeed, the Greek tradition of writing handbooks (

[technai]) addressing the subject of rhetoric in detail only began with the Rhetorica of Aristotle

(384-322 B.C.E.), which he likely wrote in the years about 330 B.C.E. In this treatise and in

similar texts from following generations, Aristotle and later rhetoricians develop a theory of the

structure of speech ( [lexis]), analyzing it into sentences and constituent phrases. Aristotle

proposes a hierarchy of two levels. The higher level of syntactic unit he calls the period

( [periodos], pl. [periodoi]), which he defines as follows: I call the period an

utterance () that has its own beginning and end, and an easily comprehensible

magnitude.5 These periods may be made up of shorter clauses, called colons ( [kla],

sing. [klon]), that is, members, as of a body; alternatively, periods can also be simple

( [aphels]), consisting of a single colon.

At some point in the following two centuries a new, still shorter unit was added to the

hierarchy of period and colon.6 This was the comma ( [komma], pl.

[kommata]), that is, a cutting, incision, or articulation of the utterance into brief segments.

These concepts clearly establish a hierarchical organization of word grouping, but they are far

from strictly defined. Given the amount of information provided in Aristotles treatise and the

4 It was not until the early fourth century that the first formal school of rhetoric was founded, by

Isocrates (436-338 B.C.E.), and his letters, the sole contemporaneous extant source, merely hint at his

pedagogical program.

5

(Aristotle, Rhetorica, III.9, 1409a34-b1).

6 Perhaps the earliest extant Greek texts to use the term colon is the De compositione verborum of

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (fl. 20 B.C.E.), but the presence of the concept in the Roman tradition of

rhetoric in the later second century B.C.E. makes it clear that Dionysius was not the first author to use the

term (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De compositione verborum, XXVI, ll. 12-3).

18

scanty number of extant Greek rhetorical works which survive from the following three

centuries, one cannot reconstruct with certainty precisely how any author would or would not

employ these concepts in practice. Rather, the vagueness of the definitions offered suggests that

students learned the concepts of period, colon, and comma not primarily through such

definitions, but empirically and inductively, through their instructors examples and gradual

honing of the students intuitions.7 Consequently, we should not expect lucid, precise

explanations of this conceptual triad, but rather we should hold fast to its basic hierarchical

relationship while attending to the broader implications of the terms definitions.

Perhaps surprisingly, the concepts of the period, colon, and comma were not often

introduced in later rhetorical treatises as a broadly applicable means of breaking down and

comprehending entire passages. Instead, they usually served as a tool in discussions of literary

style, which was one of the chief concerns of rhetorical education in Greco-Roman Antiquity.

Since young students of rhetoric learned to recognize and create different kinds of style through

analyzing exemplary passages and composing imitations of them, it was important to be able to

recognize common techniques of manipulating normal speech to produce heightened effects.

The most well-known of these techniques became codified in lists of tropes (tropoi) or figures

of speech (exornationes verborum), such as antithesis, asyndeton, and climax. Yet from the time

of Aristotle rhetoricians had used the period and colon (and later the comma) as another means

7 For instance, Augustine of Hippo employs the comma, colon, and period to analyze scriptural

excerpts in his De doctrina christiana, but offers only examples of their use, rather than substantive

explanations of the terms (De doctrina Christiana, IV.7, 11, 13). This passage circulated widely by the

tenth century as an appendix to many copies of Cassiodoruss Institutiones (R. A. B. Mynors,

Introduction, in Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937],

xxx-xxxix).

19

of describing unusual, marked structuring of words, including successive colons of similar

length (parisosis or isocolon), clauses containing antithetical thoughts (antithesis), and similarity

or dissimilarity of the final syllables of successive phrases (paromoiosis).8 Consequently, later

rhetoricians, such as pseudo-Cicero, often set their treatments of the period, colon, and comma

in the midst of lengthy lists of these figures of speech.9

Despite the paucity of extant Greek treatises from the first and second centuries B.C.E.,

our knowledge of rhetorical doctrine during that period is not impoverished. Starting in the

later second century B.C.E. a Roman tradition of rhetoric arose which doubtless borrowed

heavily from Greek rhetoric of the day. As Harry Caplan notes, the rhetorical treatises written

during the initial decades in which that field was being established in Rome have not survived

intact, and thus the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 90s B.C.E.) is the oldest

Roman rhetorical text to survive in its entirety.10 This treatise presents and explains in detail a

fully formed doctrine embracing the conceptual triad of period, colon, and comma, or

continuatio, membrum, and articulus, as the anonymous author translates the terms. Because of

the longstanding erroneous attribution of the Rhetorica ad Herennium to Cicero, this work was

tremendously influential in the medieval period; consequently, it is worthwhile to investigate

its transmission of Greek rhetorical doctrine in some detail.

8 Aristotle, Rhetorica, III.9.

9 [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV.xiii.19-xliii.56.

10 [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan in Loeb Classical Library 403 (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1954), vii.

20

Adhering to tradition, Pseudo-Cicero presents the three terms as a hierarchy in which

commas compose colons, which in turn compose periods. Concerning the comma/articulus

(which Cicero calls incisum,) pseudo-Cicero writes: It is called a comma (articulus) when

individual words are separated by pauses in choppy speech,11 e.g. By [your] sharpness, voice,

expression, you terrified your enemies.12 This stipulation that every comma is comprised of

an individual word (by your sharpness is one word in Latin) is much more restrictive than

the Greek conception of commas as merely being shorter than colons. As for the

colon/membrum, pseudo-Cicero invokes a two-colon norm reminiscent of Aristotles first type of

period (the ): Colon (membrum orationis) means an element (res) that is

briefly concluded without the articulation of the complete thought (sententia), which is

continued with a fresh start by another colon, in this way: You were at once benefiting your

enemy . . . That is what we call one colon. This should then be taken up by another [colon], in

this way: and you were injuring your friend.13 The last category, the period/continuatio, is

11 Choppy speech is my rendering of caesa oratione. Lewis and Shorts A Latin Dictionary glosses

this phrase as asyndeton, which is the rhetorical device in which conjunctions are omitted (s.v.

caedo). The examples given by pseudo-Cicero all exhibit asyndeton, but adopting that word in the

translation would give an incorrect impression that the Latin text involved that degree of technical

terminology.

12 Articulus dicitur cum singula verba intervallis distinguuntur caesa oratione, hoc modo:

Acrimonia, voce, vultu adversarios perterruisti ([Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV.xix.26). Translation

adapted from Caplans edition, p. 295.

13 Membrum orationis appellatur res breviter absoluta sine totius sententiae demonstratione,

quae denuo alio membro orationis excipitur, hoc pacto: Et inimico proderas. Id est unum quod

appellamus membrum; deinde hoc excipiatur oportet altero: Et amicum laedebas (ibid.).

21

described much more concisely: A period (continuatio) is a compact and uninterrupted

crowding together of words with completion of the thoughts.14

The definitions of these latter two, the colon and the period, both employ the concept of

the sententia (thought or idea), which merits discussion. Through the rest of Antiquity and well

into the Middle Ages rhetorical theorists relied on a poorly defined set of terms having to do

with meaningmost notably sententia, sensus, and significarein their discussions of both

rhetorical and grammatical matters having to do with the analysis of speech. No consistent

differentiation exists in the grammatical corpus between the nouns sententia and sensus; while

some authors, like Isidore of Seville, do attempt to employ them in distinct ways, other authors

use them interchangeably. One of the most common usages of these terms is to invoke the

semantic referent of a given group of words. Another important one refers to a thought, with

overtones of something resembling our modern sense of syntactic structure. For instance,

Pseudo-Ciceros definition of the colon stipulates that it concludes without the articulation of

the complete thought (sententia). To my knowledge, authors from Antiquity and the medieval

period never spell out what distinguishes completion from incompletion in the realm of

thought and meaning. Many authors do, however, provide examples of complete and

incomplete thoughts, and in each example which I have evaluated the authors indication of

whether the thought is complete aligns with my intuition of whether the syntax of the text is

closed off. Due to the lack of conflicting evidence, I choose to assume that the meaning of

completion and incompletion in these texts roughly corresponds to ours. (An important

14 Continuatio est densa et continens frequentatio verborum cum absolutione sententiarum

(ibid., IV.xix.27).

22

proviso, however, is that grammatical texts from Antiquity and the medieval period do not

appear to have a direct correlate to our modern idea of the simple sentence. The nearest

analogy to our sentence is the concept of the periodus, but classical orators often developed

tremendously long periods, which we would identify as compoundor even run-on

sentences.) Thus, the sententia or (sensus) of a collection of words like The severed hand of

Cicero, being displayed in the Rostra is Ciceros hand itself, but the words also would be

considered to comprise an incomplete sententia. It is also worth noting that some authors seem

to employ sententia or sensus to indicate the verbal entity itselfthe ordered series of

wordsrather than the referent of those words. The verb significare and its derivatives are used

to denote the action of words whereby they represent, express, or convey a thought. From text

to text the precise nuances of these terms can vary, of course, so we will reflect upon their

meanings when the implications are significant.

Through the rest of Antiquity rhetorical theorists increasingly came to rely upon these

ideas of meaning and sense when discussing the comma, colon, and period. For instance, even

though Quintilian (ca. 30-ca. 100 C.E.) adapted these terms to serve his description of prose

rhythm, in which orators or writers employ formulaic metrical patterns at the ends of sentences,

he still describes the comma and colon as thoughts (sensus).15 More specifically, the colon is

an incomplete thought that is rhythmically closed, whereas the comma is a thought that is not.16

15 The subject of prose rhythm is addressed in more detail in the next chapter, section 2.1.

16 In my opinion a comma is a thought which is not closed off by a finished rhythm, and which

commonly is a part of a colon (comma est, ut mea fert opinio, sensus non expleto numero conclusus,

plerumque pars membri) (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IX.4.cxxii); a colon is a thought which is closed

off by rhythms, but is disconnected from the whole substance [of the speech] and completes nothing in

23

Martianus Capella (fl. 410s-20s C.E.) further intensified the role of signification, and thus

thought, in his definitions of the period, colon, and comma, describing both the colon and

comma as a portion of a speech which signifies (pars orationis significans). The former signifies

in many words (i.e., more than one) something complete, and the latter signifies something

incomplete in fewer words.17

These conceptions of the comma and colon demonstrate the increasing importance of the

role of thought (sententia) in these late-antique definitions. Pseudo-Ciceros description of the

comma as a word distinguished by pauses has completely disappeared, and his rather

mechanical focus on the grouping of more or fewer words in the colon and period has been

largely suppressed in favor of a more insightful description of thought-units that comprise

more or less information, and have greater or lesser degrees of completion. Of course, in both

conceptions the main criterion for judging between period, colon, and comma ends up being the

conclusion (or lack thereof) of the meaning of the words in question; nevertheless, some authors

present their concepts as consisting primarily of analyses of verbal structures per se, while

others more explicitly take account of the semantic content of the thoughts expressed. This

shifting emphasis between analyzing words and analyzing thoughts will continue to be

important in the consideration of punctuation immediately to come.

itself (membrum autem est sensus numeris conclusus, sed a toto corpore abruptus et per se nihil

efficiens) (ibid., IX.4.cxxiii).

17 A colon is a part of speech which expresses in many words something completely (membrum

est pars orationis ex pluribus verbis absolute aliquid significans) (Martianus Capella, De nuptiis, V, 528,

p. 184); a comma, however, is a part of speech which expresses in two or more words something not yet

complete (caesum autem est pars orationis ex duobus aut pluribus verbis dum quicquam absolute

significans) (ibid.).

24

1.2 The Grammatical Doctrine of Punctuation in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

From a modern readers perspective, the development of a system of punctuation would

seem to have been almost necessary for classical culture. Greek scribes, and Roman scribes

from the second century C.E. onwards, wrote in continuous script (scriptura continua), in which

all the letters of a text were spaced at roughly equal distances from each other, a practice that

gave no indications of distinctions between words, let alone larger sense units.18 In a context

like this, scribes could have relied on punctuation as a way to help readers intuit the texts

syntactic structure, or even to give aspiring orators indications of appropriate points at which to

breathe or to pause for emphasis. And indeed, such a system of punctuation was developed

and propounded in grammatical textbooks, as we shall see. Yet it is crucial to note that the

practice of punctuation in Antiquity was very different from that of our day. As the

paleographer M. B. Parkes has shown, punctuation marks were never written concurrently with

texts by the original scribes before the sixth century C.E.; rather, they were added to texts by

readers as they attempted to parse the string of letters presented to them in the scriptura

continua style of writing.19

Given this ad hoc nature of early punctuation, it is perhaps unsurprising that in

Antiquity and the medieval period there was often a large discrepancy between the practice of

punctuation and contemporaneous explanations of how punctuation functions. Scribes in

18 Concerning the Latin adoption of scriptura continua and gradual adoption of word spacing in

the medieval period, see Paul Saenger, Space between Words: the Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, Cal.:

Stanford University Press, 1997), 9-17.

19 M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 9-13, 16.

25

different locations and periods employed many different signs in a wide variety of ways, and

could even vary their practices substantially within a single manuscript. Although the doctrine

of punctuation developed by grammarians was widely transmitted and conceptually neat, it

did not adapt by expanding to include the variety of functions that scribes desired, so it became

increasingly irrelevant in the medieval period. The development of the practice of punctuation

from Antiquity to the Renaissance has been masterfully explained by Parkes, and music

historians like Leo Treitler have proposed compelling theories of the dependence of early

musical notation on medieval punctuation marks.20 Yet as we shall see, the most sophisticated

medieval theories of musical closure utilize the concepts developed in the doctrine of

punctuation, and largely ignore the complexities of scribal practice. Consequently, we will turn

our attention on this doctrine, focusing on the watershed punctuational theory of the late

Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus (fl. mid-fourth century C.E.).

Before proceeding, there are two things one should note about terminology: first, in this

chapter I retain punctuation-related terms in their original language because authors choice of

terminology is often significant and reveals trends of word selection and doctrinal influences.21

Translating the substantial number of synonyms using the same English words or phrases

would obscure the differences; translating the synonyms differently would suggest to the

20 Parkes, Pause and Effect; Leo Treitler, The Early History of Music Writing in the West, Journal

of the American Musicological Society 35, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 269-73; ibid., Reading and Singing: On the

Genesis of Occidental Music-Writing, Early Music History 4 (1984): 186-208.

21 For example, in Latin texts, earlier authors use both the terms positura and distinctio, with

a tendency to prefer positura when discussing the general phenomenon of punctuation marks. In

Isidores writing the term distinctio has fallen out of fashion, but by the time of John of Affligem

distinctio has replaced positura as the term of choice.

26

English reader a greater variety of concepts than is actually in play. Secondly, most

grammatical authors use the term distinctio (originally stigm in Greek) to indicate all three

punctuation marks in general, and also to refer specifically to the most final punctuation mark,

the plena distinctio (teleia stigm).

As is the case with Latin rhetorical theorists, Donatus drew upon a much older Greek

tradition in the creation of his grammar textbook. This tradition stretches back to Dionysius of

Thrax (ca. 100 B.C.E.), whose Ars grammatica (Treatise on Grammar) was the foundational text of

the Greco-Roman grammatical project, and contains the oldest extant theory of punctuation.22

Surprisingly, despite the path-breaking stature of Dionysiuss Ars grammatica, its teachings on

punctuation do not appear to have become integral to the art of Greek grammar: virtually none

of the extant Greek grammatical works transmits any form of its punctuation doctrine, other

than the Byzantine-era family of commentaries specific to this text.23 Indeed, it was not until the

flourishing of Roman grammar in the mid-fourth century C.E. that the doctrine of punctuation

was again discussed in a clear and thorough fashion. At least six independent treatises from

about this period contain statements concerning punctuation, and many more treatises gloss

and amplify those six. Of the six treatises, the Ars maior of Aelius Donatus was by far the most

influential in later times, and its treatment of punctuation contains all the elements of classical

theory that were employed by authors in succeeding generations.

22 Dionysius of Thrax, Ars Grammatica, 6.

23 Several fragments attributed to a certain Melampodos transmit pieces of this doctrine, but they

are not sufficient to explain the system of punctuation on their own. These fragments are printed in M.

Hubert, Corpus stigmatologicum minus, Archiuum Latinitatis Medii Aeui (Bulletin du Cange) 37 (1970):

13.

27

Because Donatuss account of the punctuation marks presents largely the same

information as that of Dionysius Thrax, but in an expanded and clarified fashion, we will

proceed directly to his account:

There are three positurae or distinctiones, which the Greeks call (theseis)24: distinctio,

subdistinctio, and media distinctio. A distinctio is where a complete thought (sententia) is

finished; we place its mark by the top of the letter. A subdistinctio is where not much of

the thought remains [unsaid], which [remainder], although necessarily separate, is soon

to be provided (inferendum); we place its mark by the bottom of the letter. A media

distinctio is where almost as much of the thought remains as has already been said, and

yet it is necessary to breathe; we place its marks by the middle of the letter. In reading, a

complete thought is called a period; its parts are colons and commas.25

At the core of the doctrine of punctuation which Donatus borrows from Dionysius Thrax is a

system of three marks (positurae;26 stigmai, sing. stigm in Dionysiuss Greek). All take the

form of simple dots, like the period in modern punctuation, and differ only by their position on

the page: one sits beside the top of a [capital] letter (), another beside the bottom of a letter (.),

and the final beside the middle of a letter (). The first of these, the distinctio, seems to

correspond quite closely to the modern sense of the period mark: it indicates the conclusion of a

24 Curiously, no Greek texts seem to survive that use the term in this manner (The Greek-English

Lexicon of Liddell, Scott, and Jones offers only Donatuss Latin text as a source for this meaning of the

term [s.v. ]), which suggests that Donatus (or an earlier scholar) was drawing in part upon

a non-extant Greek textual tradition.

25 Tres sunt positurae uel distinctiones quas Graeci uocant, distinctio, subdistinctio,

media distinctio. distinctio est, ubi finitur plena sententia: huius punctum ad summam litteram ponimus.

subdistinctio est, ubi non multum superest de sententia, quod tamen necessario separatum mox

inferendum sit; huius punctum ad imam litteram ponimus. media distinctio est, ubi fere tantum de

sententia superest, quantum iam diximus, cum tamen respirandum sit: huius punctum ad mediam

litteram ponimus. in lectione tota sententia periodos dicitur, cuius partes sunt cola et commata

(Donatus, Ars grammatica 612).

26 Although Donatuss introductory sentence treats positura and distinctio as equivalent, I prefer to

employ the term positura when discussing this grammatical doctrine, and reserve distinctio to refer

specifically to the mark that concludes a complete thought.

28

complete thought (plena sententia). Here the term sententia functions in multiple ways,

referring to the words on the page beside which the mark is place, to the semantic referent of a

group of words, and to the quality of closure exhibited by those words. The distinctio, in

contrast, refers to the written mark itself, and not to the semantic or verbal unit that it

demarcates. The second mark, the subdistinctio, indicates a minor division in the flow of the

thought, and Donatus suggests that it comes towards the end of a given thought.27 The last

type, the media distinctio, refers to breathing. In contrast to the previous two positurae, which

mark minor or major divisions of thought, the media distinctio comes into play at the point when

suitable thought divisions are furthest away: when almost as much of the phrase remains

[unsaid] as has already been said. Donatuss further association of this mark with breathing is

noteworthy, since it inserts seemingly incongruous performative concerns into a doctrine that,

at least explicitly, is concerned explicitly with the realm of thought and meaning, and the

analysis of the degree of something resembling syntactic closure. This importation of issues of

breathing into punctuational matters is doubtless due to the Greek traditions conception of the

analogous mark (called the mes stigm), in which the sign is used to indicate where one should

breathe.28

The last sentence of the passage by Donatus merits special attention, because it lays the

ground for a new conceptual relationship between the positurae and rhetorical analysis that

music theorists later exploited. (In the ancient and early medieval grammatical and rhetorical

27 Donatuss description of the subdistinctio adds to Dionysius Thraxs description of the

analogous mark, which describes it merely as the sign of an incomplete thought (Dionysius of Thrax, Ars

Grammatica, 6).

28 Ibid.

29

texts no such relationship is to be found: the two conceptual triads of period, colon, comma and

distinction, subdistinction, and medial distinction seem to occupy parallel universes, isolated

from each other.) In our excerpts final sentence, Donatus briefly mentions the period, colon,

and comma, and states that the first consists of the latter two. Although this simple statement

does not assert any explicit connection between these rhetorical terms and the doctrine of

positurae, Donatuss decision to place it immediately after his discussion of punctuation suggests

that he sees some connection between the two terminological triads. And indeed, there are

intriguing similarities between the first two positurae, in particular, and the concepts of the

period and colon, in that both categories make reference to the concept of the thought and its

completion or incompletion; the positurae could be used to indicate the period, colon, and

comma. Yet there are two significant reasons to be wary of these conceptual similarities. The

first has already been mentioned: there is no evidence that authors before Donatus had drawn

any connection between the two. The concepts of the period and colon belonged to the study of

rhetoric, whereas the punctuation marks arose in the field of grammar; the fact that the concepts

belonged to different disciplines may be responsible for the lack of connections made between

them.29 The second reason is that the rhetorical and grammatical concepts do not correspond

perfectly to each other. Period and colon were primarily used in the analysis of figures of

speech in the heightened language of oratory or orations, and refer either to a given group of

29 This is one of several respects in which Donatus blurs the strict delineation between the fields

of rhetoric and grammar that had been championed by Quintilian (Institutio II.i.4-6, cited in James J.

Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974;

reprint ed. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001], 33). For more

on Donatuss blending of rhetoric and grammar in book III of the Ars maior, see Murphy, Rhetoric in the

Middle Ages, 32-4.

30

words or to the thought that those words express. The distinctio and subdistinctio, in contrast,

appear to have served a more pedestrian function: they seem to have been invented to assist

readers in their attempts to sound out the text by parsing the string of letters into words and

units of thought. The terms do not signify a group of words or a thought; rather, they refer to

physical marks, which in turn indicate either the end of an incomplete component of a thought

or the word that completes a thought.

Surprisingly, this fleeting incursion of rhetorical concepts into a grammar text proved to

be tremendously long-lived, which can be seen in the fact that practically all accounts of the

positurae in the seven centuries after Donatus at least preserve his mention of the period-colon-

comma triad.30 But many do more than that. For the mere implication of a relationship

between that rhetoric-derived triad and the positurae made by Donatus did not remain long

remain the status quo, due to the wide circulation of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (ca.

560-636). Here, in a dramatic change from all extant punctuation doctrine prior to this, each

kind of punctuation simply is a different phrase type, and yet at the same time is also the

written mark that indicates the phrase:31

30 M. Hubert discusses the grammatical reception of these three terms and other related triads

exhaustively (Le vocabulaire de la ponctuation aux temps mdivaux: un cas dincertitude lexicale,

Archiuum Latinitatis Medii Aeui [Bulletin du Cange] 38 [1971-2]: 80ff.).

31 R. W. Mller speculates that this aspect of Isidores doctrine may, in fact, be older: he posits

that it could come from the lacuna in Charisiuss grammatical treatise, or perhaps from the Bobbienser

Mischhandschrift. Unfortunately, Mller does not elaborate his claim or provide any support for it.

Based on this authors acquaintance with Isidores discussion of music and its substantial divergences

from earlier musical texts, it seems entirely possible that Isidore himself is responsible for the innovations

found in his treatment of punctuation. Thus, this author sees no reason to accept Mllers hypothesis as

it stands (Rudolph Wolfgang Mller, Rhetorische und syntaktische Interpunktion: Untersuchungen zur

Pausenbezeichnung im antiken Latein, Ph.D. diss., Eberhard-Karls-Universitt zu Tbingen, 1964, 75).

31

A positura is a mark written to distinguish meaning (sensus) through colons, commas,

and periods. When it is added appropriately, it shows us the meaning of a reading.

They are called positurae either because they are notated with positioned (positis) points,

or because the voice is lowered (deponitur) there for a [brief] span of time appropriate to

the distinction. The Greeks call them , and the Latins positurae. The first positura

is called subdistinctio, and also comma. The media distinctio follows; it [is] also [called]

colon. Last is the distinctio, which closes an entire thought (sententia); it [is] also

[called] period, the parts of which, as we have said, are colons and commas. The

difference [between these colons and commas] is shown by points placed in different

positions. For when at the beginning of the utterance there is not yet a complete unit

with regard to its meaning, and yet it is necessary to breathe, a comma is made, that is, a

sense fragment; its mark is placed by the bottom of the letter, and it is called a

subdistinctio, from [the fact] that it receives a point below (subtus), i.e., by the bottom of

the letter. Where, however, in the sequel the group of words (sententia) manifests its

meaning, but something of the groups fullness yet remains left over, a colon is made;

we mark the middle of the letter with a point, and we call it a media distinctio, since we

place the point by the middle of the letter (ad mediam litteram). But when, speaking step

by step, we effect a complete closure (clausula) of the thought, there is a period; we place

a point by the top of the letter, and this is called a distinctio, that is, a disjunction, since

it has marked off (separavit) a complete thought.32

As this account of the positurae demonstrates, Isidores association of punctuation marks with

closure of thought, or lack thereof, is traditional, and one can see similarities between it and the

classical punctuation theory that stretches all the back to Dionysius Thrax. Yet Isidores

conflation of rhetorical phrase with punctuation mark leads to fundamental differences from his

32 Positura est figura ad distinguendos sensus per cola et commata et periodos, quae dum ordine

suo adponitur, sensum nobis lectionis ostendit. Dictae autem positurae vel quia punctis positis

adnotantur, vel quia ibi vox pro intervallo distinctionis deponitur. Has Graeci vocant, Latini

posituras. Prima positura subdistinctio dicitur; eadem et comma. Media distinctio sequens est; ipsa et

cola. Ultima distinctio, quae totam sententiam cludit, ipsa est periodus; cuius, ut diximus, partes sunt cola

et comma; quarum diversitas punctis diverso loco positis demonstratur. Ubi enim initio pronuntiationis

necdum plena pars sensui est, et tamen respirare oportet, fit comma, id est particula sensus, punctusque

ad imam litteram ponitur; et vocatur subdistinctio, ab eo quod punctum subtus, id est ad imam litteram,

accipit. Ubi autem in sequentibus iam sententia sensum praestat, sed adhuc aliquid superest de

sententiae plenitudine, fit cola, mediamque litteram puncto notamus; et mediam distinctionem vocamus,

quia punctum ad mediam litteram ponimus. Ubi vero iam per gradus pronuntiando plenam sententiae

clausulam facimus, fit periodus, punctumque ad caput litterae ponimus; et vocatur distinctio, id est

disiunctio, quia integram separavit sententiam (Isidore, Etymologiae I.20).

32

predecessors. In the classical punctuation doctrine of Donatus and others, the full distinctio

indicates the end of a completed thought. In Isidores theory, the term distinctio all at once

refers to the mark (figura) which is placed after a given word, to the collection of words

(pronuntiatio) that is thus demarcated, and therefore also to the completed thought (tota

sententia) which those words express. Once the positurae take on these additional meanings of

word-group and thought, Isidores retention of the performative implications of breathing for

the comma seems all the more incongruous. Indeed, grammarians in the four centuries after

Isidore tended to minimize this aspect of the traditional punctuation doctrine, often going so far

as to omit it entirely.33

Isidores account of the positurae is also noteworthy because it strives toward a more

complex understanding of sensus and sententia than in earlier texts. As we have noted, authors

like Donatus and Cassiodorus use the terms in practically indistinguishable ways, to refer to the

referents of a group of words, something resembling the syntactic structure of those words, and

to the words themselves. Isidore often exhibits a similar degree of ambiguity. For instance, in

the opening sentences of the quotation one could translate sensus as meaning, or, just as

plausibly, as structure. Similarly, his definition of the distinctio as something that closes an

33 Four related Donatus commentaries from the ninth century all minimize the concept of

breathing, and each does so in a different way. Sedulius Scottus gives the Donatus lemma, but does not

mention breathing at all in his commentary; he later quotes the entirety of Cassiodoruss account of the

positurae, which is one of the few pre-Isidore sources not to mention breathing (In Donati artem maiorem

52-3). Murethachs only acknowledgment of breathing is that he glosses it is necessary to breathe

(respirandum sit) with pause (repausandum), which shifts the emphasis from respiration to the

articulation of the meaning (In Donatem 44). The Ars Lavreshamensis does not include the phrase and yet

it is necessary to breathe in the lemma, so the issue of breathing never arises (185). Lastly, Remigiuss

commentary rephrases Donatus, rather than giving lemmas, and he never mentions breathing at all

(Commentum 230-1). See the bibliography for full citations of these sources.

33

entire sententia could equally well refer to group of words or thought. Yet later in the

passage, Isidore clearly attempts to articulate a more sophisticated understanding of these

ideas. There, he establishes what seems to be a mutually exclusive contrast between

sententia, which refers only to a collection of words, and sensus, which indicates the

semantic referent of those words: Where, however, in the sequel the group of words (sententia)

manifests its meaning (sensus), but something of the groups fullness yet remains left over, a

colon is made . . . Here it makes little sense to think of sententia and sensus being

interchangeable; instead, a group of words invokes those words semantic referent, but it is

lacking the words necessary for it to attain the fullness (plenitudo) of something approaching

syntactic closure. Unfortunately, Isidore does not consistently employ these terms in a way that

reinforces this sophisticated understanding, but this passage does demonstrate his efforts to

articulate notions of groupings of words, meaning, and syntactic structure as distinguishable,

though related, concepts.

In spite of all this theorizing abou