Formal and Tonal Organization in a 17th-Century Ritornello/Ripieno Structure

Abstract

Length, as such, is hardly criterion of aesthetic assessment. (The last movement of Schubert's Great C major symphony, for example, is not heavenly merely by virtue of the 145 number of bars it contains.) The question nonetheless arises: how does seventeenth-century composer deal with the more extended length of composition based on motetor madrigal text? While the sixteenth-century composer generally adhered to paratactical procedure, that is, technique of linking textual and musical phrases according to syntax and semantics, the composer of the early Baroque period discovered reiteration of textual and/or musical sections as one of the fruitful possibilities for expanding and structuring work. Michael Praetorius is the only theorist/composer of the seventeenth century to address the topic of musical repeats at some length. In his discussion of musical terminology, volume III of Syntagma musicum, he acknowledges the Italian origin of ritornello and ripieno.l As one might expect, the entry ritornello in an etymological dictionary refers the reader to the infinitive ritornare, return or repeat, and identifies the term's primary usage as: a verse or groups of verses that are repeated within poetic structure. Only secondarily does the dictionary allude to the musical usage that emerges at the end of the sixteenth century: musical strand that repeats. Three

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