Bass-Triadic Cadence Formulae in Melchior Neusidler’s Original Compositions from Il Primo (-Secondo) Intabolatura Di Liuto

There was a paradigmatic shift in the discourse surrounding lute music between the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The lute treatises written by early sixteenth-century German lutenists, such as Hans Judenkünig, Hanse Gerle, and Hans Newsidler, focused on technical directives that support a linear conception of music. However, lutenists active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, such as Matthaeus Waissel and Jean-Baptiste Besard, describe technical accommodations for vertically conceived structures. Contemporaneously, at the turn of the seventeenth century, the discourse on bass primacy and triadic structures developed from an undercurrent, cast in the shadow of counterpoint treatises, to a prominent discourse, starting in 1581 with Johannes Avianus, who described triads as coherent musical objects to 1610 with Johannes Lippius, who codified the concept of triadic inversion. What elevated a slight undercurrent of discourse on music theory to the presiding conversation? Born in 1531, the prominent Germain lutenist Melchior Neusidler directly influenced John Dowland and Jakub Reys, both of whom were instrumental in developing lute compositional practice heading into the seventeenth century. Additionally, Neusidler incorporates a curious compositional technique that displays the struggle between counterpoint and harmony, demonstrating the shift into vertical coherence. He conglomerates a style evocative of freely linear vocal polyphony with dense, triadic homophonic textures. In Neusidler’s homophonic writing, which encompasses most of his original oeuvre, he prioritizes triadic and vertical coherence, often at the expense of counterpoint directives. Understanding how Neusidler fits the historical gap between the early sixteenth-century German tradition and the advent of the French Baroque lute tradition that was instrumental to the development of harmony and tonality will enrich and inform current practitioners of lute music, cultivate a discussion on lute music as a catalyst of the development of harmonic structures in the broader study of early music, and provide a more complete picture of the historical trajectory of the repertoire.