Keyboard thinking: intersections of notation, composition, improvisation, and intabulation in sixteenth-century Italy

This dissertation examines the relationship between Italian keyboard tablature (IKT) and the unwritten tradition in the sixteenth century. Used to notate the majority of early modern Italian keyboard music, IKT appears similar to modern notation but in many ways behaves more like Italian lute tablature. Its particular characteristics are directly related to the process of intabulation, but I also argue that they strongly reflect the influence of the unwritten tradition. In addition, I argue that IKT’s unwritten conventions and laws influenced the style of the music it transmits, giving it a degree of agency in the compositional process itself. IKT sits squarely at the point at which intabulation process, compositional process, notational convention, and the unwritten traditions of keyboard playing join. ❧ Also situated at this same nexus is keyboard thinking, the overarching analytical construct used in this study. Keyboard thinking attempts to partly reconstruct the mindset of the cinquecento keyboardist. It is particularly used in Chapter 2, which attempts to reconstruct a historical technique of improvisation involving the use of the triadic accompaniment of melodies and melodic fragments. I argue that this technique strongly shapes IKT’s conventions. ❧ In turn, in Chapter 1 I investigate these conventions through the lens of intabulation process. I examine the extent to which IKT’s rules were understood as a distinct system, and I argue that they were deeply tied to the physical actions of playing. In Chapter 3 I explore the influence of notation on composition from a specific angle: that intabulations in sixteenth-century prints can be read as a case of self-fashioning, as intabulators either exploited or pushed back against IKT’s conventions to demonstrate specific aspects of the intabulatory art.