Abstract:
Renaissance musicians learned to sing using hexachordal solmization, a precursor to our modern solfège systems. Solmization instruction books often describe their goal as building “musical understanding” in their students—something deeper and richer than merely training singers to sight-read effectively. This talk explores what musical understanding might have looked like in 16^th-century polyphony, arguing that solmization represents implicit knowledge about tonal space and how to navigate it. Using examples drawn from Palestrina’s masses and motets, we will see how attention to solmization makes Palestrina’s tonal strategies transparent, and how solmization shaped the tonal system of 16^th-century music more broadly.