New theories for old music: An analysis of Lamentations settings by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd

Movement through pitch space in the Common Practice Period is generally acknowledged as being structured on the fifth relation, whereas movement through the pitch space of the highly chromatic music of the nineteenth century is thought of as being structured on the third relation. Pitch-space structures in pre-tonal music are rarely if ever discussed. This study presents an alternative method for the analysis of pre-tonal music primarily by defining criteria for an examination of long-term movement through pitch space, as seen in the settings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah by English composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. It is the author's hypothesis that composers in the latter half of the sixteenth century increasingly organized musical pitch space into circle-of-fifths substructures. Even though third relations continued to persist to some extent, it was the fifth relation that was to prevail for the next two centuries.