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Although the Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy ranks among the most studied exchanges between a conservative theorist and a progressive composer in music history, a basic point of contention between the two sides has remained overlooked. As essential to Monteverdi's seconda pratica as his unprepared dissonances and deviances in mode was the common tuning system of his time, meantone temperament. Out-of-tune text-setting devices figure throughout Monteverdi's oeuvre, from his early madrigals to his late operas. Although Monteverdi left no directions for tuning, supporting evidence of this practice is in fact found in Artusi's Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica, in which the theorist attempted to tamper with modern music-to retune it in equal temperament. Taking issue with both the systematic and the literary-critical approaches to analysis developed by Eric Chafe, Susan McClary, and others, I argue that modern musicology has become Artusian by expecting Monteverdi's music to sound in tune. Beyond retuning our historicallyinformed performances of Monteverdi's music and fine-tuning our understanding of Artusi's theories, there are still wider implications for Western musicology that follow from this: As with ethnomusicology, the presumption that music must be in tune by our modern standards ought to be set aside in the study of Western music history.
Keywords: Text-tone relationships; Renaissance music theory; Madrigal
Giovanni Maria Artusi's Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica (1600) has long incited musicologists to read into Claudio Monteverdi's vocal music for subtexts about theory versus practice.1 Whether historiographical or analytical, most accounts of Monteverdi's seconda pratica are prefaced by the "Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy" For want of Monteverdi's promised but non-extant treatise, we have had no other recourse but to extract the principles of his practice from his music, with the aid of his (and his brother's) occasional writings and the treatises by Artusi.2 This strategy has been pursued over the generations to such an extent that some musicologists, in recent years, have become weary of it-of recounting the exchange one more time, as though Monteverdi's stylistic development actually depended on Artusi at all. Anthony Newcomb, for one, cautioned out of a "veteran's weariness" against writing "yet another analysis of another analysis of the words of Artusi and Ottuso and the Monteverdi brothers on the subject of the seconda pratica." Newcomb asked, "Are we to believe that Monteverdi's musical...