Research on the European Polyphonic Music in the Sixteenth Century

This book is an updated report of Professor Ding-Cheng Dai's contribution on the early western music harmony research, and is another masterpiece following his earlier publications "European Polyphonic Music Between the 9th and 16th Century: Its Concepts and Forms of Harmony" (2000), "Choral Classics - Renaissance Choral Works" (2008), "Catholic Music in Macao in the Twentieth Century" (2013). It has been acknowledged that in the modern music academic field, research on music before the Baroque period has been limited. A number of the renowned history books do mention about the development of this period, yet having relatively few references of music examples.

The Renaissance period in Europe is well-known for "the golden age of choral polyphony in western music history". The choral works composed in this musical period shows the characteristics in style, form, structure, rhythm, texture and composition method etc. In Europe, there is already a trend in studying about the analyzing of these particular pieces, and we mainly get in contact of development of western music system in most music history texts. This book named "European Polyphony in the 16th Century", uses the perspective of synchronicity to explore the Russian Orthodox polyphonic works, as well as Portugal pieces from the same period.

Currently, Russian Orthodox music is rarely known in the Chinese academic field, and it may not be quoted in some important historical theory texts. This book is inspiring and educational in music composition as well as studying the history of western choral music, with numerous proves, in-depth analysis and descriptions provided.

The Russian Orthodox choral music in the 16th century, has reflected both the Orthodox Church and early Russian polyphonic music, as well as the change in characteristics including harmonic progression when monophonic music gradually develops into polyphonic music. This is because Russian Orthodox music had more completed copies of early music, which provides clearer historical information.

This chapter summarizes the three forms in Russian Orthodox polyphonic choral music back in the 16th century, which the ideas are presented in a clear manner, as well as abundant examples to prove different theories, which is different from other analysis of polyphonic music focusing on theories instead of providing actual pieces as examples. The tonality, dissonances, choral parts as well as cadence of Orthodox choral music forms a unique musical style, while it might be different from some theories of contemporary educational texts about harmony, including harmonic progression, dissonance parts and cadence.