TONAL TYPES IN THE KEYBOARD MUSIC OF FRESCOBALDI The following is a scan of the original, unpublished English text of a presentation I gave (in an Italian translation) at the 1983 Frescobaldi Conference in Ferrara. The Italian version was published in 1987 in the Report of the Conference. Following the Conference I continued working on the project, applying the same analysis to a large number of musical repertories from the late sixteenth- to the late seventeenth century, including works by Giovanni Gabrielli, Gesualdo, Michelangelo Rossi, Monteverdi, Froberger, Stradella, and Buxtehude. My hope was that the results would reflect the transition from a “modal” to a “tonal” idiom. I also developed a quantitative indicator, the “beta factor,” to show the place of each body of works along this path. Its theoretical value for a purely “modal” repertory would be 0, and its value for a pure “tonal” repertory would be 100. In fact, the value for Frescobaldi’s 1615 Recercari e Canzoni publication, with their almost artificial modal language, turns out to be approximately 3, and the value for all his published keyboard works is approximately 12, whereas the value for Corelli’s four collections of trio sonatas is 99! The data were generated by means of a Basic program that I had developed on an Apple 2e computer, and the tables and graphs shown in the handout were produced automatically upon inputting the values. In spite of these promising results, I had to halt the project after my move to North Carolina in 1984 due a number of other commitments, and I never returned to it. In the near future I hope to self-publish here a few more details on this further work. Alexander Silbiger March 2010