6a: "Ut re mi fa sol la" (Byrd)

In a piece for harpsichord called "Ut re mi fa sol la" William Byrd features the stepwise ascending and descending Guidonian hexachord as a recurrent subject. The piece is included in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and in the score of the Breitkopf & Härtel edition from 1899 (avaiblabe via IMSLP) one finds 17 annotated entries of the subject in whole notes.

In the light of this extravagant compositional idea it is interesting to inspect the various instances of this subject in their respective local contexts. Before looking into details from a modal point of view, it is a good starting point to take the syllables as a nearly emblematic reference. They refer to six notes forming the step interval pattern T T S T T (T = whole tone, S = semitone). To further simplify things on the Tonkreisel we always start the hexachord from the first scale degree of the corresponding Ionian mode. In other words, all the 17 hexachordal subjects have the solmisation do re mi fa so la - la so fa mi re do and they are all played by touching the segments 1 2 3 4 5 6 - 6 5 4 3 2 1 on the circular playground (see video).

The following analysis of the hexachords with respect to the surrounding polyphonic setting may be the motivated by some comments of Stephano Megozzi (see paragraph 22 in his Review of Lionel Pike, Hexachords in Late-Renaissance Music )

To be continued...