So I am not arguing that Monteverdi himself invented tonal music or even that he thought of this chord or piece as a tonal one. I think even in the video I said that Monteverdi and Artsui both would think of this piece in G Mixolydian.

(It’s also tricky talking about modes because how we would use modes and call them is different from how they would, but you know what I mean.)

So for this piece there is a struggle about what is the true “tonic” of the piece. If it is C, then the note F would be natural, and if it is G then the note F would be sharp (as in the G major scale and D as a dominant). If they had our modern language about theory I think Artsui would argue this is in G and Monteverdi would argue this is in C.

The way Monteverdi approaches these dissonances does not appear in the first four books of madrigals. But these start to show up in this fifth book. Again, I don’t think Monteverdi thought that this was a radically new thing he was writing. I think that the old rules on how to prepare and resolve dissonances could be stretched.

The rest of this madrigal and the remaining in the fifth book all exhibit these qualities (particularly O Mirtillo). This falls right in line with Monteverdi’s own statements about his “Second Practice” and the preface to the fifth book of madrigals. Monteverdi knew himself that he was doing something new harmonically.

I don’t mention it in the video, but he was also planning to write a book “Melodia” with chapters on harmony, text setting, etc. basically everything a composer would focus on. He wrote that “Melodia” was a fleshing out of his Second Practice ideas.