ABSTRACT
Tonality casts a large shadow over the scholarship concerned with English music and English music theory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The critical approaches to the music most frequently employed are either unabashedly tonal or invoke a version of modality closely related to tonality. At the same time, investigations of English music thl~Ory seem to be concerned primarily with identifying elements of emerging tonality. Titles such as Wienpahl's "English Theorists and Evolving Tonality," or Lewis's "Incipient Tonal Thought in Seventeenth-Century English Theory," or Johnson's "Solmization in English Treatises Around the Turn of the Seventeenth Century: A Breakfrom Modal Theory" (italics added for emphasis) reveal the underlying assumption of progress towards tonality.
