From Psalmody to Tonality *

At a certain point in my article on “Mode” for The New Grove, I wrote the following:

By a circuitous but traceable route through French- and German-speaking Catholic countries, what had begun as Banchieri’s eight “psalm-tone keys” were finally incorporated into the system of 24 Major and minor keys in Mattheson’s Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre. ¹