Tutorial Four

Tutorial Four: Sogetto Cavato

What is Sogetto Cavato

Composer Josquin des Prez explored using solfège syllables to create words in music, a practice he called sogetto cavato.

A famous example is his work Vive le roi, where in he transliterates "Long live the king" (vive le roi) into solfège syllables. If we were contemporaries of Josquin, instead of do for the tonic pitch, we would use ut, which stands in for the 'v' in vive le roi. If we translate that into notation:

This sequence of pitches is then used as the cantus firmus for Vive le roi.

Creating Sogetto Cavato in Py2MusicXML

Sogetto cavato translates text into notation. As Python can do this task, we can create a little bit of software that will translate a string into notation. This is handy, in no small part because we can make it reusable, but because it offers us possibilities for other things to translate.

Dictionaries

In Python, there's a data type called a dictionary that is comprised of key and value pairs. It's sort of like a phone book - there's the key, or the person you're trying to call, and there's the value, the phone number. There are lots of other ways to look at this too, one of which could be a key, or a note, and a value, or letters that could be represented by that note.

A simple dictionary that would complete Josquin's task above would be like this, using set theory numbers for the pitch values:

sc_dict = {
    'v': 0,
    'e': 2,
    'i': 4,
    'o': 7,
}

We can then create a little logic to make sure we're skipping letters that aren't in the list of keys.

solfege_vowels = []

for key, value in sc_dict:
    solfege_vowels.append(key)

We can then write a function that will take a string, and translate it to a list of pitch classes.

def convert_to_sogetto(string_to_convert):
    sc_dict = {
        'v': 0,
        'e': 2,
        'i': 4,
        'o': 7,
    }
    solfege_vowels = []

    for key, value in sc_dict:
        solfege_vowels.append(key)
   
    pc_list = []
    for letter in string_to_convert:
        if letter in solfege_vowels:
            pc_to_add = sc_dict[letter]
            pc_list.append(pc_to_add)

    return pc_list

We can then call this function, passing in our string:

vlr = 'viveleroi'

vive_pc = convert_to_sogetto(vlr)

And then convert, using Py2MusicXML, into an xml document with a cantus firmus from this conversion process.

vive_note_list = []

for pc in vive_pc: 
    vive_note_list.append(Note(4, 4, pc))

time_sig = [(2,2)]

vive_cantus_firmus = Part(vive_note_list, time_sig)

vive_score = Score([vive_cantus_firmus])

vive_score.convert_to_xml("viveleroi.musicxml")

Opening in engraving software would lead to this result:

Tutorial Five takes the sogetto cavato idea to even more abstraction!