Quid non-ebrietas. Adrian Willaert (c. 1490 – 7 December 1562)

In an early 4-part vocal work, Quid non-ebrietas? (In some sources called the Chromatic Duo) Willaert uses musica ficta around the circle of 5ths in one of the voices resulting in an augmented 7th in unison with the ending octave, an outstanding experiment with chromatic enharmonicism. Willaert was among the first to extensively use chromaticism in the madrigal.

This is music fraught with dangers almost impossible to perform. Even the simple concluding octave could not easily be executed. Willaert had slyly placed an enormous obstacle in its way: All through the piece, as a performer steered his part through different tonal centers, he would unavoidably run headlong into musical commas at every turn the irreconcilable gaps that result from the fact that fifths, octaves, and thirds are all based on different standards of measure.

Excerpt from Temperament by Stuart Isacoff

"Willaert's Quid non ebrietas shattered convention. The piece opens in an ordinary fashion, using harmonies built from the tones of the do scale. In the beginning, do serves as the work's central tone the hub around which all the musical lines will orbit. The musical scale that begins and ends on do thus serves as the music's framework. But Willaert's voices never settle down for long. Within moments, the tenor part, twisting and turning in unexpected directions, snakes its way toward another tonal center, with a different constellation of scale tones; then it moves on to yet another. Every time the music seems to fix itself around one particular point, it swerves abruptly, winding this way and that, sleekly traveling through unexpected pathways, alighting for a brief moment on every one of the twelve distinct tones Pythagoras found in his chain of perfect fifths. Finally, it concludes its journey with an octave leap.
This is music fraught with dangers almost impossible to perform. Even the simple concluding octave could not easily be executed. Willaert had slyly placed an enormous obstacle in its way: All through the piece, as a performer steered his part through different tonal centers, he would unavoidably run headlong into musical commas at every turn the irreconcilable gaps that result from the fact that fifths, octaves, and thirds are all based on different standards of measure.
Each gap would set the singer slightly off course. The music would inevitably drift out of tune, leading to bad-sounding intervals, just as it would on a keyboard with fixed strings.
Striving to make the first and last tones of Quid non ebrietas agree was like trying to fill a gallon tank exactly to the brim by alternately emptying quart jars and liter containers into it. The differing proportions of these receptacles will always prevent them from arriving at the same level.
In the end, the tank will either overflow or be partially empty. When sung in Pythagorean tuning, Willaert's melody concludes with a disastrously ugly leap, an interval slightly larger than a pure octave; it overflows. Using just intonation, on the other hand because of that tuning's particular irregularities produces in the Willaert piece a final jump slightly short of a pure octave; the melody leaves its container unsatisfactorily empty The composer purposely designed this music so that it would fail with either system. It would succeed flawlessly, however, with a radical tuning called equal temperament."

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# Quidnonebrietas

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