This thesis treats Daniel Read's music analytically to establish style characteristics. Read's fuging tunes are examined for metric placement and structural occurrence of dissonance, and dissonance as text painting. Read's comments on dissonance are extracted from his tunebook introductions. A historical chapter includes the English origins of the fuging tune and its American heyday. The creative life of Daniel Read is discussed. This thesis contributes to knowledge of Read's role in the development of the New England Psalmody idiom. Specifically, this work illustrates the importance of understanding and analyzing Read's use of dissonance as a style determinant, showing that Read's dissonance treatment is an immediate and central characteristic of his compositional practice.

This study is an attempt to shed some light on the treatment of one dissonance—the seventh—in the works of the following composers: Cipriano de Rore (1516-1565); Philippe de Monte (1521-1603); Giaches de Wert (1535-1596); Luca Marenzio (1553-1599); Carlo Gesualdo (ca. 1560-1613); and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). The purpose of this thesis is to discover (1) the frequency of occurrence of primary (relatively accented) sevenths and their inversions (^ chords, etc.) in a selection of each composer's madrigals; and (2) the methods of handling sevenths employed by each composer, with particular emphasis on the relationship between these methods and sixteenth century theory.