The Triad in Dispute: Johannes Lippius, His Audiences, and the Disputatio Genre

Abstract

The reception of Johannes Lippius’s path-breaking conception of the triad chiefly relies upon his treatise Synopsis musicae novae. Yet Lippius first published most of his ideas in texts called “disputations,” whose genre-specific peculiarities have been overlooked. By situating Lippius’s writings within the early-modern university system, this essay reveals an important instance of how demands of audience and genre have shaped music theory and offers tantalizing glimpses of how the oral disputation may have encouraged Lippius to clarify his ideas, particularly in his recasting of the analogy between the triad and the Trinity.