The history of modal theory in Western music is notoriously complicated. While a student can easily learn the use of the eight modes in Gregorian chant in a day, studying the historical development of those modes, their relationship to ancient Greek theory, and their application to more recent musical genres can occupy a lifetime. The complexity of the Carolingian synthesis of Greek theory and chant practice is easily matched by the complexity of the dissolution of that theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Michael R. Dodds’s From Modes to Keys in Early Modern Music Theory authoritatively does for the latter what Charles Atkinson’s The Critical Nexus does for the former: it manages to disentangle historical and theoretical threads that had seemed hopelessly tangled.1
Dodds’s narrative, which draws on sources from across western Europe, starts in the sixteenth century and ends in the eighteenth, eras with coherent theories that...