In her detailed and wide-ranging study, Megan Kaes Long shows how the balle o and canzone a created a novel sense of tonal expectation for late sixteenth-and early seventeenthcentury listeners-a significant but under-appreciated first step in the emergence of what we recognize as tonality. As she explains, her view of tonality follows the precedents of Edward Dent (1930) and Brian Hyer (2002) and "centers not pitch, but rhythm and meter" (3), so that rhythmically incisive text-se ing and metric

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... regularity within a homophonic texture prove crucial to this new tonal idiom. Within a larger historical context, Long links the balle o and canzone a to earlier homophonic and distinctly tonal-sounding genres of the Renaissance (fro ola, chorale, musique mesurée) as similar products of a pervasive humanist spirit. Thus, to simplify Long's thesis radically: humanism begets homophony begets tonality. In the course of making this larger argument, Long analogizes her repertory's balanced phrases and clear-cut forms with Renaissance dance, painted miniatures, cartography, and clocks. In sum, the book is richly informative, its scope ambitious, and its subject ma er vast. But there are questions that will nag at the reader throughout. First is whether the repertory's metrically supported tonal style was the result of its poetic texts rather than its association with dancing. Next and more consequential is whether the repertory initiated the style of European music that we recognize as tonal. Was it simply caught up in a larger trend? Ultimately (and enigmatically), Long leaves us wondering: can we even describe this repertory as "tonal"? [2] Analytical descriptions of this music lie at the heart of Long's book, which details how partsong composers guide listener expectation throughout these brief pieces. To take an example, Long shows how Orazio Vecchi's "Chi vuol goder il mondo" (61-63) achieves this guidance by prioritizing metric regularity and harmonic drive. Each line of poetry comprises two measures of music, the rhymed couplet makes four, and the concluding fa-la, refrain balances this with four more. That much comprises the first strain of this binary-form piece, the second half of which follows the same pa ern except to add two measures for a concluding line of poetry (thus 8 + 8 + 2). Beyond its clear periodicity, Vecchi's balle o pulls the listener along by closing the first strain with a half cadence and the second with an authentic cadence. That relationship between the two strains, in which the second completes the first, replicates not only the pairing of phrases in which