Introduction
(I) Specified chromatic inflections in vocal sources
(II) The theorists' statements
(III) Instrumental tablatures
(IV) Doubling the subtonic

> (V) General conclusion
 

 
Thus all the different approaches used in this study are seen to meet eventually at one and the same point. They clearly demonstrate that the attraction principle, which originated in the late thirteenth century, gradually develops during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but was to be challenged in the late years of the fifteenth century, i.e. at the very moment musicians began to concern themselves more specifically with modal theory.
   This temporary decline of the attraction principle can be seen essentially in the theoretical literature (Gaffurius, later Danckerts, Coclico, and the silence of almost all Germanic theorists), in the instrumental tablatures (Buchner, Gerle, etc.) and above all in the Franco-Flemish vocal repertoire (doubled subtonics, beginning with Ockeghem).
   For leading note accidentals, the recovery movement starts in Italy in the 1530s, with such names as the composers Carpentras, Willaert, Festa; the theoreticians Vanneo, Dentice, Del Lago; the lute intabulators Francesco da Milano or Vincenzo Capirola. About thirty years later, it spreads to France and Flanders as well (Vaet, Le Jeune, L'Estochart, around 1560-80).

It is very striking to observe that this evolution was by no means a smooth and predictable one. Ancient and venerable as it is, the attraction principle did not always hold sway over Western music. After the Renaissance, it is true, it was to rule more than two centuries of tonal music. But in the nineteenth century, composers like Berlioz, Borodin or Dvorák were to draw part of their inspiration from modal aesthetics. Thus it seems obvious that the addition of a leading note would result in ruining Dvorák's famous theme:

ex.: A. Dvorák, 9th symphony ("From the New World"). IV. Allegro con fuoco

 
During the very same period however, Wagnerian chromaticism was driving composers pretty much towards the opposite direction, an evolution which eventually led to the appearance of atonality in the first years of the twentieth century.
   But it may be that the process of evolution has not come to an end yet, and that modal formulas will be found to be used again some day by a later generation of Western musicians.
 

English translation: Vincent Arlettaz
Text revised by Michel Austin, Kurt Lueders, Monir Tayeb