"Michael Dodds offers an ambitious and wide-ranging account of one of the most vexing problems in the history of Western music, the shift from mode to key. Dodds brings unparalleled knowledge of musical repertories and theoretical thought to illuminate pivotal moments. Disentangling diverse strands of thought he offers a three-fold model to explain change based on the dynamic interplay among three historical-conceptual layers. From Modes to Keys becomes the starting point for all future investigations of mode." -- Jessie Ann Owens, Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus, UC Davis"The historical path leading from modality to tonality has long been a confounding and contentious subject for musicologists. In his brilliant new study, Michael Dodds may well have written the definitive account of this epic story. We learn how the familiar major and minor key system emerged not through any direct evolution from the set of eight Ecclesiastical modes, rather through a radically new theoretical conception of tonal space catalyzed by the introduction of keyboard instruments in the church service. A landmark book.

" -- Thomas Christensen, Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities, The University of Chicago"Well produced with print that is easy on eyes of all ages, this is a deeply learned study." -- Choice"This text is highly accessible to a wide range of musical audiences, who are curious about the history, development and reasoning behind the system of tonality we employ today." -- Kymani Armstrong-Williams, Physics Book Reviews"The history of modal theory in Western music is notoriously complicated. 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. [Dodds's] theoretical model and his clear approach to historical analysis will ensure that the present book will have to be considered in any future research in this area." -- Charles Weaver, Journal of the American Musicological Society.