Editing Perfect fourth (section)

===Renaissance and Baroque===
The development of tonality continued through the [[Renaissance music|Renaissance]] until it was fully realized by composers of the [[Baroque]] era.

[[Image:Renaissance Kadenz for wikipedia.png|thumb|left|200px|Conventional closing cadences]]
As time progressed through the late Renaissance and early Baroque, the fourth became more understood as an interval that needed resolution. Increasingly the harmonies of fifths and fourths yielded to uses of thirds and sixths. In the example, cadence forms from works by [[Orlande de Lassus|Orlando di Lasso]] and [[Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina|Palestrina]] show the fourth being resolved as a suspension. ([[Image:Loudspeaker.svg|11px]][//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Palestrina_Lasso_Schlusskadenz_for_wikipedia.mid Listen])

In the early Baroque music of [[Claudio Monteverdi]] and [[Girolamo Frescobaldi]] triadic harmony was thoroughly utilized. Diatonic and chromatic passages strongly outlining the interval of a fourth appear in the ''[[lamento]]'' genre, and often in ''passus duriusculus'' passages of chromatic descent. In the [[Madrigal (music)|madrigals]] of Claudio Monteverdi and [[Carlo Gesualdo]] the intensive interpretation of the text ([[word painting]]) frequently highlights the shape of a fourth as an extremely delayed resolution of a fourth suspension. Also, in Frescobaldi's ''Chromatic [[Toccata]]'' of 1635 the outlined fourths overlap, bisecting various [[church modes]].

In the first third of the 18th century, ground-laying theoretical treatises on composition and [[harmony]] were written. [[Jean-Philippe Rameau]] completed his treatise ''Le Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels'' (the theory of harmony reduced to its natural principles) in 1722 which supplemented his work of four years earlier, ''Nouveau Système de musique theoretique'' (new system of music theory); these together may be considered the cornerstone of modern [[music theory]] relating to consonance and harmony. The Austrian composer [[Johann Fux]] published in 1725 his powerful treatise on the composition of [[counterpoint]] in the style of Palestrina under the title ''[[Gradus|Gradus ad Parnassum]]'' (The Steps to [[Mount Parnassus#Parnassus as metaphor|Parnassus]]). He outlined various types of counterpoint (e.g., ''note against note''), and suggested a careful application of the fourth so as to avoid dissonance.