Society
for Seventeenth-Century Music
2008
Abstracts
(in program order)
“Une espèce d’éloquence dans la musique”:
Embracing a Dis-Figured Rhetoric in France
Jonathan Gibson
Around 1680, the rhetorician and theologian François Fénelon wrote of Greek and Latin rhetoric, “it is true that, when one has undergone thorough study, one can derive great benefits from it... But in the end, one may dispense with it.” The nonchalance with which Fénelon dismissed revered classical texts exemplifies the growing disenchantment among rhetoricians with figures, tropes, the dispositio, and other aging rhetorical precepts. Seventeenth-century rhetoricians—among them Fénelon, Bernard Lamy, René Bary, and René Rapin—enacted a radical reinvention of French rhetoric, splintering the discipline into three often conflicting strands: the first continued to reference French versions of classical rhetorical figures; the second melded with these ancient precepts a Cartesian taxonomy of the Passions; and the third sought to abandon artificial precepts altogether in the quest for transparent, or “Natural,” representation.
Even while adopting opposing methods, representatives of all three approaches were unanimous in regarding rhetoric and music as “sister” disciplines. Furthermore, French musicians and rhetoricians alike rejected the prevailing idea that the relationship between these disciplines was hierarchical, with rhetoric the dominant sibling. This shift helps to explain why the notion that music “imitated” the structures and conventions of rhetoric, while popular in other regions, is to be found in no French source after ca. 1640. Yet, many recent studies continue to perpetuate such hierarchies, mapping onto musical works rhetorical concepts unknown or consciously avoided in France.
In this paper, I portray rhetoric in late-seventeenth-century France not as a unified discipline, but as a collection of often disparate approaches. Relating a more nuanced depiction of French rhetoric and eloquence to music-centered writings by Bacilly, La Croix, Lecerf and Grimarest reveals that the conflicting aesthetic stances evident among rhetoric texts also shaped the era’s discourse on music. More broadly, since no tradition existed in French musical discourse of articulating aesthetic matters until Lecerf’s Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (1704-1706), the intersection of music and rhetoric offers an ideal starting point from which to begin to construct an aesthetics of musical eloquence in seventeenth-century France.
The Rhetoric of Mouvement and Passionate Expression in
Seventeenth-Century French Harpsichord Music
Margot Martin
Although rhetoric is generally associated with verbal expression, an entire branch of rhetorical theory based on the non-verbal notion of mouvement existed in seventeenth-century France—prevalent not only in artistic and intellectual disciplines, but also within the musical arts and circles of polite society. While modern studies have examined this philosophy with regard to the visual and the verbal arts, few have considered how this notion relates to contemporaneous instrumental music. This paper illustrates how the rhetoric of mouvement applies especially to French harpsichord music.
Mouvement went beyond basic temporal motion (meter and tempo) to encompass interior motions (emotion) associated with feeling and passion. For example, Richelet states that mouvement signifies “thought, sentiment…all that touches and moves the heart.” It was believed that mouvement resulted from a physical and temporal motion that could both represent and incite people to feel passion.
This paper examines prevailing philosophies of mouvement and passionate expression, discussing chief tenets and demonstrating how they manifest themselves within different artistic disciplines, including instrumental music. It considers how passionate expression through mouvement derives from various disciplines, citing Félibien’s and Le Brun’s commentaries on painting, Méré’s writings on civility, Bellegarde’s treatise on eloquence, and Masson’s and Mersenne’s treatises on music. The principles discussed in these texts are echoed by St. Lambert, whose treatise allows us to apply their principles directly to harpsichord playing.
Mouvement in harpsichord music was engendered by effecting physical and temporal motion of sound on many levels: tempo, meter, melody, rhythm, harmonic rate of change, and use of agréments. This paper focuses on two key aspects of mouvement: its general rhetoric as found in the chief dances of the repertoire, and the agréments, which functioned within this general framework to create another level of mouvement, which fashioned the music’s passionate and expressive gestures. Thus agréments, rather than mere extraneous embellishments, function as part of the music’s intricate declamatory language to create an expressive rhetorical discourse reflecting socio-aesthetic values.
Pious Persuasion: Bénigne de Bacilly’s Spiritual Airs for Repentant Souls
Catherine Gordon-Seifert
Throughout the seventeenth century, Catholic Church leaders in France sought to persuade female aristocrats to renounce frivolity and live a life of religious devotion. Singing sacred songs was an important part of this initiative. To meet the need for a suitable repertory, François Berthod published three volumes of sacred parodies of love songs (1656, 1658, 1662). Certain critics, however, found Berthod’s works inadequate as expressions of an increasing religious fervor and irreverent by reference to their profane originals. Women singing parodies would remember the previous “sinful” texts.
This paper explores a new kind of sacred song, composed for women, that captured the spirit of an intensified religious zeal through a new persuasive rhetorical-musical language: Bénigne de Bacilly’s two volumes of spiritual airs (1672, 1677, five re-editions, 1683-1703). The airs were set to lyrics by Jacques Testu that are not parodies or French paraphrases of psalms but newly-written poems on sacred themes. Bacilly’s spiritual airs differ significantly from Berthod’s parodies, as they are not love songs for Jesus/God, but utterances of repentance, reflecting Jansenist views of predestination.
By reference to theological and rhetorical treatises, prefaces to Testu’s verses and Bacilly’s airs, and through an analysis based on rhetorical principles, particularly memoria, I show how Bacilly manipulated musical conventions associated with profane airs in unconventional ways to create a sense of familiarity that make both melody and text more memorable. This approach served a pedagogical function: to enable women, many musically illiterate, to learn airs easily and sing them from memory. Thus the use of profane musical conventions would more readily “imprint” the meaning of the sacred texts upon the memory.
By using conventions associated with passionate expression in profane airs, Bacilly represented the opposition between heavenly virtue and earthly vice: desperate utterances of unrequited love become expressions of the struggle for paradise, while sorrowful declarations of lost love are associated with earthly damnation. The intent was to create a music that was so persuasive that it would alter one’s mental state and imbue woman with the desire to resist worldly pleasures and instead to seek salvation in order to earn a place in heaven.
Rules Versus Agréments:
Ciceronian Propriety in Seventeenth-Century French Contrapuntal Theory
Don Fader
“Figure, que me veux-tu?”—Diderot
Although numerous seventeenth-century French writings link musical expression with oratory, there has been little work on the role of rhetoric in French theory after Mersenne. A review of French writings on counterpoint from the 1640s onwards reveals that theorists used rhetoric not as a means of categorizing musical techniques in the mode of Burmeister, but rather as a source of fundamental principles. French writers refer to instances of contrapuntal rule-breaking not only as figures, but also as “licences” or “agréments,” terms drawn from classical writings, in particular from Cicero’s use of music as a model for spoken rhetoric. In this context, contrapuntal agréments represent Cicero’s rhetorical ornaments: striking and pleasurable departures from the conventional.
This French usage of rhetoric has significant implications. A central problem for theorists was to assign a place for counterpoint in the scheme of rhetorical functions: convincing (through reason), moving (through the passions), and pleasing (through sensation). Many theorists saw contrapuntal licenses as essentially sensual, having neither an appeal to reason (as did language) nor a clear mimetic function (as did melodic declamation). Therefore, contrapuntal usage was not subject to any general theory. Instead, it depended upon Cicero’s concept of propriety, which enjoined orators to consider the tastes of their audience and act with virtuous restraint in their use of pleasurable ornament. Increasing familiarity with Italian practice caused a realization, particularly among “modernes.” that the effects of harmony were palpable but ultimately dependent on custom. This allowed theorist-musicians such as Charpentier, Loulié, and Brossard, to uphold Italian dissonance practices as powerful musical tools because they were attuned to the ears of “learned listeners,” obviating the need to explain how or why they functioned.
The largely sensual effects ascribed to contrapuntal agréments, and their dependence on the tastes of the audience, made a French “doctrine of musical figures” impossible. At the same time, the notion of propriety in counterpoint played a more significant role than has thus far been recognized in the conflicts over taste and the expressive value of harmony vs. melody that pervaded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French theory and aesthetics.
“La prova tirava troppo in lungo per la lunga serie di versi”–
Reconstructing the History of Ercole amante (1662)
Michael Klaper
The unfortunate fate of Ercole amante, a ‘tragedy in music’ by Francesco Buti and Francesco Cavalli, is well known: commissioned by the First Minister of France Jules Mazarin as part of the wedding celebrations of Louis XIV and the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa in 1660, and destined to be performed in a newly erected theatre building in the Tuileries, the work had its premiere there only in 1662, one year after Mazarin’s death. And although Mazarin had succeeded in inviting the famous architect Gaspare Vigarani to come to France in order to realize the theatre as well as splendid machines and scenery for the spectacle, Ercole amante was not welcomed by the greater part of the French audience. In fact, it was (with one unique exception) the last Italian opera to be given in France before the eighteenth century.
Although these general outlines are clear, the history of the creation of the opera in the course of more than two years is not. My aim is to show that one may reconstruct large parts of this history, first of all by studying the letters that Gaspare Vigarani and his sons sent to their hometown of Modena during the preparation and performances of Ercole amante. These letters were inventoried some 100 years ago, but they have never received the attention they merit, containing not so much information on political and diplomatic matters (as is the rule with letters from the period in question), as upon artistic and cultural ones. They shed light, for example, on the situation of the Italians present at the Parisian court in the early 1660s and on the respective roles of the people involved in the project of Ercole amante. But most of all they allow us to reconstruct different stages in the genesis of the opera, which can be interpreted as an ever-growing compromise with French taste. The Vigarani letters thus give valuable insights into the mechanisms of opera production at a crucial moment in the musical and theatrical history of seventeenth-century France.
Acteurs as Lully's Muses? The Case for Marie Le Rochois
Antonia L. Banducci
Noting the similarities between the roles of Armide and Galatée, both of which Marie Le Rochois premiered in 1686, Jérome de la Gorce in his recent book on Jean-Baptise Lully, states categorically that Lully wrote Galatée's role for Le Rochois. What La Gorce and other scholars have not highlighted, however, is that the same three acteurs, Beaumavielle (basse-taille), Du Mesny (haute-contre) and Le Rochois performed together in Lully's and Quinault's Proserpine (1680) and premiered prominent or leading roles in Persée (1682), Amadis de Gaule (1684), and Roland (1685). Du Mesny as Renaud and possibly Beaumavielle as Hidraot premiered Armide and Du Mesny premiered the eponymous male lead in Lully's last complete operatic work, the pastorale heroïque Acis et Galatée (libretto by Campistron). Did Lully and his librettists create these operas with these acteurs in mind? A study of Le Rochois's roles and what Lully's scores required her to do suggests an affirmative response.
Contemporary accounts laud Le Rochois's expressive acting as well as singing. All of Lully's roles for her require these abilities. But a comparison of her first roles with her later ones leads one to conclude that Lully responded to Le Rochois's early operatic success by composing even more dramatically powerful music for her. His roles for Armide and Galatée feature highly expressive vocal lines. They also include the increased presence of long preludes and ritournelles that demand strong acting skills.
Plot oddities generated by the three other roles that Le Rochois premiered have perplexed Quinault scholars: Mérope, an entirely invented but dramatically compelling character in Persée; the sorceress Arcabonne, who, with her brother, dominates the middle three acts of Amadis; and Angélique, who controls the action in the first three acts of Roland, acts in which the soon-to-be mad crusader barely appears. That Le Rochois was the first to perform these roles likewise suggests that they were created and composed with her in mind. This paper will thus provide an additional perspective on Lully's works, one that moves his operas from the score to the stage.
Manuscript Publishing in Seventeenth-Century England:
An Unknown Source of Commonwealth Instrumental Music
in the Henry Watson Music Library, Manchester
Alan Howard
Among the manuscript collections of the Henry Watson Music Library, Manchester, is a hitherto unreported volume of consort music. Dating from the 1650s, BRm630.85Go42 contains a series of pieces for two trebles and bass: twenty-two by the little-known Sir Edward Golding and eleven by Matthew Locke from his Little Consort, which was published in full by Playford in 1656.
The manuscript significantly augments Golding’s known output, from just nine to twenty-eight works, and preserves readings of Locke’s Little Consort that predate Playford’s edition. Even more importantly, the character of the copying, together with the apparent presence of price inscriptions, marks out the volume as a rare instance of “manuscript publication,” arising from the organized entrepreneurial production of hand-written music for financial gain. This phenomenon has long been recognized in seventeenth-century English music, and its identification here raises two important questions.
Firstly, how did music by Golding, an obscure member of the provincial gentry, come to the attention of London’s elite musicians? The copyist of the manuscript remains uncertain, but the appearance of three of the pieces in Playford’s Court Ayres (1655), and the few surviving biographical details suggest that Golding may have moved among exalted musical circles; new evidence for the participation of peripheral figures in the highly centralized musical climate of Commonwealth England.
Secondly, to what extent can such a "manuscript publication" illuminate the history of Locke’s Little Consort, which is already familiar from other, apparently more authoritative sources? A number of unique readings and concordances with erased notes in Locke’s autograph scorebook, British Library Add. MS 17801, suggest that the Manchester versions antedate Locke’s scorebook. Thus Locke’s cancelled readings, previously understood as comparatively early rejections, actually represent distinct phases in a more extended creative process; versions that were disseminated and probably performed.
Recent research has underlined the importance of contextualizing observations about musical creativity in Restoration autograph manuscripts in terms of their intended function; this Manchester volume demonstrates that such concerns are no less relevant to earlier, non-autograph sources.
“A lovely and perfect music”
Maria Anna von Raschenau and Music at the
Viennese Convent of St. Jacob
Janet K. Page
Maria Anna von Raschenau (1650–1714) has been known only as the composer of several oratorios, all thought to be lost. Nothing was known of her life except the dates of her birth and death, and that she was Chormeisterin at the convent of St. Jacob in Vienna in 1710—since there seemed to be no surviving music, there was no need know anything more.
But not all her music was lost. Three anonymous scores in the Austrian National Library match the texts of libretti that attribute the music to her, and other anonymous scores associated with the convent are likely also her work. The music shows her to have been a composer of skill and imagination, making full use of the resources of her convent, which had a highly developed musical tradition. References to her in court documents provide a picture of her life and personality: she was a prodigy, not only in music but also in other intellectual accomplishments, and she was—most unusually for a woman—granted a court stipend to continue her education, at the request of her father, a respected court employee. Trained in languages, philosophy, theology and history, as well as music and the usual household arts, she may have aimed to become a courtier or a noble wife, or perhaps a court governess or musician. In 1671 or 1672 she entered the convent of St. Jacob, where her musical career blossomed, as the practice of presenting large-scale musical works on patron saints’ days for members of the Imperial family became established in Viennese convents. The high point of this activity was 1690–1710, a time during which state visits to convents to hear music performed by virtuous nuns and young girls meshed perfectly with the Imperial family’s concept of itself. Raschenau thus contributed through her music to the political order of the time, as well as enriching the life of her convent. In this paper, her life and music are examined in light of the concept of communities as a means of understanding the accomplishments of a creative artist.
A Reappraisal of Bertali’s Instrumental Compositions.
Charles E. Brewer
In the preface to his Compositioni musicali (1645), Giovanni Antonio Bertoli called his contemporary Antonio Bertali (1605-1669) “valoroso nel violino” (skilled on the violin). Earlier critical examinations of the Baroque sonata by Newman and Apel relied heavily on the two collections of sonatas entitled Prothemia suavissima (1672), though the ascription of these works to Bertali is now known to be quite problematic. A new examination of the varieties and styles of all instrumental works that can be more firmly attributed to Bertali will demonstrate their significance within the context of instrumental music in Central Europe during the mid-seventeenth century.
With the exception of Zink’s 1989 dissertation, the previously identified twenty-nine instrumental compositions (primarily sonatas) were rarely examined as a corpus. To these can now be added thirteen more compositions from Jacob Ludwig’s little-studied “Partitur Buch” (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 34.7 Aug. 2o), dated 1662 – including two solo violin sonatas, what is most likely an earlier version of his modulating Ciaccona, 3 sonatas à 2, 1 canzona and 1 sonata à 3, 1 sonata à 4, 2 sonatas à 5, and 2 sonatas à 6 – making this manuscript the largest and earliest single collection outside of the Kroměříz archives for works by Bertali.
This new study of Bertali’s compositions provides evidence – most especially in his three solo sonatas and his Ciaccona—for his significance as a virtuoso violinist in the first half of the Seventeenth Century, supporting earlier speculations concerning his role as a teacher to Löwe, Schmelzer, and Biber. In addition, an examination of these works establishes Bertali’s importance in the formation of a “Hapsburg” compositional style in the sonata, emphasizing the use of counterpoint and imitation within the context of the stylus fantasticus as described by Kircher. Finally, the critical examination of these works and their dissemination demonstrates that Bertali had a significant direct impact on the compositional style of instrumental music in Northern Europe, including Nicolai, Pohl, and Buxtehude.
“Venus amid the thorns”: Zarzuela and the Erotic Politics of Monarchy
Louise K. Stein
Today, the word Zarzuela refers to a Spanish genre of musical theater with a mixture of sung and spoken dialogue, erroneously described in some dictionaries as a Spanish form of opera comique or operetta. Productions of zarzuelas today in the United States tend to emphasize “local color” or the folkloric element--- a splashy generic Hispanicism with Andalusian flamenco touches ala the Feria de Sevilla. But even in its heyday in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the zarzuela was an urban genre not concerned primarily with the rural south of Spain, but designed for Madrid’s public theaters and promoted as the “national lyric-dramatic genre,” a potent weapon in the nationalist arsenal against the foreign genres such as Italian opera, French opera comique, and grand opera. In the late nineteenth century, Zarzuela was Spain’s art-musical bulwark against the rising tide of foreign opera, and it was imagined to pour forth a bracingly native, popular expression for Madrid’s bourgeois audience.
The true story of the zarzuela’s invention, social-political function, and early history somehow was lost amidst the flag waving and political maneuvering attached to the genre in the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century, the zarzuela was not a popular entertainment, but a court entertainment for the Spanish king and an elite, invited audience. In the late 1650s, zarzuelas were performed at the renovated Palacio Real de la Zarzuela, a royal hunting lodge in the secluded wooded outskirts of Madrid. These plays with musical scenes took rustic and pastoral landscapes as their setting, but incorporated music by royal composers. Seventeenth-century zarzuelas involve classical mythological characters in amorous intrigue, but burlesque the loves of gods and mortals alike. This large dose of comedy mixed with eroticism distinguished zarzuelas absolutely from the dramatic operas and semi-operas of the same period.
This paper proposes a fresh look at the early zarzuela, with a new understanding of its music and its performance style. Thanks to newly-recovered visual evidence (to be presented and analyzed as part of the paper), it is possible now to understand better how words, music, setting, performance, performers, gender, and social class worked together in the early zarzuelas to create a special, erotically stimulating event for the Spanish court during its pleasure-filled retreats. The royal libido was the early zarzuela’s most important client. At the Zarzuela palace, the king was both principal spectator and protagonist.” Everyone involved in his theatrical productions, from Carpio as aristocratic producer, to the lowliest actress or musician, was engaged in a performance “for the service of his majesty,” so that the zarzuelas were unavoidably political. Though they did not take up overtly political subjects in the modern sense, the zarzuelas were important to the delicate politics of royal entertainment and stimulation.
Dramatizing the Magi and Adoring the Child:
The Epiphany Theme in the Seventeenth-Century Villancico
Drew Edward Davies
The reenactment of Epiphany, the story of the magi arriving in Bethlehem to adore the Christ child, constitutes an important aspect of Christmas season commemorations in Hispanic cultures. Visible today in popular practices such as moving the statues of the three kings progressively closer to the manger in nativity scenes, the dramatic potential of Epiphany found particularly innovative expression during the seventeenth century as a scenario for Spanish and Spanish-American villancico texts.
Epiphany villancicos, capitalizing on the non-biblical tradition that one magus traveled from Ethiopia, tend to employ literary stereotypes of ethnic others in order to stress the idea of the universality of the Roman church. Subgenres of stereotyped villancicos, including the negrilla and the jácara, dramatize groups of ethnic others and low-class Spaniards adoring the Christ child through dance and song. Musical settings of such texts feature asymmetric rhythms and hemiola patterns seemingly evocative of popular genres, yet unequivocally characteristic of elite Spanish musics.
The performance community and some scholars, unintentionally applying seventeenth-century literary stereotypes to exoticist constructions of Latin American history, have falsely assumed a direct relationship between the texts and music of Epiphany villancicos and the multi-ethnic reality of the Americas. Whilst compelling, no one has presented convincing ethnographic evidence for such an interchange. To the contrary, study of the repertoire yields a context in the elite literary tradition of Lope de Vega (i.e., Los pastores de Belén), the iconographic tradition of Rubens (i.e., images of the Adoration of the Magi), and the general seventeenth-century penchant for allegorical representation (i.e., the Four Continents).
Using as case studies Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla’s A la jácara jacarilla, Juan de Araujo’s Los coflades de la estreya and the anonymous Catalán villancico Una jacarilla traigo, this paper will trace the European roots and didactic theological messages of the seventeenth-century Spanish and Spanish American Epiphany villancico in order to contextualize a repertoire in the process of entering the canon. It will show that the Epiphany villancico served as a catalyst for people to imagine the circumstances and contradictions of Christ’s birth within the confines of cathedral devotion.
“‘And a Thousand Violins Begin to Play’:
Instrumental Interventions in the French Baroque Cantata
Michele Cabrini
In two seminal articles, David Burrows and later Margaret Murata discussed a group of Italian cantatas whose subject is singing. The cantatas’ self-referential, satirical, and ironically detached tone, together with their parody of singing clichés, turned the audience’s attention to the performance itself, fueling that very Italian “rage for wit” and ingenuity, to use recent words by Roger Freitas. A different kind of sophistication permeated France, where cantata composers took another approach. Rather than emphasizing performance through singing, they did so by focusing on the dramatic rapport between the singing character and instrumental music employed far beyond its function as mere accompaniment. Overall less overtly self-referential than “singing about singing,” as Murata put it, these cantatas nevertheless draw the listener’s attention to the performing act in a variety of ways absent in their Italian counterparts by turning the instruments into an equal dramatic partner of the voice.
In this paper, I wish to explore this unique rapport and present a preliminary taxonomy of what I call “instrumental interventions” in the early 18th-century French cantata. Through examples by Bernier, Campra, and Morin, I will show how composers turned instrumental music into an essential part of the drama by introducing it within the statements of the singer’s recitatives. In the most basic form, this stratagem helps listeners envision the dramatic space and the action, as in Morin’s Le Naufrage d'Ulysse, where brief spurts of the storm music interrupt the singer’s narration as if coming from afar, or in Campra’s La Dispute de l’Amour et de l’Hymen, where the sound of a bourrée gradually interrupts Venus’s sleep. A more complex use entails revealing the function of the music in stages with the help of the text: in Bernier’s L’Amour vainqueur, the instrumental spurts punctuating the singer’s failed efforts to cope with love represent his attempts to burst into song once they finally metamorphose (and materialize) into the ritornello of his aria. Finally, in Campra’s Le Jaloux this equal partnership comes full circle, as the singer engages in a dramatic tête-à-tête with the instruments, challenging their soothing powers over his miserable state.
Transmission of the Roman Cantatas: The Evidence from Philology
Christine Jeanneret
The Roman cantata is one of the most important secular vocal genres of the Baroque era. Destined for aristocratic cognoscenti, it survives almost exclusively in manuscript form. It is therefore quite remarkable that this repertoire was widely exported, in Italy as well as abroad, though always in very elitist circles. The purpose of my paper is to investigate this transmission on the basis of a philological and codicological study of some fifty manuscripts from the years 1640-1680 preserved in the Casanatense Library (Rome), the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), and the Christ Church Library (Oxford), containing works by, among others, Carlo Caproli, Giacomo Carissimi, Pietro Antonio Cesti, Marco Marazzoli, Luigi Rossi, Mario Savioni, and Antonio Francesco Tenaglia.
Switching the focus from the traditional study of the works and their attributions to the study of the volumes containing these works allows for some interesting conclusions on the transmission of the repertoire. Most of the manuscripts are magnificent volumes with exceptionnally rich bindings, mainly realized in the famous bottega degli Andreoli, bookbinders of the Vatican. They show splendid decorated initials and beautiful calligraphies of professional scribes such as Antonio Chiusi, Bernardino Terenzi, Giorgio Lottico, and Giovanni Antelli. These are clearly objects of prestige, commissioned by a patron and realized by professional copyists. They were an exclusive gift from the papal court, considered the most important at that time, deliberately intended for a selected audience. Other volumes are much simpler, bound in plain parchment, with the hastily and more careless writing either of a composer or of a copyist realizing a volume that is not intended for a patron’s collection but for personal use. Finally, some other volumes are clearly anthologies of miscellaneous fascicles written by different hands that have been assembled and bound afterwards, either in a simple binding but also as prestigious gifts. The codicological study (format, binding, ink, paper, watermark, rastra, collation, and emblems) undoubtedly points to a Roman provenance, except for some peripheral and rare cases. Few hands recur in the whole corpus and concordant pieces are often copied by the same scribe.
O Welcome Death? Depictions of Martyrdom
in the Sacred Operas of Stefano Landi and Virgilio Mazzocchi
Virginia Christy Lamothe
Sacred operas of the seventeenth century reveal in a unique way how music plays a crucial role in conveying the important social and religious ideas embodied in the drama to the audience. In three operas written for the court of the Barberini family, with libretti by Giulio Rospigliosi and music variously by Stefano Landi and Virgilio Mazzocchi, Sant’Alessio (1632, 1634), San Bonifatio (1638), and Sant’Eustachio (1643), the music is liberated from the text of the libretto at the moment each saint stares into the face of death.
What does it mean to die a “good” death? In the case of these early operas, this ideal martyrdom is shown from different angles in the text and dramatic action. Although each saint does die valiantly, each one learns a different lesson about the poignant impact that their death has upon him, specifically in regard to fear, anger, and pity. But it is the music that adds a new dimension in each case. Here, the music is set in order to direct not only the saint but also the audience members through a process expected of martyrs: to overcome their emotional responses and assume their calm, steadfast resolve to die.
By looking at these musical depictions of martyrdom, I will explain not only unique compositional processes, but also two important aesthetic issues that played structural roles in the operas’ composition: a demonstration of the anticipated role the audience would play in an opera’s dramatic process, and an evaluation of the seventeenth-century concept of a renewal of classical ideals for drama, such as those outlined in Aristotle’s Poetics. This examination will add considerably to what is known about early opera because it examines little known works extant only in unique as well as recently-discovered sources.
“Del vario stile in cui piango e ragiono”:
The Ethical Divide between the Florentine and Seconda pratica Composers
Jamie G. Weaver
It is widely accepted that opera, the monodic aria, and the concerted madrigal in Italy were developed by composers operating under identical codes of compositional conduct: the Camerata fiorentina and the seconda pratica composers are generally seen as sharing common ethical goals in the act and outcome of composition. However, a close reexamination of the compositions and theoretical writings of these groups reveals divergent ethical views that resulted in independent codes of compositional conduct. An understanding of the development of opera, cantata, and vocal chamber works is reframed by an evaluation of each group’s compositional ethics, and the nature and deployment of the ethics supports an expanded concept of the seconda pratica as a compositional movement originating in Ferrara in the 1580s and pervading northern Italy until the 1640s.
Several ethical points illuminate the differences separating Florentine composers from those of the seconda pratica. Guided by their own initiative or the interests of others, composers in Florence rejected polyphony in their secular composition almost entirely, while the composers of northern Italy continued to treat it as a viable means of musical communication. Florentine composers explored predetermined musical genres modeled upon literary counterparts, while northern Italian composers combined and blended musical styles and genres. Florentine composers rejected the mixed-genre concept of tragicomedy expressed in Guarini’s Il pastor fido, favoring poetic ideas they deemed Aristotelian; seconda pratica composers embraced Guarini’s concepts. Composers in Florence included personification as a worthy compositional technique, while seconda pratica composers rejected it as lacking verisimilitude. Finally, Florentine composers subscribed to classical imitative theories, while the composers of the seconda pratica chose to pursue individual methods of musical imitation.
The emergence of evidence for clear ethical imperatives differentiating the Florentine from the seconda pratica composers allows musicologists to reassess the scope of the musical and rhetorical ideas that shaped opera and vocal chamber music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These genres evolved from revolutionary ideas about the treatment of text as well as from experimentation with ancient Greek models. Reshaping our own understanding toward an updated model acknowledges the contributions of diverse ideologies to these rich genres.
Colonial Difference in Armide
Olivia Bloechl
This paper considers Lully’s and Quinault’s tragédie en musique, Armide (1687), in the context of seventeenth-century French colonization. It argues that the challenges of representing difference in that context shaped the opera’s poetic and musical characterization of the Syrian sorceress Armide. I conclude that the opera registers an ambivalence toward the means and ends of French colonialism that was characteristic of late-century colonial discourse.Quinault’s libretto adapted the Rinaldo-Armida episode from Tasso’s Crusade epic, the Gerusalemme liberata (1581). From this original source the opera inherited a concern for colonialism. Tasso himself drew an analogy between the Crusades and Catholic imperialism with his encomium to Columbus in Canto 15. He also set Armida’s realm in the colonial Canary Islands (the “Fortunate Isles”).
Armida’s characterization tested the problem of how to relate to and represent people of different ethnicities and religions in conquest situations. The resulting possibilities—recognition through alliance, or alienation through subjugation—had a clear relevance for French colonialism. Characteristically, the tragédie en musique internalized these dynamics as affective relations between noble characters. In the opera, Armide’s love alliance with Renaud explores a relation of mutual recognition that (nearly) overcomes her politically motivated hatred. Her character expresses her affective indecision in the powerful monologue airs from Acts II and V. But Armide’s conflicted passions emerge from a more basic problem of colonial representation: how to represent a Syrian, Muslim sorceress caught between romantic identification with a Frankish conqueror, and a politically and ethnically determined difference?
The opera never resolves Armide’s affective dilemma or her character’s conflicted identification as “same” and “other” relative to Renaud. I use postcolonial theory to analyze this characterization of Armide as an example of colonial ambivalence, which Homi Bhabha defines as a conflicted colonial “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” This new reading of the opera applies the concept of “ambivalence” as an interpretive tool that yields a political rationale for the opera’s unconventional features. The resulting colonial reading demonstrates the relevance of political formations other than absolutism for our understanding of French opera.
Roxana’s Dance:
The Persuasive Footwork of Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress
Jed Wentz
In his dark and brilliant novel The Fortunate Mistress (1724), Daniel Defoe advances his heroine’s worldly fortunes in a climactic scene of masked dancing. Though nominally set during the reign of Charles II, the novel’s time scheme unexpectedly oscillates between the Restoration and Georgian periods. These fluctuations influence the choice of dance forms that Defoe uses to underscore the shifting social relationships between his characters. The dances offered to, engaged in, and declined by Defoe’s heroine represent more than simple physical pleasure; their succession charts her social progress within the context of a 17th-century masked ball. However, it is her final solo, an exotic “Turkish” dance—perhaps inspired by choreographies performed on the 18th-century London stage—that whips up her audience into a frenzy of admiration, ensuring her social triumph.
This paper analyzes the non-verbal social signifiers of Defoe’s ball-scene using 17th- and 18th-century dance treatises as a guide. Special attention will be paid to the noble air and aristocratic grace associated with the courante. The social implications of masked, comic, and theatrical dancing will also be examined, as well as that deceptive manipulation of movement for worldly advancement that Defoe so scathingly criticizes in The Fortunate Mistress.
‘To entitle himself to ye Composition’:
Investigating Concepts of Authorship and Originality
in Seventeenth-Century English Ceremonial Music
Rebecca Herissone
The creative culture of the seventeenth century is difficult to penetrate from the perspective of modern times: while today our understanding of creativity is firmly based around ideas of imagination and originality, it is far from clear that such concepts were always relevant to the production of visual art, music, plays, poetry, and literature in the seventeenth century; moreover, basic tenets that we tend to take for granted—such as the primacy of the author—have been shown to be inappropriate in a number of significant studies, particularly those focusing on early-modern drama. Drawing on ideas investigated in recent research in other disciplines, this paper seeks to highlight and examine some of the evidence concerning the creative approaches of English composers during the Restoration and to reflect on what they can tell us about authorship and invention amongst musicians during the period. It focuses on two intriguing case studies of music composed for ceremonial events: the first traces the complex history of Carminum Praeses, an Act Song associated with Oxford University, which seems to have been adapted, extended, and recomposed by at least two and probably three composers over the course of a twenty-five-year period; the second investigates the relationships between two odes linked to the royal court—Welcome Happy Day and Welcome Glorious Day—which share an opening verse despite the fact that the musician who claimed ownership of the latter ode, Daniel Purcell, evidently did not compose the former. Whether such examples demonstrate collaboration, theft, or a kind of borrowing considered entirely acceptable during the period is a question rendered difficult to answer by a series of errors made by modern scholars in assessing the sources of these pieces, including wrongly identified hands, faulty chronology, and misattributions. Such mistakes—which sometimes seem to have resulted from methods of determining authorship that were based on modern assumptions—only serve to illustrate the conceptual difficulty we have today in understanding how music was created in the past, and highlight the need for us to reassess what it meant to be a composer in the seventeenth century.
“A Point without a Ditty”:
Sung Fantasias by Thomas Morley and Orazio Vecchi
Paul Schleuse
In the Third Part of Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) the Master praises Italian composers who, “taking any point in hand, will not stand long upon it but will take the best of it and so away to another, … except [when] one would take upon them to make a whole Fancy of one point; and in that … you shall find excellent Fantasies both of Master Alfonso [Ferrabosco the Younger], Horatio Vecchi, and others….” Morley can only be referring to Vecchi’s four-voice Fantasia from Selva di varia ricreatione (1590), which is both the only fantasy Vecchi ever published and an excellent example of the single-subject fantasy style Morley describes. Vecchi’s subject seems also to have been the model for one of the untexted duos in Part One of the Introduction. Morley’s familiarity with Selva is apparent again in his brief explanation of musical genres, which include several types found almost uniquely in Selva.
This paper will delineate these hitherto unexamined links between Selva di varia ricreatione and A Plaine and Easie Introduction, and will explore the problematic status of the sung fantasia for both composers. Morley describes the fantasia as “the most principal and chiefest kind of music that can be made without a ditty,” but also admits that, “with them who practice instruments of parts, [it is] in greatest use, but for voices it is but seldom used.” Vecchi’s explicit use of instruments for polyphony in Selva is restricted to a set of dances “per cantare e sonare insieme,” and the Fantasia is labeled simply “senza parole,” implying that the piece, though textless, is to be sung. Rather than the freedom and improvisational virtuosity associated with fantasias for lute or keyboard, for both composers the polyphonic fantasia seems to suggest a didactic exercise in counterpoint. Morley admits as much in reference to pieces like Vecchi’s: “Such they seldom compose except to show their variety at some odd time to see what may be done upon a point without a ditty.
San Salvatore, Venice’s Surrogate French Theater
Eleanor Selfridge-Field
While there is no shortage of factual information about the Teatro di San Salvatore as an opera house (1661-1700), there is no individual study of it independent of the generous accounts given by Nicola Mangini (1974) and the Mancini-Povoledo-Muraro collaboration (1995-96). In Venetian operas studies generally, San Giovanni Grisostomo receives the lion’s share of individual attention. San Salvatore (also known at the Teatro San Luca and the Teatro Vendramin) was the most important competitor of the two Grimani opera houses—SS. Giovanni e Paolo and, from 1678, San Giovanni Grisostomo. San Salvatore was unusual in that it hosted comedy exclusively before 1661 and after 1748. Even during its four decades as an opera house, it offered comedies in the autumn and operas in the winter.
The accumulation of other information in studies of individual works and personalities, in combination with gleanings of a large-scale survey of manuscript weekly news sheets, warrants a new examination of the extent to which San Salvatore was, more than any other theater in Venice, a venue for French musical taste, genre preference, and, very probably, performance practice. Interactions with the French community were often officially mediated in Venice by important figures associated with Genoa, Milan, and Florence. They could also be mediated unofficially by troupes of comedians who traveled in regular circuits throughout northern Italy, and by diplomatic personnel who were often pressed into service to recruit performers.
When viewed from the perspective of a preference for French styles and practices, the repertory of San Salvatore takes on its own distinctive personality. The consequences of San Salvatore’s political inclinations can be seen in the profile of the theater’s patrons. Inferences can be drawn about ways in which instrumentation was fashioned. Direct observations can be made about preferences for certain kinds of sets and entr’actes. The most striking evidence of San Salvatore’s high stature in the eyes of the French may be in the enthusiastic reviews its works received in Le Mercure galant.
On the Emergence of Semi-Private Theaters in Rome after 1675:
Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna’s Theater
Valeria De Lucca
After only four years of activity, the holy year 1675 marked the end of the short and rather unsuccessful experience of the Teatro Tordinona, the first commercial theater “alla moda di Venezia” to be opened in Rome. For quite some time scholars have considered the years that followed the closure of this theater as one of the “darkest ages” for musical theater in Rome. A more attentive look at operatic productions after 1675, however, shows that several semi-private theaters rose like phoenixes from the ashes of Tordinona. Among these, the theater in the palace of Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna was one of the most active.
Although its activity began in 1676, it is in 1682 that the Colonna theater began to operate as a commercial enterprise in a proper space designated ad hoc and with the sale of tickets (bollettini), and that it became a “professional” theater. This is also evident from the quantity and quality of the expenses recorded in the family account books, first to build the theater, and later to purchase costumes, machinery, lighting equipment, and scenery.
In the first part of my paper I explore the financial and social mechanisms through which the Teatro Colonna functioned, focusing in particular on the years after 1682 and on Lorenzo Onofrio’s collaboration with Filippo Acciaioli, former impresario of Tordinona. In the second part I examine its repertory and the ways in which Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna’s choices reflected this new phase in his lifelong support of musical theater. I argue that the Colonna theater was the result of Prince Colonna’s experience with both the world of courtly patronage and that of the commercial theaters of Venice, in which he had been deeply involved during the 1660s and 1670s. The shift from courtly patronage tout court to a new model of commercial enterprise reflects a crucial phase in the history of patronage, in which the transformation in the relationship among audience, patron, work, visual space, and musical phenomenon led to a more modern conception of opera.
“Songs and deuises of baser alay”: Politics, Patronage, and Popular Balladry in The Gypsies Metamorphosed
Megan Guenther McFadden
Although Ben Jonson was the most prolific author of masques at the Jacobean court, this great panegyric dramatist was also famous among London theater audiences for his satirical city-comedies. In addition, Jonson wrote multiple narrative ballads and included this simplest musical genre in his plays. But he did not limit his ballads to the public theater, as seen in his comedies Epicoene (1609) and Bartholomew’s Fair (1614); in The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) Jonson transgressed class boundaries and inserted an irreverent ballad parody of a flatulent, man-eating devil into the center of a royal masque. Jonson further contradicted Jacobean masque practice by giving his young patron, George Villiers, the prominent speaking role of a common gypsy captain. While Jonson’s gypsy masque was King James’s favorite and was performed on three separate occasions, the irregular formal structure, unconventional speaking roles, and bawdy musical humor of The Gypsies Metamorphosed confound scholars of the masque. Contradicting Stephen Orgel’s observation that Jacobean courtiers danced in masques and left vocal impersonation to professional actors and musicians, Jonson’s courtier gypsies dance and recite flattering fortunes. Furthermore, given the length and lowbrow themes of the antimasque, Peter Walls debates whether Jonson’s work can even be classified as a masque.
In this paper I demonstrate the wide popularity of sensational ballads before diverse audiences in Jacobean England to show why Jonson’s gypsy masque prompted enthusiastic praise from his royal audience, not censure. I also explain the courtiers’ vocal roles in the antimasque by scrutinizing the political implications of Jonson’s gypsy portrayal of Villiers—James’s favorite social-climbing courtier who garnered immense financial and titular reward from the aging King. As is clearly evident from Jonson’s masque, gypsies and ballads were not just popular entertainment on Jacobean streets and theater stages, but they were also hits at court which occasionally provided new ballad material for subsequent general appreciation. Following the success of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, adaptations of Jonson’s ballad reappeared in broadsides and musical collections for the rest of the seventeenth century.
Chloris and the Potent Memory of Caroline Masquing
Stacey Jocoy Houck
Among the conceits of the Caroline court during the 1630s was the use of pastoral nicknames drawn from court masques to indicate famous aristocrats. One of the names in the music of this period that appears frequently is the name Chloris, goddess of vegetation, flowers, and reproduction. In Mary Chan’s discussion of Commonwealth songbooks, she recognized the figure of Chloris as that of Queen Henrietta Maria, drawn from her first masque Chloridia (1631). The regular appearance of the name Chloris in songs of the 1640s-50s can thus be explained as royalist, nostalgic evocations of their queen, which veiled her identity from Parliamentary censors while recalling the lost Golden Age of the Caroline masque.
Many texts featuring Chloris existed, and after the regicide several versions of William Strode’s poem “Chloris walking all alone” were set to music and published. This acted as a lament for the king, but, as the current study shows, simultaneously functioned on several socio-cultural levels to transform the queen’s stage identity into an emblem of royalist hope. Beyond the suffering royal widow, Henrietta Maria became a heroic anti-Puritan figure in her own right, her masquing name itself recalling her conflict with William Prynne over women on the stage. Puritanical sexual discomfort was heightened by Strode’s lyrics, which focus on aspects of Chloris’s physical body, especially her breast—both an object of male gaze and a symbol of her emotions. Chloris represents the pagan goddess of springtime, a popular metaphor in royalist literature symbolizing the hope for a quick end to the winter of Puritan oppression. However, this one text, despite its many musical settings, is only one in a larger matrix of Chloris imagery, which was brought to its height by the recitative songs featured at the beginning of Henry Lawes’s Airs and Dialogues series (1653, 1655, and 1658). These musico-dramatic works kept the queen and the royalist cause that she symbolized within the public eye as she continued to masque on the imagined stage of printed song.
“When Beauty arm’d with smiling eyes”:
Didactic Musical Entertainments and the Judgment of Paris Story
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Ellen Harris has famously argued that Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas served a moralistic purpose for the young women who performed the opera at Josias Priest’s boarding school. While Purcell almost certainly did not compose Dido for Priest’s pupils, Harris’s intriguing interpretation of Dido as a morality play raises the question of whether other seventeenth-century English works might have had a didactic function. The present paper sheds light on the little-investigated genre of moralistic musical entertainments for gentlemen and women through an analysis of James Shirley’s The Triumph of Beauty, performed as private recreation for gentlemen in 1644 with music by William Lawes, and Thomas Duffett’s Beauties Triumph, a masque performed by gentlewomen at a boarding school in Chelsea in 1676 with music by John Banister.
Both entertainments were based on the mythological story of the judgment of Paris. The English had a well-established custom of using the tale of Paris, who incorrectly chose Venus over Pallas and Juno, to indict those ruled by pleasure and lust. The current study shows how earlier iterations of the story, as well as early modern notions of gender, shaped the messages for the gentlemen and women who performed in Shirley’s and Duffett’s entertainments. Although Shirley’s entertainment for men is sometimes comedic in tone, it ultimately conveys a stern moral about Paris’s immature behavior. Indeed, Paris, after hearing the goddesses present their sung offerings, confesses that he is “too unripe for judgment.” Duffett’s masque for women articulates an even more serious and explicit warning about the dangers of choosing pleasure. Discord relishes the results of Paris’s foolish decision, declaring, “Good, good, then Rapes and Murthers shall be done.” Despite such strong verbal condemnations of Paris’s judgment in these works, this paper identifies a potential schism between didactic theory and performative practice. Participants engaged in the very activities the larger moral discouraged singing and dancing in praise of pleasure and love, even as elsewhere the texts warned them away from Venus’s intoxicating snare.
Allegorical Discourse in the English Court Masque
Andrew Walkling
In recent scholarly discussions of the English court masque, much has been made of the importance of allegory to the structures of signification that undergird this important genre. Yet the all-too-common division between early- and late-seventeenth-century studies has impeded our understanding, not only of the continuities between Jacobean/Caroline and Restoration masque, but also of the ways in which these forms can be productively contrasted. What such an investigation reveals is the wide range of modalities encompassed by allegorical discourse, from the presentational to the representational and from a Neoplatonic supra-performativity to a purely mimetic focus on stage action.
This paper explores the variety of allegorical modes in court masque by comparing and contrasting the elements of Caroline and Restoration masque and by exploring analogous presentations of allegory in seventeenth-century English portraiture and epideictic painting. The paper examines Charles I's self-fashioning as a series of invented mythical figures (Albanactus, Britanocles, Philogenes) around whom the masque's ideological rhetoric was constructed, and then turns to the more detached depictions of Charles II as allegorized lover (Jupiter, Adonis) and the special, highly experimental modes of allegory during the reign of James II. In addition, it addresses the dynamics of multi-layered allegorical structures in Restoration masques and how these structures can be seen to have grown out of mid-century developments in literary form and genre. The purpose of this investigation is to show the prevalence of allegory in the discourse of the court; how allegorical expression functions, both in musical/theatrical entertainments and in the realm of courtly visual culture; and the ways in which articulations of allegory change over time. Ultimately, such a comparative approach to allegorical modes can also tell us something about the personalities and aspirations of the individual monarchs for and around whom the court masques were constructed.
Henry Purcell and John Norris:
A Platonic Song and a Poem on Musical Ecstasy
Janet Youngdahl
In 1688, Henry Purcell published a song with a text by well-known Cambridge Platonist John Norris. Titled The Aspiration, it appeared as one of seventeen domestic devotional songs by Purcell for solo voice and continuo in Henry Playford’s Harmonia Sacra collection. Norris’s Neo-Platonic poem appeared in his Collection of Miscellanies one year earlier, amongst other poems and religious tracts. Within the same volume we find Norris’s curious poem “On a musician, supposed to be mad with music.” His poem defends the ecstatic performer of religious songs and condones a rapturous performance style. Purcell’s domestic devotional songs have long been accused of being overly dramatic, inexplicably dramatic. Could Purcell have been attempting to achieve a religious song-writing style that exuded musical ecstasy? Analysis of the song text reveals that Purcell understood Norris’s underlying Platonic metaphor of the soul in a metal cage wishing to escape. Purcell embeds a distinctive melodic pattern at significant places in the poem; once extracted, they create a distilled version of the text. In addition, Henry Playford’s preface to the 1688 song collection appears to guide the reader toward an extremely passionate interpretation of these religious songs. Using primary evidence from Playford and Norris, Purcell’s song may be traced to the concepts of ecstatic devotion, the biblical sublime and Neo-Platonism, as they existed in the late seventeenth century. Interpretive information about these unusually virtuosic songs is essential for both performers and scholars. The preface of the musical edition, Purcell’s musical setting, and Norris’s poetic defense of religious ecstasy provide a tantalizing window into seventeenth-century performance practice.
Public Piety and Musical Bounty: Peter Philips at Isabella’s Confraternity of Our Lady in Early Seventeenth-Century Brussels
Anne E. Lyman
Composer Peter Philips (1560/1-1628) was one of many international Catholic refugees at the Brussels court of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. During the time he served there as organist (1597-1628), Philips produced several collections of sacred vocal music, including three collections of few-voiced motets with continuo. Questions remain as to why Philips might have written pieces in this style, especially in light of the fact that little of his court activity suggests a need for such works. Aside from biographical information provided by his publications and a few scant pieces of archival evidence, heretofore little was known of Philips’s activities in the Spanish Netherlands. Furthermore, this lacuna reflects the incomplete picture of musical life in this region.
Newly discovered archival evidence supports the existence of a musically active Confraternity of Our Lady at Saint Gudula in Brussels during the early seventeenth century. Although records show that the confraternity had been dwindling both in size and funds in the decades immediately preceding its temporary cessation in 1604, Isabella resurrected it in 1622. Its surviving list of members from this time includes over 1,000 of the most prominent men and women in Brussels, not the least of whom was Peter Philips himself. Musicians from both Isabella’s court and Saint Gudula were employed to perform in its many services and processions.
Peter Philips was held in especially high regard among the musicians who participated in the confraternity’s activities. He served both as a performing musician and as a benefactor, paying handsomely in order to secure one of the fifty-two weekly endowed masses. In bringing to light its musical activities and, in particular, Philips’s twofold position within the organization, I will show that it was in part for Isabella’s Confraternity of Our Lady that he composed his few-voiced motets.
As of 12 February 2008
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