Society for Seventeenth-Century Music
A SOCIETY DEDICATED TO THE STUDY
AND PERFORMANCE OF 17TH-CENTURY MUSIC
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Abstracts of Presentations at the Fourth Annual Conference
18-21 April 1996, Wellesley College
* Index of Presentations
* Program and Abstracts
* Program Committee

Thursday, 18 April 1996
Concert: Organ Music by Juan Cabanilles
Donald Joyce (Queens College)

Friday, 19 April 1996
Session I Courtly Ballet and Opera
Lois Rosow (Ohio State University), Chair

Louis XIV's Roles in Court Ballets
Rose Pruiksma
Louis XIV's active participation in his ballets de cour has been a long-accepted feature of the history of court ballet. Yet the nature and extent of his participation as well as underlying political implications have remained less explored areas. Visions of Louis as Apollo, or Louis as the Rising Sun, dominate any discussion of his theatrical dancing, vividly illustrated by surviving costume drawings. The glorious aspect of the king was indeed an important facet of his theatrical display, but only one facet. Louis also danced in less splendid roles, ranging from a debauche to a moor, from a nymph to a slave, over the course of his balletic career, 1653-1669. In addition, his roles were not primarily designed for solo dancing; instead, Louis appeared more often in roles as one among several of his courtiers.
   This paper seeks to demonstrate the wide range of Louis's roles, from Apollo to nymph, and to examine their significance and allegorical meaning within the context of court society. While recent scholarly attention has focused on the burlesque nature of Louis XIII's ballets and his active participation in burlesque roles, such aspects of Louis XIV's ballets and roles have been generally dismissed or mitigated. Mark Franko (Dance as Text: Baroque Ideologies of the Body, 1993) sees this along Bahktinian lines, accepting the end of carnival with the absolutist reign of Louis XIV and the increased controls placed on dance with the creation of the Académie de Danse in 1661. The continued presence of the grotesque, exotic and burlesque in Louis XIV's ballets would suggest that Franko's reading is too limiting a frame through which to understand mid-seventeenth-century ballet de cour. This paper will question Franko's assumptions while offering a less narrow framework that strives to take all the elements of the ballet de cour—dance, music, sets, costumes and verse—into account.
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Dance/Music Relationships in the Operas of Lully
Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Cornell University)
It is well known that dance formed an integral part of every act of a Lullian tragédie en musique and that most of the dancing occurred during the portion of the act known as the divertissement, in which instrumental dance pieces were interwoven with vocal airs and choruses into a large dramatic and musical unit. Unfortunately, the way a divertissement might have looked in Lully's day is not at all apparent from either the scores or the livrets of his operas. Not only are the original choreographies irrecoverable, in many cases it is not even clear how many of the pieces within a divertissement were actually choreographed. The only way to get a sense both of how the dancing worked and what it meant in these spectacular scenes is by examining the bits of information sprinkled throughout the livrets in conjunction not only with the scores, but with other available sources regarding theatrical dance in late seventeenth-century France.
   This paper attempts to establish plausible hypotheses regarding how dance functioned in two quite different divertissements from Lully's opera Alceste: the Act Three divertissement depicting the mourning of the Greeks over the death of Alceste; and the Act Five celebration of Alceste's return to life. The first was qualified by the Abbé Dubos as a "ballet almost without dance"—a "jeu muet" or pantomime, whereas in the second, the texts of the surrounding choruses make it clear that this music is to be heard as "real" music and the dances seen as "real" dances. Issues to be discussed include the location of the dancing within the scene as a whole (including the use of dance during choruses); how the musical construction suggests ways that the different categories of performers—dancers, solo singers, and chorus members—might have functioned visually relative to each other; conventions governing symmetrical groupings of dancers; and the kinds of music considered appropriate for male or female characters. It will be argued that dance in Lully operas, far from merely providing a decorative element, served as a fundamental bearer of meaning.
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Regular and Irregular Figures: Symmetry as a Structural Element in Baroque Dance Choreographies
Carol G. Marsh (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Spatial symmetry is an important structural element in Baroque dances of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as is readily apparent to anyone who has looked at choreographies preserved in Beauchamp/Feuillet notation. The spatial symmetry is reinforced in performance by the use of arms; thus any deviation from the principles of symmetry is immediately communicated to the audience. Yet in spite of the importance of symmetry in Baroque dance, no systematic study of this element has been made.
   Feuillet's Chorégraphie (1700) describes two types of symmetry which he calls "regular and irregular figures." In regular or bilateral symmetry the dancers travel in mirror-image paths relative to an imaginary vertical axis. Almost all danses à deux begin and end with bilateral symmetry, and it predominates in most couple dances. Feuillet's "irregular" symmetry, or symmetry by translation, occurs most often in the menuet, both dancers tracing identical floor patterns while facing in the same direction. Other significant types of symmetry not mentioned by Feuillet include co-axial, "echo" and "consecutive" symmetry.
  This paper addresses the following questions: How do changes in spatial symmetry articulate the structure of the dance? How do these changes reflect the structure of the music? Are there differences in the treatment of choreographic symmetry among various dance types, choreographers, or national styles? Finally, what assumptions can we make about the use of symmetry in "grotesque" dances, for which almost no notated choreographies survive?
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Session II Song and Society
Lionel Sawkins (London, England), Chair

Seductive Dialogues: Late Seventeenth-Century French Air and the Salon
Catherine Gordon-Seifert (Providence, Rhode Island)
The French air was a most important musical genre during the second half of the seventeenth century. Songs not only provided a basis for judging the ability of poet and musician, they also served as a means for gaining entrance into polite society. Indeed, many of the most renowned French musicians and poets participated in the creation of airs during this period: composer/performers such as Michel Lambert and Jean-Baptiste Lully, and poets such as Jean-Baptiste Molière and Philippe Quinault. In this paper, I explore why French airs merited the attention of the most prestigious French artists for such an extended period of time and argue that the air's value was based upon its link to the most influential literary model in seventeenth-century France: "la conversation à la française."
  Literary conversations, notably those by Madeleine de Scudéry, reveal that the function of the air within the French salon was to summarize and encapsulate the various points of view presented during a conversation. The creation and recitation of the airs was often the focus of the conversation, the airs appearing in "clusters" that constitute musical dialogues within a discourse. By extension, I will show that these musical dialogues correspond to gallant conversations or dialogues of seduction, most notably those by René Bary. The airs from throughout the repertory can be classified according to different phases of the seduction process as described by Bary and other writers. Groups of airs that represent each stage in the process not only share the same subject, they also share similar musical features.
   Ultimately, I argue that airs, even the most serious and passionate, reflected the "jeux d'esprit" or "games of wit" that characterized literary conversations, themselves idealized imitations of the verbal interchange so artfully practiced in seventeenth-century salons. The composition and performance of airs, as extensions of this "jeu d'esprit," were themselves a challenging undertaking used to engage and entice an entire group of participants. Composers, poets, and performers who could successfully accomplish this task joined the ranks of France's most prestigious literary and musical personalities.
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Sébastien Le Camus and the Social Function of Song in Seventeenth-Century Paris
Lisa Perella (University of Pennsylvania),
While the extensive research of French musicologists such as Catherine Massip and Marcelle Benoit has shaped an awareness of the social role musicians and institutions played in the drama of France's culturally-driven political body during the seventeenth century, the musical culture of the salon has largely remained peripheral in histories of the period. This chamber repertory-and its employment in seventeenth-century French society-is exemplified by the serious songs of Sébastien Le Camus (c. 1610-1677). A model of a courtier-musician who moved between the different spheres of the royal court and the hotels of the Parisian nobles, Le Camus was conversant with the patronage networks of both. His personal and political fortunes parallel the career of Lully; for after beginning his musical service under a protector on the wrong side of the Fronde, Le Camus advanced into the royal household as ma”tre de la musique de la Reyne and viol player of the king's bedchamber. But though these appointments place him at the court of Louis XIV, the character of Le Camus's songs corresponds more to Parisian circles than to the court, less to the stage than to the cabinet or ruelle. Thus Sébastien Le Camus's œuvre provides an alternative model for the creation and social function of vocal music in France. A consideration of the composition, performance and circulation of his serious songs in the 1650s, 1660s and 1670s reveals instances of male and female collaboration and coexistent spheres of influence as can be seen in the literary pursuits of the time. This paper also provides an occasion to apply notions of the "public" and "private" worlds of a court musician, contrasting the musical cultures of court and city.
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Session III French Studies

Invited Speaker: Catherine Massip (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)
Musical Life and the Social Function of Music in the "Historiettes" of Tallemant des Réaux

The "Historiettes" by Gédéon Tallemant, sieur des Réaux, were published for the first time in 1833, based on the manuscript held by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (Manuscript Department). Written before 1660, this source contains more than 480 generally short anecdotes, and presents a noteworthy gallery of portraits depicting a multitude of characters both from the nobility—those from the old court nobility and those who had recently purchased titles—and the bourgeoisie. One anecdote is devoted to musicians: the singers and composers Pierre de Niert and Michel Lambert, and the singer Hilaire Dupuis. It provides very precise details on their training, their musical activities, and their social standing in seventeenth-century Paris, facts that can be corroborated by archival sources. Further, a careful reading of these anecdotes shows that most of them offer information on the place of music-making in daily life. These musical activities fall naturally into several categories: the role of dance as an indispensable element of both educational formation and social life, the omnipresence of the air as a poetic and musical form, and the centrality (here confirmed) of lutenists and "amateur" singers, of whom a list can be gleaned. (Translation by Bruce Gustafson)
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Progress report on the Lully edition
Carl Schmidt (Towson State University)

Open Discussion: "The State of French Studies"
Bruce Gustafson (Franklin & Marshall College), Moderator

Recital of Harpsichord Music by Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre
Frances Fitch

Session IV Devotional Music
Paul Walker (Charlottesville, Virginia), Chair

Girolamo Frescobaldi and the Archconfraternity of the Gonfalone in Rome
Noel O'Regan (University of Edinburgh)
Girolamo Frescobaldi is known primarily as a keyboard composer and as having been organist at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. However, he also composed at least one book of small-scale motets, while two polychoral masses have been fairly securely attributed to him. Hitherto, there has been no known context for this sacred music, but the archives of the Roman archconfraternity of the Gonfalone preserve a payment to Frescobaldi covering three different occasions in late 1623 for which he organized their festal music. His payment included a "mancia," or gratuity, of six scudi for himself: this may relate to his having composed music especially for these occasions. In any case it shows Frescobaldi to have been active in what was a lucrative business for the city's musicians: providing music and musicians on a freelance basis to the many institutions which could not afford to have permanent choirs; this happened during a period when we have otherwise little information on his activities.
   The paper will examine the context for this involvement, looking at the relative importance of these three particular occasions in the archconfraternity's liturgical program. While there is no further information in the archives about the vocal and instrumental forces which Frescobaldi might have used in 1623, such information does survive for the years 1630-32. This will be pooled with similar information from comparable Roman institutions in order to arrive at a plausible lineup of musical resources for the 1623 events. Lists of items normally sung in polyphony on such occasions will be matched with known compositions by Frescobaldi to identify appropriate works which might have been performed. Suggestions will also be made about why the composer might have been asked to carry out, and might have accepted, this commission to provide music for the Gonfalone, the oldest of Rome's confraternities.
   See N. O'Regan, "Girolamo Frescobaldi and the Archconfraternity of the Gonfalone in Rome" in Irish Musical Studies 4 (1996): 189-202.
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Concerted Music for Vespers in St. Sebald Church, Nuremberg: Johann Pachelbel's Vocal Legacy
Kathryn Welter (Harvard University)
Following Johann Pachelbel's death in 1706, with the exception of his keyboard music, almost all of his works fell into obscurity. Even today, Pachelbel is known best for his keyboard and chamber works-a reputation that overlooks his extensive activities in the composition of sacred vocal music. During his own lifetime, he was well known in central and southern German states and had filled both civil and church positions in the cities of Vienna, Eisenach, Erfurt, Stuttgart, Gotha, and Nuremberg. In fact, his reputation was such that in 1695 his own Nuremberg invited this now-famous native son—without examination—to return as organist and Director chori musici to the church of St. Sebald.
   This paper focuses on a rich but neglected aspect of Pachelbel's activities at St. Sebald Church in Nuremberg, that of composing music for Vespers, with special emphasis on the concerted Magnificat. The discussion of his Vespers music will emphasize a group of manuscripts from the Tenbury collection. These manuscripts may represent some of the very few examples of the composer's autograph hand and are unique sources of Vespers music in the Tenbury collection. The paper will take up issues of provenance and purpose as part of its investigation of the Vespers music.
  Taken as a whole, the concerted Magnificats exhibit sufficient variety in the treatment of forms, textures, and melodies that they illuminate the full range of Pachelbel's vocal style. The picture is further enriched through study of the Tenbury manuscripts, since they contain additional music for the Vespers service, including polyphonic settings of the opening Vespers antiphon, the Ingressus, as well as concerted Psalm motets. To date our knowledge of the Vespers service is more complete for northern German states. A study of the Tenbury manuscripts helps to provide a comparable narrative for the central and southern German states, and does so by relying on the actual music used within the Vespers service. In so doing, it helps to redefine Johann Pachelbel's role as a seminal figure in the German musical culture of the late seventeenth century.
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Franz Tunder's Stockbroker Concerts: Prelude to the Lübeck Abendmusiken
Kerala J. Snyder (Eastman School of Music) with performances by James David Christie (organ), Sally Sanford (soprano) and Ensemble Abendmusik
   "In former times the citizenry, before going to the stock exchange, had the praiseworthy custom of assembling in St. Mary's Church, and the organist [Tunder] sometimes played something on the organ for their pleasure, to pass the time and to make himself popular with the citizenry. This was well received, and several rich people, who were also lovers of music, gave him gifts. The organist was thus encouraged, first to add a few violins and then singers as well, until finally it had become a large performance, which was moved to the aforementioned Sundays of Trinity and Advent."
  So wrote the St. Mary's cantor Caspar Ruetz in 1752 as he tried to trace the origins of the Lübeck Abendmusiken. From the time of its founding in 1605 until 1673, the Lübeck stock exchange had no building; it met in open air on the northern side of the marketplace adjoining St. Mary's church. In a concert-lecture in the Wellesley College Chapel, we shall recreate one of Tunder's concerts. Our program will include a short praeludium and large chorale fantasy by Tunder, two sacred concertos for soprano and strings by Tunder, and a sonata by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. In 1660 St. Mary's Church purchased for Tunder's use Schmelzer's "Sonaten a 3," most likely his Duodena selectarum sonatorum, published in 1659. The Wellesley Fisk organ is ideally suited for such a concert; it is tonally related to the Lübeck organs renovated during the seventeenth century by Friedrich Stellwagen, and its quarter-comma meantone temperament (with subsemitones) matches the pitch-class range of Tunder's music and renders it beautifully.
  A short lecture places the model for this concert in its historical context and introduce some Lübeck citizens, including businessmen who may have been Tunder's patrons and the eminent musicians who played with him, particularly Nathanael Schnittelbach, one of the great violinists of the seventeenth century. Our selections could have been performed during the mid 1660s, following the purchase of the Schmelzer sonatas and before the deaths of Tunder and Schnittelbach in 1667.
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SATURDAY, 20 April 1999

Session V Conceits and Concepts
Tim Carter, Chair

From "Concept" to "Conceit": Reading Petrarch's "Concetti," 1540-1640
Rose Mauro (University of Pennsylvania)
Shifts in the meaning of the word "concetto" correspond to fundamental changes in musical style and text-setting around 1600. Musicologists such as Claude Palisca and Stefano La Via have dealt with this term primarily in discussions of sixteenth-century music aesthetics, due to its role in the writings of Bardi and Galilei. Literary scholars, on the other hand, have focused on the seventeenth century, with the development of the metaphysical conceit and the movement known as concettismo. Attempts to trace the meaning of "concetto" in both sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary theory, by K. K. Ruthven, Frances Yates, Ulrich Leo and Alexander Parker, find no parallel in histories of music. In fact, Maria Rika Maniates, the only musicologist to treat this term as employed in both centuries, conflates its various meanings, thereby gaining support for her thesis of a unified period of musical mannerism from 1530 to 1630.
   One group of sources left unexamined by both literary and musical scholars are actual analyses of poems into their component concetti. In this paper I will compare two of these: an explication of Petrarch by the Venetian editor and polymath Lodovico Dolce (1553) and the treatise Del concetto poetico by the Marinist literary critic Camillo Pellegrino (c. 1598). Bernard Weinberg's position on the increasing importance of diction—and thus the elaboration of figures of speech—is amply borne out by this comparison. The same process of fragmentation is apparent in three settings of Petrarch's "Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono" by Jachet Berchem (1546), Giovanni Gabrieli (1575), and Claudio Monteverdi (Selva morale e spirituale, 1640-41). A fourth setting, by Sigismondo D'India (1618), illustrates the application of concetti to the analysis of monody. Finally, the implications of these alternative readings of Petrarch for a Petrarchan/Marinist dichotomy in Monteverdi's work will be explored.
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"Excuse me, but your teeth are in my neck": Of (Love)bites, Jokes, and Gender
in Claudio Monteverdi's "Eccomi pronta ai baci" and Other Works
Massimo Ossi
Few of Monteverdi's madrigals have an overtly comic intent. Passing references in Pirrotta's "Monteverdi's Poetic Choices," as well as in more recent literature, note that such pieces as "Gira il nemico insidioso amore" and "Ardo, avvampo," both included in the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, are best understood as jokes, but the question of humor, particularly in the madrigals, has not been the subject of extensive discussion.
The setting of Giambattista Marino's "Eccomi pronta ai baci," from the Concerto. Settimo libro de madrigali (1619), suggests that the composer manipulated conventional madrigalian elements, such as scoring, texture, and chromaticism, to realize the comic elements of Marino's text. The poem's female protagonist allows her suitor Ergasto to kiss her, but warns him not to bite her and leave a mark that would remain as public testimony of their intimacy; he promptly bites her. She cries out in shame and swears she will never allow him to kiss her again. In Marino's Rime, the madrigal is part of a dialogue cycle, in which it is the climax of a seduction that develops over several poems; after her shock, Ergasto apologizes and the two are reconciled. Monteverdi isolates the poem from its context, making it appear as if the lady herself had invited the kiss and leaving her mortified outburst unresolved.
  The musical setting emphasizes the incongruity of the scene. Its scoring, for two tenors, bass, and continuo, boldly contradicts the speaker's gender, not merely masking the woman's voice within a larger ensemble but assigning her words to a combination of low male voices. The action, as Tomlinson has noted, is represented precisely, even including the moment of the bite itself, but the excited declamation, text repetition, chromaticism, and climactic melisma that accompanies the lady's mortified "ahi, tu mi segnasti, ahi [alas, you have marked me, alas]," are exaggerated and their sincerity is undermined by the male voices, suggesting that the impetus behind the composer's use of mimetic devices is not mere madrigalian depiction but comedy.
  Monteverdi's deployment of humor, which appears in his madrigal books for the first time in the Concerto, follows his interest in forms, like the canzonetta (as both a poetic and musical genre), associated with low rhetorical styles, and in the combination of these forms with others, such as scenes in genere rappresentativo associated with more ambitious aesthetic aims and profound emotional expression.
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Defending Music in Seicento Rome: Agostino Mascardi's "Discorsi morali sulla Tavola di Cebete"
Robert Holzer
A new view of music-making in Baroque Rome emerges from an unexpected source, the Discorsi morali sulla Tavola di Cebete (1627) by Agostino Mascardi. Philosopher and historian, intimate of the Barberini, Mascardi (1590-1640) defended music from the attack found in the "Tabula of Cebes," a first-century writing of unknown authorship once believed the work of a disciple of Socrates. The Tabula portrays life as a journey from error and ignorance to the true happiness won of self-control and perseverance. Here, music is a detour, cloying pseudopaideia rather than genuine culture. Mascardi responded with an arsenal of ancient citations, demolishing pseudo-Cebes's position with counter-arguments on the utility of music's delight. Behind this traditional laus musicae, however, lurks a subversive psychology. "Music has dominion over the passions of the soul," Mascardi allowed, but such was now all to the good: to be led through a series of emotional states was in itself salutary.
   This paper summarizes Mascardi's defense and comment upon his choice of ancient sources. I shall argue that by plumping for a mercurial human nature (here I shall examine his 1639 treatises Romanae dissertationes de affectibus sive pertubationibus animi and Ethicae prolusiones), he attempted to square the conflict between post-Tridentine calls for art that was wholesome and music that was not. Finally, I shall link Mascardi's arguments to the music with which he must have been most familiar. By declaring musical pleasure moral, he implied that Rome's raciest secular productions—the amorous intrigues of La catena d'Adone, the questionable subject matter of many cantatas (some of the latter sponsored by the music-mad papal family itself)—were as edifying as its sacred music. This defense, more radical than the unconvincing allegories often attached to such work, also suggests a no less radical rethinking of power: here as elsewhere in early modern thought, the neo-stoic program of repressing the passions was abandoned in favor of their sublimation.
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Session VI Two Sopranos
Jonathan Glixon (University of Kentucky), Chair

The Castrato as Man: The Example of Atto Melani
Roger Freitas
This study examines our understanding of the social position and image of the castrato in the seventeenth century by highlighting the biography of perhaps the most documented singer of that age, Atto Melani. As John Rosselli has noted, the most influential sources concerning contemporary perceptions of castrati have come from the later eighteenth century, when this vocal tradition was already in decline. Rosselli argues that in the seventeenth century, the castrati were a far more common, accepted social group than these late observations suggest. The life of Atto Melani supports this conclusion.
  It has long been noted that Melani's oft-quoted letters only occasionally address musical issues. In fact, on the whole, they paint the seemingly unlikely picture of a castrato whose primary interests lay outside the field of music. Building on the work of scholars like Robert Weaver and Henry Prunières, and incorporating my own archival findings from the past two years, I can show how Melani often shunned the company of other musicians; document his close, in some cases intimate, relationships with numerous rulers, nobility, and government ministers; and demonstrate how he used his singing to collect information on both the details of court intrigue and highly sensitive diplomatic and military intelligence. In fact, after he gave up all musical activities at around age 40, he continued to expand his many connections with the elite of society, even suggesting diplomatic strategies to Louis XIV into his infirm old age. Here was a castrato who thought of himself, and was treated by the aristocracy, much more as an able man of his age than as anything found in Casanova's memoirs. By emphasizing and detailing his personal relationships and non-musical accomplishments, and briefly linking his example to parallel cases of some other contemporary castrati (e.g., Domenico Melani [unrelated], Domenico Cecchi, Matteo Sassani), I can corroborate much of Rosselli's viewpoint and suggest that we must be careful about "over-exoticizing" the castrato of the seventeenth century.
   See R. Freitas, Un Atto d'ingegno: A Castrato in the Seventeenth-Century (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998)
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A Singer's Magic: Margherita Salicola and the Transformation of Gierusalemme liberata (1687)
Irene Alm† (Rutgers University)
Given the unusual circumstances of its dual premieres, Carlo Pallavicino's Gierusalemme liberata would seem to present the perfect opportunity for a study of the differences between "public" and court opera during the late seventeenth century. Commissioned for the court at Dresden, Gierusalemme liberata was produced at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice less than a month before its German premiere. Moreover, Pallavicino directly participated in both productions. The Dresden score has long been available in an edition by Hermann Abert (1916). My discovery of a complete score for the Venetian production made it possible to compare Pallavicino's approaches to the commercial theater and the court theater, using a single opera within a single season.
  Yet were the locales and the audiences the primary considerations in Pallavicino's revisions of Gierusalemme liberata? Despite well established notions of court and "public" opera, a closer examination of these two productions led me to some surprising conclusions. The most substantial changes to the opera resulted not from the composer's response to local tastes, but from the power of Dresden's prima donna, Margherita Salicola. Pallavicino's transformation of the principal role of Armide for Salicola was the primary force in his reshaping of the opera for Dresden. In a previous paper, I have addressed the broader implications of these conclusions and have questioned traditional assumptions about genre and production values in public and court theaters. In this study, I specifically examine Palllavicino's revisions to the role of Armide, dramatic as well as musical, and discuss them in the context of Salicola's remarkable career.
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Session VII Idiom and Composition
Frederick Hammond (Bard College), Chair

Apparent and Intentional Genre Ambiguity: The Ciaccona and the Passacaglia
Alexander Silbiger (Duke University)
The ciaccona and the passacaglia survived, often side-by-side, through a good stretch of musical history, despite the apparent lack of consistent differences between the two. The continued appeal of these closely similar genres can be understood by considering them as a genre pair. Members of such a pair possess both shared characteristics (providing the potential for ambiguity) and distinguishing markings. The distinguishing markings often form binary opposites (e.g., duple/triple meter, major/minor mode), as in the simple examples of the pavan/galliard or passamezzo antico/moderno pairs. Although the existence of distinguishing markings is necessary to the survival of the pair, the specific distinctions do not need to remain the same over the course of its history. The attempt to differentiate between ciaccona and passacaglia merely on the basis of simple structural formulas like ground-bass progressions has on the whole been problematic. Rather, as typical for genre pairs, they are distinguished by a complex of surface features, some more readily perceptible by ear than by score-based analysis. Opposition of affect, in part expressed by those surface features, also is likely to play a role, and related topical oppositions may be evident in texted settings. Some composers were fond of deliberately exploiting the ambiguity between members of a genre pair, by playing what might be called "the game of pairs": a game of confrontation, role reversal, and—at the most sophisticated level-metamorphosis. The great master of the game was Girolamo Frescobaldi, who also may have been responsible for introducing the ciaccona and the passacaglia as a genre pair into art music; his virtuoso skill is displayed most stunningly in the Cento partite sopra Passacagli.
  Although the ciaccona-passacaglia pair did not pursue the same course within various national (e.g., Italian, German, and French) traditions, memories of the original distinguishing marks lingered on. The paper concludes with a brief look at two late contributions to the game of pairs: François Couperin's "Chaconne ou Passacaille" (Les Nations) and his "Passacaille ou Chaconne" (Pièces de violes).
   See A. Silbiger, "Passacaglia and Ciaccona: Genre Pairing and Ambiguity from Frescobaldi to Couperin" in Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, vol. 2 (1996): http://www.sscm-jscm.org/jscm/v2no1.html
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"Rasgueado" Guitar Accompaniment as Model for the Basso Continuo of Early Recitative
John Hill (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Rasgueado guitar accompaniment emerged into notation at about the turn of the seventeenth century, just as figured-bass notation did. But it was known in performance long before it appeared in written form. One of Joan Carlos Amat's chordal-tablature guitar accompaniments (1596) for a portion of an untexted part song (probably the declamatory quatrain of a romance) shows that a guitar chord was provided only for each change of harmony but not for repeated pitches, leaps within a chord, passing notes, or suspensions. At times only one chord per measure is sounded.
  The earliest securely dated source of the Neapolitan alphabet guitar tablature is a manuscript (I Rvat Chigi Cod. L.VI.200) dedicated to the Duchess of Traetta (near Naples) in 1599. Like Amat's, these guitar accompaniments do not maintain the integrity of the lower voices of their polyphonic models. The vocal bass line, in particular, is replaced by a more slowly moving abstraction that is strictly limited to the function of harmonic support; and, because of its prevailing movement by leaps, the lowest "voice" in the guitar accompaniment is instrumental rather than vocal in character. In some songs, as many as eight syllables are to be sung to a single guitar chord. The repertoire of sixteenth-century Spanish romances contains many examples of recitational style; these pieces were undoubtedly performed at times by solo singers to such sparse, chordal guitar accompaniments.
  Caccini was initially hired into the Florentine court musical establishment as a representative of Neapolitan singing style, and he studied with Scipione del Palla (formerly active in Naples), to whom he attributed the essential features of his musical style. Caccini knew the practice of recitational singing to chordal guitar accompaniment, as did most other singers of early monody. That group included the immortal Adriana Basile, who was in the service of the dedicatee of the Traetta manuscript-Isabella Gonzaga, Duchess of Traetta-apparently since at least 1590 (according to a newly recovered document) and therefore at the time when the Traetta manuscript was dated. In 1610, when Basile was lured away from Traetta to become Claudio Monteverdi's colleague at Mantua, it was reported that she played the Spanish guitar and accompanied herself on it in a repertoire of 300 Italian and Spanish songs, many of which are undoubtedly preserved in the manuscript that belonged to her patroness.
   See J. W. Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1: 69-76.
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Lecture-Recital: Spanish Continuo Playing
Louise Stein (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Chair

Luz y Norte: New Developments in Continuo-Band Performance Practice in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Secular Music
Andrew Lawrence-King (Akademie für alte Musik, Bremen)
Continuo style is quite literally fundamental to any performance of seventeenth-century music. This lecture/demonstration examines an entirely new understanding of the basic Hispanic style, radically different from "normal" pan-European continuo realization. It is particularly related to dance-music and theater music as well as chamber music. This work is founded on studies of Ribayaz's Luz y Norte (Madrid, 1677), comparisons with other contemporary sources of related repertoires, investigation of surviving performance practices and instruments in Latin American folk music, and on contemporary literary descriptions of Hispanic continuo-bands, as well as on experimental work with the musicians of the Akademie für alte Musik, Bremen (Germany). Continuo bands in seventeenth-century Spain for large ensembles centered on plucked strings rather than keyboards, featuring group improvisation with large numbers of diverse instruments. Ribayaz's Luz y Norte was written as a "traveler's guide to Spanish music" and deliberately aimed at musicians without a teacher. It therefore includes information considered too elementary to be worth mentioning by other period sources. Much of this information is radically different from our standard assumptions.
   The pasacalles, often considered merely elementary technical studies, were also a basis for introductions and interludes, accompaniment and improvised variations, and were adapted for particular dances. Melodic variations themselves were sometimes specific to an individual dance type: acanariada agaitada.
Luz y Norte brings into focus links between instrumental styles: harp, keyboard, vihuela, guitar, percussion and cross-influences from Latin America, Italy, Africa and from sixteenth-century styles, based around the typical Spanish instrumentarium of harp and guitar ensemble. Ribayaz concentrates on two of the three classes of dance music recognized by period treatises, but the approach to continuo playing and improvisation he describes has far-reaching implications for other secular repertoires, for vocal music, for theater music, and even for sacred music.
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Organ recital: Sweelinck, Scheidt, Scheidemann, Buxtehude
William Porter (New England Conservatory)

SUNDAY, 21 April 1996

Session VIII Theaters and Music for the Theater
Ellen Harris (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Chair

The Music in Thomas Middleton's The Witch (1613)
Raphael Seligmann (Brandeis University)
Music on the Jacobean stage signified in complex ways. Most was performed by drama's "others"—female and servile figures subordinate to the masculine, aristocratic guardians of social and cosmic order. Although a discourse of marginality, sung utterance was thought to possess a potency beyond that of words alone, especially when the singer was a young woman. Thus, a mode of communication employed by persons of little account bore rhetorical and affective capabilities out of proportion to its perceived social value. Unfortunately, little actual music from the early modern stage survives to enable these dynamics of voice and voicelessness to be examined in their original setting. One of the few plays of the period with most of its original music extant is Middleton's The Witch, a tragicomedy performed around 1613 by Shakespeare's company, the King's Men. Whatever the merits of Middleton's drama, the music enters the play of values in the script and greatly complicates our sense what is right and wrong in the world it portrays. This paper analyzes two songs from the play.
  The first, "In a Maiden-time Profest," is sung by a bride to her impotent husband after a disastrous wedding night. The singer's aggression is communicated musically by a contrast between passages that treat maidenhood and marriage—choppy phrases of foursquare rhythms—and those that treat the subject of widowhood—longer phrases in jaunty rhythms and modulation to the dominant key. The effect is to identify widowhood as higher and livelier than the matrimony the song purports to extol.
  The second song, "Come Away, Hecate," is a choral number for a group of witches. Musical figures associated with the Stuart masque and word-painting techniques to represent the witches' rising and swooping express both their communitarian ethic and their freedom. "Come Away" closes with a nachtanz section which, startlingly, resembles certain metrical psalms with a three-beat sway. Through its associations with both masque's idealization of earthly society and the kingdom of God, the song imparts a vision of social order that if stated outright would approach blasphemy. Middleton's cryptic allusion to the play as "ignorantly ill-fated" suggests that audiences may have found the play's reluctance to confirm the established civil order confusing or distasteful.
   See R. Seligmann, The Functions of Song in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1997)
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"La Furstenberg" and "St. Martin's Lane": Purcell's French Odyssey
Richard Semmens (The University of Western Ontario)
It is over thirty years now since Franklin Zimmerman first questioned the authenticity of the "First Act Tune" from The Virtuous Wife by Thomas D'Urfey, for which Purcell had provided incidental music sometime in the early 1690s. Zimmerman's assessment was informed, in part, by a short article by Norbert Dufourcq published in 1960 that traced an interesting history of the tune in eighteenth-century France, where it was known as "La Furstenberg." Dufourcq was apparently unaware of the tune's association with Purcell. In 1963 Guy Oldham published a brief response to Dufourcq's study.
  I do not propose to offer a definitive answer to the issue of authorship in the present investigation. Indeed, Curtis Price would likely argue that the authorship of the tune is no longer in question, although not everyone will agree that his evidence is unequivocal. Rather, I intend to explore a feature of the history of the "First Act Tune" that has not yet been considered by scholars, namely its role as an accompaniment to dancing. In England, the tune came to be known as "St. Martin's Lane," the accompaniment to a popular country-dance that was included in several editions of Playford's The Dancing Master, beginning in 1696. In France, the tune served as the accompaniment to a couple dance for the ballroom, with a choreography by Louis-Guillaume Pécourt, first issued by Feuillet in 1702. In this publication the dance is titled "Les Contrefaiseurs." In order to come to terms with this somewhat unexpected confrontation between an English country-dance and a French couple dance in the noble style, my paper examines the fascination with country-dances that grew quickly at the French court starting in the mid 1680s. I also revisit Dufourcq's arguments as to how the tune might have come to be known as "La Furstenberg" in France, and I offer an alternative explanation based, in part, on Pécourt's choreography. My investigation leads me to the conclusion that the "First Act Tune," whether or not by Purcell, is certainly of English provenance. It provides important evidence for the dynamic interaction of dancing styles in England and France in the final years of the seventeenth century.
   See R. Semmens, "'La Furstenberg' and 'St. Martin's Lane': Purcell's French Odyssey" in Music & Letters 78 (1997): 337-48
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Walking through Lully's Paris Opera Theater in the Palais Royal
Barbara Coeyman
French taste in musical theater in the seventeenth century was particularly driven by visual spectacle. Greater understanding of the physical settings for opera can inform us of the total theatrical experience, explaining sights and sounds for performers and audiences alike. Lully's principal opera site was the theater in the Palais Royal, home of the Académie Royal de Musique, 1673-1781. Before mounting his first production, Alceste, in January 1674, Lully and his partner Carlo Vigarani remodeled the hall, to rid it of Molière's memory and to accommodate it to their vision for public stage productions. The hall typifies many French theatrical conventions of the seventeenth century.
   Using a variety of visual documents, this paper describes the Palais Royal theater under Lully, 1673-1687, when Vigarani and then Jean Berain served as principal designer. Historians rarely include information about the theater in discussions of repertoire, some reporting that next to nothing is known about the site. My research has identified numerous surviving images of the hall. Certainly no one image tells the whole story, but a combination of documents makes it possible to mentally reconstruct the theater, suggesting what it may have been like during Lully's lifetime. My description is based on documents not previously published or little known in musical studies. An engraved exterior illustrates the relation of the theater to the rest of the palace and the infamous "cul de sac de l'opéra." Interior drawings, possibly in Vigarani's hand, provide measurable information about circulation, seating, orchestra, stage, etc., suggesting that the relatively small hall probably afforded clear sight and sound. Drawings of scenery by Vigarani and Berain illustrate their different styles. Diagrams of traps and flats explain mechanical capabilities which Lully and Vigarani installed. Visual sources are complemented by payment records, Vigarani's correspondence, the theater's historical context from its opening in 1641 to a destructive fire in 1763, and repertoire performed during Lully's lifetime. This reasonably quantifiable view of the theater supports many historians' claim that Paris theaters were far behind Italian and some other French sites at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries.
   See B. Coeyman, "Walking through Lully's Paris Opera Theater in the Palais Royal" in Lully Studies, John Hadju, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
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Sites for Music in Purcell's Dorset Garden Theatre
Mark A. Radice (Ithaca College)
Purcell wrote the majority of his "dramatick operas" specifically for performance in London's Dorset Garden Theatre. Architectural design in most English theaters of the seventeenth century significantly influenced the nature of musical-dramatic repertoire. It has already been established that Purcell included musicians on stage as part of the dramatic action. In this presentation, I point out additional locations for the placement of musicians in the Dorset Garden Theatre, which typified British theatrical practice generally for the seventeenth century. Additionally, I note how Purcell and his librettists were careful to make use of these music facilities in Dorset Garden.
  The principal location for the orchestra was the "musick room" located above the proscenium arch. Additionally, it is clear from contemporary documents that the substage area—which would still be very different from a Continental "pit" placed before an apron stage on the same level as the parterre yet partitioned from the audience seating area—was used. Additional locations included the balconies that flanked the thrust stage, the areas behind the flats, and the "inner stage" and "deep inner stage" areas that could be created through the use of the Dorset Garden Theatre's dispersed shutter system. These areas are illustrated through slides of architectural drawings and engravings of performances.
  Passages in Purcell's repertoire which took advantage of these various locations are presented, along with discussion of the relationship of the text and music to the placement of the performers in these spaces. Musical examples by composers other than Purcell complement his repertoire.
   See M. Radice, "Sites for Music in Purcell's Dorset Garden Theatre" in Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 430-48.
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1996 Program Committee
Bruce Gustafson, chair (Franklin & Marshall College)
Margaret Murata (University of California, Irvine)
Lois Rosow (The Ohio State University)
Louise K. Stein (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
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