Abstracts
The
Dramatic Role of Preludes and Ritournelles
in French Baroque Opera
Antonia L. Banducci
James R. Anthony, in his groundbreaking French Baroque Music, observed,
"The preludes and ritournelles found in French Baroque
opera serve two functions: they may be used in a purely musical way
to introduce a scene, an act, an air, or an ensemble; or they may be
linked dramatically to the action onstage." In her more focused
study, Music and Drama in the Tragédie en Musique, 1673-1715,
Caroline Wood came to a similar conclusion: "Most of the [preludes
and ritournelles] are neutral, but some are used to evoke a
mood, set the scene or define the personality of the character arriving."
In this paper, I argue to the contrary that no prelude or ritournelle
in a tragédie en musique is "purely musical"
or "neutral" because the association of the music with stage
action gives dramatic import to that music, however neutral it may sound.
Anecdotal accounts of Lully’s work with singers, Titon du Tillet’s
description of the ritournelle ("wherein all the actor’s
feelings must be silently depicted in her face and appear in her action"),
and two representative prompt notes for a proposed 1778 production of
Lully’s Armide provide a context for my argument. (The
prompt notes precisely indicate when Armide enters the stage relative
to a prelude and thereby determine the prelude’s role in the opera:
the first becomes a musical manifestation of the drama; the second,
a dramatic accompaniment to mute gesture.) I then demonstrate—using
musical examples from Armide and from Lully’s Persée,
and staging information gleaned from the scores and librettos—that
ostensibly neutral preludes and ritournelles necessarily assume
dramatic character within a performance context. This paper models a
new approach to analyzing this music, one that takes visual as well
as aural elements into account.
Return to 2004 Index
Church Music, Musical Topoi,
and the Ethos of the Sonata da chiesa
Gregory Barnett
This paper untangles complexities of style, ethos, and function in
the sonata da chiesa by examining the diverse topoi
of sacred music that course through the sonata from the time of Corelli.
The evidence presented here begins with testimony from the late Seicento
in little known dedications, prefaces, and eyewitness accounts that
describe sonatas as inspiration in the contemplation of the divine.
Next is a survey of seventeenth-century anthologies and treatises (Bottazzi,
Frescobaldi, Croci, and Fasolo) that present organ compositions with
specific liturgical designations and that illustrate musical topoi
common to both organ music used in post-Tridentine worship and the sonata:
among these, the toccata d'intonazione (Introit), the ricercar
cromatico (Offertory), and durezze e ligature (Elevation).
Such topoi reveal the sonata’s strong kinship with liturgical
organ music and, along with numerous sonata evocations of Palestrinian
polyphony documented here, they contradict recent arguments against
a perceptible sacred style within the genre. But the sonata’s
churchly ethos in no way implies performance exclusively in church:
a second line of inquiry explores the relationship of musical style,
function, and the qualifier "da chiesa." In short, da
chiesa connotes a suitability for the church rather than a specific
prescription for use; moreover, it describes a style of music that recalls
the sacred liturgy and inspires affects of devotion in the listener,
irrespective of performing venue. Thus, within both sacred and non-sacred
performing contexts, the designation of churchly venue effectively underscores
the expressive power of sacred musical topoi.
Return to 2004 Index
Lecture-Recital
The Polyphonic Passion in Mexico City
The Passio secundum Mattheum of Antonio Rodríguez de
Matta (d.1643)
Grey Brothers
In the southern region of the Iberian Peninsula during
the sixteenth century there developed a tradition of the responsorial
polyphonic Passion characterized by intense emotion, coined the "Andalusian
tradition" by the late Robert J. Snow. This style of the emotionally
charged Passion was fostered in the New World and spawned a variant,
which I have labeled the "Mexico City tradition."
This unique tradition, represented by settings of the Passion composed
in the vicinity of Mexico City during the early seventeenth century,
can be distinguished from the Andalusian tradition in several ways.
First, representatives of the Mexico City tradition make little reference
to the plainchant version of the Passion with which they were to be
performed. Second, settings of the Passions according to Matthew and
Mark include certain of Christ’s words uttered in the Garden of
Gethsemane, which are found in the manuscripts out of the narrative
sequence, as a postlude. Third, the speeches specifically attributed
to women in the four Passion accounts are typically given polyphonic
treatment.The decisions regarding which passages were polyphonically
highlighted in responsorial Passions reflected prevailing devotional
attitudes. As a result of the unique prophetic gifts manifested by certain
female mystics during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, women had
gained unique status in Spanish ecclesiastical circles, which may have
granted them particular prominence in seventeenth-century Mexican settings
of the Passion.
Mexico City Cathedral Choirbook II includes seven Passion settings by
cathedral maestros Antonio Rodríguez de Matta (d. 1643), Luis
Coronado (d. 1648), and the celebrated Francisco López Capillas
(c.1608 - 1674). Two Passions from Choirbook II, one according to Matthew
and the other according to John, by Antonio Rodríguez de Matta
reveal him as an expressive composer of subtlety and refinement. Portions
of Antonio Rodríguez de Matta’s Passio secundum Mattheum,
illustrating characteristics particular to the Mexico City polyphonic
Passion tradition, are featured as part of the lecture. The presentation
concludes with a performance of Matta’s work in its entirety by
the Westmont College Choir.
Return to 2004 Index
From
the Visual to the Aural:
Tempête and the Power of Instrumental Sound in the French
Cantata
Michele Cabrini
In 1706 Marin Marais composed the single most celebrated
instrumental piece to appear in a tragédie lyrique:
the tempest in Act IV, scene 4 of Alcyone. While the protagonist
is peacefully asleep, she experiences a sudden storm during a brutal
nightmare. A dramatic outcome ensues: Alcyone, visibly perturbed, breaks
out into a monologue concluding the act. This kind of emotional reaction
was typical in tempest scenes. The initial instrumental music portraying
the storm, with its impressive virtuosity verging on sonic violence
conveyed a sense of primordial power, causing a psychological shock
with a consequent reaction in the character(s).
This paper investigates the transference of the tempest topos
from the tragédie lyrique (as epitomized in the violence
of Alcyone) to the French Baroque cantata and its aesthetic
consequences for the listener, an aspect that has gone unexplored. While
opera’s visual appeal contributed significantly to the overall
spellbinding experience, in the cantata composers could only rely on
the acoustic allure of the instrumental music in order to engage the
audience, thus turning what was a simultaneously visual and sonic experience
into an entirely acoustic one. By examining a number of case studies—including
Bernier’s Hipolite et Aricie (1703) and Jacquet de la
Guerre’s Jonas (1708)—I will show how composers
employed an acoustic "trick": instrumental music that carries
on across several recitatives and arias to create the illusion of continuity,
while the characters react to its manifestation. In doing so, cantata
composers not only evoked the storm’s inexorable force according
to verisimilitude, but they also demonstrated how the Italian recitative-aria
pair—a typical cantata feature, often denigrated in France because
of its fundamentally dualistic nature—could be manipulated to
satisfy a quintessentially French aesthetic that valued continuity over
disruption. While each composer’s musical response to the scenario
varies according to personal style, what emerges from this study is
a shared aesthetic and compositional strategy, employed to describe
an event that transcends the formal border between recitative and aria
in order to convey its expressive power.
Return to 2004 Index
Transcriptions
for Solo Viol of the Music of Jean-Baptiste Lully
Stuart Cheney
Testament to the wide popularity of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s music
are the over 400 transcriptions and arrangements of his works for contemporaneous
solo instruments such as lute, guitar, harpsichord, or organ. More such
arrangements have inevitably surfaced since 1981, the year that Herbert
Schneider’s catalogue of the composer’s work (LWV) appeared.
Apparently unknown to Lully’s cataloguers at that time were at
least thirty-nine transcriptions and arrangements for solo unaccompanied
viol found in twelve manuscripts. These transcriptions are based primarily
on stage works ranging chronologically from the Ballet de l’Impatience
(1661) to Armide and Acis et Galatée (1686),
including selections from eleven of the tragédies lyriques.
They include both vocal (choruses, airs) and instrumental pieces
(dances, overtures, preludes, marches, ritournelles).
All the manuscripts seem to date from Lully’s lifetime up to the
first two decades of the eighteenth century. Twenty-seven of the thirty-nine
transcriptions are found in six of the Kassel viol tablatures, a large
source of arrangements of French music originally conceived for harpsichord,
lute, and ensembles; the unfigured bass parts that appear with six of
these pieces were almost certainly added by someone associated with
the compilation of the manuscripts and seem not to derive from the original
bass lines. Besides the Kassel tablatures, three Swedish manuscripts
contain ten transcriptions employing three different viol tunings. The
quality of all the settings varies according to the manuscript sources
and individual pieces: some are sophisticated and may have been prepared
by August Kühnel or other professional viol players associated
with the courts at Kassel and elsewhere.
The paper discusses the genres that were transcribed for viol, compares
the transcriptions to the originals, then examines the possible routes
of transmission of the pieces in order to shed light on the reception
of Lully’s works outside France, the art of transcription, and
the unaccompanied viola da gamba repertoire in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries.
Return to 2004 Index
Plainchant
at Florence Cathedral in the Late Seicento:
Unwritten Sharps and Shifting Concepts of Tonal Space
Michael R. Dodds
The integration of plainchant and polyphony in seventeenth-century
liturgy involved a negotiation between old and new elements that may
be compared to the blending of architectural styles encountered in many
European churches. Both of these contexts manifest aesthetic tensions
between expressing current taste and maintaining a harmony of the whole.
But in the integration of old and new, Baroque alternatim practice enjoyed
an important advantage over stone and mortar. While load-bearing elements
such as ribbed vaulting cannot easily be altered to attain a new harmony
of the whole, in alternatim practice the older element of plainchant
is always recreated anew and thus may be subject to alteration of various
kinds, including the use of musica ficta. This paper presents
new evidence for the use of unwritten sharps in plainchant, focusing
on one of Italy’s most important churches, Santa Maria del Fiore
in Florence.
While accounts of modal change in Baroque music have often focused on
progressive genres such as opera, conservative repertories may also
reveal important shifts in the conceptualization of tonal space. The
presence of "new" elements in a conservative context can provide
an index of how deeply new ways of thinking have penetrated. For this
reason, the plainchant treatises of Matteo Coferati (1638-1708), a singer
and chaplain at Florence cathedral for nearly forty-five years, merit
special scrutiny. Coferati’s unprecedentedly detailed instructions
on the use of unwritten sharps in plainchant present new solutions to
old problems while implicitly reflecting the influence of polyphony
in general and the alternating organ in particular. The relationship
between plainchant and polyphony thus emerges as a reciprocal one. Moreover,
the distance between monophonic and polyphonic modal norms turns out
to be less than one might conclude by examining notated chants without
considering unwritten performance practices. That Coferati’s teachings
represent practice at the Florence duomo is supported by a
contemporaneous manuscript choir book from the cathedral’s archives,
containing the very sharps he advocates. In addition, new archival findings
revise Coferati’s long-accepted birth and death dates and provide
specific information about his service as cappellano at Florence
cathedral.
Return to 2004 Index
Bellerofonte
Castaldi’s Extraordinary Capricci a due stromenti
David Dolata
Hand engraved by the Modenese composer, singer, theorbo virtuoso, poet,
and artist Bellerofonte Castaldi (1580-1649), the musical print Capricci
a due stromenti cioè tiorba e tiorbino e per sonar varie sorti
di balli e fantasticarie (1622; facsim. ed. Geneva: Minkoff, 1981)
is a stunning work of art. Until recently, he was known more for the
sensational events of his life and the innovations of his monody collection,
Primo mazzetto di fiori musicalmenti colti dal giardino bellerofonteo
(Venice, 1623; facsim. ed., Florence, 1984), with its controversial
introductory comments, than he was for the remarkable Capricci,
which unites his own allegorical poetry and visual artistry with highly
refined and often virtuosic music. Capricci contains sophisticated
and visionary music for solo theorbo, the only known music for theorbo
and tiorbino duo, and monodies with unfigured bass lines and
tablature accompaniments, providing an incomparable example of how a
well-regarded soloist, singer, and poet realized unfigured basses and
approached the art of song accompaniment. This extravagant publication
also includes some of the earliest single-movement sonatas and is the
only early seventeenth-century Italian repertoire for the theorbo that
maintains any significant link with the vocally-based aesthetic of the
past or that demonstrates any meaningful awareness of contemporary trends
from outside of Italy. No other lute publication contains such variety.
This multimedia presentation introduces the audience to Castaldi and
the depth and diversity of music in the Capricci, through sound-recordings,
modern transcriptions of the tablature, and for the first time in the
United States, visual images from the Capricci print held in
the private Fondo Pagliaroli of the Biblioteca Forni near Modena. Designed
to dovetail with the author’s forthcoming edition of the Capricci
to appear in A-R Editions’ Recent Researches in the Music of the
Baroque Era, this paper also exposes the widely circulated myths regarding
the provenance of the extant Capricci prints and reveals new
information about Castaldi’s life, music, and the "invention"
of the tiorbino. Through this knowledge, derived in part from
analysis of the volume’s dedication and poetry, including the
tour de force poems exchanged between Castaldi and his friend,
the acclaimed poet Fulvio Testi (1593-1646), we achieve a deeper appreciation
of Castaldi’s interdisciplinary contribution to the musical culture
of Italy in the early Seicento.
See David P. Dolata, "The
Sonatas and Dance Music in the Capricci a due stromenti (1622)
of Bellerfonte
Castaldi," (Ph..D. diss., Case Western Reserver University, 1998).
Return to 2004 Index
Marin
Mersenne and the French View of Musical Rhetoric
Don Fader
Although the notion that musical expression was grounded in rhetoric
was a common trope in seventeenth-century French writings, it has puzzled
scholars that no French author of the period attempted anything like
the codification of musico-rhetorical figures developed by German theorists.
An answer to this quandary lies in the writings of Marin Mersenne. Mersenne
turned to rhetoric not for an explanation of contrapuntal licenses but
in an attempt to overcome objections—made by Descartes and others—that
music’s powers were impossible to account for because they depended
largely on irrational elements that varied from person to person. In
response to these objections, Mersenne identified passionate accents
of the voice as the universal source of musical expression, arguing
that because accents were "natural" and their effects did
not vary from person to person they could be understood through reason
and cataloged. Mersenne regarded these accents as communicating largely
through rhythm and melody, and saw the effects of harmony as depending
primarily on sensation and association, which meant that they were non-universal
and outside of (or liminal to) reason. He viewed dissonance, in particular,
as a source of pleasure which created the variety emphasized by Cicero
as an important rhetorical technique. As such, the use of dissonance
could neither be governed by rules nor catalogued but only judged by
its effect upon an audience. Mersenne’s ideas thus have implications
for our understanding of the aesthetic aspects of French music theory
because later composers and theorists echoed his ideas, treating dissonance-handling
as a matter of decorum requiring the composer-orator to balance between
a libertine indulgence in too many figures and a pedantic insistence
on too few to please the audience.
Return to 2004 Index
Approaching Music
and Religious Identity in Early Modern Germany:
Sacred Music in Augsburg during the Thirty Years' War
Alex Fisher
In the spring of 1629 Emperor Ferdinand II, emboldened by a decade
of Catholic military successes, promulgated an Edict that mandated the
return of all Imperial cities with mixed Catholic and Protestant populations
to sole Catholic control. In Augsburg, the largest of these cities,
Protestant city councillors were replaced by Catholics, Protestant services
were banned, and Catholic officials sought to stamp out the public and
private singing of Lutheran chorales and psalms. On a Sunday afternoon
in November of that year, thousands of Protestants gathered in a graveyard
outside the city walls, ostensibly to hold a funeral service, but in
fact to pray and sing the songs that were forbidden within the city
itself. Guards sent to break up the gathering were repulsed, and a gravedigger
on the scene would report that "they continued with their singing
and stayed until 4 o’clock; they also said that they would gather
again, and not allow themselves to be stopped." This incident was
but one example of how music could become simultaneously a means of
comfort and a potential mode of resistance for Augsburg’s Protestant
majority in this troubled time. Singing played a vital role in confessionalization,
the gradual and uneven process by which the major Christian churches—Lutheran,
Calvinist, and Catholic—consolidated their doctrines and positions,
and encouraged their followers to think in sectarian, or confessional,
terms. As a particularly effective medium for the transmission of religious
ideas, music reflected and contributed to this process on all sides
of the early modern confessional divide: Lutheran chorales, Calvinist
psalms, and Catholic vernacular songs provided a means of confessional
indoctrination while enabling lay collective and individual religious
expression. In Augsburg, as elsewhere, political and military events
dramatized the cultural divide that had been growing between Protestants
and Catholics since the mid-sixteenth century. If the biconfessional
city of Augsburg had been a microcosm of the religious divide within
the Holy Roman Empire as a whole, the chaotic years between the Edict
of 1629 and a devastating siege in 1635 gave focus to music’s
potential to express and shape confessional identity.
Return to 2004 Index
I
pianti d’Apollo: Desire, Melancholy, and the Power of Song
Wendy Heller
Among the ironic and eccentric essays in the Bizzarrie accademiche
of Giovanni Francesco's Loredano is a single oft-cited essay associated
with music, likely read in the context of a musical evening—a
meeting of the Accademia degli Unisoni, including no less a musician
than Barbara Strozzi. Inspired by Apollo’s unsuccessful pursuit
of the nymph Daphne, the dialogue examines whether tears or singing
is the most advantageous means of winning the affections of a reluctant
maiden. The relationship between music and melancholy suggested here
is not one in which melancholy inspires song or music induces sadness.
Instead, under the influence of Marinist aesthetics, the debate presupposes
that both sorrow and song have the power to arouse sexual desire. Orpheus,
as the proponent of weeping argues ironically, may have gained Euridice
through the power of song but might have lost her a second time because
of a lack of tears. No longer understood as an interior state of being
experienced by listener or musician, melancholy—and the tears
that it produces—is recognized as both art and artifice, an expressive
device that might be annexed by music, but that is no less capable of
moving the affections, albeit in a manner scarcely anticipated by the
creators of opera.
My paper explores the connections between song, melancholy, and eroticism
as expressed in a set of works arguably written for this purpose: Nicolò
Fontei’s three volumes of Bizzarrie poetiche, to poems
primarily by Giulio Strozzi and likely performed by Strozzi at the Accademia
degli Unisoni. I propose that Fontei’s settings of such works
as "Canto di bella, focile d’amor" might be understood
not only in the context of a debate on melancholy and tears (as suggested
by John Whenham), but are in fact also a calculated study of Academy
aesthetics in which Strozzi herself—as both performer and the
object of myriad desires—played a critical role. Finally, I show
how this reconfigured relationship between music and melancholy, explored
in these academic experiments, would become an essential part of the
aesthetics of Venetian opera and its obsession with the erotic.
Return to 2004 Index
Ov’è il
decoro? Court Etiquette, Affective Expression, and Aria Treatment
in the Operas of Antonio Cesti and Beyond
John Walter Hill
Cesti’s Orontea (in the 1656 opera of the same name), torn between
love and station, erupts, "Where is royal dignity, where is my
decorum?" Decoro was then understood as (1) public emotional
restraint, expected of monarchs above all (Elias, Elliot, Monod, Foucault),
(2) dramatic portrayal of any personage with verisimilitude, and (3)
consistent treatment of all characters within a drama. Emotional restraint
was increasingly expected from rulers during the seventeenth century,
as Spanish court etiquette gradually became the norm all over Europe.
Meanwhile, trends in Italian opera developing during the 1650s included
character depiction with ever greater degrees of consistency and verisimilitude,
and a shift toward placing strongly emotional verbal expression in arias
rather than in recitatives. But the collision between these social and
theatrical trends created a problem in the operatic portrayal of monarchs:
they could not deliver aria texts containing strong affect and yet maintain
the degree of decorum that verisimilitude would demand. That is the
apparent reason why Cesti’s Orontea kept her arias from being
heard by other characters. The royal protagonists in Cesti’s earlier
operas did not observe decorum in this way, but they do in all of his
historical operas from Orontea onward, regardless of librettist,
city, or patron: none of their arias is intended to be heard by another
personage. This consistency is absent from all other roles in these
operas. It has gone completely unnoticed in scholarship.
The emotional outpouring set to music in monarchs’ arias is deflected
from the hearing of other characters in Cesti’s operas by various
means. The one eventually favored is partendo: the ruler sings
aside in the act of departing. Thus, the exit-aria convention appears
to have been promoted by simultaneously changing views of court etiquette,
dramatic decorum, and the expressive function of arias. A re-study of
the libretto revisions traced by Burt, Freeman, Powers, and Rosand shows
that increasing use of exit arias in them generally correlates with
the gradual elimination of indecorous, base characters together with
a progressive extension, downward through the social hierarchy, of the
diegetic and dramatic decorum earlier reserved for monarchs, real and
staged.
See John Walter
Hill, "<<Ov'è il decoro?>> Etichetta
di corte, espressione degli affetti e trattamento dell'aria nell'Orontea
di Antonio Cesti" in La figura e l'opera
di Antonio Cesti nel Seicento europeo. Convegno
internationale di studio, Arezzo, 26-27 aprile 2002, ed. by Mariateresa
Dellaborra (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2003, pp. 3-14.
Return to 2004 Index
Tradition
as Sedition: Christmas Carols in Puritan England
Stacey Jocoy Houck
During the period of England’s Civil Wars and the ensuing Interregnum,
Christmas, and other traditional holidays were banned by Parliament.
Of all the ordinances that Parliament passed to change England into
a "Godly" country, this was the most inflammatory. The social
ramifications were manifold: nativity services were forbidden, merchants
were forced to keep their stores open, and traditional activities such
as feasting, wassailing, and the lighting of the Yule log were punishable
offences. Popular resistance to this ordinance was immediate and sustained
even though public dissent, under the Treason Act, could be punishable
by death. Thus the safest outlets for voicing discontent were private
and anonymous writing, usually in the forms of poetry, tracts, and music.
My discovery of some hitherto unknown sources together with a reassessment
of the whole corpus of mid-seventeenth century Christmas literature
has revealed that royalist sympathizers capitalized on this situation,
joining the verbal fray with texts that equated Father Christmas and
his victorious return with King Charles, thus presaging the restoration
of the monarchy.
Christmas music from this period often echoes the political rhetoric
of this literature. Although literary scholars, such as Hyder Rollins
have recognized the political relevance of some cavalier texts, the
political significance of Christmas carols have largely been overlooked.
I offer several previously unexplored examples of such politicized carols
of this period, from overtly anti-Puritan pieces such as "Beat
Up a Drum" where Father Christmas goes into open combat with Old
Man Winter, to the more subtle, traditional works found in Francis Coles’s
1642 collection Christmas Carols. Representative of the latter
is "All hayle to the dayes." Despite its seeming innocence,
its approbation of dancing, drinking, and mumming violated Parliamentary
order and its refrain "drive the cold winter away" could be
understood as a metaphorical rallying cry to incite popular revolt against
Parliament and bring about a return of merry old England.
Return to 2004 Index
Early Seventeenth-Century
"Harmonic Progressions"
YouYoung Kang
Seventeenth-century music has often been viewed as progressing toward
functional tonality. In particular, the conventional cadences found
in most music and the identifiable harmonic progressions such as the
descending fifths sequence have been highlighted as pointing toward
the tonality of the eighteenth century. However, modern theoretical
discourse does not adequately explain other seventeenth-century harmonic
progressions which are not so easily labeled. In this paper, I show
instead how these "harmonic progressions" point to contrapuntal
experimentation in the early to mid seventeenth century and suggest
that in general, these "progressive" experiments were not
emulated by later composers. Rather, it was the conventional, less progressive
elements that were emulated in later repertories. I identify such progressions
in the sacred and secular polyphonic music of Italy (particularly in
works by Monteverdi and Carissimi) and discuss how these sequential
harmonic motions by fifth, third, and step result from the composers’
unique expansion and experimentation with the conventions and rules
of counterpoint.
The art of counterpoint as outlined in seventeenth-century Italian musica
pratica treatises mimicked Zarlino but described an entirely different
process of composing music. It stressed the primacy of the bass voice
and the importance of full sonorities with the third and fifth (or sixth)
above that bass. In addition, the use of ornamental figures and sequences,
as well as the free use of parallel thirds, gave new possibilities for
contrapuntal innovation.
By starting with this concept of counterpoint, one can then start to
explain the harmonic language of seventeenth-century music. In Monteverdi’s
music, one sees an unorthodox combination of contrapuntal techniques
to create distinctive harmonic progressions, whose ultimate purpose
seems to be text expression. In the later works of Carissimi, the harmonic
progressions usually serve as non-rhetorical compositional devices,
but they nevertheless exhibit a distinctly mid-seventeenth-century logic
of harmony—one in which harmonic motion by thirds, fifths, and
step all seem derived from various, equally important contrapuntal considerations.
In conclusion, this study of seventeenth-century harmonic progressions
suggests how one may explain seventeenth-century harmonic practice in
practical terms rather than in the realm of speculative tonal theory.
Return to 2004 Index
Commendatory
Verse as Music Criticism in Early Modern English Music Books
Janet Pollack (University of Puget Sound)
The relationship between commendatory verse—poems inserted at
the beginning of books that serve to recommend and commend authors and
works to potential purchasers—and early English music books has
yet to be examined convincingly, if at all. There are a few studies
on verses in literary works that focus on gender and voice, but none
on verses in music books. Music scholars tend to overlook commendatory
verses and to treat them as nothing more than insubstantial and ephemeral
exercises in flattery, mere "metrical puff[s]."
Yet I suggest that these verses warrant attention if not always for
their literary value than for their social interest and for the questions
they raise. Building on the insights of Franklin B. Williams and others,
and analyzing verses in music books by a number of prominent poets,
dramatists, and writers of the time, I argue that the practice of writing
verses intended for English music books should be viewed as a type of
music criticism. They raise issues of style and cultural commonplaces,
suggest standards of excellence, and offer insight into what was accepted
as desirable and praiseworthy in music at the time. They also give us
an idea of what musicians and poets thought of their peers, what musicians
were trying to achieve, and with what success. In other words, these
poems are valuable social documents, style-critical surveys of excellence,
and reception testimonies.
This study systematically examines the commendatory verses in English
music books published before 1641 and places these books and their verses
in the context of contemporaneous Italian music books and their intellectual
milieu. The format and design of the books and the nature of the verses
are reviewed. The study shows how poets and writers of commendatory
verses mingled exaggerated laudatory rhetoric and telling analogies
with more theoretical criticism in a manner that suggests an early seventeenth-century
English critical consciousness.
Return to 2004 Index
Awarded
the 2004 Irene Alm Prize
Monteverdi’s Operatic Experiments:
Finding Orfeo in
the Continuo Madrigals of 1605
Paul Schleuse
This paper explores rhetorical and musical relationships between Monteverdi’s
L'Orfeo (1607) and the six continuo pieces which conclude his
fifth madrigal book (1605). Gary Tomlinson has suggested that the continuo
madrigals were composed after the publication of Book IV in 1603, placing
them chronologically adjacent to Orfeo, while Massimo Ossi
reads the schematic forms and cyclical organization of these pieces
as a precursor to structures in the opera. Further observations reconfirm
the idea that in his first use of basso continuo Monteverdi was developing
techniques that would become central to Orfeo. The textual
sensitivity central to Monteverdi’s earlier madrigals is here
applied to a new flexibility of texture, with solo voices, duets, trios,
and tutti ensembles deployed in the service of dramatizing the poetry.
The refrains and other formal elements introduced may be read as tools
of text-expression, rather than impediments to it, and the use of textural
variation to differentiate levels of subjectivity prefigures choral
functions in Monteverdi's first opera.
The continuo madrigals have recognizable descendants in the concluding
sections of the first two acts of Orfeo, which Claude Palisca
described (without further comment) as having the style of the concertato
madrigal. Again, Monteverdi uses a variety of vocal textures, employing
instrumental and choral ritornelli as formal markers. While
these structures derive partially from ritornello forms used elsewhere
in Orfeo, their versi sciolti and harmonic freedom
suggest other influences. As dramatically self-contained closing sections,
they parallel the coro stabile as functionally distinct from
the coro mobile heard earlier in each act, even if the same
singers are used. The objective voice of the coro stabile,
particularly when it echoes or alters previous music, is analogous to
the use of tutti textures in the madrigals. This interpretation
clarifies both the structure and the dramatic significance of the first
two acts of Orfeo.
Return to 2004 Index
"Una
música de noche, que llaman aquí serenata"
Spanish Patrons and the Serenata
in Rome and Naples
Louise K. Stein
Reading avvisi from the last decades of the seventeenth century,
it is easy to understand that the serenata was cultivated by
aristocrats in Rome and Naples for social and political purposes. Spanish
aristocrats living in Italy also sponsored serenate, as well
as operas and other musical entertainments, though it was more typical
for them to carry the customs, assumptions, and musical traditions of
their native Castile to distant places, and to look back to the Madrid
court as a model of sober elegance.
In Rome and Naples in the last decade of the seventeenth century, Spanish
diplomats were finally converted to the serenata. But it is
striking that two of the most famous serenate produced there before
1690 were sponsored by the most influential Spaniard in Italy—Gaspar
de Haro y Guzmán, marchese del Carpio, who served first as Spanish
ambassador in Rome (1677-1682), and then Viceroy of Naples (1683-1687).
Carpio was a fanatical collector of painting, sculpture, and antiquities
who had produced spectacular musical plays and operas in Madrid from
1655 to 1662. In Rome and Naples, he produced Spanish plays, Italian
opera, and some very lavish serenate, though he preferred the
more typically Spanish bullfights and ostentatious spectacle plays with
music. For Carpio, a musical event without visual effects lacked elegance,
though several avvisi call him "tanto amico della musica."
The first large-scale public musical event that Carpio produced in Rome
was, nevertheless, the serenata for three voices performed on the name-day
of the queen of Spain, on August 25, 1681 in the Piazza di Spagna. The
soloists who sang the parts of Fama, Pace, and Il Tebro were joined
by a "Concerto di sinfonie con 60 instrumenti." The music
(in manuscript) and a printed libretto are extant today, as well as
an engraving of the set design by Filippo Schor. The second of the grand
serenate that we know he sponsored was twice performed in Naples in
the last year of Carpio’s life. This was Alessandro Scarlatti’s
now lost "L’Olimpo in Mergellina," which involved twenty
singers and an orchestra of ninety instruments (and for which I have
found new archival documents).
This paper is about how Spanish diplomats viewed the serenata
in their pursuit of influence, political legitimation, and social leadership
in Rome and Naples. The marchese del Carpio’s selective patronage
of the serenata offers one case study of how a particular genre
or piece of music was shaped by the patron’s personal preferences
as well as his politics. Carpio hand-picked artists and musicians to
work as a team under his supervision. Some of them (Corelli, Lonati,
A. Scarlatti, "Siface," and Paoluccio) were among the most
famous of their time. Carpio’s death in 1687 brought the end of
an era for the "Spanish nation" in Rome and Naples. The popolo
in Naples mourned, the writers of the avvisi lost one of their
most colorful and controversial subjects, and the serenata
was chosen by new patrons who had no qualms about supporting a wholly
musical and fully Italian genre. The variety of serenate sponsored
by Spanish patrons in Rome and Naples actually increased after his death,
when his successors relied on the genre to smooth a diplomatic and social
path toward the Roman aristocracy.
Return to 2004 Index