CHARACTER
AND CONTEXT IN ITALIAN MUSIC
“But I don’t have my head in the clouds!”: The Education
of a Sienese Castrato
Colleen Reardon (University of California, Irvine)
In the mid-1690s, Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici took under
his wing the Sienese castrato Giovan Battista Tamburini. Francesco Maria
must have heard Tamburini’s potential in the early 1690s, when
the castrato sang small roles in operatic productions in both his native
city and Florence, for he sent him off to study, first in Rome, and
then in Parma. From 1697 through 1700, Tamburini wrote the Cardinal
frequent letters, not only from Parma, but also from Livorno, Turin,
Rome, Piacenza, and Venice. These frank missives would be valuable just
as a gold mine of gossip on the personalities, artistic and otherwise,
of many famous singers of the day and on operatic productions and practices
in Parma and Piacenza at the end of the seventeenth century. But more
important, they shed light on Tamburini’s training as a singer.
This education included not only the musical tutelage of Bernardo Sabadini,
heretofore recognized as a composer, but not as a singing teacher, but
also practical advice on how to conduct an artistic career, sometimes
coming in the form of orders from the cardinal and his allies, and sometimes
offered as opinions by fellow singers. Through the letters, we see the
rough-and-tumble industry of recruiting performers for operas and learn
of the informal network of friendships and business dealings that connected
Tamburini to other operatic singers. We see Tamburini grow up: the young,
impatient upstart of the first letters finally absorbs some of the lessons
his teacher, patron, and fellow singers proffer and goes on to a successful
career that lasts through 1719. Finally, the letters are valuable for
the light they shed on Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici. His
role in promoting the arts has been overshadowed by that of his nephew
and near-contemporary Prince Ferdinando. Tamburini’s letters offer
us a better understanding of the Medici cardinal’s taste and judgment
and his activities as a patron of opera.
“Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto”:
The Function of Portraits of Mid Seventeenth-Century Singers in Rome
Amy Brosius (New York University)
This paper addresses the types and functions of singers’ portraits
in the court culture of seventeenth-century Rome. I will be examining
the portraits of the following singers: Anna Francesca Costa, Margherita
Costa, and Leonora Baroni. By situating these images in contemporary
views on portraiture, gender, social status, embodiment, and selfhood
I will explore the different ways portraits were valued and utilized
by singers and their patrons. Performing in court society could have
a paradoxical effect upon the social status of early modern singers:
while it put them in intimate contact with those in power who provided
them with opportunities for social advancement, the relationship of
vocal performance to somatic acts such as sex had the potential to inhibit
acceptability and advancement for many female singers. In order to mitigate
such negative connotations, singers, with the help of their patrons,
fashioned courtly personae, which enabled them to perform and maintain
their important role in court culture. Portraits were one means through
which such personae were constructed. Reflecting the diversity of these
singers’ backgrounds and relationships to the social and gender
hierarchies functioning in court society the images in their portraits
reveal an array of cultural anxieties surrounding the act of singing
and the persona of the singer. They also speak to the ways in which
patrons valued their singers. Vocal performances were highly regarded
by patrons, especially for the physical and psychological changes that
they were thought to engender in their audience. These changes were
informed by a conception of the early modern self that posited the inseparability
of psychological and physical states, a conception which also informed
the belief that a visual representation of the body necessarily represented
the complete self, body and soul. As representations of the total self,
portraits of singers could function in performative ways, causing viewers
to interact with the portraits as they would with the embodied singers.
In this way the singers’ portraits offered a permanent simulacrum
of the singer and their performances, an image that could incite fantasies
and engender similar changes in the viewer that a real vocal performance
would in the listener.
Biagio Marini’s Sonate (1626/9) in Pursuit
of the Stile rappresentativo
Rebecca Cypess (Yale University)
In early seventeenth-century vocal music, the stile rappresentativo
had at least two components: its goal was accurate dramatic representation,
and the means to the achievement of that goal was often, though not
always, the stile recitativo, which afforded the composer greater
verisimilitude than “true” song by approximating speech.
Especially in madrigal genres such as the lettera amorosa,
the stile rappresentativo was used to imitate the vagaries
of human emotion, captured in a quasi-improvisatory style.
This paper posits an instrumental stile rappresentativo, which
maintains the goal of dramatic representation while doing away with
recitative itself. Biagio Marini’s Sonate opus 8 (dedicated
in 1626 and published three years later) contains some of the earliest
manifestations of the instrumental stile rappresentativo. While
one of Marini’s opus-8 sonatas actually makes use of “violin
recitative,” this piece is exceptional. Instead, Marini and other
composers of instrumental music (especially Dario Castello) developed
a dramatic language of their own—one which isolated and expressed
the emotions behind words rather than the words themselves. In this
language as in the stile recitativo, the listener can trace
the music’s trajectory of affective content through quick changes
of tempo, character, melody, and harmony, to discern a musical narrative
that is arguably as “dramatic” as the staged works of Peri
and his successors.
Marini’s instrumental stile rappresentativo, however,
goes beyond that of other composers. The title page of his opus 8 boasts
of the “curiose e moderne inventioni”—echo effects,
scordatura, the use of multiple stops, and others—employed
in many compositions in the volume. These features have previously been
dismissed as nothing more than technical “tricks”—surface
elements intended only to show off the performer’s virtuosity.
This paper will reinterpret the curiose e moderne inventioni as
part of Marini’s conception of the instrumental stile rappresentativo.
Through specific instructions regarding the staging and execution of
his inventioni, Marini makes known his concern that the performers
interact with their audience, thereby transforming the production of
instrumental music into a “dramatic” enterprise.
Trespolo là, Trespolo quà:
A Comic Playwright’s Influence on the Development of Comic Opera
James Leve (Northern Arizona University)
The Tuscan playwright Giovanni
Battista Ricciardi (1624–86) never wrote an opera libretto, but
he influenced the early development of comic opera. During the second
half of the seventeenth century, Ricciardi wrote a series of prose comedies
featuring a cantankerous, bumbling vecchio named Trespolo.
One of these plays, Il Trespolo tutore (ca. 1666), inspired
two comic operas in the late 1670s. The action of Ricciardi’s
comedy centers on Trespolo’s attempts to marry off his ward so
that he will be free to pursue another young woman. The better of the
two operatic versions, written by the librettist Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi
and the composer Alessandro Stradella, is a faithful versification of
Ricciardi’s text. Stradella’s setting renders the tutor
(Trespolo) a basso buffo character (in the other operatic version,
Trespolo is an alto). Villifranchi and Stradella also wrote comic arias
for the romantic innamorati.
Following the success of Il Trespolo tutore, Villifranchi went
on to become the leading comic opera librettist in Florence, writing
several original works plus an opera based on another one of Ricciardi’s
Trespolo comedies. For all of these operas, Villifranchi included a
vecchio role and adopted the streamlined dramaturgical structure
and cosmopolitan style of Ricciardi’s comedies. The plots are
unified actions involving a relatively small group of characters. The
language is simple and uniform, aimed at imitating ordinary speech.
These works strongly contrast with Giovanni Andrea Moniglia and Jacopo
Melani’s Florentine comic operas from the 1660s, which featured
a myriad of plot complications, a diverse linguistic range, and an alto
vecchio.
I argue that Ricciardi’s brand of comedy became the new model
for Florentine comic opera in the late seventeenth century, which in
turn influenced the development of Neapolitan opera buffa in
the early eighteenth century. With thirteen arias, the role of Trespolo
signals the beginning of the regular use of the basso buffo
for the authoritative patriarchal figure in comic opera. Villifranchi
and Stradella’s deft handling of this role and their comic treatment
of the innamorati are among the most important developments
in comic opera just prior to the birth of an authentic opera buffa
genre.
Return to 2007 program
DANCE
AND MEANING
Of Dancing Stars, and Dukes –French Influences on Dance and
Instrumental Music
at the Court of Modena in the Late Seventeenth Century
Hendrik Schulze (University of Heidelberg)
Under the reign of Francesco II d’Este (1674-94), the arts and
sciences flourished in the north Italian dukedoms of Modena and Reggio.
His court soon became famous for its splendor. The Duke himself was
praised for his fine violin-playing, and he encouraged many of the resident
composers such as Giovanni Bononcini, Giuseppe Colombi, Giovanni Battista
Vitali, and Tomaso Antonio Vitali to publish their instrumental works.
Most of these publications were dedicated to the Duke himself or to
members of his family. Their dedications bear witness to a neo-platonic
way of thought special to French ballet de court under Louis
XIV, linking dance, music, and government all to what G. B. Vitali calls
“the most regular dance of the stars.” While other courts
were increasingly relying on Aristotelian and Cartesian models of defining
their claim to power, the dukedom of Modena demonstrates thus a most
profound French influence.
A number of dance compositions by composers like Antonio Gianotti, Luigi
Mancia, and Giuseppe Colombi, preserved in manuscript at the Biblioteca
Estense in Modena, demonstrate that the French influence was not restricted
to philosophical thought and political theory. In addition to the usual
Italian dances, they contain a number of modern French dances such as
minué (minuet), sometimes in French five-part setting
(and–in one instance–in French clefs), but mostly in the
three-part setting more common in Italian instrumental music. These
dances, especially those by Colombi, illustrate how the Italian composers
worked when adapting French music to the taste of their audience by
simplifying it formally, but emphasizing counterpoint rather more than
their French colleagues. There also is some evidence that these dances
were actually danced to at court, which raises the question whether
they had the same importance as the dances danced at the court of Louis
XIV, thus demonstrably serving to stabilize and define the order of
the state.
Reading Roland
Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Cornell University)
Dance has such a strong presence inside of French baroque opera that
it cannot be ignored. However, it can be, and often has been, marginalized—damned
with the label “decorative” that obviates any need to take
it seriously. In this view, dance may be part of the work, but it is
not part of the drama. By extension, the divertissements in
which the dancing is embedded are seen mainly as pretexts for dance
and spectacle. Even scholars of baroque opera tend to subscribe to this
view: divertissements in general are characterized as having “little
to do with the main action,” as features that “inevitably
dilute the dramatic intensity,” or as “a decorative but
nonessential and dramatically neutral ornament.” To be fair, I
must point out that these and other scholars do recognize that
not all divertissements are alike and that Philippe Quinault, Lully’s
main librettist, was particularly skilled at integrating the divertissements
into the opera. Nonetheless, discussions of the dramaturgy of divertissements
have generally remained on the level of the plot.
What happens if, instead of trying to explain away the presence of dance,
we accept it as an essential element of the style and ask what kind
of work dance is doing inside the opera? This switch in angle of vision
encourages us to assume that the librettist, composer, and choreographer
knew what they were doing in constructing divertissements as they did,
and that it is our job to make sense of their choices. It further obliges
us to pay close attention to the texts, music, and (insofar as it can
be discerned) the choreography of the divertissements. As a first attempt
at giving the divertissements full dramatic standing inside an opera,
this paper proposes a reading of Lully and Quinault’s penultimate
tragédie en musique, ROLAND (1685).
This study reveals that far from offering a distraction, the divertissements
deepen the characterization of all three principal singers (Roland,
Angélique, and Médor) and intensify the main themes of
the plot; they even expose power relationships and gender issues that
in the “main” part of the opera remain under wraps.
Return to 2007 program
MYTH IN
LULLY’S PHAËTON
Echoes of Allegories Past in Lully’s Phaëton
Lois Rosow (Ohio State University)
Our manner of reading Lully’s operas as political allegories,
and especially of seeing the heroes as representations of Louis XIV,
has undergone revision in recent years. Scholars have learned to see
a complex relationship between the godlike “Hero” of the
Prologues and the more problematic heroes of the tragédies,
to understand the relationship of weak kings and young heroes as a ritualistic
reference to the feudal past, and to apply the theory of the king’s
“two bodies” to certain protagonists. More generally, reading
these operas à clef has largely given way to reading
them as metaphors for courtly society—representations of symmetry,
magnificence and splendor, and top-down authority. Moreover, while the
primary sources occasionally encourage us to interpret the hero specifically
as Louis, and contemporaneous anecdotes demonstrate that courtly audiences
made a game of seeing themselves in particular characters, these were
“fleeting and often multi-faceted associations,” a “web
of interconnected reflections.”
Using Phaëton as a case study, this paper will suggest
another source for allegorical reading: the reception of the mythological
stories. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid divided the story, introducing
it at the end of Book I and opening Book II with the splendid palace
of the Sun. The splendor of Apollo’s palace is suggested in the
opera by an expansive divertissement and evocation of Versailles.Whereas
Ovid was sympathetic to Phaethon, praising his risk-taking, the principal
early-modern allegory—that is, Phaethon as an immature prince
attempting to rule before he is ready—expressed moral disapproval.
This disapproval pervades the love triangle and story of royal succession
in the opera (largely the librettist’s invention) and especially
the encounter with Jupiter at the end, whereas the musically expansive
encounter with Apollo largely follows Ovid and stresses Phaethon’s
gloire and willingness to die for immortality. Art historian
Pierre Marechaux has demonstrated that the depiction of Phaethon’s
fall in Bernard Solomon’s highly influential annotated illustrations
for Metamorphoses (1557) juxtaposes Jupiter as a rigorous,
severe god, and the Sun as a source of Christian redemption. This juxtaposition
is evident in Lully’s opera, where Apollo and Jupiter reflect
different aspects of Louis XIV.
“Quelle estrange Chaleur nous vient icy brûler?”:
Issues of Time and Power in Phaëton
Kathryn A.M. Baillargeon (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Apollo, the god of the sun, each day drives his chariot across the sky
exerting his power over time as the controller of the hours, seasons,
and years. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Phaëton, a mortal,
requests to use his father’s chariot for one day, which leads
to his death and the near-destruction of the earth. Due to the protagonist’s
terrible fate, scholars consider Phaëton, the last of the Lully/Quinault
tragédies en musiques based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
a political lesson—a warning—against defying Louis XIV’s
wishes. Seventeenth-century explications and commentary on Ovid’s
masterpiece agree, but emphasize a different aspect of the tale: Apollo’s
attempts to “teach” his son, Phaëton, can be read allegorically
as instructions of how to govern a country. Phaëton is ultimately
unsuccessful, and the situation problematizes Apollo’s authoritative
godly image. This is most evident at the climax of the story when Apollo
feels he must uphold his vow to his son and, in giving the reins of
his chariot to Phaëton, he temporarily loses his control of time.
Apollo’s decline as exemplified through this tale is a curious
turn of events in the representation of Louis XIV, as the king’s
chosen emblem was the sun.
This paper explores the connections between time and power in Phaëton
using current Ovidian scholarship and the myth explications of Nicolas
Renouard (1609) and Pierre du Ryer (1661). In the opera, time and power
are particularly celebrated in Act IV, when Apollo makes his sole appearance
within the opera. Apollo is praised during the entire first scene with
choirs of the Hours and Seasons and in an air sung by Autumn, while
in the second scene he regretfully hands his chariot to Phaëton.
I speculate that the issues of time and power within the opera illustrate
a vision of Louis XIV that is laudatory, but one with shades of subversion,
creating a more complex reading of Quinault’s and Lully’s
final Ovidian tragédie en musique.
Return to 2007 program
CIRCLES
AND FIGURES
Seventeenth-Century Music and the Culture of Rhetoric:
Erasmus, Burmeister and Schütz
Bettina Varwig (Magdalen College, Oxford, UK)
Since a number of critical attacks in the 1980s brought about the demise
of the so-called doctrine of figures, traditional rhetorical theory
has for the most part been silently abandoned as a model for hearing
and interpreting seventeenth-century music, even while the ossified
Figurenlehre still makes regular appearances in textbooks and
undergraduate survey courses. Yet since it seems historically problematic—if
not outright irresponsible—to neglect or deny the central importance
of the ars oratoria for seventeenth-century thought, I propose
in this paper a fundamental reconsideration of our understanding of
the scope and potential of rhetoric in the period. By moving beyond
a narrow conception of rhetoric as a hermeneutic key to match musical
gestures with specific affective meanings, I aim to reconstruct the
discipline as the dominant intellectual force it was, and to situate
early seventeenth-century music and music theory in Germany within this
wider cultural domain. Using Erasmus of Rotterdam’s highly influential
volume De duplici copia rerum et verborum (originally published
1512, reprinted countless times throughout the seventeenth century)
as a central source, I first explore how Erasmian procedures for verbal
composition, based on patterns of variation and amplification, shaped
the conceptual world of the German musica poetica theorists
around 1600 as they attempted to verbalize (for the first time) certain
rules for devising convincing musical design. I then show how this procedural
approach to composition might transform our understanding of the compositional
practice of Heinrich Schütz and his contemporaries. In place of
an exclusive emphasis on localized musical-rhetorical figures decorating
textual images, their music can thereby be reheard in its large-scale
formal-expressive potential as shaped by contemporary models of creation
and horizons of expectations.
Volvelles in Baroque Music Theory Books
Michael Dodds (North Carolina School of the Arts)
As early as Ptolemy, music theorists have employed circles
to illustrate musical concepts. Prior to the seventeenth century, musical
circles were associated mostly with speculative theory. In the Baroque
era, authors characteristically used circles to teach more practical
aspects of musical instruction, including key relationships (notably
the circle of fifths) and transposition. When presented graphically,
most such circles are fixed on the page, but a small number of Baroque
music theory treatises include revolving paper wheels called volvelles.
The interactive, dynamic nature of volvelles permits their users to
transpose intervallic patterns—whether single intervals, triads,
hexachords, or scales—to any chromatic degree of the keyboard.
Music volvelles singularly manifest an epochal shift in musical
thinking during the seventeenth century—a shift away from essentially
vocal ways of conceptualizing tonal space in medieval and Renaissance
modality toward more keyboard-oriented major-minor tonality.
Given the ubiquity of volvelles in early modern astronomy and
navigation books, it is noteworthy that some of the most nuanced music
volvelles should come from Portugal and Holland, nations more
noted for seafaring and cartography than for music theory. A volvelle
in Fernandez’s Arte de musica (Lisbon, 1626) presciently
encapsulates central themes in later Baroque music theory, including
the derivation of major and minor thirds and their transposibility within
a nuanced, circular tonal space. Transposition of the twelve modes as
well as the two modern modes is demonstrated by a volvelle
from Fischer’s Kort en grondig Onderwys van de Transpositie
(Utrecht, 1728). Volvelles in Italian treatises such as Cantone’s
Armonica gregoriana (Turin, 1668) and Tevo’s Il testore
musico (Venice, 1706) reconcile the received hexachordal tradition
with the fully chromatic keyboard. Music theory volvelles cannot
be properly understood apart from the pedagogical traditions that produced
them. Yet they also suggest intriguing conceptual and historical parallels
with other disciplines, most notably between the mapping of geographical
and tonal space. The handout for this paper will include musical volvelles
by Fernandez and Fischer.
Return to 2007 program
“FROM
BEDS OF RAGING FIRE”:
PERFORMING BAROQUE MADNESS
Much ink has been spilled over the question of “authentic”
performance; scholars often dismiss it as overly treatise-bound and
uncritical, while performers consider such efforts idiosyncratic and
dispassionate. Though it might be tempting to admit defeat and abandon
the idea of achieving an intersection of what Carolyn Abbate calls the
“drastic” and the “gnostic,” we would like to
make such an attempt in this panel. This lecture/recital consists of
three papers and the performance of several mad songs in medias
res. These essays and performances are interwoven to create a sense,
pace Abbate, of the multiple layers of the gnostic that can
be involved in the preparation of a drastic event. Each mad song is
presented as a performative event, for which the surrounding commentary
provides a scholarly framework that emphasizes a symbiotic relationship
between performance and scholarship. In so doing, we hope to expand
the boundaries of scholarly presentation.
Inflamed Passions and Performative Extremes
Sean M. Parr (Columbia University)
The most unbridled and exaggerated expressions of emotion
in seventeenth-century English music were operatic in all but name.
Appearing primarily as music incidental to plays written on mythic subject-matter,
English mad songs functioned largely outside the plot (being sung by
secondary characters) and yet were the showstoppers of the theatre.
The performers of the genre, not the playwrights or composers, were
the shapers of its success. Madness in Restoration England was constructed
via images of emotions gone wild. The body’s central fire in the
heart was believed to regulate emotions and overtake the body, leading
to the unbridled passions and manic possession that characterized those
imprisoned in “Bedlam,” London’s abusive mental hospital.
Cartesian passions and Petrarchan extremes of fire and ice pervade the
genre.
In setting musical mad scenes, dramatists provided opportunities for
histrionic spectacles, chances for audiences to view voyeuristically
emotions rarely expressed in public. Instead of the emotional stasis
of later opera seria arias, mad songs by composers such as
brothers Henry and Daniel Purcell and John Eccles are multi-sectional
and through-composed, consisting of quickly changing affects, often
juxtaposing polarized emotions. In broadly outlining this genre of mad
song, this paper will suggest that its core performative effects of
impulsiveness, over-the-top musical affect, and histrionic theatricality
could be an aid in its revivification today. Resulting performances
reveal the relevance of sprezzatura to today’s audiences—performances
informed by historical gesture, vocal effects, text declamation and
improvisation, but also imbued with the performer’s own brand
of personal spontaneity.
Anne Bracegirdle on Fire
Amber Youell-Fingleton (Columbia University)
Around 1660, the London theatre, previously dominated by men on both
sides of the proscenium, began to experience an influx of women actors.
By the end of the century, female “singing actors” had gained
considerable power over both the stage and the theatre management. Among
the most important of these women was the actress Anne Bracegirdle (1663?-1748),
who was renowned for her physical beauty, fiery personality, powerful
performances and, above all, her avowed celibacy. At a time when women
actors were often the prey of male spectators, Bracegirdle was no less
than a sensation, driving one man to attempt her kidnapping and then
to kill her suspected lover. On the stage, Bracegirdle re-enacted the
drama of her real life, playing alternately the worldly woman or the
virginal maiden. However, in almost every case her character eventually
surrenders to the force of her passions, fulfilling her audience’s
fantasies. In the case of Thomas D’Urfey’s 1694 The
Comical History of Don Quixote, her character gives way to madness.
Singing the mad song “I burn,” composed by John Eccles,
Bracegirdle succumbed to her audience—the frenzied melodies, “hysterical”
tempo changes, and manic declamation of the song allowed the audience
to experience a ravishing of the virgin. As a character in the play
exclaims, “when once a Woman’s mad, she’s in perfection.”
Accompanied by a performance of Eccles’ “I burn,”
this paper will suggest how these possibilities of meaning can further
connect the audience with the performer, rendering the mad song even
more “ravishing.”
Transcending the Fourth Wall: Gesture and
the Mad Song
Brooke Bryant (City University of New York)
Against the historical narrative of theatre and religion in seventeenth-century
England, theatrical performances in the Restoration period may be understood
as reflective of the radical Protestant desire to change audience members
from participants to observers of onstage action. During the Restoration,
stage spaces were modified in order to introduce decorum into the theatrical
experience. Seating arrangements were changed to create a more “refined”
performance environment, and theatres began to feature proscenium arches,
architectural tools devised to create a “fourth wall” between
actors and their audiences. Theatre-goers also witnessed the importation
of a highly-stylized, codified gesture system from the continent.
This paper explores the problems inherent in staging late seventeenth-century
English mad songs, focusing on the paradoxical process of using a highly
codified gesture vocabulary in a restrictive stage space to make performance
seem spontaneous. It applies principles outlined in popular oratory
and gesture treatises (such as John Bulwer’s Chironomia [1644])
to a musical excerpt from Daniel Purcell’s “Morpheus, Thou
Gentle God”; this application examines the possibility of using
period gesture to influence the passions of the twenty-first-century
listener’s soul, thus fostering an intimate, physical connection
between the performer and her audience. This interactive study will
demonstrate that period gesture is capable of transcending two varieties
of the “fourth wall”: that between Restoration actors and
their audiences, and that between twenty-first-century performers and
historical performance practice.
Return to 2007 program
SOURCES
AND SOCIETY
Pasqualini, Composer
Margaret Murata (University of California, Irvine)
Forty-eight secular cantatas exist in seventeenth-century sources attributed
to papal singer Marc’Antonio Pasqualini (cf. Murata 2003). This
slim output, however, is more than doubled when compositions bearing
the monogram MAP are added to it. When the seventy-four anonymous compositional
drafts and sketches in his hand are considered, the singer’s oeuvre
approaches two hundred cantatas. This paper will categorize and illustrate
the Pasqualini sources beyond the forty-eight firmly attributed works,
strengthening the case for “MAP” as an indication of authorship
(and not the singer’s mere possession of the scores) and differentiating
between Pasqualini’s compositional hand (Konzeptschrift)
and his “fair hand” (Reinschrift). Finally, taking
into account the recent studies Grampp 2002 and Speck 2003, I will credit
Pasqualini as the composer of parts of—if not all of—three
of the oratorios in the Barberini Library in I-Rvat, distinguishing
between his contributions as a composer and as a copyist of the other
six Barberini oratorio scores, which contain music by Luigi Rossi, Marco
Marazzoli, and others.
Grampp 2002: F.
Grampp, “Die anonymen Oratorien und Oratorienkantaten der Barberini-Bibliothek”
in Sub tuum praesidium confugimus. Scritti in memoria di Monsignor
Higini Anglès, ed. F. Luisi, A. Addamiano, N. Tangari, Rome
2002, pp. 257-98. Murata 2003:
M. Murata, “Pasqualini riconosciuto” in
"Et facciam dolçi canti." Studi in onore
di Agostino Ziino, ed. B. M. Antolini, T. M. Gialdroni, A. Pugliese,
eds., 2 vols., Lucca 2003, pp. 655-86. Speck
2003: Chr. Speck, Das italienische
Oratorium, 1625-1665. Musik und Dichtung, Turnhout 2003. Speculum
Musicae vol. 9.
Performing the Virgin(al):
Women and Domestic Keyboard Music in Early Modern England
Yael Sela (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, UK)
Women’s musical performance in early modern England was confined
under the code of chastity and modesty to the privacy of the household.
Writers of conduct manuals, moral treatises, and sermons warned against
the dangerous power of public performance of music by women to mar social
stability. More radical writers denounced women’s musical practice
altogether, dreading its corrupting effect on women’s gullible
minds. However, ample evidence in music manuscripts and memoirs known
to have belonged to women, as well as in printed commentaries, testifies
that the attainment of musical skills became increasingly fashionable
in the course of the seventeenth century among girls of the educated
classes as a mark of social advancement. In the decades leading up to
the civil war, the virginals especially gained popularity as instruments
associated with domestic female performance.
Women’s participation in the dissemination and performance of
domestic keyboard music in early modern England has largely remained
unexplored. Drawing on a group of virginal manuscripts owned by women
during the first half of the seventeenth century, this paper explores
the social meaning and significance of women’s keyboard performance
as cultural practice within their domestic frame of life. As recent
scholarly studies in literary and cultural history have shown, although
womanhood was defined as private and domestic, the early modern household
was a space in which commonly accepted hierarchies could blur: gender
boundaries could be undermined, sublime and mundane mingled, sacred
worship and secular entertainment interlaced. Similarly, women’s
manuscripts inhabit a complex set of cultural and social practices,
traditions, and relations recorded in diverse texts that circulated
between the private and the public realms, from poetry and devotional
verse to household accounts and medical recipes.
Following this notion, women’s virginal manuscripts can be interpreted
as micro-historical documents, offering a window into the social habitats
and musical practices in which they were embedded. The paper demonstrates
how although women’s musical practices were confined to the household,
the embodied musical performance was an act which enabled the female
player to manipulate and even resist the confinements imposed on her
sex by masculine ideology.
The Southern Roots of Printed Alfabeto
Song
Cory M. Gavito (Oklahoma City University)
Published all over Italy, alfabeto songs were among the most
prolifically printed secular vocal music repertories of the early-to-mid
Seicento. Yet no comprehensive study of the repertory has been
written, perhaps due to the assumption that alfabeto was an
expendable addition to vocal publications, instead of a necessary and
in fact defining component of a musical tradition dating back to the
sixteenth century. While Silke Leopold and Roark Miller have uncovered
the musical and textual concordances between Remigio Romano’s
Raccolte di bellissime canzonette (Vicenza, Venice, and Pavia,
1618-1626) and Venetian printed alfabeto song books of the
1620s, there remain hundreds of instances of shared texts and music
within the wider repertory of alfabeto songs published between
1610 and ca. 1665. The central aim of this presentation is to reveal
patterns of the repertory’s publication and concordances that
emphasize relationships between an earlier “southern” practice
and a later, more standardized “northern” repertory. These
shared texts further articulate specific musical and textual themes
that suggest that alfabeto and the Spanish guitar were used
to evoke the artistic sensibilities of the Mezzogiorno. Many of these
themes focus on the pastoral and cultural authenticity of the Italian
south, an awareness also formulated by the Jesuit missionary sojourns
to the Kingdom of Naples and in the growing number of Neapolitan travel
guides and regional histories published throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In illustrating the repertory’s foundational
associations with southern Italian culture, I will focus on three printed
alfabeto song sources: Girolamo Montesardo’s I lieti
giorni di Napoli (Naples, 1612), Pietro Millioni’s Prima
scielta di villanelle (Rome, 1627), and the song anthologies of
Giovanni Stefani (Venice, 1618-24). These three sources represent the
most common alfabeto songbook formats that emanated from the Italian
music presses during the early Seicento: unstaffed text with
alfabeto (Millioni), staffed text with alfabeto (Montesardo),
and alfabeto song anthology (Stefani).
“This charming invention created by
the King:”
Christian IV’s Court Orchestra as a Musical Wunderkammer
Arne Spohr (Hochschule für Musik, Cologne, Germany)
The Renaissance and Baroque eras produced numerous widely-studied Kunst-
and Wunderkammern. Princes and scholars collected precious, exotic
and sometimes even bizarre items, mostly works of art, natural objects,
scientific instruments and books to demonstrate comprehensive views
of the world and symbolize their claims to power. This paper explores
King Christian IV’s famous Hofkapelle, one of the largest
courtly musical institutions in Europe at the time, as a musical Wunderkammer
purposefully assembled by its royal collector.
An examination of the various analogies between Kapelle and
collection can significantly add to our understanding of the institution’s
organization and its representative functions. A striking analogy is
the both exclusive and diverse character of the Danish Hofkapelle,
resulting from the king’s systematic employment policy. He not
only tried to draw renowned virtuosi to Denmark, but he also engaged
musicians from a wide variety of countries, including Ireland and Poland,
thus making his the most internationally diverse Kapelle in
the whole of Europe. I argue that this diversity has strong political
implications, symbolizing Christian IV’s claim for his leading
role among the Protestant powers of the time.
By displaying his musicians as precious objects or keeping them from
view so that their music, through a “charming invention”
(in the words of a contemporary visitor), appeared in the audience room
as an acoustic miracle, the public use of the Hofkapelle shows
more analogies to the symbolic meanings and political functions of Wunderkammern.
I suggest that the king used this acoustic “invention” in
the context of courtly ceremonial to present himself as cause and center
of earthly harmony and, accordingly, the political order of his kingdom.
Return to 2007 program
BUXTEHUDE
AND RHETORIC
Buxtehude’s Pedaliter Praeludia and the Stylus
phantasticus
Paul Collins (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland)
While eighteenth-century writers describing the stylus phantasticus
generally took Athanasius Kircher’s definition of the style (1650)
as their starting point, the concept of a ‘fantastical’
style was significantly transformed in meaning by 1740. This transformation
is observed most particularly in the account of the style found in the
first part of Johann Mattheson’s theoretical tour de force,
Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739). Indeed, Mattheson’s
concept of the style has been more consistently invoked than that of
Kircher in discussions of the kinds of freedom associated with keyboard
works by Italian and German composers of the Baroque. From being a vehicle
for the display of compositional artificium and a didactic
tool to illustrate good contrapuntal writing, Kircher’s stylistic
category became primarily a performance-oriented concept for Mattheson,
referring especially to extemporary ability. Mattheson’s fantastische-Styl
embraced a more fundamental notion of musical freedom than Kircher had
envisaged, casting aside whatever inhibited the pursuit of musical ecstasy
in performance. While Buxtehude may very well have entertained a different
notion of musical fantasy to that presented in Capellmeister,
Mattheson’s thoughts on the stylus phantasticus nevertheless
constitute an apt template for discussing the improvisatory quality
that characterizes much of the writing in the Lübeck organist’s
pedaliter praeludia. The free sections of the praeludia give
particularly apt expression to Mattheson’s fantastische-Styl,
the style perfectly capturing the spontaneity and unpredictability of
these sections. However, the relevance of Kircher’s earlier concept
of the same style for the praeludia cannot be overlooked, given the
north German predilection for learned counterpoint and compositional
artifice. In the final analysis, Buxtehude’s praeludia embody
the inherent tension in the dual role of composer-performer, namely
that of the ‘diligent’ craftsman who must commit structured
ideas to paper versus the spontaneous performer or improviser. This
paper argues that Buxtehude’s praeludia constitute a rich repository
of musical fantasy, and that given its focus on creating the illusion
of instantaneous invention-in-performance—thereby making the listener
a delighted hostage of surprise—Mattheson’s stylus phantasticus
concept is of particular significance for today’s performer
of these works by one of the seventeenth century’s most ‘diligent
fantasy makers.’
Rhetoric in Buxtehude’s Cantata Cycle
Membra Jesu nostri
Eva Linfield (Colby College)
This seven-cantata cycle that Buxtehude dedicated to Gustav Düben
in 1680 is unique in its textual, theological, and therefore also its
musical conception. As a cycle Membra Jesu nostri presupposes
the Man of Sorrows and the desire to share in Christ’s suffering.
With this cycle Buxtehude erects, so to speak, the cross with Christ,
one of the most important icons in Christian theology. What may have
motivated or inspired him in choosing his text and crafting it in this
particular manner? My paper will fall into two larger sections: one,
a look at various cyclical aspects and their ramifications for performance
and two, an investigation of Buxtehude’s use of rhetoric and musical
rhetoric. The discussion of the cyclical nature of the composition will
include questions about the transmitted sources, the origin of the text,
and theological concerns. The discussion of rhetoric and musical rhetoric
will incorporate questions of analysis and ultimately its bearings on
performance practice.
Beyond Sources and Works: A Fresh Look at
Buxtehude’s Legacy
Kerala Snyder (Eastman School of Music)
The Düben Collection Database Catalogue has just
been published on the World-Wide Web, revealing more information on
the sources of Buxtehude’s vocal music than has ever been available,
together with scanned images of all the manuscripts in the collection.
A newly-discovered tablature in Weimar reveals that Johann Sebastian
Bach was playing Buxtehude’s organ music at the age of thirteen
or fourteen, long before his fabled walk to Lübeck. But the sources
vary from one another; what is the nature of the works that lurk behind
them? New research on Buxtehude’s organs at St. Mary’s Church
in Lübeck suggests that Buxtehude could not have played some of
his works on those organs because of limitations in tuning and compass;
indeed, that he instead played his organ works on a pedal clavichord.
And post-modern musicology wonders whether the work-concept was operative
at all in Buxtehude’s day. Clearly, three hundred years after
his death many questions remain concerning his musical legacy.
Using criteria developed by Lydia Goehr in The Imaginary Museum
of Musical Works and of other scholars commenting upon her work,
I will offer evidence that Buxtehude did indeed consider himself a composer
of genuine musical works and displayed a freedom in their composition
that placed him in the vanguard. At the same time, we must acknowledge
that he and his contemporaries—notably Gustav Düben—took
a more flexible view of the character of a musical work than we usually
do, and I will offer suggestions for performance that arise from this
new understanding.
LECTURE-RECITAL
From Italy to Germany and Beyond via France—
Les Goûts réunis in the Music of Michel-Richard
de Lalande (1657-1726)
Lionel Sawkins (Beckenham, UK)
In 1707 France’s foremost court composer, whose fame was to last
through most of the century, turned 50, and in the same year he produced
his most celebrated composition, which was to become the most-performed
work by any composer during the whole history of the Paris Concert
spirituel (1725-90). This was Cantate Domino, a grand
motet by Michel-Richard de Lalande, the ‘Latin Lully,’
whose 350th anniversary is being observed in 2007 by many more performances
and recordings. If Charpentier is the name most often associated today
with French Baroque choral music, this phenomenon is of recent date,
and certainly does not reflect the situation in 1707, when his music
was quickly forgotten even three years after his death, while the motets
of Lalande continued to dominate not only the repertory of the court
chapel but became the staple diet of the Concert spirituel
from its inception until 1770 when the symphonies of Josef Haydn replaced
them.
Lalande’s mastery of forms, including a command of counterpoint
to rival that of his famous German contemporaries and a rich harmonic
palette shared with Charpentier, were allied to a sensitivity to the
texts of the psalms which were his most frequently used text source.
This paper will explore the reasons why, following the time when Lully
had tried for so long to bury his own Italian origins and prided himself
on being more French than the French, Lalande’s increasingly Italianate
motets came to be recognised as the chef-d’œuvres
of the genre. Tracing his love affair with ultramontane influences,
including that of Corelli’s works, it will be shown how Lalande
transformed his own style and set a standard that was to be emulated
by his contemporaries and successors.
Return to 2007 program