Logical, Captain! The implications of Peri’s Preface

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

Before I offer you, dear Readers, this analysis of mine, I think I ought to bring to your attention what has led me to re-examine this well-known Preface, for in all human operations logic should be the beginning and source…

SUMMARY

Here is a statement of my own, about Jacopo Peri’s Preface to his setting of Euridice (1600), the earliest surviving secular ‘opera’.

I reduced the Preface to its essential point, so that the process of reading should not need (in a kind of way) to ‘plough through’ every sentence. That’s the principle of a summary, whereas the complete Preface naturally requires detailed examination.

I modelled this statement on Peri’s sentence structures, but working logically through the 17^th-century formulations, it should be clear that:

I am discussing a summary.
There are differences between a summary and the complete Preface.
I made the summary by reducing the Preface to its essential argument.
The idea is to avoid ‘ploughing’ by means of the reduction of the Preface.

There are two further implications:

Normally, with the complete Preface, the attentive reader will indeed ‘plough through’ every sentence.
Even in a summary, readers will follow me, though they don’t ‘plough through’.

Now here is a summary of Peri’s most famous statement about the composition of dramatic music, explaining how he imitates ‘the course of speech’ in song [his complete text is below]:

I reduced the Bass to its essential pulse, so that the course of speaking should not seem (in a kind of way) to ‘dance’ to the movement of the Bass. That’s the principle for sad or serious material, whereas happier texts naturally require more movement in the Bass.

Working logically through Peri’s 17^th-century formulations, it should be clear that:

Peri is discussing music for sad or serious texts.
There are differences between sad or serious material, and happier texts.
Peri made his serious music by reducing the Bass to its essential pulse.
The idea is to remove ‘dancing’ by means of the reduction of the Bass.

There are two further implications:

Normally, in happier texts, stylish singing will indeed ‘dance’ to the movement of the Bass.
Even in sad or serious material, singers will follow the Bass, though they don’t ‘dance’.

Peri’s Preface has often been misunderstood as an appeal for ‘rhythmic liberty’, and its most famous statement mis-interpreted as ‘singers should not follow the Bass’. Those frequently repeated distortions fit comfortably with the 20^th-century notion of rubato and free rhythm as the epitome of expressiveness, and with the modern convention that accompanists must follow the soloist. But period sources from Agazzari to CPE Bach and Leopold Mozart insist that the Bass lays down the Tactus, and that soloists follow this essential pulse (just as in today’s jazz). Sometimes the singing ‘dances’, sometimes it is sad or serious, but it always has the essential pulse of Tactus, led by the Bass. Before the year 1800, soloists follow the accompaniment, because accompanists have particular responsibility for maintaining the Tactus.

Meanwhile, the ‘liberties’ Peri asks for are not to do with rhythm, but relate to musical ‘grammar’ – the rules of dissonance, l’uso delle false. When he does talk about rhythm, he draws attention to the great variety of note values he employs, linked to the emotions of the text. Contrasts in note-values would be destroyed, if there was no underlying pulse to structure all that variety: indeed such destruction of notated contrasts is just what happens in many modern ‘free’ performances of early 17^th-century monody.

Throughout Peri’s Preface, there is nothing to contradict the general (historical) assumptions for all music of this period:

There is a regular Tactus pulse.
Soloists follow the Bass.

You can read more about Tactus here. And you can read about how Tactus structured early 17th-century music here.

One last observation: Peri never uses the word ‘recitative’. His topic is nuova maniera di canto (a new kind of song, a new way of singing) for Musica su le scene (Theatrical Music). And he refers to even the most poignant speeches of Orpheus, of the lamenting shepherd Arcetro and of Dafne (the Messaggiera) as arie. The word aria in this period does not necessarily mean a ‘tuneful melody’, but rather refers to elements of repeated structure, for example a ground bass, or any repeated rhythmic fragment.

Peri’s complete text with my translation and commentary are below.

And may you live happily!

Annotated translation:

Jacopo Peri Preface to Euridice (Florence, 1600)

The original Italian text is here, along with the music of Euridice (mostly by Peri himself, but with some items contributed by Caccini).

Editorial procedure: I have tried to stay close to Peri’s word-order, and to use English cognates whenever possible, to help the reader follow the Italian text in parallel. Any serious discussion of this key text has to be made using the original Italian text, since translation (and the specific 17^th-century meaning) of Peri’s terms is inevitably open to question.

Before I offer you, dear Readers, this Music of mine, I think I ought to bring to your attention to what has led me to invent this new manner of song, for in all human operations, reason should be the beginning and source; And he who cannot show reason easily leads one to believe that he worked by chance.

Peri offers a Scholastic defence for the Humanist project of creating a new kind of music. Ritrovare, which I have translated as ‘invent’, also means ‘to find out again, or to retrieve’ (Florio Dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues. London, 1611). Although Peri’s ‘manner of song; is ‘new’, the artistic endeavour was to re-discover Ancient music. This suggests interesting comparisons to today’s Early Music!

Although by Signor Emilio del Cavaliere, before any other that I know, with marvellous invention our Music was made to be heard on the Stage; nevertheless it pleased Signori Jacopo Corsi and Ottavio Rinuccini (at the end of the year 1594), that I should apply it [our music] in another guise, setting to notes the fable of Dafne, written by Signor Ottavio, to make a simple test of what singing could do in our era.

Peri properly acknowledges Cavalieri’s achievements, and presents his own previous experience. Corsi was a patron of ‘early opera’, Rinuccini one of the greatest libretto poets. Caccini is not mentioned, in spite of his strong claims to have invented the new style himself, but Peri quietly positions his 1594 Dafne well in advance of the rival settings of Euridice and Caccini’s Le Nuove Musiche (1601/2). Peri’s Euridice, which includes some music by Caccini, was the first to be performed, but Caccini rushed his own complete setting into print before Peri’s was published.

From this it is seen that we were dealing with dramatic poetry, but if one should imitate in song how one speaks (and without doubt, no one ever actually spoke by singing), I esteem that the ancient Greeks and Romans (who according to the opinion of many sang entire Tragedies on the Stage) used a musical style, which going beyond that of ordinary speaking, descended so much from the melody of singing, that it took the form of something intermediate; And this is the reason by which we see in this Poetry there is a place for the Iambic, which is not exalted like the Hexameter, but merely is said to advance beyond the confines of everyday discourse.

There was no difficulty in setting to music diegetic songs and dances (theatrical scenes which represented the characters making music) and it was accepted as a convention that Prolouges, Choruses, Gods and similar other-worldly figures might sing. The question Peri grapples with here is the theatrical representation of speech. In the Platonic tradition, imitare implies also ‘artistic expression or representation’. Peri admits that people don’t normally sing when they speak, and looks to Ancient Greece and Rome for an intermediate form, something between speech and song. He compares this to blank verse, which is intermediate between prose and poetry..

Armonia can mean ‘harmony’, but often has a wider meaning as any kind of musical organisation, especially rhythmic, as well as melody: here, I translate it as ‘musical style’, for Peri is concerned with the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech. Peri’s ‘something intermediate’ reminds us of Caccini’s sprezzatura, a nonchalant, ‘cool’ voice-production, something between singing and normal speech.

Contrary to received opinion. Caccini’s sprezzatura is NOT rhythmic freedom. Read what Caccini actually wrote, here.

And so, having rejected any other manner of song heard until now, I devoted myself totally to researching the representation needed for these Poems; and I consider that the sort of tones, which the Ancients assigned to singing, and which they called Diastematica (as if drawn out and suspended) could sometimes be taken faster, and take a moderate course between the movements of song (slow and suspended) and speech (speedy and fast), & be adapted to my proposition (as they [the Ancients] also adapted it [Diastematica] when reading Poetry and Epic verses) to approach that other [sort of tone] of speaking, which they called Continuous; This is what our modern people (although perhaps for another end) have already done in their music.

‘Researching’ translates Peri’s ricercare, which – like ritrovare – carries also the suggestion of rediscovering or searching again. The word reminds us of abstract polyphonic music designated ricercar, recalling the concept – of music being ‘found’ rather than invented – at the root of the word Troubador.

‘Tones’ translates Peri’s voci: his word takes oin the concepts of ‘voice’, ‘note’, ‘syllable’, ‘vowel’. Again, Peri proposes something ‘intermediate’ between slow singing and fast speech: he also suggests that that the syllable speed would vary. He makes a parallel with different ways of reading lyric and epic verse. Around 1600, it was already customary, even in polyphonic music, to set text to varied note-values.

I know similarly that in our speaking some tones are pitched in such a way that there one could lay a musical foundation, and in the course of speech many other [tones] pass by, which are not pitched, until one returns to another [tone] suitable for movement of a new harmony, & having respect for those modes and those accents which are needed in lamenting and rejoicing & in similar matters, I made the Bass move in the time of these, sometimes more, sometimes less, according to the emotions, and kept it unmoving through the dissonances and through the correct consonances, until – running through various notes – the tone of the speaker arrives at that [syllable] which in ordinary speaking would be pitched: [this] opens the way to a new harmony;

Peri takes his inspiration from the sustained syllables of declamatory speech, for which a musical pitch can be assigned, and/or a harmonious accompaniment created. Again, the word ‘tones’ should be read to include also the concepts of ‘the voice’, ‘syllables’ and ‘vowels’. The word accenti carries the meanings of ‘expressive words’ and ‘expressive notes’: in this period it also means a particular expressive ornament. Armonia can mean the pitch of the sung note, or a harmony in the accompaniment.

Peri constructs a bass-line according to the musical requirements of varying emotions .Those emotions dictate the rhythm of the bass, which moves ‘sometimes more, sometimes less’. Sometimes he keeps the bass fixed in spite of some dissonances in the voice-part. After many quick, light, ‘unpitched’ syllables, the bass plays a new harmony with the next sustained, pitched syllable.

And this is not only so that the course of speaking should not wound the ear (as if stumbling as it encounters the repeated strings of more frequent harmonies) or that [the course of speaking] should not seem in a kind of way to dance to the movement of the Bass, principally in matters either sad or serious, other happier [matters] naturally requiring more frequent rhythms:

Peri’s word corde, ‘strings’ implies the notes played by the continuo-bass. The bass should not play too often, because this would disrupt the proper course of speech. Here I think Peri refers to the pitch-level of the ‘course of speaking’ which would ‘stumble’ upon the dissonances created with an unchanging bass-note, if that note were repeated. It is significant that he associates the continuo-bass with the plucked string of a theorbo, harpsichord or harp (bowed strings and organ can sustain, they would not need to repeat their notes). Nevertheless, the word corda can also refer to a note played on the organ. This first sub-clause refers to problems of harmony, rather than rhythm.

In the next sub-clause, Peri turns to the question of rhythm. His famous, and oft-quoted phrase that the course of speech should not ‘dance’ to the movement of the Bass needs to be read very closely. The implication is that the singer does follow the bass, and even ‘dances’ in other, happier, music. The singer still follows the bass in ‘sad and serious’ music, but the bass moves less and the singer does not ‘dance’.

It is precisely because the singer expects to follow the bass that Peri has to reduce the amount of activity in that bass for ‘sad or serious’ music. The effect of ‘dancing’ is avoided, if the singer only has to coincide with the bass on those significant syllables that are properly pitched and accompanied with a new harmony, and when the bass only moves in long notes, i.e. at the Tactus level of minims and semibreves. In happy music, the bass is more active, the Tactus pulse is rhythmically sub-divided, leading to the effect of ‘dancing’.

But also, because the [correct] use of dissonances would either reduce or cover up the advantage we gain from the necessity of pitching every note, which perhaps the ancient Music did not need to do.

Peri’s phrase uso delle false carries the meaning of ‘the correct procedures of dissonance’. Peri knows that his proposed infrequent movement of the bass is contrary to the normal rules of counterpoint. Since, in the voice part, he has to set even light & quick syllables to some specific note, there are passing dissonances between voice and bass that are not properly prepared and resolved. He wonders if ‘ancient music’ didn’t actually pitch every single note!

But (although I do not dare to assert this to have been the song used in Greek and Roman fables), so I believe it to be the only [song] that can be given from our Music to accommodate to our speech.

Conclusion

In this famous description of his composing method, Peri presents several fundamental concepts of early 17^th-century music, familiar to academics, but contrary to the standard operating procedures of many today’s early music performers:

The voice normally follows the rhythm of the bass
The voice follows the rhythm of the bass even in ‘sad or serious’ music
The emotion is built into the rhythm of the bass, as well as into harmonies and melodic figures
In sad, serious ‘recitative’ the fixed rhythmic points of the bass occur less frequently
In light, happy music the fixed rhythmic points of the bass occur more frequently
Between these fixed rhythmic points, the ‘song’ follows the ‘natural course of speaking’
The ‘course of speech’ refers to the poetic metre of the syllables, & the approximate pitch of the speaking voice
The ‘in-between’ syllables should be passed over quickly and lightly, almost without musical pitch
The ‘freedom Peri asks for in his speech-like music is the freedom to ignore the normal rules of counterpoint.

Peri’s ‘new style for theatrical music’ is ‘intermediate’ in several ways:

The syllabic speed is intermediate between normal speech (which is faster) and normal singing (which is slower).

This is exactly what results, if one performs the ‘new style’ music with a consistent Tactus at approximately minim = 60. Many modern performances are too slow, too ‘sung’.

The voice production is intermediate between normal speech (which is not pitched) and normal singing (which is fully pitched)

Most modern performances are fully sung: it is hard to re-create this voice production, but try lightening up the unaccented syllables, maintaining the Tactus, and not singing too loud! The early operas were sung softly, compared to contemporary church music.

The coordination with the bass is intermediate between normal speech (which has no Tactus) and normal singing (which might even ‘dance’ to the bass-line’s subdivision of the Tactus).

Peri’s ‘reduced’ bass typically moves in semibreves and minims, corresponding to Tactus and semi-Tactus. So in ‘sad or serious’ music the singer fits ‘the course of speech’ within the framework of steady Tactus, in happy music, the singer ‘dances’ to the more active movement of the Bass.

Peri describes a kind of music in which the bass moves infrequently, whilst the voice sustains significant syllables, and then passes lightly and rapidly over several less important syllables. We see this kind of music in his setting of Euridice, which follows this Preface. Today, we call this Recitative, but Peri does not use the words recitativo or musica recitativa. According to the anonymous (c1630) MS, Il Corago, what we nowadays call ‘Recitative’ was known as modulazione, and music with any kind of repeating structure (rhythmic, harmonic or melodic) was called aria. Musica recitativa meant ‘dramatic music’ and it included both modulazione and aria. Recitare meant ‘to act’, whether in spoken drama, music-theatre, or even silent pantomime.

These differences in historical nomenclature remind us that we cannot apply our modern assumptions about ‘Recitative’, nor performance practice for 18^th-century recitative, to Peri’s theatrical music. There is nothing to suggest that Peri’s ‘sad or serious’ music was rhythmically free. Rather, it is built on the foundation (Peri’s word is fondare) of a slow-moving bass, whereas happy music ‘dances’ to a fast-moving bass.

Having explained how he composed his modulazione, in the second part of the Preface Peri discusses how it was performed. I’ll translate and comment on that in another post.

Until then, “may you live happily!”

Please join me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lawrenceking.9 and visit our websites www.TheHarpConsort.com

www.IlCorago.com and www.TheFlow.Zone

Opera, orchestra, vocal & ensemble director and early harpist, Andrew Lawrence-King is director of The Harp Consort and of Il Corago. From 2010 to 2o15 he was Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions.

Tempus putationis – Getting back to Monteverdi’s Time

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

Monteverdi fans will recognise this snippet as part of the tenor solo, Nigra sum, from the 1610 Vespers. The text is usually given in English as ‘the time of the singing of birds is come’, translating direct from the original Hebrew of the Song of Solomon. Monteverdi’s setting creates a musical picture of the word tempus (time) with a succession of semibreves.

Cranes in Israel in early spring

Around the year 1600, the semibreve is the note-value where Time as musical notation and Time in the real world meet. That meeting is governed by the Tactus, the physical movement of the hand, down-and-up. Down and up again corresponds to a semibreve, and lasts about 2 seconds. [Read more about how 17th-century notation was calibrated against real time in Quality Time, here]. So Monteverdi’s semibreves for tempus putationis are a musical picture of Time itself.

However, the Latin word putatio actually means ‘pruning’, so Monteverdi’s text actually refers to the early spring pruning of the vines [the Song of Solomon has more to say about the ‘vine with the tender grape’]. That might encourage some pruning of any bird-song ornaments from this phrase! And it inspires me to cut away all the excess foliage to show what I believe to be the essential structure of Time, in Monteverdi’s period.

pruning vines

For this ‘pruned down’ post, instead of arguing from original sources towards my personal conclusions, I’m going to begin by setting out (my take on) the starting assumptions of Monteverdi’s generation. Starting from these period assumptions (very different to those of today’s musicians), we’ll see what kind of music-making might grow, as buds from these particular shoots.

Honoro

This post is also inspired by Bill Hunt’s comments and challenges to my article on Proportions in Monteverdi’s Ballo, here. Thank you, Bill for your thought-provoking remarks: my replies and ripostes are below!

So let’s start at the very beginning, with the ut re mi of seicento Time. But keep in mind: this is not simply a matter of practical music-making. We are dealing here with renaissance ‘Science’, that is to say the Philosophy of splendid, cosmic, divinely-ordained things, the knowledge of what really counts.

MONTEVERDI’S TIME: PHILOSOPHY

Monteverdi understood Time (as a philosophical concept) in Aristotelian terms, as defined by motus (movement, or change). This is very different from Newton’s concept of Absolute Time (1687) that still today underpins our intuitive grasp of Time.
Time in the real world was defined by the heavenly clock of the cosmos. Each day, the sun reaches its zenith and defines noon.
The best clocks of Monteverdi’s period could indicate the passing seconds, but could not measure seconds accurately. They were only accurate to about 15 minutes a day.
Smaller intervals of time could be measured by the human pulse, the heartbeat. Although the heart-beat varies from person to person, and according to the physical state of the individual, it offered higher precision than the best clocks. But there was no means of calibrating this accurately to clock-time, since clock-time itself was insufficiently precise.
Even smaller intervals of time could be measured by musical rhythm, subdividing to, say, 1/8th of a second. This was the highest precision timing known in this period (renaissance swordfighters wished to emulate singers’ sense of precision timing). Again, there was no means of calibrating this accurately to clock-time, since clocks themselves were inadequate.
There was a strong belief in the existence of a single, divinely ordained, correct Time, defined by the cosmos, e.g. by the noon-day sun.

MONTEVERDI’S TIME: MUSIC

Music itself was cosmic [musica mondana, the Music of the Spheres], and human [musica humana, the harmonious nature of the human body], as well as sound [musica instrumentalis, music sung and played here on earth].
Musical Time was measured by the Aristotelean motus of the perfect movement of the cosmos, of the steady beat of the human heart, by the down-and-up movement of the Tactus hand.
Just as citizens tried to regulate their clocks to run steadily (for practical convenience, and as faithful microcosms of solar time), so musicians tried to keep Time as steadily as humanly possible. This regulation was at the level of about one second of clock-time; in music, it was at the level of the Tactus beat.
Smaller intervals of Musical Time were measured by sub-dividing the Tactus beat.
Just as citizens tried to calibrate their clocks to agree with each other, and with Solar Time, so musicians tried to agree with each other about Musical Time. The various members of a musical ensemble needed to agree on Time, in order to play together, just as citizens had to agree on a time of day, in order to meet each other. From one day to another, from one place to another, citizens and musicians alike tried to keep a consistent sense of Time. However, they had no means of precise calibration: they could only make their best human estimate. Consistent Time was what felt consistent.
There was a strong assumption of a single, heavenly-inspired, correct Musical Time. A musician’s job was to get it right, not to have a personal clock that ran unsteadily, or differently from everyone else’s.

MONTEVERDI’S TIME: TACTUS

All this philosophy was put into practice using the Tactus, the down-up movement of the hand, which calibrated musical notation to real-world Time. The Tactus could be physically enacted, or just kept in mind as an organising concept: either way, it was compared to the heartbeat.
Under mensuration symbol C, the complete Tactus cycle (down-up) corresponds to a semibreve. Down for a minim; up for a minim.
In Tripla Proportion, down corresponds to three minims, up to another three minims. The Tactus-beat is maintained without change.
In Sestupla Proportion, down corresponds to six semi-minims (these look like crotchets in 6/4); up to another six semi-minims. The Tactus-beat is maintained without change.
In Sesquialtera Proportion, down corresponds to two semibreves; up to one semibreve. The duration of the complete Tactus-cycle does not change, but now the down is longer than the up, the beat is ‘unequal’.

MONTEVERDI’S TIME: QUALITY

Like the Cosmos, like a clock (but better!), like the heartbeat (but slower), the Tactus beats steadily and slowly.
A musician’s job is to get it right, to keep it steady, to make it consistent from day to day and with everyone else’s.
Like the stars in heaven, like a clock at the back of the room, the Tactus (as a concept) existed before the music started, will persist after the music stops, and continues across silences within the music. This Tactus-as-concept directs the music. The Tactus itself is the director, not the human who waves the Tactus-hand.

MONTEVERDI’S TIMES: CALIBRATION

Music was calibrated to the Tactus at the level of semibreve (complete cycle) and minim (down alone, or up alone).
The Tactus shared many vital qualities with the heartbeat, but was not calibrated to it (the heartbeat was generally faster).
The Tactus felt slow and steady, as perceived in the human arm. This sets some limits (a finger could wag faster, the entire body might sway slower), but does not offer precise calibration.
There was no means to calibrate the Tactus accurately to clock-time. The best approximation was about 1 beat (down, or up) per second for minims, i.e. about 2 seconds for the complete down-up cycle, for the semibreve. Tactus was calibrated not by clocks, but by a feeling of consistency.
The Tactus felt the same, whatever the circumstances. We can imagine that in a large resonant building, the Tactus might actually proceed a little slower, in order to get the same feeling as in a small rehearsal room. We can imagine that, at moments of great excitement, or deep, genuine emotion, musicians might feel their Tactus to be consistent with the rehearsal, but this subjective impression would be altered by their human emotions.

MONTEVERDI’S TIME: HUMAN INTERVENTION

Like the Cosmos, like the heartbeat, the Tactus has a conceptual existence and an authority that mere humans should not try to mess with. It is better than any clock, not in the sense of being ‘less mechanical’, but in the quality of being more accurate, more steady.
A musician’s job is to maintain the Tactus steadily, consistently and in agreement with all colleagues.
Within these assumptions, as a daring challenge to the stability of the Cosmos, and at the risk of upsetting one’s own heartbeat, performers began to flirt with the notion that the authority of the Tactus might not be wholly Absolute. In certain, strictly limited, situations, a human musician might intervene to alter (momentarily, minutely, infrequently) the way in which Tactus directs music.
Caccini describes (and Monteverdi notates) a senza misura (out of measure) in which the singer temporarily ignores the Tactus. The Tactus continues as a concept, and in the continuo accompaniment. This is like a jazz singer floating elegantly around a steady beat in the rhythm section. This is a special effect, not to be over-used.
Caccini and Frescobaldi describe (and Frescobaldi links to Monteverdi-type madrigals) ways to guidare il tempo (drive Time), in which the Tactus beats sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and even hesitates (momentarily) on the up-stroke. These changes are between sections (passi, movements), at the boundary of contrasting rhythmic structures and emotional content, not within one section. The alteration is a ‘step-change’, rather than a smooth acceleration/deceleration; it’s like changing gears, rather than using the accelerator/brake; it’s like the way a horse changes pace by changing gait (from walk to trot, canter and gallop), not the smooth acceleration of jet-plane. This is a special effect, not to be over-used.
When ‘driving the Time’ any change to the Tactus itself is small. The purpose is that the listener should perceive a change of emotion, not simply to turn the speed-dial up or down. When a noticeable change in the speed of the notes is wanted, the composer can notate this with changes in note-values, or changes in Proportion.

Source references for these period assumptions can be found in many of my previous postings on Tactus, Time and Rhythm (use the Search button and Tags elsewhere on this page) and in Citations and Sources, below. There’ll be more in future posts, too. Tactus and the Philosophy of Time are discussed in great detail in Roger Matthew Grant Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, hot off the Oxford University Press, and highly recommended, here.

But since this posting is pruned back to the essentials, I’m now going to apply these starting assumptions to Bill Hunt’s excellent list of questions.

Galileo challenged by the Philosophers

In the discussion that follows, the challenges come from the eminent English viola-player, William Hunt, profile here. Three articles about the Ballo in Monteverdi’s Orfeo are under discussion: Roger Bowers on proportions here, Virginia Lamothe on dance here, ALK on tactus, proportions and dance here.

WH: I’d like to propose a contrary view. Part of the problem with Andrew’s fascinating discussion is that he sets up a number of straw men in order to arrive at his conclusions. Principal amongst these, in referring to the articles by Lamothe and Bowers on L’Orfeo, is the assertion “Their suggested metronome mark of approximately 50/60 as the Tactus Aequalis is certainly highly plausible. And Bowers agrees that the notation implies the same Tactus for the whole opera”. Bowers makes no such claim.

ALK: (See ‘Citations and Sources’ below). I should first state clearly that I have great respect for Prof Bowers, and I agree with his points of principle. Indeed, I wish to go even further in the same direction of consistency that he recommends. I set up the assumption of single Tactus for the whole opera, not as a ‘straw man’ to be cast away, but as a strong principle that I thoroughly agree with. Indeed, I believe that a particular notation implies the same Tactus wherever it is encountered in this entire repertoire (to the limits of subjective, human ability to maintain a single Tactus without any clock to confirm it).

For Orfeo, Bowers argues that the original notation conveys precise information that should be respected in performance. I agree. He argues that proportions are mathematically precise, and I agree. I disagree only on the detail of which mathematical ratio applies in certain instances.

In the Ballo, Bowers argues that there is no change in the meaning of note-values between the two triple-metre sections [3/2 and 6/4]. I agree. I go further to argue for equivalence of note-values between all triple-metre sections within the work [3/2 and 6/4 are the only triple-metre ‘time-signatures’ that occur in the whole of Orfeo]. I go further again, and argue for equivalence of note-values between sections in duple-metre too. Therefore, note-values only change, when the Proportion changes between duple and triple.

Bowers notes that all ‘time-signatures’ are governed by C throughout the whole work. He argues for a consistent Tactus from Sinfonia at the end of Act I to the entrance of the Messagiera. I agree, and I go further: I argue for a consistent Tactus throughout the whole work. I see no indication for a great increase of speed at the end of Act I, as the Sinfonia starts (Bowers’ argument requires a three-fold increase in speed at this moment). I see no evidence for doubling the speed (or more) between a “recitative” in C and the ballo also in C.

Bowers seems to be inconsistent about when he applies the principle of constant tactus, and when he does not. He wishes to apply it during the Ballo and through the Act I-Act II sequence, through many changes of ‘time-signature’, coloration etc. I agree. I go futher, I wish to apply it consistently throughout the work. But Bowers rejects the argument for constant tactus in general (see Bowers ‘footnote 33), without careful argument. Does he mean to say “Tactus is constant when I want it to be, and otherwise not”?

I say that Tactus is always constant, with only small and infrequent exceptions. I note Frescobaldi’s and Caccini’s discussions of when and how to change the tactus. They describe very restricted circumstances when tactus may be changed. And those changes should be small – if a composer wants double speed, he writes shorter note-values or switches to C-slash. [Some sources indicate that even C-slash is less than twice as fast as C]. If a composer wants a gear-shift of 3:2 or 3:1, proportional notation is available.

So I conclude that a performer’s personal choice of tempo-change would be within a small speed-range. And this personal choice would be exercised very infrequently. In his example madrigal, Caccini changes the Tactus only once (in response to an obvious cue from the words). Frescobaldi similarly sets specific conditions for change of Tactus: break between sections, change of rhythmic structure, change of affetto. Since they follow the affetto, these changes in tactus exaggerate what the composer has already notated: long note-values (for a sad affetto, say) are played in slower Tactus, short note-values (for a happy affetto) in faster Tactus. The affetto is determined on the short-scale, “line by line, even word by word” [Il Corago, Monteverdi and many other sources], but the Tactus only changes between sections, if at all.

Finally, when one considers the audience – it is after all their ‘affetti‘ we want to ‘muovere‘ – one realises that doubling or halving the speed has no effect. The listener perceives the same pulse, with different levels of activity. But a small increase in speed, in the context of precisely regular Tactus, has a strong emotional effect. It may even entrain the listener’s heartbeat, which was previously aligned with the regular, slow tactus, and increase it. As Renaissance theory of emotions describes, a performer might move the listener’s ‘affetto‘ and even create physiological changes in the body and blood (the doctrine of the Four Humours).

A fine example of this is Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” which accelerates between sections (within the general context, throughout pop music of that period, of steady tactus). There is some fascinating interview material with the performers, where they discuss the general context (“getting faster was absolutely prohibited”) and the emotional effect of a few small, but perceptible changes, in this song. I hear echoes of Caccini and Frescobaldi….

WH: I do firmly believe, as Andrew clearly does, that tactus was an essential structural constant that could unite consecutive and contrasting passages in logically proportionate tempi. On the face of it, the section which Bowers identifies, running from the Sinfonia to Act 2 up to the entrance of Messaggiera, is exactly such an instance, because of the succession of mensural signatures and the absence of intervening double barlines or fermata (the same is not true of the passage from “Lasciate i monti” up to the end of Act 1). Here, if one follows through Bowers’ notational logic, one ends up with a pretty fast tempo for “Vi ricordi boschi ombrosi”, as he says. Personally, I find that persuasive both musically and dramatically, but I have yet to experience it in performance, due to directorial intervention.

ALK: The entire opera (indeed this whole repertoire) offers ‘a succession of mensural signatures’. And I know of no period evidence that a fermata or a double-bar implies a change of Tactus. In Orfeo, Monteverdi sometimes places a fermata in one voice, when simultaneously another voice has no fermata: the fermata sign simply indicates ‘the end of something’, and cannot imply any alteration in the motus of the Tactus. Double-bars are often used to seperate consecutive strains of a single dance-movement, where a change of Tactus would be most implausible.

I don’t accept the argument that the passage from Lasciate i monti up to the end of Act I is somehow ‘different’.. It too has a ‘succession of mensural signatures’. Sure, it has some fermatas and double bar-lines, but so what? If Tactus is ‘an essential structural constant that could unite consecutive and contrasting passages in logically proportionate tempi’ [and it surely is!], then why not for the passage after the Ballo, as well as for the Ballo itself? Why not for the end of Act I, as well as for the bridge from Act I into Act II?

Does WH wish to say that “Tactus is constant when I want it to be, and can be changed when I want”? Or does he know of evidence of a fermata or double-bar as an instruction to change Tactus?

I believe that Tactus is constant, with only small and infrequent changes. Frescobaldi and Caccini list the circumstances in which the Tactus might be changed: neither of them mention fermata or double-bar.

WH: Bowers … analysis of the notation is that … semibreve of the C equates to dotted semibreve of the 3/2. I suggest a tempo of something like semibreve = 52 for the opening (not a minim tactus, for reasons which I am coming to) becoming dotted semibreve = 52 for the 3/2, and finally bar = 52 (i.e. the ‘new’ semibreve = 52) for the 6/4: in other words a constant tactus.

ALK: I agree with the principle of a pulse that is maintained, and I have no objection to approximately MM52 for that pulse. And this interpretation of the proportions works too, in this place, starting from semibreve = 52 at the beginning of the ballo. But how do we find this tempo at the beginning of the ballo? Semibreve = 52 cannot apply to the whole opera – just try it for the beginning of the opera, for the Toccata or the Ritornello to La Musica or for any recitative: it is about twice as fast as possible. Why pick this fast tempo for this place notated in C, and not for another, also notated in C?

According to modern assumptions, directors can choose their own tempo, whenever there is a reasonable excuse (a fermata, a double-bar, personal inspiration, whatever). But according to period assumptions, the Tactus itself directs the tempo, and that Tactus is as constant as we humans can make it. (Caccini and Frescobaldi list limited circumstances where small and infrequent changes of Tactus might occur). My approach is to take that Tactus (somewhere around minim = 60), apply it at the beginning of the work, and maintain it, as best I can, until the end. And I’ll try to establish and maintain the same Tactus tomorrow, to the limits of my subjective perceptions of musical tempo.

The movement of the hand in beating Tactus is specified in period sources: in C, down for a minim, up for a minim. I find semibreve = MM52, i.e. minim = MM104 inconveniently fast for this mode of time-beating. I also find the resultant motus incompatible with the qualities of slow, steadiness that are associated with Tactus. I’m more convinced by the motus of minim around 60.

My approach starts from a broad principle, of a constant tactus. I apply this general principle first, before I look for solutions to particular problems of Proportions. I then apply the same solution to parallel situations. Following the Ballo under discussion, the next Proportional change in Orfeo is between the recitative (C) Ma se il nostro goir and the Ritornello (3/2), which moves in dotted semibreves and minims. My solution to the Ballo is C: minim = 60 leads to 3/2: dotted semibreve = 60. My solution to the following, parallel situation is the same.

Bill’s solution to the Ballo [C: semibreve = 52 leads to 3/2: dotted semibreve = 52] does work there. But it does not work for the parallel situation of Recitative & Ritornello. Either the 52 pulse or the proportional relationship (or both) have to be abandoned. Is it Bill’s argument that although the notation is parallel, the second situation allows a personal choice, whereas the first situation indicates the composer’s tempo intentions? Why?

My belief is that the entire concept of personal choice of tempo is foreign to this period and its repertoire. Mensural notation indicates the composer’s intentions.

WH. … treating the central section of the first “Lasciate” as not being repeated. (No repeat is marked, of course, but a second verse of text is underlayed. I subscribe to Andrew Parrott’s view that this is a printer’s error, and that the second text should have been printed in the second “Lasciate”, instead of the repeated underlay of “Qui miri il sole”. This would result in an ABC form for each chorus, though, as Andrew (LK rather than P) points out, the uninformed listener would hear it as AABCC, because of the written-out repeats in the outer sections. This has a perfectly satisfactory symmetry. What is hard to believe is the format as it is printed).

ALK: I agree that the sequence of movements in the Orfeo Ballo is ambiguous – Lamothe has much to say on this. Andrew Parrot’s suggestion of a printing error in the 1609 edition is plausible, though one might have expected the editor of the 1615 edition to have fixed the problem, since much smaller errors were corrected (albeit at the cost of introducing some new errors too!). Lamothe makes a good point that the opening section (with the associated choreography of reverences and passi gravi, slow steps on the ground) would not be repeated in a court social dance. My point is that a similar opening section (which is not danced) is repeated in Cavalieri’s theatrical ballo for Anima & Corpo. We do not know which sections of the Orfeo ballo were danced, though it is sure that the singers themselves could not have danced a galliard, with all its jumps, whilst singing. Consideration of the repeat scheme for the Orfeo ballo has include all these points, together with scholarship on the total number of singers (between 7 and 9), the possibility that dancing masters might have participated (as is specified by Cavalieri), and the prohibition against women acting on stage, still in force in Mantua in 1607.

Good arguments can be made to support several possible solutions.

WH: Having read many of the linked sites here with great interest, particularly the one on “Text, Rhythm, Action / Rhythm: what really counts?”, I am curious to know what Andrew thinks about the semibreve, which so many theorists describe as the fundamental unit of time. There is so much emphasis throughout all his articles on the minim and the fixing to it of a constant tempo, viz “Around 1600, typically the Tactus will be on minims (half-notes), somewhere around MM60. Down for one second, Up for the next second”

Leaving aside the massive nature of this generalisation (is this really supposed to be typical of all music around 1600?), what about the concepts of Thesis and Arsis? It seems to me that these are essential to an understanding of musical structure in this period, especially the setting of text. Unless the semibreve is the unit on which one is principally focussed, not the minim, a whole vocabulary of subtlety is missed, to my mind. But that is a huge subject for another occasion!

ALK: Bill is absolutely right to draw attention to the fundamental significance of the semibreve. The complete Tactus-cycle (down-up) corresponds to a semibreve. I could equally well, perhaps better, express my view as “The Tactus-cycle will last for a semibreve, approximately two seconds, i.e. somewhere around MM30 for the complete down-up.” In duple time, this results in the same “Down for one second, Up for the next second”.

But an advantage of the focus on the semibreve is that it allows you to negotiate the tricky change into Sesquialtera more easily. The complete Tactus-cycle (down-up) still lasts two seconds, but the Down lasts longer than the Up. This is why triple time is described as ‘unequal’ in this period. I agree with Bill that there are interesting and beautiful subtleties to be found in a heightened focus on the semibreve.

However, period sources specify that the mode of beating time for Tactus is that the semibreve corresponds to the complete down-up cycle. There is no suggestion of beating Down for one semibreve, Up for the next: the Down and Up are on successive minims. Thus a heightened focus on the semibreve implies a heightened focus on the complete cycle, as opposed to the individual down/up movements: it does not imply a different mode of beating time. The concept of Thesis and Arsis (Down and Up) is therefore located in the alternation of minims (under mensural sign C). See my discussion of ‘The Hobbit problem’ in Quality Time, here.

Of course, there are duple (or other) symmetries at semibreve and longer durations too. It’s very good to be aware of these.

THE MASSIVE GENERALISATION

Returning to the fundamental assumptions with which I began, I agree that it is a massive generalisation to state that musical tempo was consistent throughout the whole repertoire in circa-1600 Italy, to the limits of human perception. It is a generalisation that is hard for us post-Romantics to comprehend. But it fits well with the evidence, not only of musical treatises, but of period philosophy in general. And we can observe the gradual change through the later 17th and 18th centuries; the persistence of notions of tempo giusto or tempo ordinario as late as Beethoven; the developing presumption of personal choice that comes to characterise the 19th-century; the glorification of Rubato circa 1910 that is taken by some today as a musical absolute. Those changes in musical practice follow changes in the scientific and philosophical understanding of Time itself, from Aristotle and Plato via Galileo and then Newton to Einstein and then Hawking.

It helps to keep in mind the 17th-century identification of musical tempo with Time itself, alluded to in Monteverdi’s setting of the word tempus at the beginning of this post. The ideal is to keep Time. A musician does not seek to develop a personal opinion about tempo, just as he does not seek to acquire a clock that runs differently from everyone else’s.

The difficulty is that we tend to read historical treatises on Music in the light of our modern assumptions of Science and Philosophy. If we start by assuming period philosophy, musical treatises reveal new, quite surprising details. To do this, we must be ready to abandon some modern assumptions so familiar that we hardly even notice them.

Most modern directors assume they have the right to choose their own tempo, movement by movement, through a baroque opera: most of those directors fail even to notice the anachronism of conducting, as a means of imposing those choices. But period sources tell us that music is directed by Tactus itself: not by the whim of a Tactus-beater!. And Il Corago tells us that operas are not conducted.

CITATIONS & SOURCES

At the opening of my article on the Orfeo Ballo, I tacitly linked up citations of Bowers and Lamothe with my own assumptions. So here are the individual elements:

Lamothe quotes Bowers on MM 50/60 (but identifies this with the semibreve, which would not work for the whole opera. I identify this sort of pulse with the minim). Bowers states that the notation implies the same Tactus for the lengthy excerpt from the end of Act I until the entrance of the Messaggiera halfway through Act II. Bowers remarks that the notation is the same throughout the rest of the opera too. I take the logical step that the same Tactus is implied for the whole opera.

George Houle’s (brief) discussion of constant tactus throughout the repertoire is on pages 3-5 of ‘Metre in Music’, citing Heyden, Mersenne and secondary sources. On page 2, Houle mentions (all too briefly) ‘degrees of change intermediate to those determined by diminution or proportion.’

Constant Tactus for the whole repertoire is supported by Il Corago, page 47 (see future postings on this blog).

Houle cites Dowland’s explanation of Tactus and Semi-Tactus on page 4. This is the ‘Hobbit Question’, aka ‘there and back again’: the semibreve corresponds to the complete down-up cycle. See Quality Time here.

Bowers cites Banchieri’s ‘Conclusioni’ chapter 14 “when there is no numerical sign”, in support of his Sesquialtera interpretation of proportional change. Of course, in Orfeo, there are numerical signs [3/2 and 6/4]. Banchieri addresses this situation in chapter 15, at the end of which he describes the Tripla interpretation that I propose.

I admit that Banchieri describes two interpretations, and does not discuss how to decide between them. But my general point is that we can approach such decisions by requiring consistency, not only of interpretations of Proportional relationships, but also in constancy of the underlying Tactus. If we consistently interpret the same notation the same way, if we apply a consistent tactus (perhaps allowing SMALL changes, but not doubling/halving the speed), we can rule out certain interpretations as impossible. [I try to distinguish carefully between ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘impossible’]. When – as in Orfeo and the Vespers – we have many proportions at work, the accumulated constraints of ‘impossibilities’ gradually reduce the number of possible solutions – ideally to a single answer.

Please join me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lawrenceking.9 and visit our website www.TheHarpConsort.com . Further details of original sources are on the website, click on “New Priorities in Historically Informed Performance”

Opera, orchestra, vocal & ensemble director and early harpist, Andrew Lawrence-King is director of The Harp Consort and of Il Corago, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions.

www.historyofemotions.org.au

Play it again, Sam! The truth about Caccini’s ‘sprezzatura’

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

~~Play it again, Sam!~~

As the well-informed readership of this blog will know already, in the 1942 film Casablanca, nobody ever says that most famous phrase “Play it again, Sam”. They use similar words, but somehow, the whole world has picked up the wrong version. In this post, I’m looking again at what Caccini actually wrote in his famous Preface to Le Nuove Musiche (Florence 1601/2), separating the facts from popular myths.

So let’s be clear from the outset that Caccini never mentions

~~sprezzatura di ritmo~~

Actually, he only mentions sprezzatura twice, in the whole Preface. He only uses it once, in all his extensive music examples. Sprezzatura was not his priority. Sprezzatura was applied only to whatever did not matter. In contrast, he talks much more about divisions and exclamations, and he uses these much more in his example songs. His priorities were text and rhythm.

But there is one other concept that he discusses far more than any other. [You can see my summary of what Caccini did say, at the end of this post.]

If you perform early seicento music, don’t trust what your teacher once told you his teacher told him, don’t even accept what I write here without proper scientific scepticism: you will want to read Caccini for yourself. The standard modern edition (Giulio Caccini, edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock, Le Nuove Musiche, A-R editions, 1970, second edition 2009) is widely available, and includes an English translation of the Preface. That translation has a few questionable moments, but it includes well-researched additional notes. But be careful with Hitchcock’s transcriptions of the songs themselves: not all the printed time-signatures – vital for establishing Proportions – are original.

English translations from the Preface have been printed in many source-book anthologies, beginning with an excerpt in John Playford Introduction to the Skill of Music 1664. This is available free online in the 1683 reprint here. (See Directions for singing after the Italian manner, pages 34-39)

Probably the most influential English translation is Oliver Strunk (editor) Source Readings in Music History (1950), page 370. The 1942 translation by Alfred Ashfield Finch has many editorial additions, and cannot be trusted: I mention it only because it is available online. The extract translated by Zachariah Victor is better (though he mistranslates sprezzatura di canto), it can be downloaded free here.

But best of all, the original print can be downloaded free, with the full Italian text of the Preface, Caccini’s worked examples (in which he applies his own advice to three sample songs), and all the songs themselves, including his greatest hit, Amarilli mia bella. It’s all here.

Re-assessing Le Nuove Musiche

In Baroque Music 1.0, we all learnt that Caccini’s Le Nuove Musiche represents the paradigm-shift that brought about a musical revolution, defined Basso Continuo, ushered in the Baroque Age, and led to the Development of Opera. That over-simplistic view has been re-assessed: Caccini was a clever self-promoter, and in this book as in his hasty publication of his music for the ‘first opera’ Euridice (1602), he was deliberately positioning himself as the hero of a new style. Caccini’s Musiche are not really so nuove (new); in many ways, he was less innovative than his rival, Jacopo Peri, principal composer of the first-performed version Euridice (1600). Similarly, Caccini’s advice on performance practice is a summary of developments over the last decades, rather than an ‘epoch-making’ breakthrough. Again, Peri is more daring, in the Preface to his Euridice, which I will discuss in a future post.

The songs of Le Nuove Musiche include 12 strophic Arias which Caccini calls canzonette a aria, ‘Canzonets’, and plenty of ‘old-fashioned’ diminutions, even in the 12, supposedly more modern, ‘Madrigals’. These madrigals look very much like the ornamented solo versions of four-voice part-songs heard in the Florentine Intermedi (1589). Indeed, it’s so simple an exercise to construct a four-voice madrigal from the solo and figured bass of Amarilli mia bella, that I suspect Caccini originally wrote the piece as a part-song. As Victor Coelho writes, “we know now through the work of Claude Palisca, Tim Carter, John Walter Hill, Howard Brown, and others, that Caccini’s works were closely connected to earlier and long-standing musical traditions”. Coelho’s article in the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music here places Le Nuove Musiche in the context of the previous century and of a manuscript containing intabulated accompaniments of works by Caccini, Peri, and Rasi .

Sprezzatura in the 16th century

Caccini’s sprezzatura is also a 16th-century concept, discussed in Baldassare Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (1528), transcribed into modern Italian here. Castiglione was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561 as The Courtyer here. It’s known in English today as The Book of the Courtier. In Chapter XXVI, Castiglione introduces the idea:

per dir forse una nova parola, usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte e dimostri cio che si fa e dice venir senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi. Da questo credo io che derivi assai la grazia

Here is Hoby’s 1561 translation:

(to speak a new word) to use in every thyng a certain Reckelessness, to cover art withall, and seeme whatsoever he doth and sayeth to do it wythout pain, and (as it were) not myndyng it. And of thys do I beleve grace is muche deryved

In modern editions, sprezzatura is translated as ‘disdain’ [which is literal, but unhelpful] or ‘nonchalance’ [better]. I like the translation ‘cool’. Castiglione links sprezzatura to grazia (grace, elegance), a word so evocative of the qualities of an ideal Courtier that it occurs 150 times. Sprezzatura occurs a further 8 times, in connection with dancing, as not to be overdone, as praiseworthy in itself, in contrast to attillatura (neatness of dress, also seen as praiseworthy in itself), in contrast to affectation (seen as highly negative), in contrast to ‘pestiferous affectation’ and linked to the ‘extreme grace of simplicity’, and in the context of playing a character role in costume.

This last mention is not often cited in the secondary literature, but it seems especially relevant to Caccini’s use of sprezzatura in the musical context of singing in the period of the first operas, so here it is in full, from Book II Chapter XI:

esser travestito porta seco una certa liberta e licenzia, la quale tra l’altre cose fa che l’omo po piglare forma di quella in che si sente valere, ed usar diligenzia ed attillatura circa la principal intenzione della cosa in che mostrar si vole, ed una certa sprezzatura circa quello che non importa, il che accresce molto la grazia:

Hoby translates this section in 1561 as:

To be in a maske bringeth with it a certaine libertie and lycence, that a man may emong other thinges take uppon him the fourme of that he hath best skill in, and use bente studye and preciseness about the principall drift of the matter wherin he will shewe himselfe, and a certaine Reckelesness aboute that is not of importaunce, whiche augmenteth the grace of the thinge

Hoby’s translation of valere as ‘to have skill’ is doubtful in this context: the principal meaning according to Florio’s 1598 dictionary here reprinted and extended in 1611 is ‘to be worth, to be of value, to be much or greatly esteemed’. So here is my translation:

To wear a character costume brings with it a certain liberty and licence. Amongst other things, it allows a man to take the form of something that he feels to be of great worth, and to exercise careful attention and preciseness about the principal purpose of the event in which he wants to appear, but a certain ‘cool’ about whatever doesn’t matter. This greatly increases his elegance.

Attillatura usually refers to preciseness in dressing, but it seems that Castiglione intends this example to illustrate a more general concept: even when you are doing something very important, you can be attentive and precise about the important things, and show a certain ‘cool’ in whatever does not matter.

Caccini’s Preface

Returning to the 17th century and Le Nuove Musiche, we can hear echoes of Castiglione in Caccini’s use of such words as sprezzatura, grazia and nobil (noble, which with its derivatives occurs 122 times in Il Cortegiano). But which words and phrases does Caccini use most often, what is his ‘principal purpose’?

[Square brackets like this separate my commentary from excerpts of Caccini’s text, which I report in the third person, and shorten to focus on Caccini’s discussion of style. My summary is at the end of this post]

Good Style

Caccini calls his practice la nobile maniera di cantare (the noble manner of singing), and says he learnt it from Scipione del Palla, who was active in Naples at the time of Caccini’s birth, 50 years earlier.

He claims for himself the development of lunghi giri di voci semplici, e doppie, cioe raddoppiate, intrecciate l’una nell l’altra (long turns of notes, simple and double, i.e. re-doubled, interwoven one with another). He positions these as the modern alternative to quella antica maniera di passaggi (that old-fashioned manner of divisions), which he considers more suitable for wind or string instruments than for voices.

He associates la buona maniera di cantare (the good way of singing) with crescere e scemare della voce, l’esclamazione, trilli e gruppi (crescendo and diminuendo of the note, exclamation, single-note trills, two-note trills with final turn). As the Preface continues and in the example songs, it becomes clear that crescendo and diminuendo are on one note, not throughout a whole phrase, and precisely what is meant by trillo and gruppo.

He now discusses the advantages of canto per una voce sola (solo songs, as opposed to polyphonic part-songs). He claims that recent times (moderni tempi passati) were not accustomed to musiche da quella intera grazia (music of that complete grace) that he himself hears nel mio animo resonare (resonating in his spirit). Grazia has connotations of divine, spiritual qualities as well as of artistic beauty and sweetness. Animo is the mind or spirit, as opposed to anima (the spirit or soul, in the religious sense), core (heart, fount of emotions), and the lower body, vita.

Caccini values what he learnt at Bardi’s Florentine Camerata, with its membership of noble amateurs, musicians, intellectuals, poets and philosophers, above his long training in counterpoint. These intendentissimi gentilhuomini (gentlemen of great understanding) convinced him not to prize that kind of music which does not allow the words to be understood well (non lasciando bene intendersi le parole), because it spoilt the meaning and the poetry and distorted the Long and Short syllables. [Long and Short syllables correspond to Good and Bad notes; more about Good and Bad here].

Caccini and the Camerata follow a Platonic, philosophical ideal that:

La musica altro non essere che la favella e’l rithmo, & il suono per ultimo, e non per lo contrario.

Music is text and rhythm, & sound last of all, and not the other way around.

[Hitchcock’s translation is misleading here, ignoring the effect of seicento conventions of punctuation, and disregarding that ultimo is singular. His ‘speech’ is a reasonable translation of favella but since Caccini wishes to distinguish this favella from sound, ‘text’ is probably better. His mangled version – ‘speech, with rhythm and tone coming after’ – seems to me symptomatic of 20th-century musicians’ refusal to accept the possibility that rhythm could be noble, another mistake resulting from the unquestioning assumption that expression must be linked to 20th-century rubato.]

[Caccini’s bold statement of priorities – text and rhythm – backed up with the full authority of the Florentine Camerata, has received little attention from performance practice scholars, especially compared to all the ink spilled over discussions (often skewed) of sprezzatura. But I find these priorities inspiring and noble, a breath of fresh air amongst all the arguments over vibrato, pitch and temperament that clog today’s Early Music. Caccini’s priorities (combined with the Rhetorical priority of Action, i.e. persuasive, fully embodied delivery with gestures, facial expressions, contrasts of timbre) gave the title and rehearsal methodology for my three-year project Text, Rhythm, Action! within the Performance program of the Australian Centre for the History of Emotions, with 20 staged productions of historical music-dramas, and master-classes, lectures & workshops all over the world.]

Caccini and the Camerata want music to penetrare nell’ altrui intelletto e fare quei mirabili effetti (penetrate the listener’s mind and create those marvellous effects) described by Classical writers, i.e. moving audiences to tears and laughter. This cannot be done by polyphonic music, not even by solo songs to a string instrument if there are too many diminutions, moltitudine di passaggi, applied indiscriminately to Bad as well as Good syllables [the normal rule is to ornament only the Good syllables]. According to Caccini, only plebs admire such empty vocal display (passaggi … della plebe esaltati). Such music can do no more than titilate the ears. It’s impossible to move the mind, muovere l’intelletto, without an understanding of the words, senza l’intelligenza delle parole.

So Caccini had the idea [he writes, boldly claiming the territory] to introduce a kind of music in which performers could quasi che in armonia favellare – almost speak in harmonies. [This is paralleled in Peri’s more detailed description, in his Preface to Euridice, of taking the pitches of syllables that would be sustained in declamatory speech, and accompanying those pitches with suitable harmonies.] In this music, Caccini uses a certain noble sprezzatura of song, a ‘cool’ way of singing.

una certa nobile sprezzatura di canto

[Musicologists and musicians have leapt to the conclusion that this sprezzatura is some kind of rhythmic freedom. But Caccini does not say this, not at all. Rather, it is canto song itself, that is treated with sprezzatura. We can combine Castiglione’s dictum – that one should be precise about the priorities, and apply sprezzatura to whatever is less important – with the musical priorities of Caccini and the Camerata – text and rhythm, with sound last of all. The result confirms that we should apply sprezzatura to the sound, to song itself, to the sonic qualities of singing. We should be precise about text and rhythm, and cool about vocal sound-production. As Caccini writes, we should hardly sing, we should ‘almost speak in harmonies’.]

Caccini describes how the voice-part passes through various dissonances whilst the bass stays on the same note – what we today call recitative. [This is a kind of sprezzatura of composing, a nonchalant way of dealing with the normal rules of counterpoint. These dissonances are not prepared and resolved, as would normally be required.] Sometimes Caccini does use dissonance in the conventional manner, with the polyphonic ‘inner voices’ played on an instrument, to express some emotion, per esprimere qualche affetto.

[I take Caccini’s somewhat ambiguous final clause non essendo buone per altro to mean that the ‘inner voices’ are not useful for anything else, i.e. as another negative comment about polyphony. ‘Dissonances are not good for another kind of emotion’ and other readings are also possible.]

According to Caccini, this was the origin of those modern solo songs which have more power to delight and move, piu forza per dilettare e muovere, than many voices together. [‘Delight and move’ recalls the Rhetorical aims of docere, delectare, muovere in Cicero’s De Oratore.] Caccini gives examples of his work – Perfidissimo volto, Vedro’l mio Sol, and Dovro dunque morire. [The first of these makes considerable use of the ‘recitative’ technique of a static bass, the second has one brief moment of ‘recitative’: in the third, the bass often moves fast under a sustained note in the voice. The common element of modernity seems to be reduced polyphony, rather than ‘recitative’ as such.] Caccini picks out his setting of the eclogue of Sannazaro [now lost] in particular as in the style of his music for the first Florentine ‘operas’, quello stile proprio … per le favole … rappresentate cantando.

Caccini now name-checks various nobles who had never before heard music for solo voice accompanied by a simple string instrument, which had such force to move the emotions of the spirit tanta forza di muovere l’affetto dell’ animo. He attributes his success to his new style, lo nuovo stile, and also to the superiority of his specially composed solos over arrangements for solo voice of part-songs. By 1601, everyone who writes for solo voice uses this style, especially in Florence, where Caccini claims to have worked for the Medici for 37 years.

In both Madrigals and Arias, Caccini always tries to imitate the ideas of the words, i concetti delle parole, searching out notes that would be more or less emotional according to the sentiments of the words quelle corde piu e meno affettuose secondo i sentimenti. In particular, there will be grazia because he has hidden as much as possible the art of counterpoint. [Here Caccini brings together Castiglione’s idea of the elegance of hidden art with the Camerata’s ideal of reducing polyphony.]

Passaggi

Caccini again mentions the proper distinction between Good and Bad syllables, observed in his harmonies and his ornamentation. When he does ornament a Bad syllable, this doesn’t last long, and can be considered not as a passaggio (which would be inappropriate) but as un certo accrescimento di grazia si possono permettere (a certain increase of grace, that can be permitted). But since he has already complained about the misuse of long turns of notes, malamente adoperati quei lunghi giri di voci he advises that the passaggi are not strictly necessary for the good manner of singing necessarii per la buona maniera di cantare. Rather, they titillate the ears of those who understand less about passionate singing, una certa titillatione a gli orecchi di quelli che meno intendono che cosa sia cantare con affetto. For those who understand, passaggi are hateful, abborriti, there is nothing more contrary to emotion, non essendo cosa piu contraria di loro all’ affetto.

This is why Caccini spoke about ‘misuse’: his own ornaments are introduced only in music that is less passionate, meno affettuose, on the Good syllables not on the Bad, and at final cadences. For these lunghi giri the vowel u is better for sopranos than for tenors; the vowel i is better for tenors. Other vowels are in common use, but open vowels are more sonorous than closed, and therefore more suitable for exercising such vocal agility esercitare la disposizione. Again Caccini tells us to use these giri di voci according to his rules and not just anyhow, e non a caso.

Whilst others who want to sing solos stylishly, cantar solo e fare maniera think first about the practice of counterpoint, Caccini has better advice about the good manner of composing and singing in this style, la buona maniera di comporre e cantare in questo stile. [This distinction between comporre and cantare supports the interpretation of his sprezzatura di canto as a performance practice of ‘almost speaking’, not as the compositional technique of ‘recitative’.] What is needed much more is l’intelligenza del concetto, e delle parole il gusto (the understanding of the meaning, and the flavour of the words). This flavour should be imitated in passionate notes and also expressed by singing with passion, l’imitazione di esso cosi nelle corde affettuose, come nello esprimerlo con affetto cantando. [Again, Caccini distinguishes between the work of composer and performer].

So counterpoint is not much use, Caccini uses it only to coordinate the two parts, to avoid obvious errors, and to create some dissonances, durezze, more to support the emotion than to employ artistry, piu per accompagnamento dello affetto che per usar arte. Composing according to the gusto del concetto delle parole (flavour of the meaning of the words) and singing with good style, buona maniera di cantare, are more effective and delightful than all the art of counterpoint. This is what brought Caccini to this way of singing maniera di canto for solo voice, and where to use the lunghi giri di voce.

The Passionate style

Now he discusses the use of crescere e scemare della voce, l’esclamazioni, trilli, gruppi (crescendo and diminuendo on one note, exclamations, single-note and two-note trills). These are often used indiscriminately, indifferentemente, in passionate music, musiche affettuose, where they are required more, and in light dance-songs canzonette a ballo [where they would be inappropriate]. Some people create an ultra-passionate manner of singing, una maniera di cantare … tutta affettuosa, and with the general rule that crescere e scemare della voce and esclamazioni are the foundation of that passion (affetto), they apply them in all kinds of music, without noticing whether the words require such passion, se le parole il richieggiono. Those who understand well the meanings and sentiments of the words, che bene intendono i concetti e i sentimenti delle parole, can distinguish where such passion is more necessary or less required, ove piu o meno si richieggia esso affetto.

[This is excellent advice, which I will summarise as : Don’t pour a rich sauce of fake emotion over an innocent text! Such down-to-earth honesty is all the more necessary, as we approach Caccini’s next quotable quote]

Quest’ arte non patisce la mediocrita

This Art does not admit mediocrity. The more exquisite details there are that are required for excellence in this Art, the more hard work and diligence we who profess the Art must find in all our studies. [So, stick with it, even if Caccini’s sentences sometimes seem endless!] From written sources [the Italian word scritti hints at holy scriptures] we receive the light of Science [this word has cosmic, divine significance in the 17th century], and all the Arts. So we need Love too, the kind of love that inspired Caccini to leave a glimmer of light in his music and discussion of the art of singing solo above the harmony of the Chitarrone or other stringed instrument.

For singers, the first and most important fundamental is to be to start the phrase on any note l’intonazione della voce in tutte le cordi , neither too low nor too high, and in good style, la buona maniera. Caccini discusses the ornamental start from a third below, which should be not be sustained but scarcely hinted at, a pena essere accennata. This does not always fit the harmony, and is often over-used. Many singers consider starting with a steady crescendo to be the good style of putting forth the voice with elegance, la buona maniera per mettere la voce con grazia. Caccini prefers this crescere la voce, but he is always seeking novel means to attain the goal of the musician, il fine della musico, cioe dilettare e muovere l’affetto dell’animo.

A musician’s goal is to delight and move the passions of the mind & spirit.

So Caccini claims that he invented a more passionate way, maniera piu affettuosa, starting the note with the contrary effect of a decrescendo, intonare la prima voce scemandola. [In all this discussion, we have to understand voce as ‘voice’ and/or ‘sung note’, sometimes even as ‘a word’. Similarly, corda can be ‘string’ and/or ‘note’, whether sung or played.]

But the most principal means of moving the passion, mezzo piu principale per muovere l’affetto, is the Exclamation, esclamazione. As you make the decrescendo, nel lassare della voce [this could also mean ‘just before you leave the note’], make a bit of a crescendo, rinforzarla alquanto. Caccini notes that this crescendo can become unbearably harsh in the high part, especially with falsettists. But without doubt, as a passionate ornament (affetto) to move the emotions (per muovere), the effect (effetto) is better starting the note with decrescendo, intonare la voce scemandola, than with crescendo. [Note that Caccini here uses affetto to mean not only a passion, but also an ornament that moves the passions.] Crescendo la voce per far l’esclamazione (crescendo on a note as an Exclamation) requires a further crescendo as you relax/leave (lassar) the note, and this seems forced and harsh, sforzata e cruda. But contrariwise, with decrescendo on a note (scemarla), as you relax/leave it (lassarla) giving it a bit more spirit, il darle un poco piu spirto, makes it more and more passionate, sempre piu affettuosa.

You can also vary one or other intonazione. Variety is most necessary in this art, as long as it is used for the purpose [of delighting and moving the passions].

This is the greatest part of elegance in singing in order to move the passions of the spirit, maggior parte della grazia nel cantare atta a poter muovere l’affetto dell’ animo. It applies to those subjects in the text (concetti) that are more suitable for such passions, ove piu si conviene usare tali affetti. You can learn this most necessary elegance, quella grazia piu necessaria, from written sources, but after studying the theory and the rules, perfection is attained through practice.

This leads Caccini to his music examples, demonstrating two Exclamations, languida (languid) and piu viva (more lively). You can experiment to see which way of starting the note (intonato) produces more or less elegance, maggiore o minor grazia. On the word cor, start (intonare) the first note, make a decrescendo little by little (scemandola a poco a poco), and on the second note crescere la voce con un poco piu spirito (crescendo on the note with a little more spirit). This is the esclamazione assai affettuosa (moderately passionate) for a note descending by step.

On the word deh, the exclamation is much more spirited, molto piu spiritosa, because it does not continue by step, but very sweetly with the fall through a sixth. With this Caccini demonstrates the esclamazione, which can be of two qualities, one more passionate (piu affettuosa) than the other.The way the note is started (intonate) is an imitation of the word, imitazione della parole, as long as that word has significant meaning, significato con il concetto.

Otherwise, as a general rule esclamationi can be used in any passionate music (tutte le musiche affettuose) on every occurrence of dotted minim plus crotchet [this is my reading of Caccini’s ambiguous phrase, tutte le minime e semiminime col punto]. They will be more passionate (affettuose) if the following note runs fast (corre). Don’t do them on semibreves, where there is more space for crescendo and diminuendo on the note (crescere e scemare della voce) without esclamazioni.

In light music (musiche ariose) or little dance-songs (canzonette a ballo), instead of these passionate ornaments (affetti), just use the liveliness of the voice (vivezza di canto), which usually comes from the rhythm of the song itself [aria in this period has a wide range of meaning: a repeating rhythmic unit, a tuneful song that includes such repeating rhythmic units, or a tuneful strophic song over a repeating ground bass]. If there are some esclamazioni, they should leave the same liveliness (vivezza) and not bring in any languid emotion, affetto alcuno … languido.

Musicians need to exercise their own judgement, beyond the rules of Art. In the example above, there is more elegance, maggior grazia, in the first setting of the word languire with the second quaver dotted, than in the second setting with all four quavers equal. There are many elements which create maggior grazia in the good manner of singing la buona maniera di cantare. Although they are written in one way, they make a different effect (effetto) in another way, so some are said to sing with more grace, others with less, cantare con piu grazia o meno grazia.

Trillo & Gruppo

The Trillo is on one note. Caccini taught it this way to his two wives and daughters. It starts with a crotchet, and beats with the throat (ribattere …con la gola) until the final breve. [Note that the trillo gets faster, not slower, and flows directly into the final breve]. Similarly with the Gruppo. Listeners could report how exquisitely, in quanta squisitezza, these were performed by Caccini’s second wife.

Learning the Trillo and Gruppo is a necessary first step towards many things described here, that are effects of that elegance that is most sought after in good singing, effetti di quella grazia, che piu si ricerca per ben cantare. They are written one way, and performed another to make a different effect (contrario effetto) than the usual. Here are all these effects (effetti) written in the same note-values, so that from written examples combined with practice one can learn all the subtleties (squisitezze) of this Art.

In the examples above, the second version has piu grazia.

Three Sample Songs

The next examples (below) have the words underlayed, a bass for the Chitarrone, and all the most passionate movements, tutti passi affettuosissimi. By practising them you can acquire ever greater perfection, ogni maggior perfezzione.

[It’s worth doing some simple counting. In the three examples immediately above, there are 13 mentions of esclamazione, 11 of trillo, the word gruppi occurs once and the ornament is written out 4 times. Sprezzatura occurs only once.

Senza misura (without measure) also occurs only once, in response to a strong cue from the words errate peregrine (you wander afar, erratically). Punctuation separates that instruction from quasi favellando in armonia con la suddetta sprezzatura (almost speaking in harmonies with the nonchalance mentioned above). In the passage above, that nonchalance applied to voice-production, ‘almost speaking’, and not to rhythm. Text and Rhythm are described above as the two highest priorities, the elements that, according to Castiglione, would receive Attention and Precision.

Monteverdi and others notate how such senza misura works in practice, with the singer floating in a cool way, over a regular bass. There are many descriptions of this practice throughout the baroque period and even as late as Chopin. In the Aria Possente Spirto from Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the singer’s ornaments do not coincide with the tactus beats, nor with the movement of the harmony from G to D.

Here is one possible realisation of Caccini’s senza misura, according to Monteverdi’s model, and following Caccini’s instruction (below) to make some notes just half their written length.

The important points are that this senza misura applies to the voice-part, whilst the continuo continues in measure; that this special effect is used only once in all the examples; that this is not the sprezzatura that Caccini mentions in the next clause.

There is one mention only (in the whole Preface) of con misura piu larga (in rhythm, but with a slower pulse). Again, this is in response to a strong cue from the words ch’io me ne moro (for from this I am dying). The change to a slower Tactus imitates the slower heart-beat of the dying singer.]

Caccini’s commentary on the examples above is that they show all the best passionate ornaments, tutti i migliori affetti, which can be used within the nobility of this way of singing, la nobilita di questa maniera di canti. They show where to crescendo and diminuendo the note, crescere e scemare la voce; where to do esclamazioni, trilli and gruppi, and to sum up, all the treasures of this art, tesori di quest’ arte. These ‘treasures’ are not written into the songs that follow, but the examples above are models to be followed, according to the passions of the words, gli affetti delle parole.

[Now follows Caccini’s only discussion of rhythmic freedom.] The noble way (nobile maniera) is not dominated by strict measure, often reducing the value of notes by half according to the ideas of the words, facendo molte volte il valor delle note la meta meno secondo i concetti delle parole. [See my realisation of Caccini’s example 3, above].

The noble way then gives birth to a song (canto) that’s cool, in sprezzatura as it’s called. There you can use all the effects (effetti) for the excellence of this art, l’eccelenza di essa arte: a good voice (la buona voce), and effective breathing (la respirazione del fiato). Sing solos to the Chitarrone or other string instrument. Since there are no other singers, choose the pitch that suits you so that you can sing full, natural voice (in voce piena e naturale) and avoid falsetto (isfuggire le voci finti). You waste a lot of breath faking or forcing, trying to ‘cover’ the tone. Rather, you need the breath to give more spirit to the crescendo and diminuendo on the note, per dar maggiore spirito al crescere e scemare della voce, to esclamazioni and all the other effects (effetti). Don’t run out of breath when you need it!

There is no nobility of good singing in falsetto notes. Dalle voci finte non puo nascere nobilita di buon canto. It comes from a natural voice, at ease in all the notes (una voce naturale, comoda per tutte le corde). Use the breath only to show yourself as master of all the best passionate ornaments, padrone di tutti gli affetti migliori, which pertain to this most noble way of singing (nobilissima maniera di cantare).

The love of this style and of all music burns in me by nature, and from years of study. This art is most beautiful (bellissima) and naturally delightful (dilettando naturalmente). By practising and teaching it, it becomes a true semblance of that perpetual motion of the celestial harmony, sembianza vera di quelle inarrestabili armonie celesti, from which all earthly good derives, awakening the minds of listeners to contemplation of the infinite delights of Heaven.

[Notice that in this conventional comparison of fine earthly music to the Harmony of the Spheres, the rhythm of the celestial harmony is unstoppable, inarrestabili.]

In the bass part, where there is a tie, re-strike the harmony but do not restrike the bass note. [This applies particularly to cadences, where the change of harmonies 4 3 on the dominant is notated over tied notes in the bass]. The Chitarrone is especially suitable for accompanying the voice, especially the tenor voice. Use good judgement about where to repeat the bass note in other places. Antonio Naldi, ‘il Bardella’, is credited for inventing this style of accompanying and as the finest Chitarrone-player. Caccini’s final paragraph complains that many people are not prepared to give others due credit for their inventions. [Is he hinting that he himself should receive more credit for his invention of the good manner of singing?]

SUMMARY

Caccini’s text is dominated by the interlinked concepts of affetto (passion, or a passionate ornament) and effetto (a passionate ornament or the effect of such an ornament on the listener’s passions). He mentions affetto and its derivatives 32 times: include the 8 occurrences of effetto, and this interlinked concept has 40 hits. There is also an exclamatione affettuosa in the first of the three example songs.

This suggests that what is really ‘new’ about the nuove musiche is Caccini’s focus on passion (affetto), combined with the linking of such passion to a particular class of ornaments (affetti/effetti) and to the emotional effect on the listener (effetto).

Moving beyond that principal focus, other concepts grazia (14), nobilita (8), buona maniera (7), crescere (8), scemare (6) esclamazione (12), trilli (9), giri and passaggi (5) are all mentioned far more often than sprezzatura (2).

In his examples, Caccini has 13 esclamazioni, 11 trilli, 4 gruppi. Sprezzatura occurs only once. Senza misura only once. Con misura piu larga also only once.

Caccini does not equate sprezzatura with free rhythm.

The priorities for Caccini and the Camerata are Text & Rhythm. Sound is the lowest priority. Castiglione indicates that sprezzatura is applied to low-priority elements, suggesting that Caccini’s sprezzatura should be applied to Sound. Caccini’s phrases are sprezzatura di canto and canto in sprezzatura. He associates sprezzatura with ‘almost speaking’.

Caccini’s sprezzatura is a nonchalant voice-production that is ‘almost speaking’.

Caccini emphasises that although plebs might delight in flashy singing, the noble art depends on deep understanding of the words.

The fundamental things apply…

Prioritise text and rhythm.

Don’t sing so much, almost speak.

Move the listener’s passions.

www.historyofemotions.org.au

Quality Time: how does it feel?

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

During a workshop on 18th-century music that I taught in Moscow recently, there was what diplomats call ‘a frank exchange of views’ [i.e. a heated argument]. I stated that mid-18th century musicians did not use mechanical clocks to measure musical time. A historian there objected strongly: suitably high-precision clocks had been invented in the 17th century already. I managed to restore peace, on the basis that we were both correct.

TIME AS A NUMBER OF MOTION

According to the Galileo Project [directed by Prof Albert Van Helden at Rice University] here, Galileo observed this chandelier in Pisa cathedral in 1582, and made notes on the pendulum effect in 1588. His serious experiments on the subject were begun in 1602. Around 1641, he designed a pendulum clock, but it was not built. The best clocks during the first half of the 17th-century marked the seconds, but did not measure them accurately: their best accuracy was plus/minus 15 minutes per day.

Around 1636, Mersenne and Descartes further investigated the pendulum effect. Mersenne defined the Tactus as one beat per second, and in 1644 he measured the length of a 1-second pendulum as a little less than 1 metre. Christian Huygens was the first actually to build a pendulum clock, in 1656. The accuracy of the best clocks was greatly improved, to within about 15 seconds per day.

In 1696, Etienne Loulié published Élements in which he described his chronomètre, which was essentially a variable-length pendulum combined with a ruler for measuring the pendulum-length, gradated in inches. The machine was 72 inches (almost 2 metres) tall, giving a slowest possible beat around 44 beats per minute. The middle of its range (i.e. a pendulum length a little less than 1m) was about 60 beats per minute (corresponding to Mersenne’s one-second Tactus).

18th-century devices were also very large, measuring slow beats in the range 40-60 beats per minute. The more compact, double-weighted metronome was invented by Winkel and first manufactured by Maezel in 1816.

So during the 18th century, mechanical devices for measuring musical time did exist, and were reasonably precise – good enough for all practical purposes, one would think. Their inconveniently large size is evidence of the importance of a slow count (Tactus) throughout this period. The one-second pendulum, i.e. 60 beats per minute, had a particular significance, in scientific studies.

Nevertheless, in spite of the availability of precision machines for measuring time, 18th-century musicians did not make much use of this technology. They continued to describe Tactus in the old ways. For example, Quantz Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752) here mentions Loulié and his chronomètre, but says (XVII -vii – 46) that nobody uses it, in spite of its reliability and precision. Instead (47), he describes musical Tempi in terms of the human Pulse, and for each different type of movement (Allegro, Adagio etc) relates this Pulse to a particular note-value.

So it seems that increasing precision about Time itself did not tell baroque musicians what they needed to know about musical Time. Musicians were not so interested in the absolute Quantitative measurement of Time, they were concerned with the subjective Qualitative nature of musical Time. Their question was not, “how fast does it go?”, but rather:

What is the Quality of Time? How does it feel?

This question places the investigation of Time within the study of the History of Emotions. [Read more about the Australian Research Council’s Centre for the History of Emotions, here.]

The Galileo Project characterises the slow change in concepts of Time from Aristotle via Galileo and Newton to the modern era as the shift from the ‘qualitative and verbal’ to the ‘quantitative and mathematical’. You can read more about Philosophies of Time, ancient, baroque, our own everyday assumptions, Einstein’s 20th-century revolution and Hawking’s 21st-century paradoxes, in A Baroque History of Time here, where I too emphasise the continuing importance circa 1600 of Aristotle’s idea of Time as ‘a number of motion’ [some translations have ‘a number of change’] circa 1600.

You can also watch a video discussion of What is Time? here

For the Metaphysics of Quality, be sure to read Robert M Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).

QUALITY TIME

In this post, I’d like to consider how historical philosophy affects practical music-making, in terms of Quality. What was the Quality of baroque Time? How did it feel?

In Ars Cantandi (1696), Carissimi makes it clear that 17th-century musicians appreciated the difference between Quantity and Quality of Time.

The triple-metres all agree with regard to quantity, division and proportion, as is easily understood, but in the slow or fast quality, known by the Italians as tempo and by the French as mouvement, they are utterly different.

So in the various triple-metres, the relationships between note-values agree: a semi-breve in 3/1 has the same duration as a semi-breve in 3/2. Whatever the proportion sign, a semibreve can be divided into two minims, a minim can be divided into two semi-minims. As Carissimi says, the Quantities all agree.

But the Quality, how it feels, is very different, depending on whether the music proceeds as Sesquialtera (feeling groups of three semibreves); as Tripla 3/2 (feeling groups of three minims); or as Sestupla 6/4 (feeling groups of two dotted minims). Sesquialtera feels slow, Tripla feels medium-fast, Sestupla feels fast, even though the Quantities agree, each note-value has its true, consistent worth, the same value in all three triple-metres.

We can acquire a feeling for the Quality of early 17th-century musical Time by reminding ourselves what Music itself is, in this period. As we read in many sources, for example Dowland’s Micrologus (1609) here [translating probably the 1535 edition of Ornithoparcus: the almost-indentical 1519 edition is here], what we think of today as “music”, music as sound, practical music-making, was the least important meaning. [Read more about What is Music? here]

Music is firstly Mondana, Dowland’s ‘musicke of the world’, the heavenly Music of the Spheres created by ‘the very wheeling of the Orbes.. the motion of the starres and the violence of the Spheares’.
Next, music is Humana, Dowland’s ‘humane musicke’, the harmonious nature of the human body, ‘by which the spirituall nature is ioyned with the body…that Musicke which euery man that descends into himselfe finds in himselfe’
In third place, music is Instrumentalis, Dowland;s ‘instrumentall musicke’, the actual music that we play and sing here on earth.

Music was also divided into Practical (what Dowland calls Active or Pracktick) and Theoretical or Inspective:

Inspectiue Musicke, is a knowledge censuring and pondering the Sounds formed with naturall instruments, not by the eares, whose iudgement is dull, but by wit and reason.

Such Speculative Music included many kinds of intellectual investigations, for example such contrapuntal brain-teasers as the Puzzle Canons that were popular in the 16th century.

So we end up with four types of music. The three types placed higher in the hierarchy can tell us a lot about the Quality of Time for the lowest-placed type, that is to say, for actual practical music played or sung here on earth.

Like Music itself, the Quality of Time is Cosmic. It is a slow beat, reliable, perfect (think of the circular orbits that period science insisted upon), it is divinely-ordered. Mere mortals should not trifle with it.

The Quality of Time is like the human Heartbeat. It has a double-beat, it is live-giving, essential, not to be stopped. It may in certain circumstances beat faster or slower. It is very scary to suspend it even for a tiny moment.

The Quality of Time is seen Instrumentally by beating time with your hand, tapping your foot, waving the end of your theorbo, walking, or with a long (1 to 2 metres) pendulum. This beat is known as Tactus, Dowland’s ‘Tact’.

Tact is a successiue motion in singing, directing the equalitie of the measure: Or it is a certaine motion, made by the hand of the chiefe singer, according to the nature of the marks, which directs a Song according to Measure.

Notice that Tactus is ‘motion’ [recalling Aristotle’s definition of Time as a ‘number of motion’, discussed here], that Tactus ‘directs’, that Tactus maintains ‘equalitie’ ‘according to Measure’. Tactus is not just a tool with which a performer controls time, according to his own arbitrary conceit; Tactus itself maintains the equality of measure. Dowland again:

Above all things, keep the equality of measure!

TACTUS

[See also Rhythm: what really counts here.]

Tactus is vitally important for us practising musicians – it is the practical means by which musical time operates. Tactus is “How to Do Rhythm” for Early Music. To employ a modern conductor, or to add rubato and other modern means of managing time, is a gross anachronism, like putting a modern piano into the Monteverdi Vespers. You can do it, of course, but if you do, you can’t pretend that it’s HIP.

Tactus, the visible sign of musical Time, brings together the same set of hierarchical categories as Music itself – heavenly & human, practical & theoretical. Tactus is the Divine Hand that turns the cosmos, Tactus is the Human Hand that keeps earthly musica instrumentalis in equality of measure, Tactus is related to the heart-beat. Considering musica speculativa, Tactus is where real Time for practical music (cosmic, human and actual sound) intersects with the theory of musical Time (as written in musical notation). Specifically, around the year 1600, Tactus calibrates the notational system against real time at the level of the semibreve.

Beating Tactus in duple metre, the semibreve is divided, down-up, into two minims. This is perhaps a good moment to consider what one might call the ‘Hobbit Question’, aka ‘There and Back Again’.

The Tactus Hand goes ‘there and back again’, down and up. Similarly, a pendulum goes to and fro, and a semibreve is divided into two minims. When today’s musicians think about a metronome beat, they think of the click in each direction. But when mathematicians and physicists consider a pendulum, they define the Period as the time taken to swing there and back again. Strictly, we ought to use Tactus to mean a semibreve, the movement of the hand down and up again; each beat (down only, or up only) is properly called ‘semi-tactus’. But today, and also in 17th-century sources, musicians tend to use the word Tactus more generally to mean “the beat”, without always being specific about whether a minim (down only, or up only) or a semibreve (down and back up again) is meant.

So in my discussion above (and in many discussions by modern historians and musicologists), the pendulum ‘beat’ refers to the movement in one direction only, the same way musicians define a metronome beat today. In this sense, a 1-metre pendulum gives a beat of approximately MM 60 – this is Mersenne’s ‘one- second pendulum’, and he equates this 1 second to the minim. Strictly, this should be called semi-tactus.

Strictly speaking, the modern scientific definition of the Period of a pendulum, and the academic definition of Tactus around the year 1600 refer to “there and back again”. Mersenne’s approximately-one-metre pendulum goes there and back again in 2 seconds, which he would equate to the semibreve. Dowland agrees, clarifying the concept of ‘there and back again’ as ‘reciprocal motion’:

The greater [Tactus] is a Measure made by a slow, and as it were reciprocall motion. The writers call this Tact the whole, or totall Tact. And, because it is the true Tact of all Songs, it comprehends in his motion a Semibreefe.

Ornithoparcus, Dowland’s source from almost a century earlier, has an academic’s scorn for the habit amongst practical musicians of framing discussions in terms of Semi-Tactus:

The lesser Tact, is the halfe of the greater, which they call a Semitact. Because it measures by it motion a Semibreefe, diminished in a duple [i.e. a minim]: this is allowed of onely by the vnlearned.

Well, plenty of learnéd 17th-century musicians did discuss rhythm in terms of minim and semitactus! The insistence on the semibreve is already old-fashioned and theoretical, by Dowland’s time. For practical purposes today, it is a sufficient challenge for most conservatoire-trained musicians to get used to thinking in the slow beat of minim = approx 60. They (and many early music specialists too!) might find it very hard to work with the ultra-slow beat of semibreve = approx 30. Nevertheless, it’s worth keeping in mind that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that 17th-century musicians did indeed manage to work with this long beat, the whole Tactus. Certainly, an awareness of the very big, ultra-slow, count of semibreve = approx 30 is a big help when it comes to Sesquialtera proportion.

[More about Proportions – in search of a practical theory here, with discussion of proportions for the ballo in Monteverdi’s Orfeo here]

Another source of confusion is that some earlier 16th-century music was counted with a semibreve to each beat, and a breve to the complete Tactus. Some of this music remained in the repertoire of cathedral choirs etc. Theorists, and choir-singers performing a mix of old and current repertoire, had to reconcile these two different systems in theory and in practice.

For the rest of this post, I will continue as I started, with the more practical, less ‘learnéd’ nomenclature, discussing what is strictly called Semi-Tactus, a minim beat (down only, or up only; not there and back again).

TACTUS AS QUANTITY

So, having dealt with the Hobbit Question, we can now consider how to calibrate our Tactus: to line-up the musical notation of note-values against Time in the real world of early 17th-century Italian music. We have plenty of sources to put us ‘in the right ball-park’. The double heart-beat of the Tactus semibreve is divided into two minims, down-up, with each beat at minim = approximately 60, i.e. one minim beat per second. And around the year 1600, this was as accurate as they could get, they had no way to measure it more exactly.

Try to estimate a second, without looking at any kind of modern watch, clock, mobile phone etc. To help, try imagining a 1-metre pendulum, or think about your relaxed heart-beat. Did you make your estimate? That’s how long a minim is.

In Quantitative terms, circa 1600, we cannot know any more exactly. The minim was somewhere around one second, whatever you feel one second to be. It could be slower, for practical reasons, in certain circumstance, e.g. when there is lots of complex ornamentation. (In his 1610 Vespers, Monteverdi specifies a slower Tactus for Et exultavit, because the tenors have lots of fast notes. He also warns performers not to take his Ballo Tirsi & Clori too fast, because the ensemble music is complex). How music feels depends on the size of the ensemble and the acoustic of the venue. To get the same feeling in a more resonant acoustic, it’s plausible that you might count your seconds a bit slower.

This calibration of a notated minim as a real Time second is inevitably subjective. Although a minim, or a second, are in principle fixed units, individuals will differ in how they estimate them. I remember being told as a child to estimate an English yard (a bit less than a metre, about the length of a one-second pendulum) as the distance from the tip of my nose to the end of my arm, and realised even then that not everyone’s arms are the same length (not to mention noses!). Of course, highly trained musicians could be expected to remember the duration of a minim better than the average person, just as some musicians today can remember the pitch of a tuning fork, or of the organ in a particular church. But, in the absence of a precision measurement of time, it’s your memory against mine. And if I trained with a maestro di capella who had a slower idea of one second than your teacher, we would probably continue that difference into our adult careers. So each individual will perceive Tactus slightly differently.

Tactus is also subjective in that it depends on one’s emotional state. Although I fondly imagine that I am keeping the ‘equalitie of measure’ , my sense of a one-second beat might well be a little faster when I am under stress, excited or angry; a little slower when I am especially relaxed or even drowsy.

Note that these subjective differences are not individual choices. Nor are they expressive interpretation. It’s just that my best, humanly fallible guess of the duration of one second might be different from your guess, and might also vary according to my emotional state. Long training and repeated experience of the ‘equalitie of measure’ would have helped 17th-century musicians make consistent estimates.

TACTUS AS QUALITY

Since performers’ emotional state can alter their perception of an ‘equal measure’, a singing-actor representing a character’s strong passions might act out the affetto in dramatic music (in genere rappresentativo) by letting that passion alter the speed slightly. Of course, this only works, if the audience don’t notice the trick: if they become aware that you are just going faster, the illusion is gone.

In the early 17th century, such writers as Caccini and Frescobaldi suggest subtle changes to the Tactus, according to the affetto of the sung text. Frescobaldi suggests imitating this vocal practice (which he derives from dramatic madrigals) even in instrumental music, with subtly different tempi for the various movements of a Toccata. Early violin sonatas have markings of tarde and velociter etc to show such subtle changes of Tactus, corresponding to changes in affetto. We can understand this as a performer acting out a change of Passion, as if his own heart began to beat slower or faster, in response to a poetic text, or to the affetti of such poetry imitated in instrumental music.

With such changes, the desired result is that the audience’s passions are moved. The audience should notice a change of affetto, in fact they should feel that emotional change themselves. If they simply notice a change of speed, the performance has failed. With such changes, the alteration in Tactus is small. If the composer wants double-speed, he can show that with shorter note-values. If he wants one-third faster, he can show that with Sesquialtera proportion. As George Houle writes in Metre in Music 1600-1800 (1987):

In the early seventeenth century, tarde, velociter, adagio and presto distinguished between fast and slow, that is degrees of change intermediate to those determined by diminution (2:1) or proportion (usually 2:1, 3:1 or 3:2).

(My added emphasis)

So these changes for the sake of the affetto are subtle changes. In particular, a gross change to double-speed may not be perceived at all by your audience. They will still feel the same Tactus, and just assume that the note-values have been halved.

Jazz suggests a good model for the Quality of these subtle changes. Whatever the actual, Quantitative tempo, jazz musicians recognise that one can play “on the front” of the tempo or “laid back”. What is essentially the same Quantitative speed can feel different, more urgent or more languid; its Quality can be varied.

In early 17th-century music, a change of Tactus according to the affetto will tend to reinforce whatever changes of note-values the composer has written. If the affetto is urgent, the composer will write short note-values. And then the performer takes a slightly faster Tactus, making those short notes even quicker. And the converse for languid affetti.

Another important point is that these changes are not gradual acceleration or rallentando, but a step-change in time. In what Frescobaldi calls ‘driving the time’, guidare il tempo, you don’t use the accelerator and the brakes, you use the gear-shift! Such gear-changes, even when by subtle amounts, are very strong medicine, all the more so in the context of ‘equality of measure’ throughout the rest of the performance.

Finally, even when the Tactus changes, there is still Tactus. Frescobaldi explains that although Tactus no longer rules absolutely in his toccatas, the performance is still facilitated by means of Tactus, a Tactus which now can be slightly faster or slower, changing at the intersection between movements and according to the affetto. I will discuss Caccini’s, Peri’s and Frescobaldi’s specific comments about Tactus in future posts.

Perhaps the most important Quality of early 17th-century musical time is that musicians are striving to make it as constant and consistent as they can. Although its precise Quantity is subjective, and might even be deliberately adjusted to take account of particular circumstances, or to create a subtle illusion for the audience, time is supposed to be stable, otherwise the heavens will fall. If your heart stops beating, the music also dies.

The myth of Phaeton tells of an ill-fated attempt to ‘drive time’. Phaeton grabbed the reins of Apollo’s sun-chariot, but could not control the time-horses, He crashed and burned.

THE QUALITIES OF DANCES

In the second half of the 17th century, in France, the quality of Time was linked to how it felt to perform the movements of a particular dance. Each dance had its own vrai mouvement (as Muffat calls it, in Florilegium 1698) – ‘true movement’. This deceptively simple phrase has many meanings: the particular steps of each dance, a speed-range within which those steps ‘feel right’, a particular metre (duple or triple), and also what a modern musician might call a particular ‘groove’, a regular pattern of Good and Bad beats, a tendency towards certain characteristic rhythms. Time itself ‘moves’ truly, but differently, for each dance. And of course, each dance-type is associated with a certain range of emotions. In short, each dance-type has its own feeling, its own Quality.

Modern musicologists and dance historians have worked hard to understand the precise Quantity, the actual speed for each dance-type. Commonly encountered speeds around 84 beats per minute for some dances look rather like a proportion of the earlier Italian Tactus = a bit less than 60. But perhaps too much focus on Quantity is again the wrong approach to the whole question. We might better seek to understand the Quality of each mouvement, learn how it feels. We can find a typical range of feelings, in the sense of emotions, affetti, by examining texts sung to each dance-type. We can try to discover the right groove within the Tactus, the appropriate swing of inégalité in the shorter notes, and – most importantly – we can learn how it feels, physically, to dance its characteristic steps.

When I first started playing the harp, I studied renaissance and baroque dance and spent a lot of time playing for dancers. I count this a most valuable part of my Early Music education. I quickly discovered that dancers are very sensitive to the precise speed of each dance, so as a dutiful young professional musician, I would measure their ideal speed in rehearsal with a metronome, and then use a silent metronome to reproduce this speed in performance. This was Quantitatively accurate, but it didn’t work at all. Dancers’ appreciation of speed is highly subjective – it depends on the nature of the floor surface, on the size and shape of the available floor area, on their physical condition and mood at the moment of performance. It’s not a question to be answered with a metronome; it’s a matter of How does it feel?

My solution, as an instrumentalist playing for dancers, was to learn the dance-steps so that I could watch whilst playing and allow the dancer to set the tempo in the opening bars. Of course, the ‘ball-park’ tempo was known from rehearsal, but the ‘fine-tuning’ of speed was left to the performer, in the moment. Once set, this speed, the rhythmic ‘groove’, the inégal swing, the complete vrai mouvement is maintained until the very end of the dance, just as Muffat says.

Because each dance has its own vrai mouvement, its own Time, the Quality of musical time in late 17th-century France is complex and multifarious. Time is still cosmic and divine. Indeed, dance itself is a metaphor for the perfect movement of the heavens, as well as for a perfectly organised society with Louis XIV himself as the divinely appointed principal dancer around whom everyone else must orbit. Melody, harmony and vrai mouvement (in all its meanings) work together as the head, heart and soul of the human body. Tactus is still shown by an up and down movement of the hand, or of the big stick that led to Lully’s death. Muffat recommends that dance-musicians should tap their feet in Tactus (on the downbeat of each bar). Meanwhile, the dancers’ feet strike out faster-moving beats within the Tactus, moving with the groove of the music as they step, rise and sink, turn and balance.

French dance-Time still has the Quality of being ‘true’, rather than arbitrarily chosen according to the whim of performers. But now there are many truths, as many different types of vrai mouvement as their are types of dance. The significance of individual dance-steps within the slow count of the Tactus encouraged French musicians to think more about the ‘equalitie of measure’ beat-by-beat in crotchets. The actual speed was determined according to the Quality of each dance, rather than by the Quantity of mathematical proportions. As Houle observed in 1987, these different ways of thinking were essentially incompatible, and the attempts to reconcile them make for confusing reading in late 17th-century sources.

Logical extensions of mensural principles were sometimes in conflict.

Just as the 17th century saw opposed national styles of Music (French and Italian), so each national style had its own approach to questions of musical Time. When the musical tastes were re-united, gradually and not always completely, during the 18th century, so attitudes to Time were also gradually brought closer into alignment.

THE QUALITY OF A PENDULUM

Today, when we think about beating time, we may be reminded of the Qualities of a metronome, or of a modern conductor. Experiments we carried out at Scoil na gCláirseach (2013) and at the Royal Danish Academy of Music (2014) demonstrated that a long, slow-beating pendulum (about one metre long, at a Tactus speed of around one beat per second in each direction) has quite different Qualities.

A metronome gives a sharp click, and conductors are taught to make the precise moment of the beat as sharply defined as possible. But a pendulum slows down and stops momentarily as it turns, so that the actual moment is not sharply defined. This allows a musician to ‘place’ the beat subtly, communicating the particular feeling of this note, this harmony, the quality of this moment of time, letting the audience enjoy the moment of ‘smelling the roses’ as they walk steadily along the path of the music.

Valentini’s Trattato della battuta musicale (1643) allows the downward movement of the Tactus hand to last one quaver (approximately 1/4 sec) after which the hand remains down for three quavers (3/4 sec); similarly for the upward movement. Try this for yourself: it looks very different from modern conducting, and (like a pendulum) leaves the subtle ‘placing’ to the musician, within limits of the order of magnitude of a 1/4 sec.

Within the steady Tactus, shorter note-values need not be precisely equal. Descriptions of the ‘intrinsic’ hierarchy of Good and Bad notes (buone & cattive) remind us that the concept of a ‘half’ in this period does not necessarily imply precisely 50%. Muffat (Florilegium 1698) explains that

Good notes are those that seem naturally to give the ear a little repose. Such notes are longer, those that come on the beat or essential subdivisions of measures.

It is not easy to put this difference in Quality between Good and Bad notes into words. Rameau in his Traité de l’harmonie (1722) asks for a certain je ne sais quoi on the Good beats, which he contrasts with a ‘slight leaning’ (appuyer un peu) on the Bad beats.

To get a feeling for the Quality of Good and Bad sub-divisions of the Tactus, first establish steady one-second Tactus. Then try saying simple words like piano, forte, dolce, arpa, pasta, pizza in your best Italian accent, one syllable on the down-position, the next on the up-position of your steady Tactus. [Don’t ‘bang’ the initial consonants, savour the vowels]. Can you reconcile the result of this tactus-beating with Valentini’s instructions above?

This subtle difference between Good and Bad (not loud and soft, but something of Long and Short) on the principal divisions of the Tactus (the ‘groove’ of a dance-movement) is not to be confused with the stylised inégalité on shorter note-values (the ‘swing’ of short notes in French music). Read more about The Good, The Bad, & the Early Music Phrase here. Watch a video about Good & Bad notes here.

Whereas a modern conductor might struggle to control a wayward soloist, or a modern accompanist might struggle to follow, a pendulum just swings to and fro, maintaining the ‘equalitie of measure’ calmly and gently. This quality of calm steadiness is a vital skill for a baroque accompanist to acquire. As Agazzari writes in Del Sonare (1607), the continuo’s role is to ‘guide and support the entire ensemble’: the continuo maintain the Tactus, even if a soloist chooses to place a certain note before or after the beat. But this is not an aggressive power-struggle, the continuo can remain as calm as a perfect slow-swinging pendulum.

A jazz-band provides a good model for baroque continuo, with the rhythm section keeping a steady groove, whilst the soloists syncopate or drift elegantly around the beat, depending on the affetto.

Like a pendulum or the classic swinging pocket-watch, the calm, slow, steady beat of Tactus can be powerfully hypnotic, taking musicians and audiences into a shared trance, a dream-world where the cosmic and the human are mysteriously connected, a magical space where emotions are felt more intensely, where music unites performers and audience in a shared spiritual experience.

Did Dowland perhaps refer to the inner focus of trance in his description of musica humana as ‘that Musicke which euery man that descends into himselfe finds in himselfe’? This spiritual quality of time is enhanced by calm steadiness – any random alteration would jar. One strand of my research investigates how ‘early opera’ made deliberate use of these hypnotic qualities in the first decades of the 17th century. Read more here.

THE QUALITY OF BAROQUE TIME

The essential Quality of baroque Time emerges from the fact that 18th-century musicians did not use machines to determine time accurately, even when such machines became available. No matter how closely we investigate period sources, we cannot know the precise Quantity of baroque Time. And actually, we don’t want to, because to ask the question of Quantity doesn’t give us a useful answer. The objectively “right” metronome speed will still “feel wrong” if the subjective situation changes.

So we want Quality Time. Time that is calm, steady and deeply significant, like the movement of the heavens or the beating of our hearts. And we must work hard to maintain it. Here is my personal take on baroque Quality time:

If the Tactus breaks, the heavens will fall. If your pulse stops, the music also dies.

As we begin to appreciate the subtle Quality of baroque time, we can appreciate how period writers struggled to explain its mysteries, to define the ineffable. Here is my anonymous hero, Il Corago circa 1630:

Per lo che in quanto alla tardita e velocita de’ movimenti, o vogliamo dire brevita o lunghezza di tempo nel quale si pronunziano i suoni o voci musicali, i moderni reducono e et essaminano il tutto ad una certa misura, come a suo proprio paragone, la quale essi chiamano battuta et e quel tempo che si mette nell’ abbassare et elevato la mano o piede o altra cosa che sia in una determinata velocita che d’alcuni et in alcuni casi piu prestamente di altri et in particolari occasioni meno velocimente si muove, ma pero dentro una certa latitudine o determinazione di tempo, come piu l’esperienza s’impara che chiaramente si possa esporre con lo scrivere.

Concerning the slowness and speed of movements, or we might say brevity or length of time in which musical sounds, notes or words are pronounced, modern [i.e. early 17th-century] musicians examine the whole question and reduce it all to a certain measure, as if to its own bench-mark, which is called battuta [Tactus, or ‘beat’] and which is that time which is put into the lowering and raising of the hand, or foot, or other object, which should be at a specific speed which for some people and in some situations goes faster than others, and in certain circumstances less rapidly, but however within a certain latitude or precision of time, which experience teaches more clearly than can be explained in writing.

Tactus is the seicento musician’s paragone, defined in Florio’s 1611 dictionary as ‘paragon (i.e. model/example of excellence), a touch-stone to try gold, or to distinguish good from bad.’ Tactus is the Champion of Time. Tactus is the ideal or bench-mark of Time, the gold standard.

Tactus is Quality Time.

Sherlock Holmes and the Wedding Dance: Tactus & Proportions in Monteverdi’s ‘Lasciate i monti’

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

“We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.”

In a fine article, Dancing at a Wedding (Early Music magazine 2008 here) Virginia Christy Lamothe offers “some thoughts on performance issues in Monteverdi’s ‘Lasciate i monti’ (Orfeo, 1607) from her particular viewpoint as a musicologist and dancer. In a chapter for the multi-authored book edited by Timothy Watkins, Performance Practice: Issues and Approaches (Ann Arbor, 2009) she applies her expertise to Monteverdi’s Ballo delle Ingrate.

Lamothe examines these staged dances in the light of Roger Bowers’ theories of highly conservative, ‘medieval’ notation of Proportions (Bowers on Proportions in Orfeo here). Her own contribution is to place these dances in the context of period manuals for social dancing, Caroso Il Ballarino (1581) here and Negri Le Gratie d’Amore (1600) and Nuovi Inventioni di Balli (1604) here.

There is certainly much to be learnt from Lamothe’s approach, to which we should add information specifically about theatrical dancing, in particular the Preface to Cavalieri Anima e Corpo (1600) here and the anonymous c1630 treatise Il Corago (edited by Fabbri & Pompilio here). Both recommend that a ballo should be choreographed by an expert dancing-master, both mention specific dance-steps, continenze, gagliarda, canario that we see also in choregraphies for social dancing.

Theatrical Dances

Cavalieri identifies slow steps such as riverenze, continenze and other passi gravi which are performed by the whole company con gravita. He suggests that singers might dance with instruments in their hands, and reminds us of his famous all-singing, all-dancing finale to the 1589 Florentine Intermedi, the Ballo del Gran Duca. But he distinguishes these slow, walking steps from the kind of ballo saltato (jumping steps) with gagliarda, canario, capriole (capers) etc, that would be performed by dance soloists (either two or four, depending on the size of the stage) without singing.

Listen to a duet version of Cavalieri’s Ballo del Gran Duca with Andrew Lawrence-King & Xavier Diaz Latorre here:

Monteverdi’s Balletto (Orfeo)

The stage directions in the original print of Monteverdi’s Orfeo describe Lasciate i Monti as a balletto (diminuitive), and indeed it is small-scale compared to Cavalieri’s 1589 spectacular. It is shorter than many choregraphies for social dances. But nevertheless, the ensemble is larger than for Monteverdi’s Tirsi & Clori, designated a ballo. Here, in Orfeo, we have 5 voices and 13 instruments. I will write about the instrumental ensemble in another post.

This balletto has three sections, in three time-signatures: C, 3/2, and 6/4.

C: Lasciate i monti

3/2 Qui miri il Sole

6/4 Ritornello

Lamothe equates these with three movements commonly encountered in social dances: a opening section of riverenze, continenze and other passi gravi; a central gagliarda; a final salterello (jumping dance). The dotted rhythms of the final section of Lasciate i monti strongly suggest one particularly vigorous dance, the canario.

Galliard?

I agree with these identifications of the first and third sections. But I am not convinced that the central section is a gagliarda. It’s not a problem that the first phrase starts with an upbeat qui | miri il sole – Lamothe’s gagliarda example from Caroso does this.

Caroso gagliarda

But Monteverdi chose to make every phrase start this way, even when the word-accents suggest something different vos- | tre carole. In contrast, galliard phrases normally start on the first beat of the bar, even if the second note takes the word accent.

Dowland Galliard: My thoughts are winged with hopes, my hopes with love,

As Lamothe writes, “Specific types of dances followed particular rhythmic patterns.”. “Each galliard step requires six counts”, including gettati in aria, throwing yourself into the air, on the fourth count.

But the phrasing of qui miri il sole consistently contradicts the phrasing of the galliard step. If Monteverdi had wanted a galliard here, he could have written it like this.

How ‘Qui miri il Sole’ could have been a galliard

Not everything in 3/2 is a galliard. Many of Negri and Caroso’s social dances include movements in 3/2 that are not galliards. Cavalieri tells us that theatrical galliards are danced without singing. I conclude that Monteverdi’s sung 3/2 movement, Qui miri il sole, is not a galliard.

Monteverdi’s balletto and Cavalieri’s ballo

As we try to identify the three sections of Monteverdi’s 1607 balletto, there is an excellent match with Cavalieri’s 1600 ballo, the grand finale of Anima e Corpo, This is a larger-scale piece, with six strophes and many singers (Cavalieri asks the whole cast, whether on or off-stage, to sing). But the essential structure is the same: C (sung, major mode); 3/2 (sung, minor mode); jumping dance (major mode, instrumental). The texts of both link the movement of celestial bodies to earthly dancing. Cavalieri’s central movement also begins before the beat, in this case with two upbeats – it too, is not a galliard.

Cavalieri’s galliard comes as the jumping dance at the end of the first strophe, with perfectly regular phrases beginning on the beat, and obvious galliard rhythm. And – just as we read in his Preface – after the second strophe, the final dance is varied: now it’s a canario, with dotted rhythms in 6/4, and beginning (like Monteverdi’s canario) after the downbeat. The even-numbered strophes of Cavalieri’s ballo exactly match Monteverdi’s balletto:

C (sung, major mode, could be danced by singers, riverenze, continenze etc) This section is con gravita.
3/2 (sung, minor mode, starts with upbeat, could be danced by singers but not with jumping steps, definitely not a galliard)
6/4 (instrumental, major mode, starts after the downbeat, canario, vigorous dance for the dancing-masters)

Cavalieri’s ballo has six strophes, so this particular sequence of three movements comes three times. Monteverdi’s balletto seems also to come three times: the sequence is two iterations of the balletto , some dialogue, and a final reprise of the balletto.

Repeats?

One of the challenges in reconstructing choreographies of this period is figuring out the precise repeat schemes. Lamothe problematises the repeats of the various sections of Monteverdi’s balletto. The music of the C section is written out twice, with a new text the second time; the 3/2 has the music written out only once, with two strophes of text underlayed; the 6/4 is written out twice, but when the whole ballo is reprised a few minutes later, the repeat of the final section is indicated by repeat marks.

Whilst period choreographies show many different repeat schemes for different dances, the ABC ABC form usually adopted for modern performances of Lasciate is not typical of Negri and Caroso’s social dances. However, we’ve seen that Monteverdi’s balletto is closer to Cavalieri’s staged ballo than to social dances.

I agree with Lamothe that the question of repeats is problematic. There is much to be said for her suggestion of ABB*C. (B* means the B music with a new text). The effect for the listener is logical, since Monteverdi’s music has writtten-out repeats for A and C sections, but not for B. So the listener (unaware of how the music was notated) would hear an effect of AA*BB*CC. (The C section is untexted, of course). If one agrees with this logic, then the reprise of the ballo (a few minutes later) could be taken the same way.

I recommend this solution. But I do not rule out (as Lamothe does) the ABC AB*C …. ABC that we hear in many performances today. Her example of a social dance by Caroso is an arrangement of Cavalieri’s Ballo del Gran Duca (1589). Tellingly, the original theatrical ballo and the social dance arrangement have different repeat schemes. Theatrical and social dances were related, but not identical.

Galliard tempi

Lamothe draws attention to particular features of the Galliard movement in social dances, in particular that it is often specifically marked as gagliarda. She suggests that this implies the tempo of the galliard could be specific to that dance (i.e. not in proportion), or variable. Certainly it is true that the physical demands of this jumping dance require that the dancing master has just the tempo he needs. In The Harp Consort, our standard operating procedure for galliards (when performed as a single item, i.e. not as part of a larger ballo ) is to allow the dancer to set the tempo.

Contrary to what one might at first suppose, a slow galliard is physically more demanding than a fast one. At a slow tempo, the dancer must remain in the air longer – this allows more time for capriole, leg-beats in the air – which inevitably requires a higher jump. So slow galliards are more ornamented (just as with musical ornamentation in madrigali passegiati, where a slower Tactus may be taken). And slower, ornamental galliards with their extreme physicality were particularly for men.

Lamothe cites Yvonne Kendall, a scholar of early dance and music, who “reminds us that … the rhythm associated with a particular dance may not be tied to a particular metre signature.” Monteverdi notates galliard sometimes in 3/2 minims (which I take to be tripla, i.e. three minims to one tactus at about MM60). This is a fast tempo, and we find it for example in Ballo delle Ingrate, which was danced not by singers, nor by the dancing-masters, but by the aristocratic ladies of the court.

Ballo delle Ingrate gagliarda

But in the ballo ‘De la bellezza le dovute lodi’ the galliard is in 3/2 semibreves (which I take to be sesquialtera, i.e. three semibreves to two tactus beats). This is a slow tempo, and is set to the words Ben fallo Alcide il forte referring to that mythical strongman, Hercules.

De la bellezza galliard (bass)

The agreement of fast/slow tempi with the physicality of fast/slow galliards and with texts associated with women/men seems to support my interpretation of proportions, in which the note-values (minims or semibreves) give us the information we need, to choose between tripla and sesquialtera proportions.

De la bellezza galliard (cantus 1)

By the way, in the cantus primus part for ‘De la bellezza’, there is no time-signature for that same galliard at Ben fallo Alcide. According to Roger Bowers’ theory, this would be a fatal error, a singer would not be able to interpret the notation. According to my theory, the absence of a time-signature is a minor problem; the time signature doesn’t tell the singer anything they didn’t already know.

“What do you make of it, Holmes?” “It is obviously an attempt to convey secret information.” “But what is the use of a cipher message without the cipher?”

Since dance movements in 3/2 may or may not be galliards, I suggest that the marking gagliarda in Caroso and Negri indicates not so much the tempo of the movement but rather the particular rhythmic pattern, the characteristic ‘groove’ of this specific dance. Lamothe again: “specific types of dances followed particular rhythmic patterns.”

We see the same idea with her example from Caroso’s social dance, where the final jumping dance is specifically identified as a salterello. The fast tempo and dotted rhythms might otherwise have suggested a canario (although there are other rhythmic clues in Caroso’s salterello that would contradict an initial diagnosis of canario).

Caroso saltarello

Who were the dancers?

We should move away from the conventions of Grand Opera in the Romantic period, away from the modern categories of soloists, chorus and corps de ballet. The first ‘operas’ were performed with small casts, who doubled several roles. Soloists often sang as the chorus, too. Chorus members, even soloists might dance.

Lamothe takes into account Tim Carter’s calculations of a company of 9 or 10 singers, a typical size for early ‘opera’, that could have performed Orfeo. But there is strong argument that the first performance in 1607 involved only 8 singers, SSATTBB plus Francesco Rasi as Orfeo. Either way, the singers for the balletto will be mostly, if not entirely, one-to-a-part.

It is possible that singers might sing one-to-a-part and simultaneously dance. This was done by the three female soloists in the 1589 Ballo del Gran Duca – they even played instruments too! But castrato Giovanni Gualberto Magli, who sang three roles (plus chorus parts) in Orfeo, arrived in Mantua eight days before the performance, knowing only the Prologue, and much concerned about ‘so many notes’ that he had to learn. I find it implausible that he would have learnt a dance too, although period commentators report that he performed well when it came to the show.

Certainly, singers could not have sung Qui miri il Sole one-to-a-part and simultaneously danced a galliard, with its combination of three low jumps and one high jump every two seconds. (Try it for yourself!) At most, they could have done some passi gravi during this section. This supports my argument that this section is not a galliard.

In Mantua in 1607, female courtiers were not allowed to appear on stage – that is why castrato Magli had to be brought in from Pisa. I assume that this prohibition would apply to dancing just as much as to singing. The courtly ladies who danced the Ballo delle Ingrate in 1608 (that year saw a change of policy, which also allowed La Florinda to sing the title role in Arianna), could not have represented the ninfe who are invited to leave the mountains and dance the balletto in 1607.

The most likely explanation is that the dancers were the court dancing-masters. On the model of social dances, they could have danced all three sections. Or ,on the model of Cavalieri’s theatrical ballo, the singers could have done simple movements (riverenze, continenze etc) in the slow C movement, and other passi gravi in the sung 3/2 (but not a jumping galliard). The instrumental Ritornello then featured a jumping dance, almost certainly a canario, performed by the (male) court dancing masters. Maybe four, or perhaps just two of them, since the performing space for Orfeo was small, and there are already 13 musicians and 5 singers on stage.

One of the court castrati, Issachino Massarini, was also a dancing-master (though he was elderly by 1607). Lamothe speculates that this singer might have sung the role of Euridice, and also danced the balletto. In this interpretation, Rasi as Orfeo would also have to dance the balletto. I haven’t found anything about Rasi’s dancing skills (he was a singer, theorbo player and composer), but I’m sceptical that he would find dancing a vigorous canario the ideal preparation for his great song, Rosa del Ciel, which comes about half a minute afterwards, even if he was not needed for the chorus parts of the balletto. I also find it hard to believe that old Issachino would have managed the sequence of ballo choruses, galliard dancing, and Euridice’s recitative, followed by more chorus-singing, another galliard and the chorus Vieni Imeneo, all in the space of a few minutes.

Nevertheless, Lamothe’s suggestion reminds us that a male dancing master might have danced this balletto as a female character, just as the castrati singers sang female roles.

Another possibility is that some of the 13 on-stage instrumentalists could have danced and played – more plausibly in the passi gravi of the first two movements, than in the canario. But since Stephen Player of The Harp Consort has often played guitar whilst simultaneously dancing a canario, perhaps there was a dancing-master or two amongst Monteverdi’s players. Perhaps not the bass-violinist, harpsichordists or the harpist, but what about the three chitarrone-players? We do have period images of dancers with lutes and long-necked instruments.

Consistency

Part of Lamothe’s argument is that Proportions might not apply to dancers. Dancers (and many conductors) are sometimes reluctant to struggle with the intellectual and practical challenges of Proportions, but period philosophy and historical musicology combine to emphasise that they are essential.

Ha, ha, keep time! How sour sweet music is / When time is broke and no proportion kept!

William Shakespeare Richard II (c1595) Act V scene v

To support the argument for inconsistency, Lamothe cites musicologist Jeffrey Kurtzman, who is certainly correct to draw attention to the complexity of evidence from period theorists. Working within the scholastic method, theorists had to reconcile the new practices of the 17th century – Monteverdi’s seconda prattica, the novelty of continuo-notation and (I argue) a simplified use of proportional notation – with the conservative traditions of previous generations. As George Houle observes in Meter in Music 1600-1800, changing usages were fundamentally incompatible with older notation systems, and the theorists’ attempts to unite the irreconcilable were confused, confusing, and in vain.

I do not see that inconsistent realisations could work, in a period when there was often no rehearsal at all. And I do not agree with Bowers’ position, that musicians of Monteverdi’s generation were still putting into practice highly conservative, ‘medieval’ systems – Bowers’ theories are too complicated to work in real time, when sight-reading. Yes, something of the old ways was conserved in the notation, and period theorists struggled to make sense of this. But the actual Use had moved on, and (as just continuo notation replaced intabulated accompaniments) the practice (as opposed to the theory) of Proportions had been simplified, made more practical.

We can be sure that practising musicians found pragmatic solutions that worked, that provided consistent and unambiguous realisations of proportions for ensembles sight-reading together. For, unlike opera, most 17th-century ensemble performances had very little or no rehearsal. I argue:

Practical musicians must have found workable, consistent solutions.

You can examine my theory of proportions here.

“The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical, are really extremely practical — so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.”

In addition to arguing that period musicians realised Proportions consistently, I also reject the suggestion that 17th-century dancers had a different way of thinking. Such a divergence may happen today, but the familiar concept of the Renaissance Man reminds us that historically there was an aesthetic unity across many artistic disciplines, guided by high philosophy, i.e. period Science.

In Mantua, Massarini danced and sang; Rasi composed, sang and played theorbo; Monteverdi sang, composed and played the viol. Elsewhere we know of dancer/swordsmen, swordsman/vihuelists, and many dancing violinists, and continuo-playing singers.

It’s clear that there must have been a consistent approach across all these disciplines. We must therefore synthesise all the available information.

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

I suggest that the missing links in Lamothe’s and Bowers’ arguments about Lasciate i Monti are the links: the link from the previous speech, the link to the next speech. Their suggested metronome mark of approximately 50/60 as the Tactus Aequalis is certainly highly plausible. And Bowers agrees that the notation implies the same Tactus for the whole opera:

There thus appears to be every indication of the prevalence of a single tempo for the entirety of these pages, the fundamental durations of the unblackened semibreve, minim and semiminim remaining constant throughout.

Houle goes further, showing considerable evidence of the same Tactus for the entire repertory, within this period.

But this ‘single tempo for the entirety’ must be minim = approx 60, not semibreve.

The confusion here is one that we find in period sources too, between Tactus (which strictly means the complete down-up movement) and Semi-Tactus (which is the proper name for the down-movement alone, or the up-movement alone). Many sources use the word Tactus for both, which leads to some theoretical confusion.

But in practice, there is no confusion. Just try the recitative Ma tu gentil cantor that follows the first part of the balletto,

Minim = 60? Maybe.
Semibreve = 60? Impossible!

or Euridice’s speech Io non diro qual sia before the reprise,

Minim = 60? Maybe.
Semibreve = 60? Impossible!

or the chorus afterwards, Vieni Imeneo.

Minim = 60? Maybe.
Semibreve = 60? Impossible!

All work well at around minim = 60, none could be imagined at semibreve = 60!

When considering Proportions, Tactus supplies the missing link

So, according to the well-agreed principle that the whole work has a unified Tactus, around MM 60, I’m convinced that the C section of Lasciate goes at approximately minim = 60. This is slower than many modern performances, but corresponds to the period description of this kind of movement as con gravita, with passi gravi.

Combining Tactus & Proportions

And here is perhaps the most powerful tool for the scholar of Proportions. If we combine the period principle of Proportions with the period principle of Tactus, we can eliminate many theoretical options as impossible. Starting with minim ~ 60 for Lasciate i monti (unfamiliar to our modern ears but certainly possible), the big question is what proportional relationship to apply at Qui miri il sole.

Eliminating the impossible I – Sesquialtera

If we follow Bowers’ theory and apply Sesquialtera to Qui miri il Sole, we would have dotted semibreve (three minims) = 30, i.e. minim = 90. I find this too slow for Qui miri, but not necessarily impossible. (Bowers himself arrives at a faster tempo, by applying Sesquialtera, but starting impossibly fast in the previous C section). But what about the Ritornello after the balletto reprise?

Minim = 90? Impossible!

Or (killer example) the final Moresca at minim = 90? Impossible!

Minim = 90? Impossible!

Eliminating the impossible II – Sextupla

Alternatively, if we apply the very fast (Sextupla) proportion to 3/2 Qui miri il Sole, we would get dotted semibreve (three minims) = 120.. I find this too fast, but not necessarily impossible. But now the 6/4 canario would be dotted minim (three crotchets) = 240. Impossible!

Dotted minim = 240? Impossible!

What remains?

My practical theory of proportions (here again) indicates Tripla, dotted semibreve = 60 for Qui miri il Sole. (This would work as a fast galliard tempo, but I don’t think this is relevant, since the movement is not a galliard.) Then the canario comes out at dotted minim = 120 (i.e. the same dotted semibreve = 60 as in the previous movement). This (as Latrophe agrees) is a good canario tempo.

As Sherlock Holmes said:

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four (1890), page 111]

Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson”

I find this balletto an interesting and significant test-case, for which my theory of Proportions provides a plausible solution.

But I’m certainly not so arrogant as to insist that anyone else should accept my theory. And I’m just having some fun by quoting Conan Doyle, even if investigating period performance practice can be something like Holmes’ Detective Science. However, I do suggest that you might apply my methods to test your own theory of Proportions. A good theory should be consistent, unambiguous, and easily applied for quick decisions in the real world of practical music-making.

So, as Sherlock Holmes said on the next page of The Sign of the Four:

You know my methods, apply them!

www.historyofemotions.org.au

Proportions – in search of a practical theory

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

It’s well-known that in music from around the year 1600, changes of metre are associated with Proportional notation. But how does this work in practice?

Proportions are like gear wheels – whilst the Tactus turns at a steady, slow pace (about one beat per second, as we will see), Proportional changes create fast notes: three times as fast, six times as fast, one and half times as fast. But how does the original notation show us how to select the correct gear?

George Houle’s Meter in Music 1600-1800 (Indiana, 1987) brings together evidence from many primary sources. The 17th century is a period of change, and there are differences between different decades, different countries. There are also contradictions between different writers within the same period and country. Part of the difficulty is that musicians were trying to reconcile contemporary usage with older authorities.

Nowadays, there is considerable debate about proportions amongst musicologists, with Roger Bowers (Emeritus Professor of Music at Cambridge) leading the arguments for a very conservative (almost ‘medieval’) interpretation of Monteverdi’s proportional notation. In Bowers’ view, Monteverdi’s “time-signatures” give detailed information which can be decoded to reveal the intended proportion, applying rules that go back at least into the previous century.

Given the lack of consensus, most musicologists would agree that we do not have a complete understanding of proportions today. But I suggest that the situation is comparable to that of high-energy physics. We do not have a complete understanding, a Grand Unified Theory that brings together quantum mechanics and general relativity, uniting the various fundamental forces. But we do have a good idea of what such a theory would look like.

Grand Unified Theory

In this post, I’ll suggest what a practical understanding of Proportions should look like, and propose some tests that you can use to examine your theories. And yes, I’ll set out my own theory and explain why, with great respect, I disagree with Professor Bowers. That disagreement probably reflects the difference between my practical approach and his theoretical viewpoint, a difference that we see also in period sources.

But, just as with basso continuo, Proportions are not only theory, they are crucially necessary for practical music-making. So let’s begin our search for a ‘practical theory’.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

I suggest that a practical theory of proportions should satisfy certain principles.

Proportions should be consistent, so that the same input produces the same result in whatever circumstances.

Of course, there are limits: for one composer, or for a certain period/place, perhaps as narrow as “within this one piece”. But even that most limited version of the Consistency principle is broken in many modern editions and performances (e.g. Monteverdi Vespers or Orfeo).

Proportions should be unambiguous, so that different people can reach the same answer.

Remember that most music circa 1600 was performed from part-books (not score), without conductor, and with minimal (if any) rehearsal. Each performer had to reach their own decision about each proportional change, and would not know what other parts were doing, until they heard the result.

Proportions should be simple, so that performers can reach an instantaneous decision

Since most music circa 1600 had minimal (if any) rehearsal, sight-reading performers should be able to turn a page, see a proportional change, and make an instantaneous decision. This is a comparable situation to continuo-playing, where performers similarly have to make instantaneous decisions of which harmony to play.

Proportions should be consistent with dance-types

Monteverdi’s balli, including the ballo and moresca within Orfeo, provide good examples. It’s worth remembering that Monteverdi recommended just 30 minutes of rehearsal for the Ballo di Tirsi & Clori. It’s a difficult piece, as he admits – most pieces would not have even this much rehearsal, whatever proportional challenges they might contain.

Proportions should be consistent with Tactus

Here musicologists have additional information, not taken into account by many of today’s performers. There is a very strong historical argument for assuming a consistent Tactus, around one beat per second, throughout a large-scale work, and indeed, across the entire repertoire in this period. The model is the pendulum swing, the limit of precision is human memory. This Tactus beat corresponds to a minim in C time. (Read more about Tactus here.)

Proportions should be consistent with the affetto of the text.

Such large-scale pieces as Monteverdi’s Vespers and Orfeo are good testing-grounds for any theory, since they provide a large number of cases, in full score, partial score, and part-books. In particular, the Magnificat from the Vespers has one set of proportional signs in the voice partbooks and a different set in the basso continuo book – obviously the result has to match between the two sets of notations. This hard case can test many a promising theory to destruction! There are many Proportional changes to consider in the Sonata, including one very hard case of black notation, discussed by Bowers here (and yes, once again I have to disagree. I’ll present my arguments in a later post).

The large-scale madrigals Altri canti di Marte and Altri canti d’Amor also provide challenging examples to consider.

One warning: be aware of the notation that creates triple-metre rhythms under a C time-signature, as in the first aria of Orfeo Act II: Ecco pur a voi ritorno (see below for the original notation). The minims here go at the same speed as in the preceding madrigal, Ecco Orfeo.

And another warning: even supposedly reputable editions sometimes change original time-signatures without informing you. If you are not looking at the original notation, you are liable to be misled.

So at this point, I encourage you to consider your own theory of Proportions, and to test it against the principles and examples I’ve listed.

ALK’s PRACTICAL THEORY

For anyone interested, here is my personal theory, which I have applied successfully across a wide selection of repertoire around the year 1600. You are welcome to use this, all the more so if you are polite enough to credit me for it in your writings or program notes. And if you disagree, I’d love to hear your counter-arguments, and to examine your theory in the light of my principles and test-pieces!

In common time, minims go with the Tactus, approx minim = 60.

In triple metre under a common time sign, there is no proportion, no change of speed, crotchet = crotchet. Dotted minim works out as ~ 40, but you still count the regular tactus of minim = 60, even though the word-accents will not always coincide with the Tactus count. (This is rather like modern dancers, who count a Waltz in eight: ONE two three FOUR five six SEVEN eight one TWO three four… etc)

For proportional changes, you don’t have to worry about the time-signatures, which I consider to be obsolete remnants of an ancient system, now lost, and soon (i.e. in the second half of the 17th century) to be abandoned altogether. (Here is the crux of my disagreement with Bowers, who interprets proportional signs according to medieval principles). My approach is simple: just look at the note-values, whether in white or black notation.

In triple time,

minims represent Tripla, three minims to the Tactus, i.e. dotted semibreve = 60.

semibreves represent Sesquialtera, three semibreves to two Tactus, i.e. dotted breve = 30. Notice that dotted semibreve = 60 again, and minims have the same value as in tripla.

semi-minims (looking like crotchets) go very quickly, six to the Tactus. The default grouping is three groups of two, i.e. Tripla. Under a 6/4 mark, or with 3 marked over small groups of notes, the grouping becomes two groups of three (i.e. compound duple). Notice that minims, dotted minims, semibreves and dotted semibreves have consistent in any triple time notation.

This simple consistency ensures that different voices fit together in all situations, as well as allowing quick and unambiguous solving of proportion puzzles.

BLACK NOTATION

In triple time, semibreves can be white or black. In certain circumstances (beyond the scope of this post, but the wiki article on mensural notation here is a good introduction), white semibreves get “perfected” to contain three minims. What we regard today as the dot of prolongation (a dotted semibreve is worth three minims), the 17th century saw as the dot of perfection. Black semibreves do not get perfected.

Similarly, breves can be white or black.

In practice, black notation either shows a switch to triple proportion (easily noticeable, since in common time all semibreves and breves are white) or draws attention to a syncopation within triple proportion. (e.g. the rhythm short-long, rather than the customary long-short).

Minims can also be white or black. The problem is that a black minim (triple proportion, black notation) looks identical to a crotchet (common time). It also looks like a semi-minim (triple proportion, white notation). A black semi-minim (triple proportion, black notation) looks like a quaver (common time). We also see white semi-minims (triple proportion, white notation), which look strange to us, like white quavers.

But don’t worry too much. In most situations, it’s abundantly clear whether or not you are in triple proportion, and if the notation is generally white or black.

Changes in colouration draw attention to changes of metre and/or of short-time rhythm.

THE THEORY IN PRACTICE

We end up with these five possible speeds of triple time (three different proportions, and two non-proportional notations):

Very Slow & Steady: Three beats in 3 seconds (not proportional, minims under common-time sign)

Slow proportion: three beats in 2 seconds (semibreves in proportional notation, Sesquialtera)

Medium Steady: Three beats in 1.5 seconds, crotchets under duple-time sign

Medium proportion: three beats in 1 second (minims in proportional notation, Tripla)

In principle, there could be a fast steady notation, with groups of three quavers under common-time sign (non-proportional). These would go at three beats in three-quarters of a second. But I can’t think of an example from this period. Can anyone provide an example?

Fast proportion: compound duple, counting six beats in 1 second This example from “Altri canti d’amor” sets the text “le battaglie audaci” (‘daring battles’, hence the very fast declamation)

In any triple proportion, a semibreve lasts about two-thirds of a second. A minim lasts one-third of a second. A semi-minim lasts one-sixth of a second.

But whilst the notation, the metre and the short-term rhythms change, the Tactus remains constant.

Whatever the notation says, you maintain the same Tactus beat (around MM 60, i.e. one beat per second). But before a change into Sesquialtera, it helps to focus only on the Down-stroke of the Tactus (i.e. thinking semibreve = 30 rather than minim = 60), so that you can mentally subdivide the Down-strokes into three as the change to slow triple proportion takes effect.

Some period sources discuss this in terms of Tactus (semibreve = 30) and Semitactus (minim = 60), but most use Tactus interchangeably for the full Down-Up, or just for the Down stroke.

Of course, you need to avoid anachronistic rallentando as you approach a proportional change. Don’t use the brake and accelerator, just use the gears!

In a later post, I’ll discuss the application of this theory to balli in operas, in particular Anima e Corpo and Orfeo.

But one last thought… My theory is that the “time signatures” don’t matter, you can see everything from the note values. Roger Bowers believes the opposite is true, i.e. that the vital information is conveyed by Proportional signs. So what about the moresca that ends Monteverdi’s Orfeo? It is printed under a “time signature” of C. But clearly it must be proportional notation, you couldn’t continue in common time with minim = 60.

Obviously, this was a printer’s error, and the proportional signs were omitted. But – and here’s my point – if this error were highly significant (as for Professor Bowers’ theory, it would be), surely the printers would have restored the missing signs, perhaps during the print run (other errors were fixed along the way, as can be seen by comparing different copies of the 1609 edition), and certainly for the second edition (which fixes many errors, and introduces many new readings, some erroneous) of 1615.

But they didn’t fix it, not in 1609, not in 1615. I suggest that no-one (then or now) is confused by the lack of proportional signs, and there is broad agreement today that this lively dance goes at three minims to the Tactus. QED.

PS Don’t forget to add this last killer example to the challenge tests for your own alternative theory!

Competing Theories of Historical Performance Practice?

Please join me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lawrenceking.9 and visit our website www.TheHarpConsort.com .

Inexplicable Dumb-Shows & Noise? Languages of Emotion in Early Opera

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

These representations in music, a spectacle truly of princes and moreover most pleasing to all, as that in which is united every noble delight, such as the invention and disposition of the tale;

sententiousness, style, sweetness of rhyme;

art of music, concertos of voices and instruments, exquisiteness of song;

grace of dance and of gesture.

Landi “La Morte d’Orfeo” (1619) First Staged Production i Modern Times International Baroque Opera Studio (2013)

This paper was presented at a recent Collaboratory “Languages of Emotion”, organised by the Australian Research Council’s Centre for the History of Emotions. More about CHE here.

The earliest-surviving opera, Cavalieri’s Anima & Corpo (1600) has just notched up three seasons in repertoire at the Theatre Natalya Satz, Moscow (the original home of Peter and the Wolf) in Georgy Isaakian’s modern yet highly sympathetic production, which won the 2013 Golden Mask, Russia’s most prestigious music-theatre award. Over the years, new singers, musicians and continuo-players, even the Theatre’s brand-new Chorus have joined the show, so we have been constantly in rehearsal, continuously developing the performance.

Georgy Isaakian: Three “texts” to be delivered

In a rehearsal break last year, Georgy commented to me that in opera, the libretto, the music and the stage production are each “texts” for the performers to deliver, each of which tells its own story. In the context of modern opera direction he is absolutely right. And we might paraphrase his comment for the purposes of this discussion, to claim that Text, Music and Action are each “languages of emotion”, “languages of performance”.

But that 17th-century theatre director, Il Corago, would fundamentally disagree with the second part of Georgy’s remark, that Text, Music and Action each tell their own story. In the 17th-century productions, the same story was told simultaneously in all the languages of performance. Rather than any particular detail of historical accuracy, I would argue that it is this unity, this telling of the same story, that should today distinguish a historical production from a ‘modern’ one, and it is that simultaneity which will make a historical production a good one, in the sense of being effective for the audience.

The imitation … must take into consideration only the present, not the past or the future, and consequently must emphasise the word, not the sense of the phrase.

Monteverdi Letter to Striggio 7 May 1627

Thus all the languages of emotion are aligned and synchronised in performance, like the co-ordinated pulse of a laser-beam, to move the passions muovere gli affetti of the audience. As composer, Monteverdi is praised for

adapting in such a way the musical notes to the words and to the passions that he who sings must laugh, weep, grow angry and grow pitying, and do all the rest that they command, with the listener no less led to the same impulse in the variety and force of the same pertubations.

Anon Argomento to Le Nozze d’Enea in Lavinia (c1640) cited in Tim Carter Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre

Note that it is the words, or perhaps even more fundamentally, the passions, that ‘command’. And notice the connection between ‘variety’ i.e. dramatic contrast and the emotional ‘force’ of the performance. In the Preface to Anima e Corpo, Cavalieri is particularly insistent on such variety, a crucial difference to the 19^th-century approach of intensifying one particular emotion until the cathartic moment is reached.

It’s obvious that in good poetry, each particular image should create an appropriate metaphor for the underlying message. But the sound of the words too should be appropriate, as Dante observed as he descended into the last circle of Hell:

If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous,

As were appropriate to the dismal hole

Down upon which thrust all the other rocks,

I would press out the juice of my conception

More fully; but because I have them not,

Not without fear I bring myself to speak;

Actually, Dante manages quite well to find suitably “rough and stridulous”sounds, such as occe and uco:

S’io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce,

come si converrebbe al tristo buco

sovra ‘l qual pontan tutte l’altre rocce,

io premerei di mio concetto il suco

più pienamente; ma perch’io non l’abbo,

non sanza tema a dicer mi conduco;

Dante Inferno 32

Even in instrumental music, Agazzari requires instruments to imitate the emotion and semblance of words, imitatione dell’affetto e semiglianza delle parole. (More on Agazzari’s continuo treatise Del Sonare sopra’l basso (1607) here).

Meanwhile, a singer’s acting also has to match the emotions:

When she speaks of war she will have to imitate war; when of peace, peace; when of death, death; and so forth. And since the transformations take place in the shortest possible time, and the imitations as well – then whoever has to play this leading role, which moves us to laughter and to compassion, must be a woman capable of leaving aside all other imitations except the immediate one, which the word she utters will suggest to her.

Monteverdi, ibid.

As Shakespeare has Hamlet tell the Players, “Suit the Action to the Word”. And this will be matched in the music:

[She must] be fearful and bold by turns, mastering completely her own gestures without fear or timidity, because I am aiming to have lively imitations of the music, gestures, and tempi represented behind the scene; … the shifts from vigorous, noisy harmonies to soft, sweet ones will take place quickly, so that the words will stand out very well.

Monteverdi, Letter to Striggio 10 July 1627

Text, Music and Action must be united:

They make the steps and gestures/actions in the way that the speech expresses, nothing more nor less, observing these diligently in the timing, hits and steps, & the instrumentalists [observe] the aggressive and soft sounds; and the Text [observes] the words in time, pronounced in a manner that the three actions [fight, music, text] come to meet each other in a unified representation.

Monteverdi, Preface to Combattimento 1636

All of this proceeds from the Rhetorical principle of Decorum, that every element should be suitable, appropriate to its rhetorical purpose. As we already observed, the starting point is the emotions embedded in the Text. In a 17^th-century opera house, there is a single artistic director, Il Corago, who has “universal command” over every aspect of production, but is ‘subject to the text’. The anonymous c1630 book Il Corago therefore devotes considerable attention to the requirements for a good libretto. Advising how to put on a good music-drama, Cavalieri’s Preface to Anima e Corpo similarly concentrates on the libretto, and we saw how Monteverdi carefully negotiates with his librettist, Striggio, in order to get a libretto that will give him the dramatic and musical opportunities he needs.

With the madrigalism, or ‘word-painting’ so typical of this period, composers ‘paint’ the emotion of a particular word, synchronising the musical effect with the text. This was one of the toughest challenges, as we translated the libretto of Anima e Corpo into Russian: we had to preserve the word-order of the original Italian, so that Cavalieri’s musical effects would still coincide with the correct word.

I’ve written here and here about the importance of rhythm in 17^th-century music. As Caccini writes in Le Nuove Musiche (1601), music consists of “Text and Rhythm, with Sound last of all.” But rhythm is also crucial for period gesture.

The thunderbolts of Demosthenes would not have such force but for the rhythm with which they are whirled and sped upon their way.

Quintilian, citing Cicero

The motions of the body also have their own appropriate rhythms

Quintilian

Demonsthenes, Cicero, Quintilian

This rhythm is synchronised also with the words, and with the emotions themselves:

The movement of the hand should begin and end with the thought that is expressed. Otherwise the gesture will anticipate or lag behind the voice, both of which produce an unpleasing effect.

Quintilian

Action, Music and Text are not only unified, but also synchronised.

Every gesture and every step should fall on the beat of the sound [i.e. music] and of the song [i.e. text].

Marco da Gagliano Preface to Dafne 1608

LANGUAGES OF EMOTION?

It’s tempting to go along with the idea that music is a language, “nature’s voice, through all the moving wood of creatures understood, the universal tongue to none of all its race unknown”, as Purcell’s St Cecilia Ode (1692) proclaims. Music does have a kind of grammar, with certain Parallels of fifths and octaves to be avoided, Cadences that function rather like punctuation, and Ordered Chunking of Preparation-Dissonance-Resolution that could be compared to sentence-order of subject-verb-object. We can discern some meaning in the emotional contrasts of music, and particularly in the word-painting of 17^th-century madrigalism, but we cannot translate precisely between music and text in the way we can between English and Italian.

In 1644, John Bulwer makes extravagant claims that gesture is a language. “This naturall language of the Hand” does have a “significant varietie of important motions” but it’s hard to find here any grammar, unless one counts the rule of avoiding the left hand (or at least favouring the right), in all but highly negative gestures. In L’arte dei Cenni (1616) Giovanni Bonifaccio similarly claims that the “visible speech” or “mute eloquence” of gestures (here not limited to the hand, but extended to the whole body from head to toe, not omitting “gestures of the genitalia” – you’ll have to read it for yourselves!) is a universal language.

The meanings of gesture are supposedly clear and universal, but in practice gestures are often incomprehensible – you might not recognise the gesture that “explains more subtill things” or another that “inculcates Logick, as with a horn” – or local. The street-theatre players with whom I appeared in a medieval show on tour around Greece found out the hard way that the friendly thumbs-up gesture with which they saluted the audience has a local meaning corresponding to the middle finger in other countries, or the V-sign in England.

Even in their own period, Bulwer’s and Bonifaccio’s claims obviously fail. Yet there are so many close parallels in their work, that we might consider accepting the idea of a ‘universal language’, if we confine their ‘universe’ to the narrower domain of the Western European, Christian, educated, middle and upper social classes of their readership, who shared a common background of Biblical and Classical literature, whether they were English or Italian. After all, any language is only a language for those that understand it, otherwise it is just meaningless noise. And a meaningful word in one language may be just noise, or have a different, even an obscene meaning, in another. My favourite modern example is the Vauxhall car, the Nova, which sold very badly in Spain. In Spanish, no va, means “it doesn’t go”.

So, since we have seen that Music and Gesture are closely aligned with performed Texts, in particular with the Emotions of those Texts, let’s side-step any debate over “what is a language” and look at each of these ‘languages of performance” to see what they can say about Emotions in early opera. Can we ‘translate’ between them, perhaps not in quite the same way we can translate between English and Italian, but with sufficient precision to extract emotional meaning? As many CHE researchers have commented, Emotions studies are necessarily “messy”, and inherently holistic. We have already seen that Text, Music and Action are complexly interconnected. So performers must try to isolate particular elements that they can work on in rehearsal, and prioritise amongst all the possible options.

TEXT

From the Text performers can extract factual information: Io la Musica son, I am Music. Da mio Permesso amato a voi ne vengo, I come to you from Permesso. Incliti eroi, sangue gentil de regi, the audience is honoured as famous heroes, noble blood of kings.
The Text also gives cues for specific emotions: tranquillo calm, turbato agitated, nobil ira righteous anger, amore love, infiammar fired up, gelati menti frozen minds– all these in one four-line stanza.
Text also shows the character of the speaker: “with this golden harp I’m accustomed to charm mortal ears, but with the heavenly lyre I can even involve your souls.” All these examples come from the Prologue to Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607).

Information, Emotion and Character are the Rhetorical divisions of Logos, Pathos and Ethos, which correspond also to three 17^th-century performance options.

A text may be read appropriately, but without personal involvement, as a modern newsreader would adopt a suitable tone for a serious report, whilst preserving a proper professional detachment.
A performer can invest more emotion in the delivery, in the manner of a fine poetry-reading, but without identifying themselves with the subject of the piece. So a woman might read a poem in the male voice, or a vocal ensemble perform an amorous madrigal.
But around 1600 in both Italy and England, there is a fascination with the genere rappresentativo, with embodying a character in dramatic music, with what Shakespeare’s contemporaries called Personation.

But in whichever mode the performer communicates a Text, the movement of the passions that concerns us is from the text to the audience. It is not about performers expressing their own emotions – this is an essential difference from the romantic tradition – even if performers, like audiences, get swept along by the passions that are constantly on the move.

MUSIC

Music as Caccini tells us is Text, Rhythm and Sound. This sets the first priority as

Articulation, the clear enunciation of the words by a singer who should

seek to chisel out the syllables so as to make the words well understood, and this is always the chief aim of the singer in every occasion of song, especially in reciting. And be persuaded that the true delight arises from the understanding of the words.

Marco da Gagliano, Preface to Dafne 1608

For an instrumentalist, Articulation means creating speech-like patterning by means of keyboard, harp or lute fingering; bowing on violins or viols; and tonguing on wind instruments. This creates Agazzari’s ‘semblance of words’, giving opportunity for the passions of the words to be imitated too.

2. Rhythm in this period is structured around regular Tactus and mathematically precise Proportions, inside which the accented and unaccented syllables of renaissance poetry can be pronounced Long and Short. (These syllables are often referred to as Good/Bad, but Caccini and others refer to them as Long/Short. In spoken Italian, Good syllables are usually lengthened anyway).

3. Period writers discuss the Sound of early opera as Harmony, in particular processes of dissonance and resolution, and Modulazione, the imitation of speech contours as the ‘melody’ for recitatives. In the Preface to Euridice, composer, harpist and tenor Jacopo Peri praises the emotional effectiveness of these speech-like elements, as opposed to the old-fashioned style of beautiful singing and elaborate ornamentation, as championed by soprano Vittoria Archilei.

Vibrato – the topic that dominates many discussions today – is simply not on the agenda of serious aesthetic debate: there are simple rules for applying it, just as there are for other types of ornament. At the end of a long Good note. That’s it, basta, The End.

Plain note (with messa da voce),
Waived note (with messa da voice and late-arriving vibrato)
Trillo (with accelerating trill and diminuendo)
Roger North (1695)
cited in Greta Moens-Hanen
Das Vibrato in der Musick des Barock

ACTION

We could similarly classify Action, perhaps from small to large, from

what Bonifaccio calls cenni – outward and visible signs of inner passion, i.e. gestures, facial expressions, small movements;
large-scale postures and movements of the whole body – positioning on stage, walking onto stage or around the stage, dance, sword-fighting, costumes; and
stage sets, backdrops, lighting.

We’ve just presented Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, in a version strongly influenced by CHE research, and as the first-ever performance in Russia, and this brought to my attention that 17^th-century religious liturgy also includes Action of all these classes.

RHETORIC

Passions are Nature’s never-failing Rhetorick, and the only Orators that can master our Affections.

The English Theophrastus (1708)

As languages of performance, Text, Music and Action are governed by the canons of Rhetoric. As we consider the communication from performer to audience we are concerned not so much with Invention (even if performers in this period often improvised) and Arrangement, rather with Style, Memory and especially Delivery. From the perspective of a History of Emotions, we are less concerned with what is said, than with how you say it. After all, the meaning of bare words is only the tip of the emotional iceberg: “I just asked her what time dinner would be ready, and she flew into a rage”.

Simply moving the word accent, fundamentally changes the subtext:

“What are you doing?” [neutral] “What are you doing?” [you, not me] “What are you doing?” [don’t just think about it] “What are you doing?” [disbelief] “What are you doing?” [exasperation]. A musical setting might underline one or other choice. Thus in the opening speech of Act I of Orfeo, “in questo lieto e fortunato giorno“, Monteverdi underlines the emotional words ‘happy’ and ‘lucky’, rather than the neutral fact of ‘this day’.

Gesture also underlines particular words and clarifies meaning. Alan Boegehold’s When a Gesture was expected provides “a selection of examples from Archaic and Classical Greek literature” of when a gap in the Text would have been filled by a Gesture. In seicento opera, Gesture is expected on many often-encountered words, especially on Deictics, pointing words. The frequent use of the most powerful deictics – Here! Now! Me! – in early opera points to the frequent and emotionally powerful use of Gesture, and suggests immediacy.

DEICTICS – pointing words “Here!” “Now!” “Me!”
Pointing gestures:
To show, indicates, refers to self

Other Gestures that might seem optional or unfamiliar to us would fit almost automatically into a 17^th-century hand. “To be, or not to be, that’s the question” – the famous Words suit the Actions (less well-known today) of Bulwer’s “distinguish between contraries” and “pay attention”. To any gentleman of Shakespeare’s time, these movements are utterly familiar to the hand as a rapier swordsman’s disengage from quarta (Mercutio’s punto reverso) to to seconda, followed by an attack in terza (Mercutio’s stoccata) – “a hit, a very papable hit”!

Traditionally, historical musicology has used Text to explain the Music set to it. Insights gleaned from such studies have informed today’s performers. In contrast, it has been widely assumed that we don’t know enough to attempt to reconstruct period Action, and/or that the attempt would be meaningless for a modern audience. I strongly disagree. We have lots of information, albeit as a series of stills. But study of period dance, and more recently of historical swordsmanship, can help us “join the dots”. But the difficulty is that putting your hand in the right place is not sufficient. Good gesture requires exquisite timing and powerful intention: otherwise the audience accurately read the performer’s real intention “to put my hand into the right place”. What is often missing from modern productions with ‘baroque gesture’ is the rich network of interconnections between gesture, music and text: audiences are therefore left unmoved by the emotions that should flow through those networked connections. What matters is not what you do with your hand, it’s what your hand “means to say”.

LANGUAGES OF EMOTIONS IN RECITATIVE

One particular result of my ‘Text, Rhythm, Action’ investigation within CHE’s Performance program has been to suggest a re-defining of Recitative, the musica recitativa of the first operas, not as ‘the boring bit in between the nice tunes’ but according to its literal meaning in Italian as “acted music”. (Read more here) In this new dramatic style, an innovation around the year 1600, the composer uses musical notation to recreate the dramatic timing, rhythmic patterns and pitch contours of theatrical speech. Peri explains how to do this:

I know similarly that in our speaking some tones are pitched in such a way that they could create music, and in the course of narration many other [tones] pass by, which are not pitched, until one returns to another [tone] suitable for movement of a new harmony …. And I made the Bass … according to the emotions, and kept it unmoving through the dissonances and through the correct consonances, until the tone of the speaker running through various notes, arrives at one which in ordinary speaking would be pitched, [this] opens the way to a new harmony;

Peri Preface to Euridice (1600)

This is just what we see in Monteverdi’s setting of in questo lieto e fortunato giorno.

Il Corago emphasises that singers should vary their tone-colour, so that recitative sounds just like the speech of a fine actor, which – as Shakespeare agrees – was learnt by rote: “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you”. Cavalieri and Il Corago emphasise variations in speech patterns, variations of pitch and syllabic lengths, just as we see in Cavalieri’s, Peri’s and Monteverdi’s notation of recitative. In Gibbons’ Cries of London, too, variety of pitch and syllable lengths in the persuasive calls of street sellers is contrasted with the dreary monotone of that 17^th-century news-announcer, the Town Crier. Shakespeare similarly contrasts his ideal of declamation, speech rhythms that dance “trippingly on the tongue” – with the Town Cryer’s habit to ‘mouth it’.

But within this essentially aural tradition of acting, there were strong conventions allowing less freedom than one might expect in the delivery of a particular line:

In recitative… there is but one proper way of discoursing and giving the accents.

Samuel Pepys

Jacopo Peri, Samuel Pepys & the Town Crier

Perhaps you remember James Alexander Gordon reading the classified football results “The best way to do it is to get the inflection right. If Arsenal have lost, I’m sorry for them. If Manchester have won, I’m happy for them. So it would go something like this: Arsenal 1, Manchester United 2. And so on, and so forth.” (See a video interview with JAG here).

If baroque actors declaimed particular lines in a consistent manner, we should therefore expect corresponding consistency in 17^th-century musical settings, and as part of my new CHE investigation into musical imagery, “Enargeia: Visions in Performance”, Katerina Antonenko and I have already begun to find supporting evidence.

For example, Monteverdi sets the word “Signor” with the same upward inflection, a rising minor third, as pronounced both by Poppea and (in Orfeo) by Proserpina. We can easily imagine that this follows a conventional speech pattern of courtly etiquette: “My Lord?” Signor?

It’s well known that the word sospiro (a sigh) is almost invariably associated with a short rest in the music. Less well known is that in 17^th-century Italian, such short silences are not called pausa (this is the term for longer silences) but sospiro. Still less well-known is that 17^th-century lovers sighed on the in-breath, Ah! not Ha! And Katerina has noticed that many sighs in Orfeo are associated with the same pitch, around low F#.

When for you (Ah!) I sighed
You (Ah!) sighed
crying (Ah!) and sighing
After a deep sigh (Ah!) she expired in my arms

Note the link between inspiring the breath of emotion as Orfeo sighs for love, and expiring the breath of life, as Euridice dies. This breath is Pneuma, the renaissance spirit of passion. It is very likely that 17th-century actors (and singers) sighed (on the in-breath) audibly at such moments, though this is seldom done today.

EXCLAMATIONS: EMOTIONS WITHOUT TEXT

Exclamations – Ah! Oh! – are pure emotion, essentially without text. Around the year 1600, the exclamatione was a novel vocal technique, following the fashion for more emotional delivery. Caccini gives three ways to start a phrase: intonazione, messa da voce and most up to date and emotional, exclamatione.

Consistently, Monteverdi sets exclamatione to medium-high notes, D or E.

Tancredi in Combattimento
Messaggiera in Orfeo

Orfeo (2 examples) Euridice & Messaggiera in "Orfeo" Orfeo (3 examples) ALL from "Orfeo"

Orfeo (2 examples)
Euridice & Messaggiera
Orfeo (3 examples)
ALL from Orfeo

Another exclamation, ohime! frequently combines medium high pitch, around D, with a falling inflection, and dissonant harmony.

And Orfeo’s delivery of the word lasso (Alas, wretched me!) is similar to the Messagiera’s pronunciation of the feminine equivalent lassa.

Note that when several exclamations follow one another, the pitch of the note follows the rules of rhetoric, either building upwards, or (for three iterations) high, low, higher. The rhythm is syncopated, off the beat, showing that something is wrong. A bass-note from the continuo defines that beat…

Ohi… BASS-NOTE … me!

which might be reinforced by the actor changing his stance, even stamping his foot on that beat.

And pitch contour and rhythm combine perfectly with the appropriate gesture, throwing out the hand high, above the head for Ohi… and then returning it to the chest (perhaps even striking the chest audibly) at …me!

As Il Corago tells us, pitch contours communicate emotion very effectively. This is true even without words – think of mother/baby talk, or the BBC children’s series the Clangers, in which characters ‘spoke’ only with inflected whistling sounds, performed by leading comedic actors of the day, on swanee-whistles. (If you don’t know the Clangers, you can hear them here).

Quintilian agrees:

The second essential is variety of tone, and it is in this tone that delivery really consists… Take as an example the opening of Cicero’s magnificent speech… Is it not clear that the orator has to change his tone almost at every stop?

GESTURE: EMOTIONS WITHOUT WORDS

Bulwer and Bonifaccio consider gestures to be wordless expressions of emotion:

Gesture, whereby the body, instructed by Nature, can emphatically vent, and communicate a thought, and in the propriety of its utterance expresse the silent agitations of the mind

Bulwer

And in Elizabethan times there was a fashion for silent pantomime, or Dumb Show. [See Dieter Mehl The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (1965)]. Some of Bulwer’s gestures can be confusingly similar:

"Munero" I give money to you "Demonstro non habere" I show I have nothing

“Munero” I give money
“Demonstro non habere” I show I have nothing

And Elizabethan Dumb Shows were, if not inexplicable, certainly hard to understand. So after the pantomime, the actors might re-enter, whilst someone explains what it all had meant:

Sir John, once more bid your dumb-shows come in,

That, as they pass, I may explain them all.

Munday’s Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington

So also in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where after watching the Dumb Show, Ophelia asks: “What means this, my Lord”, and when the Prologue enters, she asks again: “Will he tell us what this show meant?”

SINFONIA: PICTURES WITHOUT TEXT

In Recitative, music imitates the declamatory rhythms and pitch-contours of dramatic speech. And in all kinds of music, composers used the technique of madrigalism to ‘paint the words’, so that the music creates a detailed sound-picture of the text. Ut pictura musica – music is like a picture. This extends even to instrumental music, labelled sinfonia or ritornello in early operas. Just as with spoken declamation, there were strong conventions at work.

One of the first conferences presented by CHE was on the Power of Music, which was a highly significant topic around the year 1600. Many of the early operas explore the Orpheus myth, in which the protagonist has the power to influence nature with his music (birds, animals even trees come to listen, stones weep), to persuade Hell, even to conquer death. This cosmic, super-natural, super-human power is related to the three-fold identity of Music as

Musica Mondana – the Harmony of the Spheres, the perfect music created by the slow dance of the stars and planets
Musica Humana – the harmonious nature of the human body
Musica Instrumentalis – actual music, played or sung

Many philosophical concepts are depicted in musical ‘paintings’ of the Power of Music. Orpheus’ lyre (or his father, Apollo’s) is represented by an ensemble of bowed strings. The stability of the cosmos is reflected in root-position chords and simple harmonies – corresponding to the fundamental mathematical ratios that structure music itself, and were believed to describe the circular orbits of heavenly bodies. The ‘universal string’ is tuned of course to Gamut, low G, the lowest note of renaissance music theory (even if in actual practice, lower notes were frequently used). The benevolence of heaven is heard in the gentler sounds of the Soft Hexachord, of B-molle, i.e. G minor. The perfect movement of the heavens is a slow, formal dance. And ascending and descending scales represent in music the mathematical relationships between one Sphere and the next.

Two of the most famous soundscapes of the Power of Music, Malvezzi’s Sinfonia representing the Music of the Spheres in the first of the Florentine Intermedi (1589), and Monteverdi’s Sinfonia representing the power of Orpheus’ lyre to persuade Hell (the same Sinfonia is heard again in the last Act, when Apollo descends from heaven to rescue Orfeo from despair), show all these features:

string ensemble
root-position chords
G with a ‘key-signature’ of Bb
pavan rhythm
scales moving through the texture

UNITING THE LANGUAGES OF EMOTION

In spite of the possibilities of ambiguity in Dumb Shows, in Peindre et dire les passions (2007) Rouillé has convincingly used Gesture to identify the precise words, and hence the emotions, depicted in baroque paintings. She shows consistency of baroque Gesture between John Bulwer’s English diagrams and French paintings, e.g. the gesture for “Pay attention!”We can see similar matches between Bulwer’s English gestures and Bonifaccio’s Italian cenni, e.g. the sign to an audience for “Silence, I intend to speak”.

Musicologist Louise Stein has drawn attention to a strongly consistent dramatic style in Spanish theatrical laments. The heroine (such laments are always given to a female role, even though male roles were also acted by female actors) exclaiming on high notes, calls upon all nature to rescue her, and dividing the entire cosmos into related sets:

Sovereign spheres, powerful gods; heaven, sun, moon, stars; rivers, streams, seas; mountains, peaks, cliffs; trees, flowers, plants; birds, fish and beasts; sympathise with me, have mercy on me… air, water, fire and earth!

Calderón/Hidalgo Celos aun del aire matan (1660)

We are currently working on a Russian translation of Celos for a production in Moscow, and with recent CHE findings fresh in my mind, I suddenly realised one more reason why this model of lament would be emotionally effective on stage – the conventions call for actors to point at what they speak about. So the actress exclaims and laments with many thrilling high notes and dramatic changes of register as the music ‘paints the words’, and simultaneously her gestures are equally powerful: hands sometimes raised high above the head, then swept dramatically downwards. Spanish Laments represent visual as well as musical exclamations.

The only practical difficulty is that a few lines earlier, the goddess Diana (who is about to execute our heroine) has commanded: “Tie her to a tree trunk, with her hands behind her”. This would prevent the actress from gesturing at all. But as the Lament begins, the command has not yet been executed, as the Text reveals: “Tie her up, what are you waiting for”. As any theatre producer knows, the spoken (or sung) text provides many details of Stage Directions.

This convention, that actors point at what they speak about, extends to poetic imagery which might be realised in stage scenery, or simply imagined by the actor. “To the hills and the vales, to the rocks and the mountains, to the musical groves, and the cool shady fountains” sing the Chorus in Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas. Singers would point out each feature, whether it is actually visible in the theatre or not, so that the audience ‘see it’, either in the ‘reality’ represented on stage or imagined, in the mind’s eye. In many early operas, poetic imagery in the libretto matches the real-life surroundings of the theatre, so that actors point outwards towards what they imagine, and the audience already knows, is actually there, outside in the real world.

BACK & FORTH

If we accept that Action and Music have at least some characteristics of language, then meaning must flow not only from, but also back to, the performed Text. ‘Suit the Action to the Word, and the Word to the Action.’ Meaning also flows to and fro between Music and Action, Music and Text.

Historically Informed performers usually work from the Text and seek to move the passions of their audiences. At first glance, problematising the language of historical Emotions threatens to saw off the branch we are sitting on. If we question the meanings of historical words of emotion, how can we understand the music attached to those word? But given the reversible flow of meaning between Text and Performance, perhaps Music and Action can contribute to the linguistic debate.

FROM MUSIC BACK TO TEXT AND PASSION

In early music, well-understood historical principles of harmony (dissonance/resolution) and melody (hard/soft hexachords) allow us to assess objectively the intensity and character of an affective turn of phrase. If such an accento can be consistently linked to a passionate Word, we can reach a better understanding of that Word’s Emotional significance.

B natural, any sharps, and harmonies on the sharp side are associated with the Hard Hexachord, and therefore with hard emotions – dry Humours, Melancholic or Choleric. B flat, any flats, and harmonies on the flat side are associated with the Soft Hexachord, and therefore with soft emotions – wet Humours, Sanguine or Phlegmatic. So in his (Italian) Lament, Orfeo alternates between sadness in soft G minor and anger in hard A major. The most acute contrast of opposites comes at the words “on my troubles have pity”, moving from hard G# on mal to soft Bb on pietate, with an unsettling chromatic twist that matches the turn of the emotional screw.

Investigation of musical emotions in standard repertoire has sometimes focussed on moments of particular intensity, thrilling, spine-chilling moments, the ‘tingle factor’. We have informally collected audience reports of such moments in early opera, and many of them are linked to a particular turn of harmony towards the soft hexachord. This corresponds to an emotional truism, that it’s not the hardest moments that make you cry, but the moment when amidst the toughness, you are offered a hint of sympathy. It’s the easing of the emotional pressure, the change of affetto, the move to the wet Humour that allows the tears to flow.

Particularly strong examples we’ve observed in 36 performances so far of Anima & Corpo are Anima’s last words (moving from hard G major to soft C minor), and the chorus at Corpo’s final exit (the body ages and dies, even though the soul is eternal), which moves even further from hard A major to the same soft C minor. This moment regularly reduces audiences and many of the company too to tears.

canti la lingua e le risponda il core

At this moment of emotion, the meaning of the words (shown here in the Russian edition and original Italian) is highly significant: “the tongue sings, and the heart responds”.

Another tear-jerker is the final scene of Monteverdi’s Combattimento: Clorinda’s dying words move from hard E major to soft D minor. “Heaven opens, I go… -that’s the moment – in peace”.

Heaven opens, I go
[in peace]

At the conclusion of the CHE-supported performance in London there was a very extended silence, broken only by the sound of an audience member crying.

Musicologists have a good understanding of the relative intensity of particular harmonies, according to 17^th-century conventions. So as we look at the harmonies a composer assigns to particular words of the text, we have a reliable impression of the emotional intensity, moment by moment, word by word. Analysing the harmonies of Cesare Morelli’s setting for Samuel Pepys of To be or not to be on a simple scale of 1-5 allows us to chart the emotional intensity during this famous speech. Morelli’s setting is thought to have been inspired by the declamation of Thomas Betterton.

Whilst it would be unrealistic to expect a perfect mapping of meaning, or even the kind of translations we can make between say Italian and English ,the transforming ‘languages’ of historically informed Performance might help shape a modern understanding of the Emotional Meaning of historical Words.

In future investigations, it would be interesting to study contrafacta, where a new text is set to existing music. What are the emotional parallels between the original and new texts? How do these ‘emotional synonyms’ translate the music’s language of emotion?

FROM GESTURE BACK TO PASSION

Gesture is both cause and result of emotion, creating a spiral of intensity.

These motions of the body cannot be done, unlesse the inward motions of the mind precede,

the same thing again being made externally visible,

that interiour invisible which caused them is increased,

and by this the affection of the heart, which preceded as the cause before the effect…. doth increase.

Bulwer

Gestures are preceded by emotion, and make that emotion outwardly visible. But that physical movement then increases the inward emotion. Modern scientific studies support the traditional belief of actors that Emotions work not only from inside outwards, from the performer’s intention to exterior display, but also ‘from outside inwards’. Paul Ekman has shown that accurately reproducing the changes in facial musculature associated with a particular emotion calls up that very emotion, without any other stimulus. If the hypothesis of ‘mirror neurons’ is believed, then here is a mechanism that might explains one mode by which audiences themselves feel the same emotions portrayed by the performers they are watching.

At a recent workshop on the Feldenkrais Method, I witnessed a very telling demonstration that physical processes (in this case, the precise position of one particular neck vertebra), vocal production and emotion are closely intertwined. After the therapist had showed the singer how to reposition her head over her spine, she sang again the song she had sung moments before: the sound was utterly different. The singer was shocked, re-started, and then burst into tears. The voice was resonating freely, the emotions were flowing freely. And an audience member commented that the phrase sung after physical repositioning also communicated more emotion to listeners.

All of this fits perfectly with the renaissance theory of Pneuma, which links the mysterious Spirit of Passion (communicating emotion from performer to audience) with a flow of mystic energy in the body (rather like Oriental Chi) that promotes proprioception and relaxed movement. The same Pneuma is also associated with the divine energy of creation, the breath of life itself. The three-fold nature of Pneuma parallels the three kinds of Music.

We might therefore experiment with using historically informed Action, suited to a period Word, to re-create physical sensations, to re-embody and (in some way) ‘experience’ a historical Emotion.

DICTIONARIES OF LANGUAGES OF EMOTION

This brings me to the idea of Emotional Dictionaries, charts of Meanings between one discipline to another, an idea that regularly emerges in CHE discussions. For Historically Informed Performance, I think we need to compile dictionaries that function in the opposite direction to the historical sources: not from Gesture to Word (as Bulwer and Bonifaccio inform us), but from Word, or better still, from Passion to Gesture. This is the approach I’ve taken in my work-in-progress guide to Historical Action, which we continue to test and develop in CHE performance projects around the word.

Cross-connection dictionaries would be interesting too: from Gesture to Harmony, from Scenery to Heaxchord, and (for instrumentalists) from Music to Words. As you will remember, high D- low F# means “Ohime!”.

CONCLUSION

Below the tip of the Text iceberg lies the emotional subtext – this is what really concerns performers and – even more importantly – their audiences. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. It’s not the notated words and notes, but how you deliver them, with posture, gesture, and with variety of vocal colour. It’s not about where you put your hand, it’s what you mean to say with your gesture. It’s not about the sound, it’s about the pictures. It’s not about singing at the audience, but about telling them a story.

It’s about uniting and synchronising all the languages of emotion, putting Text and Music into Action. As Bulwer writes, quoting Quintilian quoting Cicero quoting Demosthenes:

What are the three secrets of great delivery?

Action, Action, Action!

Please join me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lawrenceking.9 and visit our website www.TheHarpConsort.com .

The Right Time for a New Vision: Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

Claudio Monteverdi’s most famous work, the 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, evokes all the glory of the Italian seicento, combining plainchant melodies, exquisite polyphony and the drama of the newly invented operatic style. This Vespers has been linked with the cathedrals of St Peter, Rome and St Mark, Venice, but the inclusion of the Gonzaga family fanfare (also featured in Monteverdi’s 1607 opera, Orfeo) confirms a stronger link to the church of St Barbara, Mantua.

The publication of the Vespers in 1610 places this collection of religious music in the context of the first operas – Cavalieri’s Anima & Corpo, Peri’s and Caccini’s Euridice all in the year 1600 – and Shakespeare’s plays (e.g. Hamlet c1600); of Caccini’s secular songs Le Nuove Musiche and Viadana’s sacred Concerti Ecclesiastici, both 1602); of Monteverdi’s own operas Orfeo (1607) and Arianna (1608); of Agazzari’s continuo treatise Di suonare sopra’l basso (1607); and of the publications of Orfeo (1609) and of Capo Ferro’s famous swordfighting treatise, Gran Simulacro (1610).

The title-page of the collection refers to some Sacred Concertos ‘suitable for the Chapel or a Princely chamber’. Musicologists debate whether these pieces are substitutes for the plainchant Antiphons specified in the liturgy of Vespers, or independent, non-liturgical additions. Either way, they alternate with the Vespers Psalms to create a fascinatingly varied publication, or indeed a modern concert. The size of the ensemble and the complexity of the music increases from one piece to the next. Meanwhile, the term ‘sacred concertos’ recalls Viadana’s publication for voices and continuo, suggesting that Viadana’s technical advice might be applied also to Monteverdi’s music. That advice emphasises the subtlety and delicacy of the ‘sacred concerto’ style, to be performed with solo voices. Viadana also gives detailed instructions for realising the continuo.

The ‘sacred concerti’ most obviously demonstrate Monteverdi’s modern style, his secunda prattica, but even if the psalm settings are more conservative, with plainchant cantus fermus throughout and exquisite polyphony, they too are full of variety. Each Psalm exploits different techniques. Dixit Dominus weaves the plainchant into rich prima prattica polyphony, and also into fashionable soprano or tenor duets. Choral recitation on a single note might be heard as highly conservative and derived from liturgical chant, but it also suggests the most up-to-date styles of operatic recitative and dramatic madrigals, for example the choral recitation in Monteverdi’s Sfogava con le stelle. Instrumental ritornelli add another fashionable touch to this Psalm.

Laudate Pueri explicitly calls for eight solo voices (not a large choir), which Monteverdi combines in many ways: as a single ensemble, as two four-voice choirs, and in pairs of equal voices. Laetatus is unified by its catchy walking-bass, another modern touch. Nisi Dominus and Lauda Jerusalem might appear similar, both for double choir, but are quite different. The block contrasts of Nisi remind us of the first metaphor of the text, God as the heavenly builder, whereas in Lauda the alternations of the two choirs come faster and faster, until the voices overlap.

It is not known if the 1610 Vespers was ever performed in the composer’s lifetime – perhaps its constituent parts were assembled only as an attractive package for publication – but it has become a world-wide baroque hit, a tour-de-force of early baroque vocal, instrumental and ensemble skills, and an icon of seicento style.

The original print has 8 part-books. Additional parts (voices or instruments) are included here and there amongst those books, but the combined parts are carefully layed out, with page-turns synchronised so that the books could well have been used in actual performance. If they were, then the combination of voices, or voice and instrument, in a single book, gives interesting information about the spatial positioning of the performers. It is noticeable that Monteverdi does not write Echos into a different partbook, even when an additional performer and an additional partbook are available: there is no change of performer or partbook when the music changes from a duet of equals to echo effects.

The Bassus Generalis partbook has a short score, since the entire performance would be guided by the continuo (as Agazzari tells us in 1607). But otherwise, no original score exists, only the individual partbooks. And there are significant differences between the Bassus Generalis and the other partbooks.

Deus in adjutorium meum

On 1st June 2014, the Cathedral of St Peter & Paul, Moscow, was filled to capacity for a landmark concert, the first-ever performance in Russia of the Monteverdi Vespers, which I had the honour to direct. Amongst many musicians and early music fans in the audience, distinguished guests included prominent Russian opera directors & international conductors, leading arts journalists, representatives of several Christian confessions, even the great-grandson of Giuseppe Verdi. The concert was the flagship event of the festival La Renaissance (artistic director Ivan Velikanov), produced by the Moscow Conservatoire and supported by the French Cultural Institute. The performance was recorded and broadcast by Russia’s largest classical music station, Radio Orphee.

Vocal and instrumental soloists were brought together from Moscow, St Petersburg, Ukraine, Lithuania, Colombia, France, Germany and UK. Many of the team have worked together with me in previous baroque projects in Russia, including the first baroque opera – Cavalieri’s Anima e Corpo (1600), soon to begin its fourth season in repertoire at the Natalya Satz Theatre Moscow in Georgy Isaakian’s Golden Mask-winning staging; the first staged production in modern times of Stefano Landi’s La Morte d’Orfeo (1619) – with the International Baroque Opera Studio and Il Corago at the St Petersburg Philharmonia last December; and the compilation I made of Shakespeare’s Musicke at Festival La Renaissance 2013.

Even though there are many fine modern performing editions available, I made a new edition for this project. The new edition re-examines some questions, but does not make too many startling new choices. Rather, it presents all the information- including the variants in the Bassus Generalis book – at a glance, so that performers can make their own choices. Continuo players had (my transcription of) the original Bassus Generalis partbook to play from. At first they found this disconcerting, since it is not a complete score, but we gradually discovered the benefits of not having a full score. The original notation encourages continuo-players to play simply, structurally, and to lead in steady rhythm, rather than trying to follow the singers.

Some singers also experimented with singing from facsimile of the original partbooks – they are clearly printed, and have very few mistakes, apart from the usual miscounting of rests. (That is to say, the original printers miscounted the rests, not our singers!).

The Moscow concert reflected state-of-the-art Historically Informed Performance practice. Solo voices (rather than a large choir) offered the listeners direct, personal communication of the text, whilst still creating impressively sonorous tuttis in the clear but generous acoustic of the Cathedral (a large building, but on the scale of St Barbara, Mantua rather than the enormous spaces of St Marks Venice or St Peter’s Rome). The chiavetti notation of the final Psalm and Magnificat was respected, so that these movements were transposed downwards to the standard renaissance vocal line-up, with high tenors (not falsettists) on the Altus parts. Cornetts, sackbuts and strings played only where called for by Monteverdi, creating dramatic contrasts by their appearances, and a more intimate atmosphere when they were silent. As the original part-books require, the famous Echos were sung and played from the same positions as the principal solos, with echo-performers turning away from the listeners to allow the acoustic to create a natural echo effect (rather than trekking off to some remote location).

And of course, we used quarter-comma meantone: there was certainly no thought of introducing the anachronism of the modern early music scene’s “one size fits all” Vallotti temperament (from the year 1779).

Most significant, and immediately visible to the audience, was the absence of a conductor. The entire performance was guided (just as period sources describe) by the instrumentalists of the continuo section (organ, regal, theorbos and harps), with each singer taking individual responsibility for maintaining the steady beat of the baroque “Tactus”.

It is well known that music was not conducted in this period, but nevertheless even specialist Early Music ensembles often introduce the gross anachronism of a modern conductor.

The project also benefitted from the latest research findings of my Text, Rhythm, Action!investigations for the Performance program of the Australian Research Council’s Centre for the History of Emotions. In Monteverdi’s Rhythm, the steady beat of the Tactus represents the perfect clock of the cosmos, the Music of the heavenly Spheres. Just a couple of decades after Galileo’s discovery of the pendulum effect, seicento music itself is still the most precise clock available on earth, with duple and triple metres alternating in regular Proportions. The Tactus is a rhythmic heartbeat, maintained throughout the whole work (except for certain movements where Monteverdi specifically indicates a more relaxed speed). With no anachronistic conductor, there are also no arbitrary changes of tempo. As a result, the composer’s notated contrasts of activity are more effective. (See Rhythm: What Really Counts here and also The Times they are a-changin’ here )

All this ancient philosophy was put to practical use in rehearsals, with a lot of time spent working on Text and Rhythm. With no conductor at the front, all the singers took on the role of “conductor”, beating time in seventeenth-century style, with a slow, constant down-up movement of the hand, like a pendulum moving for one second in each direction. When the music changes into triple metre, the fast Proportion of Tripla is counted down-two-three, up-two-three. But the Proportion of Sesquialtera counts a slow three against the two movements, down-up, of the hand. This slow Proportion is less familiar to today’s baroque musicians, but it occurs much more often in the Vespers than in secular works.

In another rehearsal exercise, we asked the singers to use their hands to show the accented syllable of each Latin word, the so-called Good syllable. Sometimes these word-accents coincide with the Tactus, sometimes they are syncopated against it. This exercise helped bring out the lively rhythms and syncopations of Monteverdi’s writing. Using the hand to show the Tactus kept the ensemble together and made the music safe: showing the Good syllables emphasised contrasts and made the music interesting.

In a development of the Good syllable exercise, we varied the hand-movement to make it long and sustained or quicker, depending on the length of the Good note. This helps to bring out the contrasts in Monteverdi’s notated note-lengths, and the long, sustained accents create a thrilling, emotionally committed sound, especially when one particular voice has long accents where others do not.

But the highest priority in early baroque music is the Text. As a madrigalist and opera composer, Monteverdi responds passionately to the poetic imagery and dramatic Action of the Vespers texts. His music for the Magnificat verse Quia respexit sets the Annunciation scene with high wind instruments (played ‘with as much force as possible’) representing the Spirit of God. Pairs of quiet instruments suggest the dialogue between the Angel Gabriel (sackbut) and Mary (flute), before the whole ensemble plays again for omnes generationes: ‘all generations shall call me blessed’.

In rehearsal, we discussed in detail the meaning of each verse, and what significance the texts would have for seventeenth-century listeners. Although this was not a theatre project, we did explore in rehearsal the baroque gestures that would be used for similar words on stage, as a way to experience the emotional force of particular words. Even in performance, hand gestures were used, but with appropriate decorum, suited to liturgical music in the sacred space of the church. But the most useful rehearsal exercise was to combine a hand-gesture on the Good syllable (this optimises the sound of the text) with simultaneous concentration on the meaning of that particular word (this synchronises the emotions of the text).

Rehearsing the text in this way revealed to us how Monteverdi cast particular voices in certain roles, just as one would find in a baroque opera. A duet for two tenors is a favourite seicento device, and obviously suits a text about two angels, Duo Seraphim. When the second part of the text begins Tres sunt (there are three), the appearance of a third tenor transforms the musical texture into something rich and strange, appropriate not only to the simple number three, but even to the divine mystery of the Trinity which the text continues to expound.

In the Psalm, Laudate Pueri, a tenor duet at the words excelsus super omnes gentes is again a conventional choice. But here the plainchant cantus firmus is given, rather unusually, to high soprano, vividly illustrating the text “in the highest heaven, above all the people”. In that same Psalm, a bass duet is a most unusual choice – there are very few duets for basses in the entire repertoire. But here, and again in the Magnificat, this combination (deep sounds, and the super-human effect of two powerful voices at once) represents God himself: Quis sicut Dominus Deus noster? (Who is like the Lord our God?) and sanctum nomen eius (Holy is his name).

In the verse et de stercore erigens pauperem , low voices paint the picture of the mire out of which God (slow triple metre) lifts up (a rising sequence) the poor man (a solo tenor). Just as in some of his polyphonic madrigals, here Monteverdi seems to cast the solo tenor as if personifying the protagonist’s role. So this singer is featured again,reciting on a single note (is this plainchant or operatic recitative?) amidst the eight-voice tutti at the words ut collocet eum cum principibus populi sui – placing him amidst the princes of God’s people. It is surely the deliberate touch of an opera composer to cast this tenor as the poor man, so that the audience – or liturgically, the congregation – sees this same man literally placed amongst the princes as he sings his solo amidst the choir, clergy, cardinals (princes of the church) and other nobility in the courtly chapel or chamber.

Just as earthly music was considered to be an imitation of the perfect, heavenly Music of the Spheres, so actual dancing was an earthly imitation of the divine dance of the stars in their orbits. This explains why there are so many slow, Sesquialtera Proportions in the Vespers, whereas Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo more often has fast Tripla. Of course, the slower movement of Sesquilatera sounds better in a church acoustic, whereas fast Tripla sounds good in a less resonant theatre. But more significantly, the sacred spheres were thought to rotate more slowly than the sublunary sphere of the earth, so a slow triple Proportion was the ideal musical emblem for the divine Trinity.

Fast, we might even say ‘secular’, Tripla dance-rhythms in the Vespers paint texts that call for divine assistance down here, on earth: Domine ad adjuvandum me festina (O Lord, make haste to help us) and Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis (Holy Mary, pray for us). And another Tripla depicts the speed of arrows in the hand of a giant sicut sagittae in manu potentis.

It is this passion for visual detail, even in a musical setting, that – according to renaissance philosophy and period medical science – conveys the emotions from the text to the listeners, in order to move their passions, muovere gli affetti. This intense, emotional visualisation by composers, performers and audiences is the focus of one of my current research strands: Enargeia: Visions in Performance.

During the project, we explored in great detail questions of Proportions and Frescobaldi’s advice for Driving the Time – guidare il tempo. These discussions helped shaped the arguments in a later blog post on the Frescobaldi Rules here, and I’ll return to the subject in future postings.

For the coming season, further Early Music productions are planned in Moscow, St Petersburg and around the country: the first Russian performance of the earliest Spanish opera, Calderón and Hidalgo’s Celos aun del aire matan (1660); the production team Il Corago with the medieval Ludus Danielis; and another historical production from the International Baroque Opera Studio.

Please join me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lawrenceking.9 and visit our website www.TheHarpConsort.com .

Opera, orchestra, vocal & ensemble director and early harpist, Andrew Lawrence-King is director of The Harp Consort and of Il Corago. From 2011-2015 he was Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions.

How to Practise

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

As with any training, practise little and often. 15 minutes, 3 times a week is better than 3 hours once a week.

3 minutes concentrated, disciplined work will advance you further than 3 hours of unfocussed playing.

Unfoccused practising is not only wasted time, it creates bad habits which are hard to get out of later.

If you are not in the mood for hard-working practice, play through your music for pleasure, but without stopping!

THERE ARE 2 GOOD WAYS TO PRACTISE:

1. Get it right

Play several times through a small section (as small as it needs to be, to be sure of getting it right), at a slow tempo (as slow as it needs to be, to be sure of getting it right).

Get it right! Get it right 10 times consecutively.

Every time you get it right, you create a good memory, a good habit. (And every time you get it wrong, you create a bad memory, a wrong habit – so get it right!) Go slow enough, stay focussed and concentrated so that you get it right.

Get it right!

2. Don’t stop

Play through a medium or long section without stopping.

Don’t stop! Even if you make a mistake, don’t stop.

By continuing, you develop your feeling for steady rhythm, and for a smooth flowing performance. (But if you stop, you develop the habit of stopping, which is hard to break, so don’t stop!). Stay focussed and concentrated so that you don’t stop.

Don’t stop!

THERE IS ONE, MUCH-USED, BAD WAY TO PRACTISE:

Start off playing, make a mistake, and stop temporarily

Now correct the note you are on, and continue until the next mistake

You have just rehearsed “making an error and stopping”. Next time, you are very likely to make the same error, and stop again. You have not properly fixed the error, or practised getting it right.

You have practised “getting it wrong”.

And your practice will probably be “successful”: you will get it wrong next time too!

SUMMARY

Either “Get it Right” or “Don’t Stop”.

Know which kind of practice you are doing.

Don’t fool yourself – bad practice does not help you. Actually, it sets you back. Because practice does not make perfect… practice makes permanent. Bad practice makes it permanently bad!

Practice makes Permanent

Please join me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lawrenceking.9 and visit our website www.TheHarpConsort.com .

The times they are a-changin’

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

We think that water has no taste, because we were born with it in our mouths.

Most performers of art-music, even many Early Music specialists, believe that the subtle manipulation of rhythm for expressive effect – so-called tempo rubato – is an essential element of fundamental musicianship. To play in strict time is derided as mechanical, the work of “a poor block-head who hammers away in strict time without … artistic expression”. Teachers are advised that “a Metronome is apt to kill the finer Time-sense implied by Rubato”. “Variations of Tempo, the ritardando, accelerando, and tempo rubato, are all legitimate aids demanded by Expression. […] use is determined by sound judgment and correct musicianly taste”. Control of Rubato lies with the conductor, or in chamber music, with the soloist. It is expected that the accompaniment will yield to the melody.

But is Rubato really an Absolute, a fundamental quality of good musicianship that has never changed over the years? Scientific scepticism would encourage us to doubt this: after all, historical pitch standards, temperaments, tempi, and musical notation itself all show significant differences from current mainstream practice. Why should we expect Rubato alone not to have changed over the years?

Happily, solid evidence is available, from detailed analysis of historical gramophone recordings by elite performers throughout the 20th century. Much of our present knowledge comes from the wonderfully-named CHARM project in the UK (the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, lots of materials available here), and Dorottya Fabian’s investigations into rhythm perception, expressiveness and emotion in music, and the Early Music movement & Bach performance, at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

[By the way, the current assumption that expressiveness is connected with Rubato is so strong, that I have suggested that researchers avoid the word ‘expressive’ in their questionnaires to listeners, since it will probably elicit responses about Rubato. A more searching set of questions might ask if the performance showed ‘signs of emotions’, whether the listener had detected the use of particular techniques (e.g. vibrato, rubato, tonal or dynamic contrasts) and (most tellingly) whether listeners themselves felt they had been touched by those emotions?]

Commenting on some results from the CHARM investigations at a recent conference of the Australian Centre for the History of Emotions, Nicholas Cook, 1684 Professor of Music at Cambridge University, described a significant change in the use of Rubato around the middle of the 20th century. Before the Second World War, performers followed what Prof Cook calls the ‘tent-pole’ model: the tempo slows down as the music approaches the important point, and speeds up again afterwards, just as the canvas of a tent rises to the point where the pole supports it, and then falls away again.

In the post-War period, a different model emerges, which I have christened the ‘tube-train’. Each phrase begins slowly, accelerates to the middle, and then slows again towards the end. The tracks for London’s Underground Railway, the ‘Tube’, descend out of each station, and ascend again to the next, to help trains accelerate away and slow down again.

There are some famous international Early Music ensembles that apply this Tube-Train Rubato to renaissance and baroque music. I speculate that this approach might be particularly favoured by directors whose formative years of high-level music education were in the 1950s.

Early Music ensembles with younger directors show other models of Rubato. The “Go-To” model, much in vogue amongst baroque orchestras in Germany and elsewhere is almost the opposite of the ‘Tent Pole’: the tempo accelerates towards the important point and dwells on this one note somewhat. This approach is associated with directorial comments and group discussion about ‘where does this phrase go to?’.

Another approach, which I’ve seen at work in renaissance polyphony, is what I call the “Smoothie”. Notated contrasts in note-values are reduced: long notes are cut short, short notes are taken more slowly. Or if the composer writes notes of equal length, the music generally slows down (from moderate tempo) or speeds up (from slow tempo, because the long notes are shortened). The Smoothie is sometimes the result of laziness in observing the written rhythms, or of sloppy bowing from string-players. But at higher levels, it is associated with performers who make sound-quality, fine tone-production, a high priority. Such performers elongate short notes, to make sure that even the little notes have the best possible sound quality.

Other genres of music favour different approaches. Most fans would agree that the emotional power of Heavy Rock is not lessened by that music’s strong rhythm in strict tempo. Mainstream jazz allows a degree of rhythmic flexibility (swing) within a steady underlying beat. In this style, soloists may float freely over a regular accompaniment in the rhythm section.

Such ‘cool rhythm’ might remind us of 19th-century descriptions of Chopin’s Rubato as “timeless melody over a timed bass”, which I shorten to TLM/TB. (I avoid terms like Chopinesque, since TLM/TB clearly pre-dates Chopin). In his book Stolen Time: The History of Rubato (Oxford 1996 details here) Richard Hudson “identifies and traces the development of two main types of rubato: an earlier one in which note values in a melody are altered while the accompaniment keeps strict time, and a later, more familiar, one in which the tempo of the entire musical substance fluctuates.”

Hudson’s book very usefully charts the recent history of Rubato, though his terminology of “Early Rubato” and “Late Rubato” has been criticised. I don’t claim that my own terminology is perfect, but to clarify my intentions, I will use the term ‘TLM/TB’ for melodic freedom controlled by a regular bass, keeping ‘Tempo Rubato’ for entirely Stolen Time. Notice Hudson’s characterisation of the ‘fluctuation of the entire musical substance’ in Tempo Rubato as ‘familiar’.

But what are the artistic and emotional results of this ‘fluctuation’ of musical Time? Assuming it is done deliberately and skillfully, what is its purpose?

Tempo rubato softens the sharpness of lines, blunts the structural angles… idealises the rhythm…. It converts energy into languor, crispness into elasticity, steadiness into capriciousness.

Wait a moment! Shouldn’t this ring alarm-bells for Early Music performers? Surely baroque music should have clear lines, strong structures, energy and crispness!! Why should we want to soften, blunt, make rubbery, unsteady and capricious a Bach fugue, a Lully overture or a Palestrina mass??? Perhaps things might have been different, before the year 1800…

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley The Go-Between (1953)

At the very least, the blind assumption that Rubato is an unchanging, fundamental absolute is demonstrably unsound. Since we now know that our ‘familiar’ Tempo Rubato has a history of change across the 19th and 20th centuries, we should begin to enquire what approaches were taken to Tempo and Rhythm before 1800. But I’ll come to this Another Time.

The three quotations in the first paragraph are from Constantin von Sternberg Tempo Rubato and other essays (c. 1920) available here; Tobias Matthay Musical interpretation: its laws and principles, and their application in teaching and performing (c. 1913) details here ; and W.E. Haslam Style in Singig (1911) here. The remarks that Tempo Rubato softens, blunts etc were made by Paderewski c. 1909, published here. All these are cited – together with the general opinions summarised by my first paragraph – in the Wikipedia article on Tempo Rubato here.

I present Wikipedia not as an academic authority, but as a reliable indication of the consensus view amongst its self-selecting editorial group. Wikipedia is also a powerful influence on students seeking basic information.

My claim is that Wikipedia’s presentation of Tempo Rubato, with its bundle of early-20th-century citations (most of them pre-World War I), not only demonstrates the consensus view, but shows that consensus to be lacking in historical perspective (there is no suggestion that use of Rubato may be a changeable element of Period Performance Practice) and somewhat closed-minded (Chopin’s use of TLM/TB, also heard in 20th-century jazz, is rejected, even ridiculed). Yet in ‘the free encyclopedia anyone can edit’ that consensus view remains unchallenged. The article has not changed significantly over the last three years (accessed March 2011 and February 2014). Elsewhere in Wikipedia, debates rage between standard repertoire musicians and Early Music specialists, articles are aggressively edited back and forth between opposing camps, and moderators are kept busy damping down the flame-wars.

But Tempo Rubato circa 1910 is accepted as a universal truth. No-one even cares enough to debate it, even though the arguments are fierce over a few Herz up and down in historical pitch, or even for a few cents this way or that in historical temperaments. Get the flavour from the FaceBook Anti-Vallotti page here.

All this supports my claim that most musicians, even many HIP specialists, consider Rubato to be an essential element of basic musicianship, in spite of clear evidence that it is a historical and cultural variable.

But I urge readers of this Blog NOT to go and edit Wiki’s Tempo Rubato. Let’s leave it there, as a gloriously fossilised dinosaur, and (more seriously) as an indicator of the consensus view, so that we can see if there is any change over the next three years!

Please join me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lawrenceking.9 and visit our website www.TheHarpConsort.com .

Annotated translation:

Jacopo Peri Preface to Euridice (Florence, 1600)

Conclusion

Share this:

Share this:

Re-assessing Le Nuove Musiche

Sprezzatura in the 16th century

Caccini’s Preface

Good Style

Passaggi

The Passionate style

Trillo & Gruppo

Three Sample Songs

SUMMARY

Share this:

TIME AS A NUMBER OF MOTION

What is the Quality of Time? How does it feel?

QUALITY TIME

TACTUS

TACTUS AS QUANTITY

TACTUS AS QUALITY

THE QUALITIES OF DANCES

THE QUALITY OF A PENDULUM

THE QUALITY OF BAROQUE TIME

Share this:

Theatrical Dances

Monteverdi’s Balletto (Orfeo)

Galliard?

Monteverdi’s balletto and Cavalieri’s ballo

Repeats?

Galliard tempi

Who were the dancers?

Consistency

Eliminating the impossible I – Sesquialtera

Eliminating the impossible II – Sextupla

What remains?

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: