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

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.

A Baroque History of Time: Stars, Hearts and Music

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

The past is a foreign country,

they do things differently there.

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

The past is a foreign country;

there is very little we can say about it until we have learned its language

and understood its assumptions.

Michael Howard The Lessons of History (1991)

One of the challenges of Historically Informed Performance is to try to catch a glimpse of our own assumptions, to notice where something seems so ‘obvious’ and ‘absolute’ that we don’t even question it. The worst decisions in Early Music are the decisions that we don’t even realise we are making, because we don’t even notice there is a question to be addressed. But as soon as we become aware of an assumption, we can look for evidence of whether the same assumption held good in the past, or if attitudes might have changed with the centuries.

In this post, I’m exploring the subject of musical Rhythm by examining period concepts of Time: historical belief-systems at both cosmic and human levels; the grand philosophy and naive assumptions that underpin pragmatic performance decisions; the changing views of science; and the various practices of artists as they performed their passions. The assumption that I’m challenging is that we today understand Time itself in the same way that Monteverdi and Shakespeare did.

The question I’m posing to Renaissance Man, in order to understand his ways of thought, is the same question we can pose to ourselves, in order reveal the assumptions of our own age:

What is Time?

Modern Time

Now, it’s almost a century since the London newspaper, the Times, declared that Newton’s ideas had been ‘overthrown’ by Einstein (7th November, 1919). One might say that this ‘Revolution in Science’ which led to a ‘New Theory of the Universe’ began with a paper written by an official in the French Bureau of Longitude, mathematician Henri Poincaré. In The Measure of Time (1898), he asked two deep questions:

1. Is it meaningful to say that one second today is equal to one second tomorrow?

2. Is it meaningful to say that two events which are separated in space occurred at the same time?

A century later, the answers are: (1) we still don’t know, and (2) No. That resounding “No” came from the work of Albert Einstein, who in his annus mirabilis of 1905 published four papers, on the Photoelectric Effect (establishing the Quantum nature of light), on Brownian Motion (addressing the methodology of statistical physics that Quantum Theory would come to rely on), on Special Relativity (overthrowing Newton’s concept of Absolute Time) and on Matter-Energy Equivalence (formulating that most famous equation, E=mc²). He also submitted his PhD thesis.

Perhaps relativistic effects helped him get so much done in just one year!

The predicted and observed effects of all this new science still seem ‘paradoxical’ to most of us. Schrodinger’s Cat is neither alive nor dead, until the act of observation collapses the quantum dynamical waveform one way or another. There’s no certain answer, only statistical Probability.

Even Einstein himself didn’t want to believe that ‘God plays dice with the universe’ like that. Whatever the science told him, Einstein’s own assumptions were inevitably conditioned by the thinking of previous generations. Before the 20th century, religious beliefs and traditional assumptions led most people to expect Cosmic Power to control the everyday scale. Like Einstein, many of us find it hard to grasp that tiny particles might dictate the fate of the universe.

20th-century Science presents many more paradoxes. Heisenberg’s Principle means that we are forced to balance knowledge with uncertainty in pairs of values, for example mass and momentum. The more precisely we establish Time, the less we can know about Energy. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicts that a man who travels to Mars and back will return slightly younger than his twin brother, who waits for him on Earth.

Time itself might be reversed, if the arrow of entropy changes, in some future contracting state of the universe. Meanwhile, Quantum effects in the brain allow our nervous system to respond to stimuli measurably before the stimulus is received. The mathematics of Quantum Theory predict the existence of Wormholes, opening up the possibility of travel through time. This raises the question of what might happen if you went back in time and killed your Grandfather, forestalling your own birth. The Bootstrap Paradox refers to creating something out of nothing by complex loops of time-travel, like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.

In Heinlein’s novel All you Zombies, kidnapping, love-affairs and gender-change surgery leave us with a time-travelling character who is his own mother, father, son, daughter, long-lost lover and kidnapper. Scientists are struggling too: Quantum Theory and Relativity do not mesh well, so that a Grand Unified Theory of Life, the Universe and Everything is currently out of reach.

But for most of us, the paradoxes of Einstein’s science, let alone more recent findings, do not affect our daily lives. We find Relativity counter-intuitive, because we do not see it at work in the everyday world. For us, Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) works just fine. If I drop an apple it will hit the ground more or less when I expect. Our intuitive assumptions about Time are more than 300 years behind the cutting edge of scientific theory.

We are very comfortable with Newton’s concept of Absolute Time, with its one direction ‘like an ever-rolling stream’, Time that exists independent of any other quantities. We are very accustomed to measuring the accuracy of a clock, the movement of a star, or the beating of a heart, against the absolute scale of Newton’s Time. So accustomed are we, that as well as ignoring what we know from Stephen Hawking about post-Einsteinian Time, we also overlook the fact that Peri and Monteverdi did not know about Newton’s Time.

Early baroque musicians, around the year 1600, did not feel about Time the same way we do. They could not have had the same assumptions. Even after Newton’s 1687 publication, it would have taken some years for his ideas to gain acceptance amongst fellow-specialists, and many decades for those ideas to become part of the instinctive assumptions of the population at large.

Monteverdi’s Time

The Early Modern philosophy of Time was founded on Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle’s Physics characterises Time as

A Number of Motion in respect of Before and After

Time is only meaningful in the context of Motion or Stillness, of observable Change before/after.

In the year 1610, this was no mere philosophising: swordfighters bet their lives on it. Capo Ferro describes a swordfighting tempo as ‘measuring the Motion of my opponent by the Stillness of my sword’. Such a tempo could be long and slow, when the duellers were far apart and reluctant to come to close combat, or terrifyingly fast, as the sword-master parries and ripostes in a single lightning-strike of tempo, driving his rapier through his opponent’s left eye.

Capo Ferro Plate 7

Viggiani’s sword treatise specifically refers to Aristotle. Agrippa’s fighting manual shows the period theory of Light, beams that come from your eyes, as he demonstrates how to save your life with a timely turn, the scanso della vita.

Tasso, whose poetry Monteverdi set as the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, owned a copy of Agrippa’s book, and that music-drama is full of swordsmanship jargon: schivar (deceiving the blade), parar (parry), ritrarse (step back), destrezza (sword-skills).

Cavalieri’s musical morality play, Anima e Corpo (the earliest surviving ‘opera’, the first oratorio; Rome, 1600) presents Plato’s philosophy of Time. Past and Future are divided by the moving point of the Present, which is an instantaneous image of all Eternity. As Soul and Body battle against worldly temptations, this libretto too is full of swordsmanship jargon, but the first character to sing is Il Tempo, Old Father Time.

Cavalieri tells us that Time flies, does not last, wears us away, measures us, that Time is short. We are told to do good works – act with the hand, act with the heart –there is a clear parallel to an actor’s performance, linking baroque gestures and heartfelt emotions.

But 17^th-century texts use the word Time (in Italian, tempo) to translate from Greek two different words, conveying two distinct concepts. Kronos is Aristotle’s numbered Time of Before and After: kairos is a timely opportunity. In Rhetoric, kairos is when the time is ripe to press home logical arguments – I hope that as you read these words, there is kairos now.

For a swordfighter, tempo is not only motion and stillness, but also the moment of opportunity, the crucial instant in which you must strike to defend yourself and wound your opponent.

In the Christian New Testament, the Messiah comes in the fullness of time – at the moment of kairos. And the Apostle Paul frequently exhorts his followers to seize the chance of their own instant of kairos.

In life, in debate, in a fight, or on stage, kairos is the moment to act. The anonymous 16^th-century Bologna sword-master said that swordsmen need the same skills of timing as a fine singer: this gives an idea of the level of sharp rhythmic precision singers must have had back then. As one voice-student said to me ruefully of today’s early music singers: ‘we’d all be dead!’.

Since Aristotle links Time to Number and to motion in Space, the Renaissance recognised an intellectual hierarchy relating Arithmetic (the study of Number), Geometry (Number and Space) and Music (Number and Time). At the top of this hierarchy is Astronomy (Number, Time and Space), the study of the heavens. That lofty position is shared by Dancing and Sword-fighting, which (in contrast to today’s devaluing of ballet, let alone martial arts) outrank absolute music.

Both philosophically and practically, sword-fighting and renaissance dancing are related, and ballets of the stars are a 17^th-century cliché. In Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Nymphs ‘leave the mountains, leave the fountains’ to dance a ballo ‘even more beautiful than those danced to the moon on a dark night by the heavenly stars’. The first opera from the New World, Torrejón’s La púrpura de la rosa (Lima, Peru 1701) begins with Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, sighting a new planet.

So here are the Stars of my sub-title. For period musicians, swordsmen, even for baroque sailors, Time is a matter of Astronomy. Around 1600, it is defined by the stars and planets (on the largest, cosmic scale) and followed here on earth (on a smaller, human scale).

Time & Music

Continuing to examine the assumptions of the past, what about practical music-making? For Cavalieri, Peri and Monteverdi, what is Music? Again, period thought was based on ancient authorities, and there is a consistent view that differs from modern assumptions.

The most significant type of music was musica mondana, the Music of the Spheres, the perfect music (inaudible to human ears) created by the heavenly dance of the stars and planets. Musica humana is the harmonious nature of the human body, the divine image incarnate, the Word that was ‘in the beginning’ set to the soul-music of embodied Creation. Musica instrumentalis is what we mean by the word ‘Music’ today, the actual sounds we make with our voices and instruments.

These then are the three categories of my subtitle: music of the stars, of human hearts, and music as performed by 17^th-century musicians. The structure of the cosmos, the beating of the human heart and musical rhythm are also the interlinked ideas that illustrate the period concept of Time. They are interconnected in philosophical theory and also in practical use.

Slow Time (years, months, days and hours) is measured by Celestial movement. A brief moment is measured by the heartbeat, which is both a symbol and a practical measurement of musical rhythm.

Galileo discovered the pendulum effect in the late 16^th century, but the first pendulum clock was not built until the 1630s. In this period, the most accurate clocks could just about count the seconds. This begs the question, how did Galileo measure the pendulum effect?

The most accurate clock available to him was his own, human pulse. This was sufficiently reliable to establish the constancy of period, around 7 seconds, for a chandelier hung on a very long cable from the roof of Pisa cathedral.

But Galileo also did high-precision experiments to determine the acceleration due to gravity, which required split-second timing. How could he do this? Circa-1600 clocks were hopelessly imprecise. His pulse (about one per second, when relaxed) was better, but still insufficient for such high-precision work.

History of Science researcher Stillman Drake realised that the Galilei family’s expertise in music would have solved the problem. Musical rhythm provides a reliable way to divide a one-second pulse into eight equal parts: in period notation, this is the equivalent of dividing a minim (half note) into semiquavers (sixteenth notes).

Joakim Linde has created an online simulation that allows you to repeat Galileo’s experiment with gravity and music, here.

What we need to understand today, is that Galileo was using Music to measure Time. Music was more precise than the very best clocks of his period. Music had the regular, heavenly equality of measure, that Time itself did not yet possess, since Newton’s idea of absolute time had not yet been formulated.

Hierarchy of Time

There is a definite hierarchy in this philosophy, in this period Science of Time. Celestial Time is the ideal, imitated on earth. As we look up to the heavens, to the musical spheres, the highest sphere is the primum mobile. It is God’s hand that winds the Clock of the Cosmos. This is imitated on earth, in that musical rhythm is determined by a long, slow count; in that we divide up those slow, long notes into faster notes (by division, or diminution); in that these faster notes must fit inside the rhythm pre-determined by the slow count; and in that we divide up the slow count in various proportions, in precise, whole-number ratios.

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

warns Richard II.

Clocks had religious significance. Just as Protestants and Catholics argued about calendar reform, so musical rhythm is a moral imperative. As Dowland thunders in 1609 (translating Ornithoparcus from 1535) “above all things… “ (the language itself is hierarchical) …

Above all things, keep the equality of measure, lest you offend God himself!

To attempt to change Time (the modern practices of rubato, rallentando, accelerando; even the 19th-century concept that the performer can decide the tempo of a particular movement) is to risk the stability of the cosmos, to threaten your own bodily health.

When Phaeton seized the reins of Apollo’s sun-chariot, he could not control the movement of the sun through the heavens. He crashed and burned.

If your pulse stops, the music also dies.

The take-home message from all of this period Philosophy, or History of Science, is that Newton’s 1687 concept of Absolute Time did not apply around the year 1600. Time does not measure music, because there is no Absolute Scale of Time.

It’s the other way around: Music measures Time. Time is determined by divine, cosmic forces that we see also at work in the human body and in music itself.

This helps us understand what seem to be needlessly complicated statements about musical notation, like Carissimi’s here:

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.

Carissimi lacks the vocabulary and the very concept of Newton’s Absolute time, and he flounders as he tries to explain something we can today express more clearly, more simply.

The triple-metres all agree with regard to the quantity, the duration of musical note-values in absolute time [a semibreve lasts 0.66 seconds, a minim 0.33 seconds, etc].

This is easily understood [but it is different from 19th-century practice, where the performer can choose the speed of a piece of music].

In the slow or fast quality [how it feels to the listener] the triple-metres are utterly different [3/1 feels slow, 3/2 feels medium fast, 6/4 feels very fast].

‘What the Italians call tempo’ can mean Time itself, or the subjective feeling of how fast a piece of music is going. Carissimi has no vocabulary to separate these concepts, except for his idea of Absolute quantity and subjective quality.

The difficulty for Carissimi’s generation is that they do not have a concept, or a vocabulary for Absolute Time. Their best measure of Time is Music. So it’s extremely difficult for them to explain how different pieces of music can have consistent note-values, yet still produce such different subjective impressions of speed.

The French language is bit more helpful: Mouvement for a piece of music helps us appreciate that music can seem to ‘move’ faster or slower, whilst we measure time steadily. But in the 17th-century they still measure Time with Music (so one can’t establish an objective description of how music moves in time), and (looking back to Aristotle) Time itself needs movement (i.e. change) in order to be measured. Without Newton’s concept of Absolute Time, it is very difficult to talk about the subjective speed of music!

Towards the modern assumptions of Time

As the 17th century progresses, the idea of an Absolute measurement of Time emerges. Clocks become more accurate, and the clock itself becomes a metaphor of time, and of music.

Thus Playford can advise music students to learn rhythm by listening to the tick-tock of a clock. Musicians’ modifying words, such as tarde, velociter, adagio, presto, function like subtle adjustments to a clock, so that it ticks somewhat slower or faster. Similarly, Frescobaldi, Caccini and others allow the Tactus beat to go faster or slower according to the affetto, just as the human heart beats faster or slower under the influence of differing emotions. Gradually, music becomes a clock that can be adjusted by emotions to count Time faster or slower.

Nevertheless, this is still far removed from Newton’s concept of Absolute Time, and from our modern ideas that music can move freely whilst time itself is regular.

We need to think carefully, we need to understand the language and assumptions of the 17th century, before we rush to conclusions about rhythmic freedom. Rather than starting from the modern assumption of Absolute Time and musical rubato, we would do better to start from the period assumption that steady time is a religious imperative; that the heavens, our hearts and our music are inter-connected.

If the rhythm breaks, the cosmos will collapse!

If your heart stops, the music also dies.

www.historyofemotions.org.au

Flow 2014 – The Cambridge Talks

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

Csikszentmihalyi defined Flow, being ‘in the zone’, that ‘Zen feeling’, you’re relaxed, but wonderfully concentrated, quietly confident, feel calmly exhilarated at the challenge in front of you. [Read ALK’s introduction to Flow, Accessing Super-Creativity: May the Flow be with you! here.]

This posting summarises and comments on papers and discussions related to Flow at the recent CMPCP conference at Cambridge University. [More about the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice here.]

SELF-REGULATED PRACTICE PROCEDURES AND FLOW STATES

Marcus Araújó, who investigates Performance Studies and Psychology of Music & Education at the Department of Communication and Art at the University of Aveiro, is interested in Flow, the cognitive processes underlying performance and practice of music, musical expertise, and expert musicians’ preparation for performance.

Abstract

The aim of his study is to explore self-regulatory practice behaviours and Flow in highly-skilled musicians. A sample of 212 musicians answered a developed questionnaire about practice behaviours and Flow state. Results show that the skilled musicians were highly self-regulated. Most of the Flow characteristics were experienced whilst practising, but ‘action-awareness merging’ and ‘sense of control’ were less reported. Self-regulated behaviours, ‘metacognitive awareness’ and ‘self-efficacy’ were correlated with Flow dimensions, suggesting that these may contribute to the Flow experience whilst practising. ‘Goal setting’ negatively correlated with the ‘action-awareness merging’ dimension of Flow. No positive associations were found between the ‘action-awareness merging’ dimension and any or the self-regulated behaviours.

ALK summary

Marcus is looking at the relationship between Flow and efficient practising. In particular, he has devised a questionnaire to measure various aspects of musicians’ experience. He has taken well-agreed indicators of Flow (from Csikszentmihalyi and others):

a good balance between challenge/skills
clear goals
clear feedback
intense concentration
loss of self-consciousness
merging of action and awareness
sense of control and agency
losing track of the passing of time
a sense of deep satisfaction

Flow improves creativity and combats performance anxiety. But there is a lack of research on positive experiences whilst practising. This is why Marcus is looking at positive experiences, and at experiences during practising (as opposed to performance).

The experience of the ‘Merging of action and awareness’ is the Flow-indicator that is most beneficial for musicians.

Self-regulation and the optimal use of one’s own personal resources is the key to finding Flow and practising efficiently.

Marcus’ results show a negative correlation between Practice Organisation and Merging. Practice Organisation may inhibit Flow.

ALK comments

Marcus’ advance title was more ambitious “Entering into Flow-state through self-regulated behaviour: an explanatory study”. This is of course what we are all looking for, reliable ways to enter Flow that we can use for ourselves, that don’t require the presence of a teacher. I can understand that with his revised title, Marcus wanted to avoid claiming more than he could deliver, but his study is already on a good path towards identifying possible gateways into Flow. And he has also noticed along the way some potential blocks to be avoided.

The particular importance of Marcus’ work is that he is measuring experience. It is very useful to have data on, as well as descriptions of, Flow. Of course, there are limitations inherent in his methodology. Participants are reporting their own experiences, after the practice-session is over. There might perhaps be a tendency for self-reporting to be over-optimistic, but the strength of Marcus’ questionnaire is that it asks about many different aspects of experience. We don’t have to make any judgement about how successful or not these musicians were at entering Flow, rather (as Marcus has done) we can examine correlations between those different elements.

There might well be differences between how a practice-session feels whilst it is going on, and how one feels about it just afterwards – obviously, questionnaires cannot give real-time data on the on-going experience. Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi has already shown that the satisfaction associated with Flow is not felt during the process (which may require hard work, Csikszentmihalyi gives the example of rock-climbers making a difficult ascent), but afterwards, when one looks back on the completed task. And it seems to me that, since Flow is associated with an absence of self-consciousness, real-time testing carries a strong risk of Observer Effect (the process of measuring will change the activity that is being measured), even of disrupting Flow entirely. It is very difficult to devise real-time testing that would be ‘invisible’ to the participant.

Marcus is measuring subjective experience. This positions him somewhere in-between those of us who are investigating experience qualitatively (i.e. phenomenology) , and the ‘hard science’ approach of measuring objective variables. Such an in-between position might be particularly advantageous for establishing connections between subjective experience and more objective measurements from neuroscience and other disciplines.

Questionnaires are low-tech, low-budget and easy to administer. Collating the data is also straightforward. These are all significant advantages.

For all these reasons, I think Marcus’ approach has much to commend it. Other studies are producing descriptive material, but lack measured data. It would be very useful if other researchers could take up Marcus’ questionnaire and apply it to their own studies, so that large data-sets could be built up for comparative studies and meta-analysis.

From his data, Marcus pulls out some interesting ideas. I agree that the Merging of Action and Awareness is a key benefit of being in Flow, not only for musicians but also for sportsmen. It’s not the only such benefit, and in a future posting I will argue that it is not the most important one for elite performance. However, Marcus is looking at practising, and my next post will present my hypothesis that performance-Flow and practice-Flow are significantly different.

Marcus observed that goal-setting and practice organisation correlated negatively with Flow. Can this be explained as conscious, Left-Brain processes interfering with subconscious Right-Brain Flow? Or does referring back (during the practice session) to goals and practice-plans (established before the session started) disrupt the focus on the present moment, the Mindfulness that is needed for Flow? These are important questions, because Ericsson’s concept of Deliberate Practice suggests that conscious organisation of practice-sessions is highly beneficial. How can we organise practice efficiently without disrupting Flow?

My own investigation examines Flow within the Griffin model of the REM-state, and in connection with Ericsson’s Deliberate Practice and Ericksonian Hypnosis. [Read more here] Learning (in lessons or in self-regulated practising) is regarded as a Post-Hypnotic process, guided by Suggestions which can come from the teacher or from one’s own self-regulation. In a future posting, I’ll discuss how established knowledge from Hypnosis might contribute to our understanding of gateways into Flow and of how to manage blocks that prevent or disrupt Flow. Marcus observes that Self-Regulation is a key factor: I will propose that Self-Hypnosis could be a highly effective gateway into Flow.

THE ABILITY OF REAL-TIME NAVIGATION IN THE MUSICAL FLOW: THEORY AND PEDAGOGY

László Stachó is a musicologist, psychologist and musician working as senior lecturer at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest ad at the University of Szeged. He is a CMPCP Visiting Fellow. His research focuses on Bartok analysis, 20th-century performance practice, emotional communication in musical performance and enhancement of attention skills involved in music performance.

Abstract

Laszlo argues that a true sign of musical giftedness is the ability to uncover meanings from musical materials – grounded in feelings – and to position into them in the act of performing with full concentration. Full concentration is fostered through the ability to navigate cognitively in the musical Flow, i.e. the ability to ‘be’ in (i.e. to position into) the future, in the past and in the present – phenomenologically very often at the same moment.

In a forthcoming book, he presents the outline of a new, detailed pedagogical methodology for enhancing in musicians (regardless of their instrument and including singers) the ability of real-time navigating in the musical Flow, including the sub-abilities to imagine the upcoming structural units (i.e. to estimate by feeling their durations through forming a mental image of them), to form a clear mental image of the past musical units to which the upcoming ones are to be measured, and to feel deeply the present moment.

ALK summary

Laszlo contrasted two viewpoints: technical, logical, looking for the end-result and content-centred, emotional, focussed on the on-going process. In Music, these viewpoints can be contrasted as Mathesis (i.e. science/learning/mathematics) versus Emotions. Today’s conservatoire methodologies are strongly rooted in 19th-century attitudes to technique. However, Emotion and Mathesis need not be mutually exclusive.

What is missing in theories of musical ability is the consideration of Affekt, and Time. What is missing in pedagogy is teaching how or what to feel, teaching how music happens in real time (as opposed to detached analysis).

Laszlo showed videos of master-classes with elite performer-teachers. Teaching how to play Chopin in 1961, Alfred Cortot said that the performers interpretation “should be transposed to the plan of a kind of intimate reverie”. “You need to dream the piece, not play”. Flow is compared to dreaming. In another master-class, Maria Peres said “We have to believe that miracles can happen, and then they happen more and more often”.

Lazlo argues that imagery is strongly connected to feeling. Mindfulness is also important: Laszlo sees it as a short-term phenomenon, linked to particularly significant musical moments.

Laszlo drew attention to the performer-teacher’s Gaze. A certain characteristic direction and focus of the eyes reveals the cognitive process of reflection.

Another video showed high-tech analysis of Gaze, contrasting two footballers, an elite international (Ronaldo, popularly dubbed “the phenomenon”, and considered by experts and fans to be one of the greatest football players of all time) and a competent amateur. Analysis showed Ronaldo’s very precise direction of his eyes, switching very rapidly and precisely from the ball to opponent’s feet, hips (for predicting the opponent’s next movement), looking for empty space to move into.

For musicians, Laszlo recommends that the mental image should appear in your mind just before you play. This ability is a core ability, appearing in sports as well.

Three skills must be operated simultaneously:

Goal setting – being in the future
Mindfulness – being in the present
Reflection – being in the past

The quality of performance depends on thoughts and feelings in your mind during performance.

Real-time navigation of musical flow requires learning “how to let go”. We learn this by visualisation exercises involving imagined movement (e.g. the trajectory of a thrown ball).

ALK comments

This was a fascinating paper, even if Laszlo’s detailed methodology for entering into Flow was not presented here. We’ll have to wait for his forthcoming book (in Hungarian!).

It could be very productive for Laszlo and Marcus to collaborate, since Laszlo has methods for helping musicians enter Flow, and Marcus can measure the experience they have as a result.

Ericsson’s concept of Deliberate Practice argues against the idea of inherited talent. I would re-phrase Laszlo’s opening claim to avoid the notion of “giftedness” and re-prioritise for the audience rather than for the performer: a true sign of musical success is the ability to reveal meanings to the audience. The performer must extract those meanings from musical materials – grounded in feelings – concentrate on them fully during the act of performing.

Laszlo is grappling with a difficult but vital concept as he tries to help performers ‘be in’ the Past, Present and Future, all at once. Perhaps this happens in different ways on different time-scales. As we speak (whether formally or in casual conversation) we are able to link the words we just said, the word we are pronouncing now, and the words that will follow immediately afterwards, in order to create a sentence. Whilst we remain more-or-less aware of our previous sentences, and of the sentence we are saying now, we might or might not have a conscious intention concerning the next sentence. Only an experienced speaker can maintain a coherent structure for an entire speech or lecture, navigating sentence by sentence through the current paragraph, whilst keeping in mind what was said in previous paragraphs and what must be said in subsequent paragraphs. Most people would memorise or write down some kind of plan (an outline, or an entire script) for such a speech. All of these examples are shorter-term than and different from Laszlo’s triad of Goal Setting, Mindfulness, and Reflection.

In Early Music, we can side-step these complications by equating Music with Rhetorical Speech. Past-Present-Future relationships in Music can then be linked to similar progressions through Time in prose or poetry (as I just did, above). I’m strongly convinced that such a Metaphorical understanding of the Past-Present-Future relationships is more useful in the practical situation than abstract theorising. Other Metaphors are also valid (walking, dancing, visual imagery) and indeed Laszlo recommends visual imaging as a practical way to manage Past-Present-Future awareness.

In Early Music, we can think about Passions (affetti) that change across measured Time. Time is measured with a slower beat (Tactus, read more here), affetti change more frequently, than in later music. This results in a different experience of passions/time, that may be more effective in facilitating Flow. My own research into Enargeia links changing affetti to the emotional power of detailed visual imagery. (More about Enargeia: Visions in Performance here). Positive imaging is frequently used in sports training and in Hypnotherapy.

Early Musicians are very aware of the bias of Conservatoires towards 19th-century models of performance and pedagogy. One aspect of this bias is the conventional divide between Technique and Interpretation. Historically Informed Performance (HIP) does not accept this binary, but follows earlier models in which technical means are more closely interconnected with musical ends (e.g. keyboard fingering and phrasing). Nevertheless, the most recent research relates HIP to Emotions Studies, so that performance, passion and the audience’s perception are also all interconnected. [Read more about How did it feel? here.]

I suggest that Laszlo is seeing from his pedagogical and Flow-oriented viewpoint similar limitations of the standard Conservatoire approach that we see also from the HIP viewpoint. Certainly most Conservatoires are uncertain how to teach Emotions in music, whether in standard repertoire or in HIP. There are programs that address the problem of performance anxiety, but (as Marcus observed in the context of practising) there is less teaching of precisely how to work positively with emotions.

Laszlo’s plea for a holistic approach that unifies interpretation, technique, and emotions should be heeded. This is the same triad that we see in the historical concept of Music as Musica Mondana (the Music of the Spheres, that Otherworld of magic, myth and mystery that makes a musical interpretation deeply meaningful, somehow spiritual), Musica Humana (the harmonious nature of humanity, unifying body, mind, spirit and emotions) and Musica Instrumentalis (actual music, i.e. techique, whether instrumental or vocal).

My first reaction to the videos of master-classes was to remind myself that a master-class is a very asymmetric situation, in which everything favours the teacher. The student is not only processing new information & new instructions, and changing their whole performance, but they are doing all this in full view of the audience. It is highly likely that the student will not be in Flow. At worst, a master-class can become a vehicle for the teacher to demonstrate their own superiority, their own Flow, at the expense of the student. But these problems for the student in a master-class are advantages for the researcher studying Flow, since we can expect to observe crucial differences between the master in Flow and the student not in Flow.

Cortot’s idea of a performance with Flow as similar to dreaming relates to the theoretical underpinning of my own research into Flow within Joe Griffin’s theory of Dreams. (more about Griffin’s theory, such stuff as Dreams are made on: Representing Emotions in Metaphor here).

As soon as I saw Cortot’s face, with the characteristic Gaze to which Laszlo drew attention, I recognised a look that can be found in many historical paintings of musicians. The eyes are directed forwards, upwards and into the remote distance.

This Gaze is associated in Neuro-Linguistic Programming with inner focus (accessing visual memory or invented imagery). In Hypnosis this eye movement is part of a standard test, and is considered to be a reliable sole indicator of a hypnotic trance. In Historical Action, it is associated with the hand gestures for Awe or Wonder: the complete set of Awe/Wonder indicators are seen in many religious paintings (saints receiving visions, calling forth or witnessing a miracle).

In 2013, I made a case-study of John Bulwer’s 17th-century gesture of awe-struck worship for performances of the earliest surviving Spanish Oratorio, which tells the Christmas story of the Shepherds witnessing the appearance of the Angel and worshipping the Christ-child in the Bethlehem stable. Another, highly detailed case-study of medieval Awe by Javier Diaz-Vera of the University of Castille La Mancha was reported at the recent CHE conference on “Languages of Emotion”. I observed a startling strong connection between this Gaze and Flow in a class at Scoil na gCláirseach, the summer school of the Historical Harp Society of Ireland, in August 2014.

The Feldenkrais Method advises re-setting ones habitual Gaze by placing the head lower, and lifting the eyes. This releases neck vertebrae, with beneficial effects for wellbeing, confidence and voice-production. Similar adjustments are recommended in Alexander Technique. I am experimenting with Gaze and Self-Hypnosis in my own investigations of Flow.

Gaze and historical performance are related in the study of Enargeia and baroque gesture – you point at what you see, which can be far off in the distance, within your imagined vision of the words you are singing. 17th-century texts frequently evoke distant mountains or the heavens.

Laszlo identifies Gaze as an indicator of Flow. I hypothesise that control of Gaze can facilitate access into Flow. In discussions at Cambridge, some delegates were concerned that such a Gaze might just be created deliberately: I don’t think this is a problem. “Fake it till you make it” applies – imitating the outward appearance of the Flow-Gaze can be expected to produce the genuine Flow-state within.

Peres’ comment “We have to believe that miracles can happen, and then they happen more and more often” can be appreciated in the context of Hypnotic Suggestion for confidence, suggesting that the ‘miracle’ of Flow happens more frequently as one gains confidence in it. The comment also makes sense in the context of Deliberate Practice: the harder you practice, the luckier you get. Flow can lift you to the very peak of your ability, but it cannot create abilities you do not have.

The Gaze analysis of footballers supports a finding in Matthew Syed’s Bounce [here] that elite sports performance is not necessarily associated with fast physical reactions, but rather with very fast subconscious processing of information coming in from visual observation. That visual observation is facilitated by rapid, accurate, but subconsciously directed eye movements. All this fits perfectly within the Griffin model of dreaming and the REM-state (Rapid Eye Movement). Eye Movement is another route into hypnotic trance (see Richard Nongard’s “butterfly” rapid induction here). I hypothesise that REM is not only an indicator of Flow in elite performance, but could be a gateway into such Flow.

Laszlo talks about “letting go” in order to enter the Flow-state for performance. I think this is a crucial building block for a better understanding of how Flow differs between training/practice and performance. At Scoil 2014 I deliberately asked students to ‘change gear’, to ‘let go’ as they transitioned from establishing technical skills with detailed slow practice into full-speed trials of the new skill. I combined this with deliberate re-direction of Gaze, in order to enter a particular Flow-state for the full-speed trial. I used the imagery of a young bird learning to fly: flap the wings slowly, learn how they work; then jump off and fly. In this context, Yoda’s advice also holds good:

Conscious doubt of whether or not one can succeed is a strong inhibitor of the subconscious Flow needed for that success.

I like Laszlo’s formulation that “The quality of performance depends on thoughts and feelings in your mind during performance.” When I was a student at the London Early Music Centre, tenor Edgar Fleet taught me that “Early Music is transparent. The audience can see through to what you are thinking about. If you are thinking about fish-and-chips, that’s what they’ll get. If you are thinking of something more meaningful, they’ll get that instead”. If we think about technique, audiences may appreciate our skill, but their passions will not be moved.

As Laszlo said in his opening remarks, we need to focus on Content and Meaning. I would add that such focus does not ‘distract us from our technique’, rather it helps us ‘let go’, and enter Flow. Let your subconscious handle technique, give your conscious mind something more interesting to think about, communicate better with your audience and also enter Flow. Win-win-win-win!

In private conversations, conference delegates reported to me that Laszlo’s coaching musicians to enter Flow has wonderful effects. I’m sure this is true, and I’m looking forward to reading his book (yep, it’s time to study Hungarian!) And what is the significance of Hungary’s position as a world-leader in pedagogy for Music (Kodaly method) and Fencing?

Other conversations dwelt on Laszlo’s personal conviction that discussion of Flow should include the language of magic. This was resisted by scientifically-minded delegates at the Cambridge conference, and it might not play well for Laszlo in academia generally. But here are my reasons for supporting Laszlo’s position. Flow is not a modern phenomenon, even though it has been named only recently. Our ancestors, right back to the first cave-painters experienced Flow, even if they did not name or analyse what they were experiencing. [More on the REM-state and evolution here] Flow and Hypnotism are clearly related to ancient traditions of folk-magic and shamanism.

Meanwhile, modern practitioners of Hypnosis recognise that different clients require different types of language. The word ‘sleep’ is used less today in Clinical Hypnosis, though it is still highly effective in Rapid Inductions. ‘Hypnosis’ or ‘Trance’ can be used with clients who are confident and comfortable with the idea of being hypnotised. For other clients, it’s better to invite them to a ‘resource state’ or ‘your own special state’. When I work with students on Flow, I take my cue from Ericksonian Hypnosis and adapt my vocabulary to match the student’s preferred language. For an Early Music fan, I’ll talk about musica mondana and musica humana; for a new-age enthusiast, I’ll rephrase this in terms of Cosmic Harmony. For the nerd (yes, there are some Early Music nerds!), the Star Wars ‘Force’ may be the best metaphor. The Celtic Otherworld or Shamanism could be very powerful metaphors for someone who responds to such imagery. For someone with a science background, the metaphor of a computer, with its memory banks, operating system, keyboard inputs and background functions can be helpful.

From an Ericksonian perspective, it is the client/student, not the therapist/teacher, who chooses the vocabulary. From a historical perspective, ancient beliefs in music and magic are indeed related to the modern experience of music and Flow. From my own, practical point of view, I’d recommend widening the vocabulary as much as possible, so as to offer Flow to students from all kinds of backgrounds. “Accept and utilise” is the Ericksonian mantra.

Thinking of the Historical priority that privileges the audience over the performer (in contrast to the 19th-century glorification of the ‘artistic genius’ and ‘expressive performer’), I raised the question at the Cambridge conference: is there any correlation between the Performer being in Flow, and audience members having a Strong Experience (shivers down your spine, the tingle factor, those powerfully emotional reactions to music)? The research project I’ve now begun on The Theatre of Dreams: Operatic Performance as an Early-Modern REM-state Activator assumes that around the year 1600 there was such a correlation, and draws on Ericksonian Hypnotism as an explanation. [More here]

WHAT COULD BE UNIVERSAL ABOUT MUSICAL IMPROVISATION? SITUATING THE COGNITIVE APPROACH

Andrew Goldman is a PhD student at the Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge. In addition to his scholarly research, he is a pianist and composer. Recently, his musical entitled Science! The Musical was premiered in Cambridge.

Abstract

Andrew Goldman reviewed trends in ethnomusicological and critical research on improvisation, showing how they challenge cognitive-scientific approaches and also how they share certain motivations (such as exploring performers’ creative processes). With specific reference to his own experimental research paradigms working with jazz musicians, he shows how such sensitivity can be an important check on the universalising tendency of scientific theorising, but also a way to demonstrate the broader validity of such scientific theories. This is accomplished through exploring modes of performance in terms of cognitive-scientific theoretical frameworks – such as motor theories of perception – in order to expand the explanatory scope of scientific conclusions beyond a particular musical tradition.

ALK summary

Andrew Goldman showed how daunting a task the serious, cognitive-scientific researcher faces, in attempting to establish solid, reliable data for such richly complex activities as music-making and improvisation. His carefully designed and executed experiment established that time-delayed Feedback disrupted the performance of jazz pianists significantly more when they were improvising. From this, we can deduce that improvising (whatever that means: for this experiment the pianists were just instructed to improvise, and the results were accepted) is indeed different, and that the difference is somehow related to Feedback and to Time.

ALK comments

I admired this paper precisely because Andrew G’s conclusion was so carefully limited, precise in what it did not attempt to claim. Painstaking and sustained effort was needed to reach even this modest conclusion. This encourages great respect for those who are investigating complex phenomenon within the ‘hard’ scientific disciplines. We do need this check and balance on the tendency to universalise individual experience to general theory. Even if we can discover more, more quickly, through an experiential, phenomenological approach, we must constantly test the assumption that such experiences have any more general significance. A rounded view of complex phenomenon is likely to come about from a multi-disciplinary combination of various approaches, both “hard” and “soft”. [Andrew G tells me that he doesn’t like these labels, but I use them as a convenient shorthand, and with proper respect for both sides].

This paper was not about Flow. But I was interested in the topic of Improvisation anyway. I improvise a lot (in HIP styles) in performance; I direct The Harp Consort, an ensemble renowned for its HIP-improvisation; I’m a teacher of HIP-improvisation and I’m personally convinced that Improvisation is a valuable skill for any musician. Andrew Goldman gives us solid evidence that “improvising” [whatever that means] is “different”.

I suspect that scientific investigation of precisely how Improvisation is “different” will run into similar difficulties as scientific investigation of Hypnosis, which has a much longer history. Neuroscientific observations of Hypnosis identify the characteristics of the activity happening (hallucinated or suggested under Hypnosis, or actually happening in a normal conscious state) rather than particular characteristics of Hypnosis itself. I suspect we will find the same is true for Flow. But in the face of this serious difficulty, Andrew G has established one clear difference, relating Improvisation [whatever that means] to Feedback. And we know from Csikszentmihalyi that Feedback is related to Flow. I have hypothesised that Improvisation may be related to Flow, and that Improvisation may be a gateway into Flow.

One possible explanation could be that Improvisation requires an Altered State of Consciousness, an inner focus that facilitates the calling up of material either from the memory, or from the imagination, or from the imaginative re-combination of memorised and imagined fragments. In ensemble improvisation, this inner focus must be combined with the processing of external information, the material improvised by other musicians. In any improvisation, this inner focus must be combined with the processing of the sound of the music one is creating, i.e. with Feedback. Improvising may self-induce a trance. In trance states, Suggestions can have particularly powerful effect. When improvising, it is the sound of this note that Suggests what note might follow. If that Feedback/Suggestion process is disrupted, the effect would be stronger in trance than in normal consciousness.

In one way, that explanation of mine is useless. It replaces one word we can’t define, Improvisation, with another word we can’t define, Hypnosis. In spite of all the years of investigation, there is still no accepted definition of Hypnosis, and no accepted scientific indicator of trance. Just as with Flow, there is a list of typical indicators: if someone experiences enough of these indicators, they are probably in that state. But the benefit of linking Improvisation, Flow and Hypnosis (no doubt there are distinctions to be made, alongside those links) would be that we could take the knowledge of Hypnosis acquired through many decades of practical investigation and scientific study, and quickly apply that knowledge (mutatis mutandis) to Flow and/or Improvisation.

Certainly, we should not be ashamed that we don’t really know what Improvisation or Flow is, in the strict scientific sense. In that sense, we don’t yet know what Hypnosis is, but we do know that it works, and that in certain circumstances, it can work magic, wreak miracles. An phenomenological approach might open up ways to extend good experiences of Hypnosis, Improvisation and Flow to the benefit of more people, more often. A ‘hard’ scientific approach can provide necessary balance by searching out chinks in the links, establishing how these related phenomena differ from each other. Ericksonian Hypnosis emphasises how one person’s experience can differ from another’s, and searches for ways to accept and utilise those differences. Can hard science establish what is universal, beyond such individual differences?

In the meantime, my own experiential investigations into the phenomenology of Flow and the Theatre of Dreams continue. More posts on these subjects soon. In particular, I will propose that Time Distortion effects (much studied in Hypnosis) are crucial to the understanding of two different kinds of Flow, in practice and in performance.

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

How did it feel? A History of Heaven, Hearts & Harps

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

We can imagine a time-travelling Arts journalist asking: “You just heard the first opera… you played continuo next to Claudio Monteverdi… you fought a duel with Rudolfo Capo Ferro… you danced with Louis XIV … you acted for William Shakespeare … you went drinking with Henry Purcell … you built a pendulum clock according to Galileo’s theories … you can see with your own eyes that the sun goes around the earth… Domenichino Zampieri made you a harp with three rows of strings… How did it feel?”

This question – easy to ask, but rich in potential for surprising answers and further, more profound investigations – might well be the unofficial motto of the Australian Research Council’s Centre for the History of Emotions. From nodes at major universities and conservatories across Australia, in research and performance projects around the world, and across a wide range of humanities disciplines, CHE’s investigators not only look at Emotions in History, but also use Emotions studies as a lens by which to view a broad field of historical themes, and to understand how Emotions and History continue to Shape the Modern.

I am a Senior Visiting Research Fellow for the Centre, attached to the University of Western Australia, and this post was first presented at a joint event of the World Harp Congress and the Centre for the History of Emotions in Sydney, Australia in July 2014.

At the beginning of the baroque, around the year 1600, the period aim to muovere gli affetti – move the passions – gives us confidence that Emotions studies are historically appropriate, as we try to understand the role of the harp within the music and culture of the time.

So whose passions are we trying to move? Simply to ask the question re-locates the focus onto the audience, a much-needed counter-balance to the academic tradition of studying composers and works, and to the conservatoire habit of concentrating on what performers do.

Audience Studies are a vital new area of musicological investigation – what makes music meaningful for the listener? How can we attract new listeners? Why are we losing touch with some listeners? I’m privileged to collaborate on such research with Prof John Sloboda at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. And studies of Historical Audiences are an important part of our work at CHE, led by Dr Penelope Woods.

EARLY MUSIC & THE HARP

This harp-flavoured post introduces some general ideas concerning Early Music, and connects these ideas to the aesthetics of two particular cultures: Italy around 1600, the period of Monteverdi’s first opera, Orfeo, in which the harp plays a major solo, as well as within the continuo ensemble; and the late 18^th-century, where we have the Mozart Concerto for traverse flute and single-action harp, and CPE Bach’s Sonata (it’s debated whether this is for Italian triple harp or French single-action harp).

One of my tasks here is to do some myth-busting, correcting some favourite misunderstandings of what Early Music is about, and pointing out some alarming discrepancies between what we see in historical sources and the standard operating procedures of today’s Early Music. So I have some images to help identify a popular myth, and to show when we’ve bust it. But since I wasn’t quite sure what a myth should look like, and I didn’t want to start exploding sacred cows, I’ve chosen the metaphor of Vampires, both modern and pseudo-old, which (like mistaken ideas) hang around half-dead, until someone arrives to slay them. And according to the principles of the baroque opera stage, the good guys will be on my right, the bad guys on my left.

And I have this genuinely 17^th-century image to draw your attention to important historical information that you might want to follow up for yourselves later. You can read more on my website: www.TheHarpConsort.com as well as elsewhere in this blog.

Right side… Good Doggy.

Over the last half-century, recording companies helped to create an audience for Early Music by promoting performances that were advertised as “on authentic instruments”, “on period (or original) instruments”. Of course, this was just a shorthand way to label what was meant to be a fundamentally different approach to music-making, but it left a misleading impression that the instruments themselves, whether original or modern reproductions in period style, were the most important ingredient for achieving Authenticity.

Nowadays, we tend not to use the A-word, since we all recognise that complete historical Authenticity is impossible. And taking the other meaning of that word, Authentic in the sense of true to one’s personal beliefs, we also recognise that every musician assembles their musical identity from many influences, that historical information as well as inspiring teaching or convincing performance can shape what each of us feels to be “true” to our personal values. So let’s leave behind us the rather negative concept of Authentic Instruments, and use the modern phrase, Historically Informed Performance, abbreviated as HIP. After all, the only alternative to being Historically Informed is to be Historically Uninformed!

A more recent attempt to describe what we mean by Early Music (that term is still frequently used, informally and amongst performers, but its more hip to say “HIP” in academic circles), was that the musicians would seek to respect ‘the composer’s intentions’. This phrase has also been rejected, because it plays into the old-fashioned, Romantic idea of idolising the Master Composer, and because baroque composers didn’t want you to play what they wrote. Like a modern singer-song-writer, or a jazz-composer, baroque composers expected you to take their idea and make it your own, with improvised variations, your own touches of arrangement, even wholesale re-writing.

LOOKING BACKWARDS THROUGH HISTORY?

Another, more subtle danger is that we find ourselves looking back into the past, from our modern perspective. The recent past (that fun CD released last year) looms large; close behind are ghostly shadows of our early musical education, and of the education that shaped our first teachers. We might be smart enough to avert our gaze from all those Romantic geniuses who clog the middle distance, and there at the far end of a dark tunnel we can just make out Mozart, Handel, Bach and (very far off now) Monteverdi. The problem here is that we are looking the wrong way down a telescope – the object of our study appears very distant and small – and we are looking the wrong way through time.

The way to understand Monteverdi is not via Mozart, Handel and Bach. Even if we know those later guys better, Monteverdi didn’t know them at all. We need to approach Monteverdi from inside the culture of his own time, not looking backwards into the past, but looking around us in his historical present. We need to look sideways, not only at the harp, but at other kinds of music, at other performing arts, at literature and paintings, at period science, at dancing and swordsmanship. To understand his culture fully, we need to start a bit earlier – perhaps with the generation of his teachers – and move forwards through time with him. Then we might have a better idea of “how does it feel”.

Otherwise, if we view old music only from our modern perspective, we may end up trying to squeeze an ancient culture into an utterly different framework, a round peg into a square hole.

As we begin to read what period writers themselves considered important, we quickly realise that our modern concepts of Technique and Interpretation, and of Conservatoire teaching in general are inappropriate. But much of the discussion amongst today’s Early Musicians is also dominated by topics that are hardly mentioned by 17^th-century writers. The pages of Early Music Magazine, and online discussion groups give a lot of space to arguments about pitch, temperament and vibrato.

But there is nothing about any of these subjects in the most important documents describing the performance practices of the early seicento: the preface to the first opera, Cavalieri’s Anima e Corpo (1600), the preface to the second opera, Peri’s Euridice (also 1600), Caccini’s Le Nuove Musiche (1601), Viadana’s figured-bass motets of 1602, Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Agazzari’s guide to continuo-playing, Dal Sonare Sopra’l Basso (both 1607) and the preface to Gagliano’s Dafne (1608), Monteverdi’s Vesperae (1610), his prefaces to Combattimento and the Lamento della Ninfa (1636), Shakespeare’s advice to the players in Hamlet (1600) and the anonymous circa-1630 guide for a music-theatre’s artistic director, Il Corago.

Meanwhile, we know that renaissance courtiers spent several hours every day for most of their lives, practising dancing and training with swords. If we want to know how did that feel, how such training affects posture, musculature, and modes of thought, we can read and try out the recommendations of the Book of the Courtier, Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528 and many reprints across 20 European cities and six languages, it was one of the most widely-read books of the time), Negri’s dance-treatises (1602 & 1604) and Capo Ferro’s Gran Simulacro of the Art of Swordfighting (1610).

FALSE FRIENDS

When learning a foreign language, we have to take care with so-called ‘false friends’, words that sound familiar but have quite a different meaning in the other language. For example, if you are new to Australia, it might help you to to know that a hot Barbie is not a blonde doll.

So it is with the language of the past – familiar-sounding words mean something quite different, and we need to understand a different set of assumptions.

There were only six notes in the 17^th-century scale, the Hexachord, so that ascending above A-la imposes a choice between B- fa and B-mi. This choice is guided by different rules in different periods, and it’s often left to the performer to make an appropriate decision: the notation may leave the question open. We absolutely cannot assume that What You See Is What You Get. The meaning of the notation itself has changed, over the centuries.

And when we move out from tiny details to the big picture, we see utterly different use of language, showing that the underlying assumptions are also utterly different. Around the year 1600, what is Music? First, and most importantly, it was the Music of the Spheres, musica mondana, the perfect music made by the movement of the stars and planets as they danced in their circular orbits around the earth, turned by the motion of the highest sphere, the primum mobile. This is the music of the cosmos, turned by the hand of God. Secondly, we have musica humana, the harmonious nature of the human body. Last of all comes musica instrumentalis, actual sounds made down here on earth, with our voices and harps.

Some other 17-century ‘false friends’ to beware of are Harmony (which just means, organised sound; the most significant organisation is usually rhythmic rather than chordal harmony in the modern sense); and Tempo (which just means time, measured in semibreves, whole notes, which last about two seconds).

ASSUMPTIONS

So much for language. Let’s explore some basic assumptions.

What is important? In his Preface to Le Nuove Musiche (the book containing that famous song, Amarilli mia bella), Caccini prioritises Text and Rhythm, with Sound last of all. And not the other way around! This contrasts strongly with modern conservatoire teaching, which focusses on sound-production, and even with the concentration of today’s Early Music Movement on vibrato, pitch and temperament, certainly with the tendency to focus on ‘original instruments’. All those questions of Sound came “last of all” to the 17^th-century mind. Rather, they were thinking about Text and Rhythm.

Who is important? We should try to clear from our minds the Romantic image of the genius performer, expressing his (and in the 19^th-century it was mostly his) sublime emotions in front of the reverent, silent audience of nobodies, sitting in the dark, worshipping at the temple of culture. 17^th-century music privileges the Audience. As La Musica says at the very beginning of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, “I’ve come from by beloved Permesso to you, great heroes, noble race of Kings, to narrate whose fame even heavenly praise would not reach the truth, since your reputation is so high”. Only in verse two does she introduce herself, “I am Music”.

What is music for? As a Rhetorical Art, music seeks to persuade the mind, delight the senses, and move the emotions. The period language muovere gli affetti, to move the passions, reminds us that multiple, contrasting emotions are at play – not just the intensification of a single emotion, as in Romantic music. The audience’s feelings are engaged by the movement of the passions. And so we performers might well want to explore a History of Emotions.

RHYTHM

So let’s consider those historical priorities of Text and Rhythm. I’ll come to Text in due course, but in order to understand musical Rhythm, we first have to ask What is Time? Our assumption today is that musical rhythm sits, with various degrees of freedom, within Time itself, which is Absolute. We can measure this Time rather accurately, with our digital watches, and we can impose it on our music with metronomes, although we feel that the higher art is to bend time into something more ‘musical’, with rubato. All of that is an essentially 20^th-century view of Time, even though it has now been updated by Einstein’s relativity,. But that 20^th-century view is utterly irrelevant to the period before Isaac Newton.

17^th-century Time is cosmic, measured by the perfect, but very slow-moving, clock of the sun and stars. Time is human, measured by the body-rhythm of our pulse or heartbeat, at about one per second when we are relaxed. In the lowest, practical sense, Time is measured by Music, since around the year 1600 a minim (half-note) is one second, as close as human beings can make it.

The best clocks could just about count the seconds. So when Galileo discovered the pendulum effect, observing a swinging chandelier in Pisa Cathedral, he checked it against his own pulse. When he needed split-second timing, to measure the acceleration due to gravity, he used the highest precision timing system in the known world: music. He got his lute-player to play fast variations (divisions, as they were called back then), which literally divided up the minims/seconds into crotches, quavers and semi-quavers, giving him precision measurement down to 1/8 of a second.

You can try the experiment for yourself in an online simulation, here.

Just as the movement of the cosmos is driven by the most divine, outermost, slowest sphere, so musical time is organised by a constant slow beat, and the faster notes fit inside this. So baroque musical rhythm is defined by Tactus, a slow steady beat, like a perfect clock, like the clock of the cosmos, or the steady beat of the human pulse. If your pulse falters, you are sick: if your heart stops, the music also dies.

But early 17^th-century sources describe certain, highly specific ways to Drive the Time in passionate music. This is dangerous stuff – if you lose control of the Time Chariot, the sun will crash into the sea. But just as you can raise your pulse rate by exercise or emotion, or lower it by relaxation (adagio means ‘at ease’, ‘take it easy’), so Frescobaldi (1615) explains how to change the time between sections in different rhythms, or how to suspend the beat in the air, momentarily. And Caccini talks about sprezzatura, nonchalant or ‘cool’ rhythm, in which the singer floats freely above a steady tactus in the continuo bass.

Music of this period was not conducted, although we often see conductors in today’s Early Music. That is a gross anachronism. Agazzari and Il Corago tell us clearly that the entire ensemble is guided by the continuo, Dowland tells us that it is Tactus itself that “directs a song in measure”. Peri expects that singers will “dance to the rhythm of the bass”, so for recitative (where speech-like rhythms are needed on the level of individual syllables) he reduces the continuo activity to semibreves and minims, just enough to maintain the Tactus.

One of the consequences of this historical view of Time, of organising Rhythm by the slow count of Tactus, is that melodies have to fit inside the tactus. And it’s the accompaniment that maintains the Tactus. So accompanists do not follow soloists, rather soloists must fit with the accompaniment. Peri expects that singers will dance to the rhythm of the bass.

This is a big shock to modern classical musicians, and even today’s Early Musicians mostly ignore the clear historical evidence. Playing continuo today can be like a fairground game: you wait there with your triple harp or theorbo, until a little yellow duck (the tenor) waddles into your sights, and then you fire off a chord, and hope to hit him in root position.

The take-home message is that music pre-1800 has a slow steady pulse (even if the actual notes are going fast), and the melody is guided by the bass. No rubato, no conductors.

TEXT

Agazzari writes that instruments should play with the affetto e somiglianza delle parole, with the emotion and the semblance of words. For singers, the sung text shows the emotional changes from one word to the next. Notice that, in this style, there are many different, changing, contrasted affetti. Frequently there is an abrupt change in text and music to the contrary emotion – an opposto – signalled by the word ma (but), or by images and gestures that point to opposite sides of the stage: here and there, heaven and hell, you and me.

In this period, instrumental pieces are often taken from vocal originals. So we can take the emotional changes from the original words, just as Agazzari instructs. In a piece where there are no words, we can still recognise emotional changes from characteristic melodic figures, so that an early Sonata shows the same strong contrasts and abruptly changing opposti that we’ve learnt to expect in vocal music.

But what about Agazzari’s somiglianza, semblance of, similitude to words? To imitate on the harp the effect of speech, we need to think about the sound of language. In Italian, many common words have two syllables, accented-unaccented, or (in period terminology) Good-Bad: piano, forte, dolce, arpa, pasta, pizza, Roma. Three syllables can be accented Bad-Good-Bad allegro adagio sonata Caccini Firenze, Milano, spaghetti; or Good-Bad-Bad: table is tavola, the last one, ultimate, is ultimo, Claudio Monteverdi worked in Mantua.

These common words form the typical patterns of the language, two or three syllables, more or less alternating Good and Bad. Where the syllables are joined together, the join can be smooth with single consonants, as in the word legato, or it can be a bumpy join with a double consonant, as in the word staccato. And of course, the consonant that starts each syllable has its own colour su, giu (up & down), no, si (no & yes) ma (but). All of this joining and separating between syllables is what Early Musicians mean by ‘articulation’. Just we ‘articulate’ our words, in order to speak articulately, on an early instrument we ‘articulate’ the notes, in order to sound as if we are speaking.

So baroque harps, baroque flutes, baroque violins, harpsichords all aim to imitate the sound and emotions of speech. This fundamental consideration is much stronger than the subtle differences between one instrument and another. In this period, musical style and passionate rhetoric are not instrument-specific. That’s good news for us harpists, since much of our best-known early repertoire is shared with, or stolen from other instruments: the Luduvico fantasia was published for vihuela in imitation of the Spanish harp; Handel’s concerto was published for Organ, even if first played on Welsh harp; the CPE Bach sonata might have had a second instrument to play continuo, and we don’t know for sure which kind of harp he meant; the Mozart concerto is shared with the flute.

But in each of these periods, the local aesthetic is derived from text and vocal music, common to all instruments, and unified across all the arts.

In contrast to a modern opera production, in which the text, the music and the staging tell three different stories, in baroque opera everything tells the same story, all directed by the artistic director Il Corago, who has ‘universal command’ over every element of the production, but who is subject to the structures, sounds and emotions of the poetic text.

THE TRUE ART

This unity of aesthetic means that baroque harpists can learn from other instruments, and that we can expect to find a high level of agreement about essential priorities as we compare different sources. In the second half of the 18^th century, our guides to the CPE Bach sonata and Mozart concerto are the three great treatises of the 1750s, as well as the harp methods of the 1760s, 70s and 80s; their fundamental agreement far outweighs their subtle differences.

Of course, historical teaching books have plenty of detailed information to offer, but we can also come to understand the underlying assumptions of period aesthetics by studying the big picture of how writers organise their material, from Milán in the 16^th century, and Ribayaz in the 17^th; to Quantz, CPE Bach and Leopold Mozart in the mid-18^th; Meyer, Cousineau and Ragué in the following decades. We can follow a chronological story, as the broad consensus gradually changes.

All these writers deal very quickly with sound-production: hold the instrument the right way up, and tune it like this. Of course, there are further subtleties, but we won’t find them in period teaching books. We have to reverse-engineer the technical means from our knowledge of the aesthetic end-goals, from iconography, from information about other instruments etc.

Milan teaches how to compose renaissance polyphony, Ribayaz how to play baroque dances.

All the 18^th-century books are structured in the same order, to teach Articulation, Ornamentation and Good Delivery.

Articulation (as we have just seen) is how to make the instrument ‘speak’.

Ornamentation is not only decoration but also a kind of musical grammar, just as those funny marks on French words are not just typographic decoration, but a basic requirement of the language. café, garçon, fête, naïf, près. In language and in music, these small marks are mentally added even if the writer forgets them; they change the sound and the meaning.

Good Delivery is not quite the same as modern ‘interpretation’. A baroque musician is not an ‘interpreter’ who translates the music into a new language, or comes up with his own explanation of it. Rather, the baroque musician is like a fine speaker, who delivers poetic lines well, who communicates to an audience the sound of the words, the meaning of the words and the emotions of the words. The term Expression is another ‘false friend’: the performer’s aim is not to express his own emotions, but to convey the emotions of the music to the audience, just as an actor does not express his own feelings, but conveys to the audience the emotions of his character. Peri and Il Corago emphasise that baroque music is modelled on the speech of a fine actor.

Some baroque books include a section on accompaniment – filling out the left hand with improvised harmonies (Ribayaz) or improvising harmonies to accompany a soloist or orchestra (CPE Bach). In the CPE Bach sonata, the continuo might be realised by the same harpist who plays the right hand, or perhaps by a second instrument. We don’t know the composer’s original intention.

So let’s take the period organisation of Articulation, Ornamentation, Good Delivery and Continuo, and apply some of the detailed historical information to the baroque harp. Articulation is produced in different ways on different instruments – with tonguing syllables tiri liri or diddle diddle on the flute; with bow strokes on the violin; with choice of fingers on harps, lutes and keyboards – but the common aim is to imitate the sound of speech. So we need Good and Bad syllables, and for Monteverdi we need to link them in the patterns of typical Italian words piano, forte, dolce, pizza, pasta, arpa. Good links to Bad.

On the harp, we match Good and Bad syllables, Good and Bad notes, to Good and Bad fingers. For 17th-century Italian harp, 1 is Good, 2 is Bad, 3 is Good. Just as the word-accents mostly alternate Good and Bad, so the scale fingerings alternate. 3-2 ascending, and 1-2 descending. With this fingering, scales are not homogenous – dadadada – but are articulated. Think of Frank Sinatra – dooby-dooby-doo. The technical procedure matches the sound of the language also by joining together Good-Bad. Piano, forte, dolce, pizza, pasta.

The whole shape of the Early Music phrase is not like the long curved lines we see engraved into 19^th-century scores. Rather it alternates Good and Bad, and has the principal accent almost at the end of the line.

To be or not to be, that’s the Question.

But the last syllable is unaccented, a Bad. This leads to a general practice in HIP of not arriving triumphantly on the last note, with a massive false accent. Rather, the assumption is that the last note is a Bad syllable, unaccented.

However, today’s Early Music performers mostly ignore clear period advice not to slow down or break before the last note. At cadences, we often hear a rallentando and a hesitation before the final note – whereas Caccini and many other 17^th-century sources ask for ornaments to accelerate and run smoothly into the last, unaccented note.

Those most famous words of Shakespeare To be or not to be, that’s the Question have a very similar pattern to the famous first line of Dante’s Inferno: Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita. The subtle difference is that Italian has more two-syllable words joined Good-Bad mezzo, nostra, vita whereas English has many monosyllables grouped into iambics Bad-Good, to be / or not / to be. So we can play the harp in the historical accents of different languages. Monteverdi should sound Italian. Bach should sound German. But what about Mozart in Paris: does his music speak Italian, French or German?

We can play Continuo also with Good and Bad chords; more notes and a quick roll on the Good, fewer notes and plaque on the Bad. With carefully use of resonance and damping, we can join Good and Bad, Italian-style. Piano forte dolce pizza pasta Or Bad-Good, to be / or not / to be. This is how continuo-players can imitate the somiglianza, the semblance of words described by Agazzari.

In his theorbo-book, Kapsberger shows how to make the arpeggio commune – ‘default arpeggio’ across two beats. This is how continuo-players can maintain the Tactus, so that they direct the song in measure, as Agazzari and Dowland recommend.

Text and Rhythm work together in music in the same way that word-accent and metre do in poetry. Tactus corresponds to poetic metre, it is like a clock that counts the time steadily. The music itself follows the patterns of word accents, which may, or may not, coincide with the ticking of the tactus clock. Sometimes the Good syllables match the Tactus: “When /I do /count the /clock that /tells the /time“. But sometimes they are subtly syncopated: “If /Music /and sweet /Poe/try a/gree“. Similarly in baroque music: there is a steady count (the Tactus), but the accents don’t always fall on the downbeat.

Early Musicians are often asked to be ‘free from the tyranny of the bar-line’. This phrase is helpful, if we understand it to mean that the word-accent does not have to coincide with the first beat of the bar, i.e. with the Tactus beat. But some modern players think that they should completely ignore the Tactus and play in free rhythm. Period sources make it clear: the Tactus is kept, slow and steady, like an old clock; but you don’t necessarily put the word-accents on the Tactus beats. This concept, of measured rhythm and independent accents (rather than accentual rhythm), is perhaps the most significant difference between modern and pre-1800 approaches. You can read more in George Houle’s excellent survey of Performance, Perception and Notation 1600-1800, Metre in Music, here.

OTHER TECHNICAL QUESTIONS

Other technical questions are not answered in the teaching books, but have to be investigated through historical images, via other instruments, or reconstructed on a pragmatic basis, once we understand the end-goal. So we see that the historical position for the Italian triple harp is with the instrument high, the player seated low; the low-tension strings require less strength, more relaxation in the hand; the hands rest on the soundboard (surviving instruments show wear-marks), the thumb crosses underneath the fingers (as with the lute), the finger-strokes are slow.

ORNAMENTS

This is a huge subject, but the take-home message about 18^th-century Ornaments comes from combining the information in Quantz’s CPE Bach’s and Leopold Mozart’s treatises. Play ornaments on the beat, with a long upper auxiliary, and with decrescendo (the so-called Abzug, phrasing off). On the harp, don’t try to make too many iterations, rather concentrate on being on the beat and getting that Abzug. There are fingerings for trills in the 18^th-century harp methods.

You need the Abzug also for appoggiaturas; Leopold Mozart says that you should ‘ooze’ into the second note, hineinschleifen in the original German. The 18^th-century harp methods also focus on the appoggiatura.

EMOTIONS

But in a historical style that does not rely on Rubato, constant Vibrato, constant Legato, nor Conductors, where can we find the Emotions? Singers move the passions with the changing meaning of each word, alternating happy and sad, as Monteverdi’s La Musica explains:

I am Music: with my sweet phrases I can make tranquil any troubled heart;

And now with noble anger, now with Love, I can inflame the most frozen mind.

For sustaining instruments like the flute or violin, long notes are highly sensual, drawn-out with a slow bow or a languid breath, releasing the long suspense with a touch of vibrato at the end of the note. Whitney Houston demonstrates baroque long notes perfectly in And I will always love you, here.

But what about us harpists, with neither text nor sustain to play with? Quantz explains in detail the Good Delivery for dissonance and resolution. The dissonance is played loud, the resolution soft (another Abzug), and the more intense the dissonance, the louder it is played, and the softer the following resolution. On the harp, we can also move down even more près de la table to make a more painful sound on the dissonance, and then up the string for a soothing resolution. Most importantly, we can feel the effect of the dissonance as an increase in tension, with a relaxation at the resolution.

DREAM-TIME

Just before I finish, I’d like to let you know about a completely new area of research that is opening up right now, one that may revolutionise our ideas about Emotions in Music and in History, and about musical pedagogy for any repertoire.

Over the last twenty years, clinical and research psychologist Joe Griffin has developed a new theory of Dreams, which offers a convincing biological, evolutionary and psychological model, replacing the outworn ideas of Freud and Jung.

Griffin shows that Dreams are the mind’s way of dealing with those powerful emotions of the previous day which were not dealt with at the time. Dreams resolve unfulfilled expectations (whether good or bad). But what we experience in our dreams is not the actual situation that brought on the unresolved emotion; rather the dream is a metaphor, a mix of memories that matches the pattern of the unresolved situation.

Dreams operate in a particular mode of sleep, characterised by rapid eye movement. The dream state is therefore known as the REM-state. There are other altered states of consciousness that allow us to enter REM-state whilst we are awake, such as day-dreaming or hypnosis. Griffin calls the REM-state the Theatre of Dreams. A signal from the lower brain, a so-called PGO-spike, calls attention to the beginning of the dream.

Many musicians, sportsmen and women, creative writers and composers know the special state of consciousness known as Flow, or being ‘in the zone’. It’s that Zen thing. It’s related to Mindfulness. You’re relaxed, but wonderfully concentrated on the task at hand; you feel quietly confident that you can manage it, you feel calmly exhilarated at the challenge it presents to you; you don’t feel self-conscious, you are just ‘there’, in the moment, in the groove; in a certain way, Time seems to slow down, so that you can calmly take in all the incoming information, and calmly make an elegant decision and execute your reponse perfectly; your artistic intentions and your manual actions unite perfectly; you are working at high efficiency, but you could continue for hours without getting tired; you feel happy, even elated.

It’s a great feeling, and it is being in Flow that makes the difference between an elite performer, musician, martial arts practitioner or sportsman and one who is merely ok. It is being in Flow that can lift any of us beyond the limits of our normal abilities. There is exciting work going on in Hungary and Holland about teaching Flow to musicians. Not just Technique and Interpretation, but how to get into Flow.

My own research project hypothesises that Flow is another REM-state. I’m suggesting that such elements of Historically Informed Performance as the slow, steady count of Tactus, a kind of meditation on rhythm, and baroque gesture with its frequent calls for attention, might function as gateways into Flow. And not only for the performer, but also for the audience. Specific features of baroque stage-practice – Historical Action – support the hypothesis that Baroque Operas (and Shakespeare’s dramas) are a Theatre of Flow, where performers and audiences share an REM-state, the mind’s Theatre of Dreams, in which emotions can be communicated powerfully through the metaphors of poetry and music.

REM-state allows us to reach something beyond our everyday experience – that spiritual dimension to art that every music-lover believes in, whatever we choose to call it. In 17^th-century philosophy, music connects us humans to the cosmos. Many of you will know about so-called Dreamtime, in which indigenous Australians connect to their family’s homeland and traditional beliefs through a spiritual state of music, art and story-telling. The Star Wars idea of a Force that we all share, that we can all learn to use, is perhaps not so far off.

And it’s around the year 1600, just as opera is being invented, that we see the invention of larger-than-life, super-human instruments like the theorbo and arpa doppia, with super low-notes and uber-chromaticism. With such an instrument, a super-hero like Orpheus can travel to Hell and back, and use his super-powers to persuade Charon into a magic sleep – another REM-state, of course.

We could almost imagine Monteverdi’s T-shirt: my super-power is Flow, what’s yours?

CONCLUSION

Leaving aside these dreamy speculations, as we study the emotional language of historical music, we can view that history from the inside if we adopt period priorities and appreciate ‘foreign’ assumptions. We can consider what we would like the audience to receive, rather than what we performers want to send out. We can concentrate on Text and Rhythm, not Sound. We can search for the shared aesthetic that unifies many arts within one culture, one region, one period; as well as for the contrasts between one culture and another.

Our harps will speak eloquently, if we focus on short-term phrasing, two or three notes at a time, articulating them with Good and Bad, giving them the semblance and emotions of words. As harpists speaking the language of historical music, we are like actors playing a role, and like actors we want to present our lines with Good Delivery, which will include all the skills of Rhetoric and Historical Action: what we do with our bodies, hand gestures and facial expressions. One of the hot areas of current Early Music research is baroque gesture, or (as it was called at the time) historical Action.

The 17^th-century writer John Bulwer quotes the great orator Quintilian, quoting Cicero, quoting the Greek rhetorician Demosthenes, who was asked: What are the three secrets of Good Delivery?

What are the three secrets of Good Delivery?

Action! Action! Action!

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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!

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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.

Where are YOU? Martial arts, self-awareness and Historically Informed Performance

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

In a second-hand bookshop, I found a copy of Moshe Feldenkrais’ Higher Judo: Groundwork (1952) as a gift for a friend. But (of course) I couldn’t resist having a quick look inside for myself, before giving it away! [You can read the whole book for yourself here]

Nowadays this author is best known as the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, which teaches healthy use of the body not through prescriptive instructions or strenuous exercise, but by developing your own sub-conscious self-awareness as well as your active proprioception. A typical “Awareness through Movement” session has you repeat simple, slow movements without undue effort, but with mindful attention. There is plenty of time between movements, not so much to rest, as to give your somatic nervous system time to ‘learn’ new connections. There is careful attention to breathing. Most participants find the sessions relaxing and undemanding (except of their attention), and are amazed at the positive effects they observe at the end. Typically, ease of movement, range of movement, balance and flow are greatly increased, with a strong accompanying sense of mental and spiritual well-being. I strongly recommend it. [Read more about the Feldenkrais Method here]

But Feldenkrais was also one of the first Western practioners of Judo, and he was held in high regard by Japanese masters of the Art. Gunji Koizumi, who brought Judo to the UK, wrote the preface to Feldenkrais’ book:

Dr M Feldenkrais has made a serious study of the subject, himself attaining Black Belt efficiency. He has studied and analysed Judo as a scientist in the light of the laws of physics, physiology and psychology, and he reports the results in this book which is enlightening and satisfying to the scientific mind of our age. Such a study has been long awaited and is a very valuable contribution to the fuller understanding and appreciation of the merits of Judo…

Dr Feldenkrais, with his learned mind, keen observation and masterly command of words, clarifies the interrelation and the intermingled working of gravitation, body, bones, muscles, nerves, consciousness, subconscious and un-consciousness and opens the way for better understanding.

As we might expect from a thinker who invented his own Method of Awareness through Movement, Feldenkrais’ idea of Groundwork goes far beyond the technicalities of holds, locks and other moves for fighting on the ground. His concept of Higher Judo applies a holistic approach with benefits for mind and spirit, as well as for the body.

Judo is the art of using all parts of the body to promote general well-being, and might be considered as a basic culture of the body. It creates a sense of rhythm of movement and co-ordination of mind and body. Soon after commencing practice, the novice often becomes aware of an improvement in his own occupation or sport, due to a sharpening of his senses.

As part of this sharpening of the senses, Feldenkrais considers a question that equally concerns actors, opera-singers and indeed any performer: how do you perceive your own location in space, where are YOU? According to E. Claparède Notes sur la localisation du Moi (Archives de la Psychologie XIX 1924 p172)

We generally localise the ego at the base of the forehead, between the eyes.

I stumbled on this question as a teenager, and my own observations then confirmed Claparède’s findings. And before reading on, you might like to consider, perhaps even experiment with your own sense of where YOU are. If you lift your hand above your head, it is definitely above YOU, your feet are probably below YOU. Can you close in those limits to home-in on your personal sense of where YOU are located?

As Feldenkrais writes, “the localisation of the ego is not an anatomical fact, but is based on subjective accounts, and is, therefore, one of those things which has little significance unless other phenomena or facts can be aligned with it. It is certainly true that most people feel the ego, i.e. the point which feels more like “I”, at the base of the forehead between the eyes. But it is not exclusively so. With the advancement towards fuller maturity of the spatial and gravitational functions, the subjective feeling is that the ego gradually descends to be finally located somewhat below the navel.”

With fuller maturity, as acheived by Judo training, and by some people by their own means, subjects have no hesitation in finding the localisation in the lower abdomen.

When I mentioned this to a couple of experts in European Historical Swordsmanship, they too had no hesitation in agreeing with Feldenkrais’ location of the self. Stage performers similarly seek a sense of being “centred” or “grounded”.

For many years, I have practiced and taught a technique of ‘grounding’ for historical harp, counter-balancing the tendency for the action to be all ‘at the end of your fingertips’ and connecting-in the whole body, with a sense of centre and a pathway to the ground. And I rediscovered the importance of such ‘groundwork’ when I began research and practical investigation into baroque gesture.

But we know all too well the opposite feeling: instead of a calm centre, there are ‘butterflies in the stomach’, your ‘heart is in your mouth’, ‘the rug is taken out from under your feet’. The opposite of being centred and grounded is to be nervous and off-balance.

Feldenkrais again: “It may be interesting to note that nervous people are very undecided as to where they feel their “I” to be. Sometimes they declare it to be placed in accordance with Clarapède and sometimes they just cannot tell. In acute states of emotional disorder the sensation is that ego shifts between the two extreme localisations mentioned. When we are in good form, the lower localisation is more frequent, and is exclusively so with the higher exponents of Judo. The reader is warned that these observations must be considered critically, though we can demonstrate that we are better co-ordinated when we have no hesitation, and feel distinctly that our ego is located in the lower abdomen.”

Western Historical Martial Arts expert and author of several books on Historical Swordsmanship, Guy Windsor (principal of the School of European Swordsmanship in Helsinki) added the observation that, after a day spent researching and writing, he is aware of the sensation of being ‘too much in his head’, and welcomes the change of his own sense of location-of-self when he turns to training practice.

So we artists, whether performing or martial, are better co-ordinated, confident and in good form when we can ‘ground’ or ‘centre’ ourselves around the centre of gravity of the body. Depression, nervousness and other disturbances to our spiritual and mental balance, even too much intellectualising, all these can destabilise that centred feeling, but it can be re-established through training and practice.

Nevertheless, a question remains for those of us working in Historically Informed Performance. Whilst we expect an Oriental martial artist to be meditating on his breathing, mindful of the balance of his spirit, and contemplating a sense of self in his own navel (my gentle teasing is accompanied by the serious respect that this person probably knows 100 ways to kill me with minimal effort on his part); whilst we see that such holistic techniques can be very effective in modern theatre, in alternative medicine, in elite sport or in promoting mental health; whilst we may well see undeniable practical benefits in our own disciplines, is there any academic justification for introducing such ‘mumbo-jumbo’ into Historically Informed Performance? Where is the Western renaissance evidence to support concepts that we tend to associate with the Orient and with the 1960s?

According to period medical science, varying mental or spiritual states are reflected in the body as changes in the balance of the Four Humours, body liquids that produce visible signs and physical sensations of emotion. Excess of any Humour is unhealthy, but when we are in good form, we are inclined somewhat to the Sanguine Humour. Red blood warmed by the heart floods through the body to give us a healthy glow, a feeling of confidence and warm generosity, an appreciation of the pleasures of the belly (good food and red wine) as well as of the delights of music and dancing. Blood flows to the extremities so that we have good proprioception and muscles are warm, ready for action. In contrast, excess of the Melancholic Humour brings all the negative factors described above, and more: too much intellectualising, nervousness, depression, cold muscles, lack of sensitivity in the nerve-endings. The Melancholy person is ‘in their head’, the Sanguine person is ‘in their body’.

Modern experts in Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method, sports coaches and dancers, anyone with advanced understanding of physical movement can spot the ‘centred’ pose of a practitioner who is ‘relaxed and ready’, ‘grounded’ yet free to move. They can also spot the ability of a trained performer to structure their posture and movement so as to direct maximum efficacy into the desired result, with minimum effort. Renaissance paintings of dancers, swordsmen, even of passionate speakers or angel musicians show the same use of the body, the same relaxed movement and effortless strength that produce grazia of action and sprezzatura in performance, the very qualities so prized in a renaissance courtier. (See Il Libro del Cortegiano, The Book of the Courtier, here).

It is reasonable to assume that in a culture where people rode horses rather than driving cars, and danced or practised swordsmanship rather than playing computer games, Renaissance Man was not only fitter, but also more ‘centred’ than his modern counterpoint. Horse-riding, walking and running, dancing and swordfighting all promote proprioception, sense of balance and control of movement. Indeed, we might even assume that ‘centredness’ was the default state for a healthy person in that period – this would explain why period sources discuss the phenomenon mostly when it is pathologically absent.

Around the year 160q0, Italian sources frequently use the word vita (life) to mean also ‘the part of the body around the centre of gravity’. Dance-teacher Cesare Negri refers in Le Gratie d’Amore (1602) to walking well ‘sopra la vita‘ an effortlessly relaxed walk, with the body elegantly balanced over the centre of gravity. He also gives hilarious examples of how not to do it. “There are many different ways to walk, as we see every day on the street: some have the feet wide apart, and when they put a foot forwards, they fall from their centre of gravity onto this foot; others have the legs spread and the feet pointing outwards; others, when they put their feet forwards, wobble their belly backwards and forwards; others take lots of tiny fast steps with the points of toes outwards, as if they are on important business; others walk with their feet apart and their knees knocking together. All this offends the eyes of the onlookers. But to walk well, balanced on your core, with the best grace and ability, so that you give honour to others, is to walk well…

Colleagues of mine who are experts in Feldenkrais Method and Alexander Technique similarly recognise how mis-use of the body is reflected in the peculiarities of people’s gait.

One of the most dramatic moves in circa-1600 rapier fighting is the ‘scanso della vita‘, in which a fast, well-balanced turn removes the entire body from where your opponent was just about to stab you. This ‘voiding of the body-centre’ is accompanied by a counter-attack with the sword-hand in quarta.

This use of the word vita assures us that the seicento sense of a ‘body-centre’ was strong. But in that pre-Cartesian culture, there was no simple duality of mind and body. We might rather think of the Mind as centred Claparède-style between the eyes; the Spirits of Passion (higher emotions) centred at the heart; ‘gut-feelings’, posture and movement at the centre of gravity. All of these centres are linked by the ‘mystic breath’ of pneuma, the European renaissance’s analogue to oriental chi.

In this period, Music had a threefold identity: the divinely ordered movement of the stars and planets, musica mondana, the harmonious nature of the human body, musica humana, and actual music as performed on earth, musica instrumentalis (whether played or sung). Similarly, pneuma, the mystical Spirit of Passion, has a parallel three-fold nature as the divine breath of creation, the flow of breath/energy within the human body, and the communicative exchange between performer and audience. For a Historically Informed Performer, being ‘centred’ not only optimises your own physical co-ordination in performance and combats nervousness, but also empowers emotional communication to your audience, and puts both performer and audience in touch with the ineffable, mystical spark of artistic inspiration.

As Feldenkrais’ book title reminds us, in so many disciplines and in so many ways, Groundwork and the Higher Art are inextricably linked.

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

Sparrow-flavoured Soup – or What is Continuo?

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

There are many possible routes towards an understanding of basso continuo. As an academic discipline, it’s often associated with the study of musical grammar, harmony and voice-leading: ‘Harmonise this chorale melody in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach’.

Some performers might – like me – have begun their study with the printed realisations in modern editions: thinning out rich, mid-20^th-century piano parts; enriching minimalist sketches; adding some improvisatory touches and trying to filter out what is stylistically inappropriate.

Often the harpsichord is assumed to be the epitome of historical style, and the combination of cello and harpsichord to be the ideal mix of melodic bass and chordal harmony, perhaps with a double-bass to add gravity.

There is a strong modern tendency to think in terms of an ideal realisation, with the ‘correct’ harmonies. In this view, a perfect (in every way!) cadence should be figured ⁵₃ ⁶₄⁵₄⁷₃over the dominant – other options are seen as variants of this ‘standard’ harmonisation.

But a moment’s reflection will suggest that over some two centuries of the basso continuo age, the ideal of a ‘perfect’ realisation must have changed. Like any other aspect of performance practice, the aesthetics of Continuo must differ according to period and national style. C.P.E. Bach’s admirably detailed instructions do not apply to Peri, Johann Sebastian’s wonderful harmonies are no guide to Caccini, Rameau’s aesthetic is not the same as Monteverdi’s.

And in Continuo studies as in any historical investigation, we must beware of teleology, of the dangers of ‘looking backwards into the past’. It is all too easy to approach the beginnings of Continuo via Bach, and to view both Bach and Monteverdi through the distorting lens of modern assumptions (whether in ‘common practice’ or ‘early music’).

So I suggest that it’s well worthwhile to start at the very beginning, and consider the earliest sources for Continuo. Those first treatises should be our guide for the early 17^th century, and they should also be our starting point from which to follow a chronological path towards Corelli, Lully, Bach and beyond.

One of the most interesting early sources is Agostino’s Agazzari’s 1607 Del Sonare sopra’l basso con tutti li stromenti e dell’ uso loro nel Conserto (About playing from the basso part with all instruments, and about their use in ensemble). See my posting What is Music here for links to a facsimile, translations and commentaries.

The reference to uso shows that Agazzari’s intent is thoroughly practical. His treatise is not lost in the clouds of metaphysical speculation (Science), nor concerned about theoretical principles governing the Art of Music. And he doesn’t waste time expounding lots of rules for playing from unfigured bass, since composers often create surprising harmonies as they imitate the passions of particular words. Agazzari prefers to write in the figures as necessary, though he emphasises that all cadences, intermediate or final, end on a major chord. His focus is consistently on the practicalities of playing from a new notation (the basso, whether figured or not, now regarded as the best guide to the structure of the whole piece, rather than a score or intabulation).

Agazzari discusses in detail what each kind of instrument should do, and categorises his material in various different ways. He distinguishes between wind and string instruments. Other than the organ, winds are excluded from delicate ensembles because they do not blend, though the trombone can serve as a low bass when only a small (4-foot) organ is available. Other wind instruments might be acceptable, if played expertly and dolce.

Amongst string instruments, he mentions those which are capable of perfetta armonia di parti (perfect structure of counterpoint – the word armonia means well-structured organisation, not just ‘harmony’): Organ, gravicembalo (large harpsichord with low basses), Lute and arpa doppia etc.

Other instruments can play harmonies (in the modern sense), but not fully correct counterpoint (not all the armonia, in the period sense): cittern, lirone, guitar. A third group of instruments offers fewer chordal (let alone contrapuntal) possibilities: Viola da gamba, violin, pandora etc.

Players are expected to have three separate but complementary skill-sets: a knowledge of armonia (counterpoint, rhythm and proportions, all the clefs, dissonance and resolution, when to play major/minor thirds or sixths etc); total familiarity with their instrument and with playing from score or intabulation; excellent aural skills and awareness of the movement of individual polyphonic voices.

Agazzari champions the practice of playing from the basso as useful in three ways: for the new style of singing dramatic music, lo stile moderno di cantar recitativo; as easier than reading, especially sight-reading, from a score or intabulation; and as a very concise and compact notational system.

But the most significant binary distinction he makes , one that he repeats several times within this short treatise, is to categorise what is played ‘on the basso’ as either Structure – fondamento ( a word that occurs 9 times) – or Decoration – ornamento (4 times). Meanwhile, we should note that the word continuo does not occur anywhere in this document.

Agazzari frames his entire discussion in these terms – Structure versus Decoration – introducing these two ordini (categories) at the very beginning of his argument. We should therefore be very careful to link each piece of advice to the relevant category. We should think too about how the various bi- and tri-partite categorisations mentioned above intersect with those most significant ordini of Structure and Decoration. And how does the concept of Continuo fit with all this?

Simply to pose this question points us towards the answer. The essential function of Continuo is fondamento: Structure (organ, harpsichord, theorbo, harp).

Meanwhile, the function of Decoration, ornamento, is condire – to spice up the ensemble with delicious tone-colours (lirone, cittern, guitar etc) or clever division-playing, scherzando e contrapontegiando (having fun and playing counterpoint, on lute, violin etc). Agazzari includes division-playing here for highly practical reasons: divisions can now be improvised whilst reading from the basso part, rather than from a score or intabulation.

Looking backwards into the past, we might be tempted to conflate these two functions, to imagine that Agazzari was writing about ‘two ways to play Continuo’. But his book is not called ‘How to play Continuo’, it’s ‘about playing from the basso’.

Moving chronologically forwards with Agazzari from the late 16^th into the early 17^th century, we can see that he is linking the uso moderno, a new use of notation (playing now from a basso, rather than a score or intabulation) to two distinct practices: structural accompaniment and fun decoration – scherzi. And he is very careful to keep the two practices distinct.

The structural foundation – Agazzari’s fondamento -is what we now call Continuo (organ, harpsichord, theorbo, harp).

Some instruments with interesting tone-colours (lirone, cittern, guitar etc) can play a chordal accompaniment (which we might well today call Continuo), but Agazzari does not class these as fondamento because they cannot play the actual basso. Nevertheless, we have clear evidence from other sources that such instruments were sometimes used as the sole accompaniment.

Otherwise, Decoration – ornamento – consists of division-playing. This ‘spice’ should of course be flavoursome and tasteful. And advanced division-playing even includes the invention of additional counterpoint. But it’s not Continuo.

As Bernhard Lang (2003) comments here, Agazzari’s advice on ornamento-playing can be seen in the context of earlier division manuals by Ganassi (1535), Ortiz (1553) and dalla Casa (1584). Agazzari’s contribution is to compare the different division-playing styles of particular instruments, inviting them all, even violinists, to improvise whilst reading from the basso part.

The other job, Continuo-playing, is described in the other part of Del Sonare sopra’l basso, in the paragraphs referring to Structure, fondamento. As Agazzari reminds us, we should not confuse the two roles –

hanno diverso ufficio, e diversamente s’adoperano (they have different jobs, and are managed differently).

But all too often today, we hear Continuo-bands playing divisions, playing divisions simultaneously (but not quite together!) on several instruments, and playing divisions on fondamento instruments. We even hear Continuo competing with the singers or solo instruments in the treble register – precisely the zuppa e confusione, cosa dispiacevole (soup and confusion, a displeasing thing) that Agazzari warns against!

Even in division-playing, whenever several instruments play together, Agazzari tells us that they should take turns to add ornamento, one at a time. They should not compete ‘like sparrows, all at the same time: and let’s see who can shout the loudest’!

Lang also comments on the seicento trend for the fondamento to be less contrapuntal, more chordal, assembled vertically over the basso. And Agazzari leaves us in no doubt that in general, too much polyphonic complexity, too much concentration on contrapuntal imitation, is contrary to the new aesthetic:

By the rules of counterpoint these might be good compositions, but nevertheless by the rules of good and true Music they are vitiose – vicious, faulty, sinful, defective, imperfect, false, corrupted, blemished, full of vice, unsound, crazy, and worm-eaten (according to Florio’s 1611 dictionary).

And that comes from not understanding the purpose and the job, from forever wanting merely to observe counterpoint and imitations of notes, rather than of the affetto (passion) and semblance of the words.

So with that stern warning and the condemnation of sparrow-flavoured soup ringing in your ears, I invite you to compare Agazzari’s point by point instructions for fondamento with what you hear, listening to Continuo in concerts and recordings today. Continuo-players, keyboardists especially, might like to compare Agazzari’s recipes with their own playing in early seicento repertoire.

The Continuo are those which guide and support the whole body of voices and instruments in the ensemble.

They are Organ, gravicembalo etc (and for smaller ensembles) Lute, Theorbo, Harp etc

The job of ‘guiding’ or ‘directing’ – guidare – reminds us of the crucial importance of rhythmic Structure. Rhythm is a significant element of 17^th-century armonia, and Caccini makes it a priority, along with the Text.

Agazzari links ‘support’ to grave resonance and low-octave basses (see below).

When playing Continuo, you have to play very judiciously, watching out for the entire ensemble…

Playing the piece as straight and accurately as possible, not making passages or divisions, but helping with some low-octave bass notes, and avoiding the high register.

Many of the earliest figured-basses show exactly where the harmonies change over a sustained bass, by writing the rhythms of the harmony changes into the basso itself. (The repeated bass notes are then tied together, to show that they are not re-struck). Such precise notation, combined with Agazzari’s instruction not to ‘break’ a bass-note and with the growing seicento tendency to think vertically over the bass (rather than horizontally in counterpoint), suggests that Continuo-players should as far as possible avoid in their realisation any activity (especially harmony changes) that is faster-moving than the basso itself.

So if the basso moves in minims, say, your realisation should also move in minims, not in crotchets and quavers. In general, we expect the entire fondamento to reflect the rhythms of the basso, and typically to be less active than the composed contrapuntal parts.

Don’t double the soprano, don’t play divisions and ornaments in the high register…

But it’s good to play with great restraint (or perhaps, very compactly), and grave (low, weighty, serious: Florio gives ‘grave, solemn, important).

Grave is also used to characterise the violone, which plays ‘as much as possible on the thick strings, often with low-octave basses’. The re-entrant tuning of the theorbo and the triple-stringing of Italian baroque harp allow compact chords, with a lot of supportive resonance all packed into the grave register: both instruments have low-octave basses, as does the gravicembalo (literally, grave-harpsichord).

Note Agazzari’s emphasis that the fondamento should play ‘very judiciously’, ‘with great restraint’. No chirping sparrows!

The Continuo holds the tenor – the underlying harmonic/rhythmic sequence, for example a ground bass (see Ortiz) and the armonia –the complete structure, both harmony and rhythm – ferma – firm, steady, fixed, sure (Florio).

In large ensembles, certain instruments have well-defined roles. When, for example, harpsichord and theorbo play together, it is the theorbo that should make some divisions (on the bass strings), whilst the harpsichord provides a fondamento grave. Agazzari’s advice is confirmed by the allocation of particular instruments to alternative bass-lines in scores by Landi, Veracini etc. The more complex basso is for lute, theorbo, or harp: the simplified part is the fondamento for harpsichord.

The role of the keyboard, whether organ or gravicembalo is entirely Structural. (Small spinetti might provide Decoration). Today, this custom is more honoured in the breach than in the observance !

Nowadays a lot of zuppa e confusione is created by inappropriately applying to Continuo-playing Agazzari’s suggestions for ornamento, whilst ignoring his warnings against chirping like competing sparrows. But his advice on fondamento is repeated in many other period sources, especially for musica recitativa, where it’s generally agreed the accompanist should play grave and not add ornaments.

The frontispiece to Del sonare sopra’l basso illustrates tutti li stromenti, with the organ, Agazzari’s own instrument, enthroned above. In the Academy of the Intronati, Agazzari’s nickname was L’Armonico intronato (well-structured musical organisation, enthroned). Below two shields show the heavenly orbits, with the caption ex motu armonia (cosmic movement produces armonia) and what might be the infernal pit, with the caption nec tamen inficiunt (and, however, they don’t create chaos – literally ‘un-make’).

So I give Agostino the last word:

Just take this as it is, and forgive me for the lack of time to write more.

www.historyofemotions.org.au

The Good, the Bad & the Early Music Phrase

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

We all know what a musical phrase is. It corresponds to a sentence of prose, or a line of verse, and we see phrases marked with long, elegantly curved lines in beautifully engraved 19^th & 20^th-century editions. The phrase is arched, long, sustained, and essentially legato. It curves upwards to the middle, and then descends. We talk of “phrasing towards” a certain note, so that the phrase “moves”, and has a “goal” along the way. And when we come to the last phrase, the final note of a piece often represents a triumphant arrival, perhaps returning emphatically to the tonic, after explorations of other tonalities.

All this is taught in elementary music lessons, so that it becomes part of what we assume to be basic, ‘instinctive’ musicality. But …

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

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

Although the guiding principle of Early Music is awareness of various different historical aesthetics according to period and country, there are some general trends that distinguish the Rhetorical age (pre-18^th century) from the Romantic and Modernist periods. For example, the relation between Rhythm and Emotion changes particularly sharply in the decades after 1800. Read more about this in Richard Hudson Stolen Time: The history of tempo rubato (1997).

The 19^th/20^th-century aesthetic encourages evenness, homogeneity, continuity during a long phrase. Consistently rich tone, even volume of sound, and continuous vibrato indicate depth of emotion, in the sense of a sustained level of intensity. The most powerful moments are the culmination of a gradual intensification of one particular emotion, to the point of cathartic release.

In that aesthetic, high artistry and nobility of purpose are indicated by bending the rhythm. Lively and steady rhythm is seen as ‘popular’, but inscrutable manipulation of rhythm casts the performer as a ‘Romantic genius’, expressing emotions beyond the understanding of the common herd.

The Early Music phrase is different

The pre-18^th century aesthetic encourages short-term contrasts within short phrases. Quality & volume of sound, vibrato and articulations, the passions themselves change from note to note. Emotion is conveyed by changing (not maintaining) passions (affetti).

High artistry and nobility of purpose are indicated by the ability and determination to frame these passions within reliable rhythm. Musical polyphony and linguistic complexity are the main indicators along the spectrum from ‘popular’ to ‘high art’ music: composers and performers are equally at home anywhere along that spectrum. Reliable rhythm is one of the fundamental skills by which a performer speaks clearly and persuasively to an audience who are at the same, or higher, social level.

In this aesthetic, the musical phrase is an imitation of the human voice, speaking rhetorically in short sense-groups of a few words. Musical phrases are broken up into short ‘mini-phrases’, like an inspiring leader delivering a passionate speech to a large audience in a big hall, without microphone. In music, as in public speaking, the primary duty of the performer is to deliver the text clearly. Clear and varied articulations of vowels and consonants produce short-term contrasts and a mix of legato and staccato.

In rehearsals and lessons, many of today’s Early Musicians talk about phrases (or shorter musical figures) “going towards” a certain note. In performance, this is often associated with a subtle rubato that accelerates towards the phrase-middle, and then slows up. Some Early Music directors deliberately coach this particular rubato technique. (I have christened it ‘Tube-train rubato’ after the London Underground, where the tracks descend away from one station and ascend again to the next, in order to help trains accelerate and slow down as required).

But I see no evidence of the language of ‘going towards’ in period texts that analyse or teach music and poetry. Rather, there are frequent reminders to maintain the tempo without change. And Cambridge University’s recently completed CHARM project has shown by analysis of elite historic recordings that ‘Tube-train rubato’ emerges in the 1950s, replacing what Prof Nicholas Cook calls early-20^th-century ‘Tent-pole rubato’, (slowing towards a meaningful note, then accelerating again, in the way that the canvas of a tent curves up towards the point where the tent–pole supports it, suspends there, and then falls away again).

So if historical sources do not discuss ‘going towards’ significant notes, ‘moving through’ the phrase, and other such indicators of rubato, what do they talk about? If musical time is regular, what else are we encouraged to vary during the phrase, to avoid monotony, and for the sake of expressive subtlety?

Good & Bad

A fundamental period assumption is that music is Rhetorical: it imitates the structures and devices of persuasive speech, in order to muovere gli affetti – to move the passions of the listeners. And if music is like speaking, then the structure of the musical phrase can be compared to contemporary poetry. Accented and unaccented notes correspond to the accented and unaccented syllables of verse: actually, in period sources, notes and syllables are referred to as Good & Bad, or Long & Short.

The regular metre of pre-1800 poetry is the underlying structure that corresponds to the regular Tactus pulse of period music. (See Andrew Lawrence-King Rhythm – what really counts? here). In poetry, Good syllables generally coincide with the underlying metrical structure, for example, in the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s (1609) sonnet:

When I do count the clock that tells the time.

But, as Patsy Rodenburg observes in Speaking Shakespeare (2002), ‘the pure regularity of such a line is relatively rare’. From line to line, word-accents and poetic metre sometimes coincide, but sometimes are in tension against each other, and this is what makes the difference between doggerel and fine poetry. Notice the subtle interplay of word-accents (underlined) and metre (bold) in Richard Barnfield’s line from The Passionate Pilgrim (1599)

If Music and sweet Poetry agree.

Similarly in period music: individual word-accents may, or may not coincide with the underlying Tactus measure.

So monotony is avoided, the regularity of rhythm is varied, not with rubato, but with varying placement of Good and Bad notes, within a steady measure of time. Read more about the distinction between metre and accent in George Houle Metre in Music (2000).

Principal Accent

The metre of period poetry typically alternates Good and Bad syllables, with the most significant Good syllable (referred to in metrical analysis as the Principal Accent) at the end of the line, where the rhyme might occur. However, this Principal Accent is usually not the last syllable: typically the line ends with a Bad syllable.

To be or not to be, * that’s the Question.

Shakespeare Hamlet

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra Vita

Dante Inferno

Even in these short examples, we see again that not every metrically ‘strong’ syllable necessarily has a Good word-accent. Metre and accent work together in independent counterpoint.

We also see that each language has its own patterns. English uses many monosyllables, Italian has many two-syllable words Good-Bad: piano, forte, mezzo, nostra, vita etc. [Cammin is a poetic shortening of cammino, which shares a typical tri-syllable pattern Bad-Good-Bad with allegro, adagio, sonata etc]

So now we can assemble the structure of a typical Early-Music phrase:

The Tactus is maintained with a slow, steady pulse
Individual notes contrast with one another in articulation, colour, volume & meaning.
Passions change rapidly – for example with dissonance/resolution.
Individual notes are Good or Bad, typically alternating Good/Bad and joined Good-to-Bad.
The Principal Accent is the last Good note.
Phrases typically end with a Bad note.
Complete phrases are separated into short ‘mini-phrases’.
Unity through the phrase comes from consistent Tactus and sustained thought, not from legato sound.

And in place of that long, elegantly curved phrase-line in thick steady black, we could envisage something more speech-like: fragmentary, multi-coloured, alternating, with its high point on the penultimate note.

The past is a foreign country; there is very little we can say about it until we have learned its language and understood its assumptions.

Michael Howard ‘The lessons of history’ 1991

In my opening paragraph, I blithely assumed that a phrase corresponds to a sentence. But in period literature, a sentence (terminated by a full stop .) is often the length of a modern paragraph, containing a long succession of clauses punctuated by semi-colons ;. In spoken delivery, within each clause, a good orator would make gaps between each sense-group of a few words:

Speak the speech, * I pray you, * as I pronounced it to you, * trippingly on the tongue: * but * if you mouth it, * as many of your players do, * I had as lief * the town-crier spoke my lines.

Shakespeare Hamlet The Advice to the Players

So in Early Music we might expect to find that short ‘phrases’ corresponding not to sentences, but to short sense-groups, linked together by steady rhythm and continuity of thought into medium-length clauses. Clauses are then separated by cadences (which correspond to semicolons, rather than to full stops). Like semi-colons in period texts, cadences occur very frequently in 17^th-century music, but they punctuate, rather than stopping the flow. Steady Tactus drives us over the momentary lull of each cadence, until we reach a full stop, which corresponds to the end of a section.

These are the hierarchical, Rhetorical structures of sentence construction and musical design which are carefully matched to each other in 17^th-century madrigals, mass-settings and recitatives. The link between punctuation and musical construction is made explicit in a 17^th-century poem in praise of composer Henry Lawes:

No pointing Comma, Colon, half so well

Renders the Breath of Sense; they cannot tell

The just Proportion how each word should go

To rise or fall, run swiftly or march slow.

Thou shew’st ‘tis Musick only must do this…

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

http://www.historyofemotions.org.au

Andrew Lawrence-King

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THE QUALITY OF BAROQUE TIME

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