What is Music?

A Master of Arms, as the opening words of a discussion on early music, might seem inappropriate…

What is Music? Is it an Art, a Science, a Practice, or just something that comes naturally? How would musicians have thought about this question in earlier periods? And how have the meanings of all these words changed over the years?

Nowadays, we admire a performance that strikes us as ‘natural’, and we shun ‘artificiality’. It’s assumed that a great Artist should not be subject to petty rules. And that the subtleties of Art transcend the limits of Science. In academic circles, Musicology (in German, Musikwissenschaft, music-science) outranks Performance Studies. And those who might wish to call themselves Artists are often looked down upon as mere Practitioners. So how did all this play out around the year 1600?

Agazzari’s treatise Del sonare sopra’l basso is one of the most-studied sources for early seicento performance practice. Many of us got to know it through Gloria Rose’s pioneering 1965 article, Agazarri and the Improvising Orchestra, but now both the original (Siena, 1607) and Bernhard Lang’s most helpful 2003 transcription (with parallel translations into English and German) are now available free online.

Original

Lang’s transcriptions

Rose’s commentary (fee or subscription to access)

Del sonare sopra’l basso is a key text that I shall certainly return to in future postings on the practical details of ensemble direction and continuo-playing. But first let’s look more closely at the preliminary dedication. It’s all too tempting to skip over this, in the rush to get to Agazzari’s main text, but it hints at answers to my question: What is Music? – answers that are significantly different from those most musicians would give today.

Agazzari’s treatise is dedicated to Cosimo Berlingucci, and the printer, Domenico Falcini, begins with the words A Professor d’armi

“A Master of Arms, as the dedicatee for teachings on liberal sciences, might well appear inappropriate – if it were true, that Sciences and Arms do not belong together.”

The myriad connections between early music and historical swordsmanship are a fascinating topic in themselves, but Falcini’s words strike to the heart of my question. He takes it for granted that music is one of the ‘liberal sciences’. His more subtle point is that Arms are also Science. Music and Arms are both scienze liberali, worthy to be studied by every free citizen.

Just a few years later, in the same city of Siena, Ridolfo Capo Ferro published his Gran Simulacro dell’ Arte e dell Uso della Scherma (1610), one of the most famous texts on period swordsmanship. Tom Leoni’s excellent 2011 English translation and commentary is currently out of print, but the original and Swanger & Wilson’s 1999 English translation are free to download:

Original

English

This ‘Great Representation… of Swordfighting’ refers to ‘the Art and Practice’, and although Capo Ferro does refer to the discipline as a Science, he formally defines it as “Art, and not Science”. “The term Science, in its strict definition”, he explains, “treats of eternal and divine things that surpass human judgement.” Capo Ferro’s main purpose is to teach the Art and the Practice, not the Philosophy, of swordsmanship.

In modern terms, renaissance ‘Science’ includes Philosophy, Astro-Physics, Mathematics and Theology: Astrology and Alchemy also are not excluded. Returning to 17^th-century ways of thinking, the Science of Geometry studies Number and Space. The higher Science of Astronomy unites the studies of Number, Space and Movement. Swordsmanship and historical Dance are thus related to Astronomy, the study of the perfect movement of the heavenly spheres. As a Science, Music is only a little lower, combining the two disciplines of Number (pitch ratios and rhythmic subdivisions) and Movement (ie, Time).

Capo Ferro also neatly summarises the period view of Nature, Art and Practice. “Art regulates Nature, and with the more secure guidance directs us by the infallible truth and by the organisation of its precepts to the true Science of our [discipline].” This places Nature, Art and Science in a hierarchy: Art is a means of organising Nature according to rational precepts, in order to approach the ‘eternal and divine’.

Capo Ferro is very clear about the relation between Art and Nature. Nature’s material receives the “ultimate form and perfection of Art”. “Art… in the guise of Architect, takes it [Nature] and makes some beautiful construction, and thus refines and sculpts… bringing it little by little to the summit of perfection.”

And what then is Art? “Art… is a system of perpetually true and well-organised precepts”. A renaissance ‘Art’ is thus a set of rules that bring disorderly nature towards heavenly perfection. But are such rule-sets really ‘perpetually true’?

I suggest that we can accept that they are perpetual, if we understand them not as abstract rules, “you must always do this”, but as precepts that guide Nature and your Practice towards the high perfection of a desired result. Different Arts will desire different results, and have different rules. Thus Capo Ferro’s set of rules still work very well indeed, providing that your intention is to defend yourself in a duel to the death with long, sharp rapiers. If you are trying to score points in a modern fencing competition using lightweight foils, without needing to kill your opponent, you need another set of rules.

Similarly, we can trust Agazzari’s rules if we are playing seicento music on early instruments, with the period intention of ‘moving the passions’ of our audience. But if we are playing say Romantic repertoire, with the 19^th-century intention of expressing the performer’s genius and sublime depth of feeling, we probably need another set of rules.

Historical treatises on Swordsmanship also deal with down and dirty questions of uso, Practice, as opposed to Art. However well you understand the precepts of the Art as an intellectual construct, you still need to practice assiduously to acquire physical skills. Musicians can certainly relate to that.

And some of what one does in Practice falls a little short of the divine perfection that Art would have us aspire to. A swordsman might stab you with his dagger, rather than with his sword, the Queen of Weapons, if it would save his life. Continuo-players might accept less-than-perfect contrapuntal move, if it preserved their concentration on the vital priorities of text and rhythm. Many historical treatises leave space for practical subtleties which cannot be written down, within the limitations (and rules) of period notation.

Now we can understand how the word ‘artificial’, in its 17^th-century sense of ‘full of Art’, is one of the highest compliments awarded to fine music, both in composition and performance. In the original sense, ‘artificial’ music takes something Natural, subjects it to the Precepts of that particular Art (since of course, Monteverdi’s Art is not quite the same as Purcell’s), in order to bring it as close as possible to the summit of heavenly perfection.

In this period view, Nature, Art, Practice and Science all have their place. But those philosophical terms, and their respective places in a hierarchical value-system, differ from our modern understanding. Is this just a quirky detail of historical philosophy, or might it change how we approach the Practice of playing old music today?

Study the Art of Historical Swordsmanship here

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

Terms of Expression

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

I’m always intrigued by the differences between various languages, words that exist in one language, but not in another. For example, the German word konsequent does not have a direct equivalent in English. Consistent, self-consistent, responsible, reliable, accepting the future consequences of one’s present actions – these are some of the areas of meaning, but there is no single English word that fully conveys the significance konsequent has for German-speakers.

But in English we do have a word – inconsequent – that neatly conveys the opposite: ‘not connected or following logically”. I think the absence of an English word for the positive qualities of konsequent says something about the respective national characters!

Within one language, words also change their meanings with time. A favourite example is the Duke of Wellington’s comment after the battle of Waterloo in 1815: “It has been a damned nice thing”. Of course, he didn’t mean that it was a pleasant occasion, with a good time had by all, as ‘nice’ would suggest today. His next words clarify the period meaning: “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”. The earlier meaning of ‘nice’ is preserved in the modern phrase ‘a nice distinction’ – a subtle, fine distinction.

Meanings that change over time and words that are missing from certain cultures warn us to be careful when considering how emotions might be expressed in music of the past. Most of today’s standard terms for musical expression – mezzo piano, legato, rubato etc – are not found in early 17^th-century notation, and are not part of the artistic discourse of the time. We no longer think that this means Monteverdi’s music was performed without expressive subtlety: we’ve moved on from mid-20^th century theories of Terassendynamik. But clearly, in the 17^th-century expression was being notated and discussed in different terms.

One practical consequence of our Text, Rhythm, Action! research is that we try to use appropriate period vocabulary in rehearsal discussion and for coaching notes. Our intention is to match artistic priorities in rehearsal to those of the original performers. But this presents an immediate challenge: the word ‘expression’ itself is conspicuously absent from early texts. This certainly does not mean that Monteverdi’s music was inexpressive: the primary aim of 17^th-century music was muovere gli affetti, to move the passions. But we can draw some nice distinctions between ‘expressing emotion’ and ‘moving the passions’.

In both Italian and English versions, the 17^th-century term for emotion is plural: affetti, passions. Rather than steadily intensifying one emotion, they wanted to move between contrasting passions. So modern-day performers and directors might find it more effective to work on emotional contrasts, rather than simply looking for more intensity.

And the phrase ‘moving the passions’ begs the question: whose passions? The audience’s, of course. This puts a completely different spin on the whole business of emotions in performance. The 17^th-century priority is to move the audience’s passions, whereas the romantic & modern term ‘expression’ focusses on what the performer does. The period term directs our attention away from the process and towards the desired outcome.

At the end of century, the distinction is made explicit in Brady’s 1692 Ode to St Cecilia, set by Henry Purcell, who himself sang the counter-tenor aria. Music is ‘Nature’s voice’, the ‘mighty art … at once the passions to express and move’. Beyond expressing your feelings, music’s primary aim is to move the audience’s passions.

This – as the Duke of Wellington might say – is a damned nice thing. It’s a subtle distinction, but it makes all the difference. Baroque music privileges the audience: it’s about moving their passions with ever-changing contrasts, not about a performer expressing his or her emotion.

Historically informed performance should encourage us to move beyond the selfishness of self-expression. Performers of baroque music, unlike Method actors, do not need to find their personal motivation before they can sing or play a certain phrase. It’s about the audience’s passions, not about your emotion.

And the clear structures of 17^th-century texts and music are not some kind of obstacle threatening to block your personal involvement with the material – they are the elegantly designed framework, the beautifully crafted box in which to deliver passionate persuasion to your audience. In particular, performers should maintain the high priority of structured rhythm alongside the first priority of communicating the text and its passions to the audience.

If we take all this seriously, much of our rehearsal vocabulary and training commentary for early music should change. We should stop asking performers to ‘be more expressive’, and instead empower them to persuade their audience to feel the changing passions structured into the original work.

theatre-palais-cardinal Louis XIII

www.historyofemotions.org.au

Music expresses emotions?

Posted by Andrew Lawrence-King

Probably most musicians and music-lovers would agree that ‘music expresses emotions’, although each of these three words can be problematised: what kind of music? What do you mean by ‘express’? Whose emotions? What is emotion, anyway? And all of these three concepts – music, expression, emotion – change as we trace them back through history.

Early Music tends to concentrate on precise detail: should we play up or down a semitone from modern pitch, or in-between? Precisely how should we tune a harpsichord for Bach? Which violin-bow or oboe-reed should we use for Handel? These small details are significant – each one is a piece of jigsaw-puzzle which constructs your over-view of a particular repertoire and where it fits in history. But here, I want to ask the big questions, questions about ‘music’, ‘expression’ and ’emotions’, questions that are sometimes missed as we grapple with the minutiae of Historically Informed Performance.

For many musicians today, the first and most important means of ‘expression’ is rubato: vacillating rhythm, playing around with musical time. Exchanges of views between ‘modern’ and ‘early’ performers tend to focus on vibrato. A blog-posting on early opera begins bravely by noting that audiences value “imagination, innovation, and musical, sensitive interpretations; not what kind of bow is in use”, but fades out with “everyone’s happy to get back to using vibrato now”. So are these today’s priorities for early music: rubato, vibrato and the performer’s happiness?

We know what the priorities were for music and performance at the beginning of the baroque, around the year 1600. According to Caccini’s Le Nuove Musiche (1601/2)

Music is nothing else than Text, and Rhythm, and Sound last of all. And not the other way around!

On performance, many writers, notably John Bulwer Chironomia (1644), cite Quintilian, Cicero and Demosthenes:

What are the three secrets of great performance: Action! Action! Action!

And summarising the first two strophes of the Prologue to Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), one of the first ‘operas’:

Music comes to you, noble audience, whose importance is too high to be told, to move your hearts.

The historical priorities are Text, Rhythm, Action – and the audience’s emotions. Text (not vibrato), Rhythm (not rubato), Action for the Audience (not how the performers themselves feel).

I’ll try to keep these historical and inspiring priorities in mind as I continue to write, as well as in my research, performance and teaching.

Meanwhile, 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”

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