Rubato

Isabella Leonarda 400th anniversary

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Isabella Leonarda:

the Soul of Music in Women’s Hands



This article celebrates the 400th anniversary of Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) – Ursuline nun, singer & composer – in connection with the Earthly Angels performance and recording project.
Listen to her music here.

An extended version of this article will be published on this blog soon.



 

The Soul of Music

 

In 1601, song-composer Caccini proclaimed the Baroque priorities of his ‘New Music’ as ‘Speech and Rhythm’.

Tempo


The first character to sing in the first opera (1600) was Tempo – the personification of Time – commanding: “Act with the hand, act with the heart!” For us today, tempo is the speed of music, but for Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) it was Time itself, defined by Aristotle as a ‘number of movement’ perceived by the Soul.

The up-and-down hand-beat of Tactus connected musical notation to real-world Time. Period iconography shows singers beating Tactus, even in solo songs.

 

 

Zacconi (1592) characterises Tactus as ‘regular, solid, stable, firm… clear, sure, fearless, and without any perturbation’. Mersenne (1636) calibrates Tactus as 1 second per minim, shown by a 1m pendulum. At the end of the century, Carissimi (1696) defines tempo as subjective ‘quality’, the way time feels.

 

17th-century ‘time-signatures’ are relics of much older Mensural notation. Long notes are divided by 2 or 3 to create short notes. Signs of Proportion recalibrate note-values in triple time. Within these fixed multiples, Leonarda employs modifying words to specify fine gradations of tempo.

 

Amidst ‘passionate vocal effects and contrasting movements’ Frescobaldi (1615) shows how to ‘guide Time’, using Tactus. Transitions between movements are made by keeping steady Tactus (no tempo change, or strict Proportion), or by 

suspending the Tactus-hand in the air momentarily, then starting the new movement with modified Tactus, steady time that now feels adagio (literally ‘easy’) or allegro (happy).

 

For Leonarda’s contemporaries, ‘Time is the Soul of Music.’ Read more here.  Zacconi explains that Time breathes life into dry notation: a minim is a dead symbol, until we animate it with the Divine Hand, symbolised by Tactus. Carissimi’s tempo is perceived as an Aristotelian ‘affection of the Soul’, an emotion. Leonarda’s precise notation contradicts 20th-century assumptions that performers choose their own tempo, or that expressiveness requires rubato.

 

Rhetoric

In Baroque speech and music, Rhetoric aims to ‘move the passions’. Read more about musical rhetoric here. Sensual love-lyrics arouse fervour that Leonarda’s music re-directs towards the Divine. Delightful hand-gestures explain the text and communicate passionate contrasts. Rhetorical Delivery combines Pronunciation of words and music with Action of gestures and facial expressions, to channel Enargeia, the emotional power of detailed description. Read more about Enargeia here

 

 

Poetic imagery brings a scene to life, as if the audience could see it with their own eyes. ‘Here’, ‘Now’, ‘Behold!’: Gesture directs the audience’s attention to significant details of the imagined vision. In baroque Madrigalism (word-painting), the music sounds like what the words mean. Fragments of melody create ‘passionate vocal effects’ corresponding to gestures of the hand.

 

Period Medical Science categorises emotion into Four Humours: warm Sanguine (love, hope), dry Choleric (anger, desire), dark Melancholy and cold, wet Phlegmatic.

 

In Leonarda’s Volo Jesum (1670), ‘you fly’ (volate) up a triple-proportion fast-note scale to ‘love God’ on a long high note. After a tempo change to happy allegro, a contrasting 64 movement cites the love-sick Melancholy harmonies and descending bass-line of an operatic lament: ‘the heart is burning’ amidst Choleric ignis et flamma  (fire and flame) with high notes and flickering vocal effects. A ‘happy mountain’ of Sanguine ‘joys’ rises boldly, Phlegmatic ‘rivers’ flow smoothly down, Paradisi has the highest note of all. Descending notes move Choleric passion to Sanguine Humour – et in flammis es dulcis spes – whilst Leonarda’s hand shows the Holy Spirit coming down to earth as Christ: ‘in flames, You are sweet hope’.

 

 

Poetic detail, moving passions, vocal effects, contrasts of tempo, expressive gestures: Leonarda does ‘act with the hand, act with the heart’. The composer’s hand notates subtle tempo changes, in which the serene movement of the Divine Hand is reflected in the diverse pulse-rates of a lover’s human heart. Violinists’ and continuo-players’ hands give life to instrumental music, a microcosm of heavenly perfection, yet swayed by the human passions of the Four Humours. All this is guided by Tactus and expressed by gestures.

 

 

Invisible music

 

Nevertheless, all Leonarda’s handiwork – composition, Tactus, instrumental-playing and rhetorical gestures – remained unseen. Hidden from the congregation by the grille that closed nuns off from the world, the woman who simultaneously embodied an ardent lover and a religious mystic communicated energia (the baroque spirit of performance), by the aural Enargeia of detailed text and precise tempo. Unlike an opera or court singer, she ‘moved the passions’ and warmed her listeners’ hearts to love by evoking ‘affections of the soul’ in sensual visions that were entirely imagined, not seen.

 

Invisible to her 17th-century listeners, almost unnoticed by musicologists until recently, women’s hands are the heart and soul of Leonarda’s music.


Listen here

 

 

Of Pavans & Potatoes: Elocutio [Prattica di Retorica in Musica 3]

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In a development I had not anticipated, this is now the third post inspired by an April Fools’ Day joke, for which I faked up the title page of an imaginary Baroque treatise on The Practice of Rhetoric in Music. It started me thinking…. Why can we not find such a book amongst historical sources? What would it say, if we could find it? Could I write it myself?

I don’t know if my unicorn-hunt will one day lead to an actual book, but after thinking about Inventio and Dispositio, my mind turned inevitably towards the third of the Canons of Rhetoric, Elocutio (style). And as a gesture of sprezzatura (elegant casualness, being ‘cool’), I departed from the previous style of titles. You might well have expected a Pavan, and I couldn’t resist a favourite line of Shakespeare:

Let the sky rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’

(The Merry Wives of Windsor V v). The ballad of Greensleeves is sung to the Passy-measure Pavin (Twelfth Night V i, but you knew that already). And I hope this citation is not too, hmm, let me say ‘salty’: circa 1600, potatoes were considered to be an aphrodisiac.

 

Potatoes in Gerard’s (1597) “Herbal”

 

Elocutio

 

This article is written for you to read, but I could have recorded it as a podcast or video-clip, and I could even have sung it to you. Music itself is a style of elocution. Once the choice is made, to Deliver our Material in musical style, historical principles apply. ‘Art’ in the 17th century is not ‘free self-expression’ but a collection of organising principles. And so the Art of Rhetoric is created according to the five Canons, and other organising principles.

The organising principles of Baroque Music are Rhetorical, because Music itself is a Rhetorical Art. Perhaps this is why we don’t have a book on Rhetoric in Music, because there wasn’t any music that was rhetoric-free! Any treatise on Music could justly be re-labelled as dealing with Rhetoric in Music. Any advice about musical Delivery will be advice about Rhetorical performance in music. The sources that we already know are labelled just “about Music” – but we can be utterly confident that everything they say will follow the principles of Rhetoric in Music.

 

Rhetoric in Music throughout all the Canons

 

And since Music is itself Rhetorical, we don’t have to “add Rhetoric”, like some kind of sauce, to our music at the last moment. Rhetoric in Music is not limited to the final canon of Delivery. Rather, a musical work has been created Rhetorically at every stage. The ingredients, the artistic material has been chosen and/or created rhetorically (inventio); and structured rhetorically (dispositio); the musical style (elocutio) has been chosen to suit that material and structure, perhaps prima prattica polyphony for a religious text; or according to the secunda prattica, solo voice and continuo, the stile rappresentativo, for music-drama; or a violin-band in dance-rhythms for a Ballo.

Different genres of music, even different dance-types, reflect different choices of elocutio, and those choices may influence decisions within the next two canons of Rhetoric.

Rhetoric & the memoria of Music

 

Memoria, the process of memorisation or at least deep study, is Rhetorical in music, as it is in any performing art. We memorise material, structure and style: and in Early Music, these are source-based historical elements. We should start from the best available source of the musical material (inventio) , and study the outlines and cross-connections of its structures (dispositio).

And when, as modern-day performers, we memorise some historical elocutio, our understanding of that style will be based on our knowledge of period performance practice. [So we might later have to re-learn the material and update the style, as our knowledge increases with further study]. But we are not instructed to memorise an individual interpretation – those personal choices are made later, in the final canon of Delivery.

Of course, that is a counsel of perfection. For most of us, our study of a new piece is not chronologically ordered and divided into mutually exclusive compartments, according to the sequence of the Canons of Rhetoric. Rather our ideas emerge holistically, as we progress from sight-reading to the profound understanding that comes only after many performances. And sometimes we need to move rapidly from sight-reading to first performance with little time for deep reflection. But it would be an interesting exercise, perhaps for a student working towards an examined performance, to structure one’s study strictly according to the Five Canons.

Nevertheless, it is good discipline within Historically Informed Performance to avoid making choices earlier than needed. That means working from period sources and applying historical principles as far as possible, and only making personal decisions when sources and principles can tell you no more. By this point, the choice should be between options, all of which are historically appropriate: if not, period information and historical principles will aid you in eliminating inappropriate options, before continuing!

Committing an interpretation to memory too early has other risks, too. Spontaneity disappears if a “spontaneous’ treatment is hard-wired into the memorisation. It might be an interesting and appropriate idea to pause before a certain, particularly intense word, perhaps an exclamation, in order’to increase the dramatic effect [approved by ll Corago]. If you memorise the ‘straight’ version, and apply the pause in performance, both performer and audience can feel the effect of an unexpected delay. But if one memorises the delay, it becomes ‘part of the piece’, and there is no longer any spontaneity in it. For the audience too, the effect will be lessened, if not destroyed, because the end result is that memorised material is being delivered ‘straight’, precisely as memorised.

Probably the worst fault in memorisation is to have re-composed the piece, perhaps without careful consideration (perhaps without even noticing!), and to memorise this version, in the self-deluding hope that it would be more ‘spontaneous’, more ‘free’ or ‘better’ than the original.

When some singer tells me that they have memorised Monteverdi’s Lettera Amorosa or the Testo’s role in Combattimento, my heart sinks. Because nearly always, they have not memorised Monteverdi’s score, but rather their own interpretation of it. And their skewed version is by now so hard-wired, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to fix even the most glaring errors during rehearsal. Saddest of all, this ‘personal interpretation’ is almost certain to resemble closely all the other ‘individual’ versions: long notes will be shortened, short notes will be lengthened, rests will be disregarded.

The remedy is to consider Elocutio – style, before Memorising. Afterwards is too late. Perhaps there really is something in the classic ordering of the Canons of Rhetoric!

 

Delivery & Decorum

 

Delivery, both the basic sound (Pronuntatio) and all the accompanying subtleties of Actio (contrasts of tone-colour, gesture, facial expression, body posture and movement, communication of changes in the Four Humours etc), is the pinnacle of the Art of Rhetoric. Here, we may well be inspired to recognise connections with other Arts, arts that are also rhetorical, especially when the principles of those arts confirm one another.

This painstaking attention to conformity of detail is the Rhetorical doctrine of Decorum. In everyday speech, ‘decorum’ is the formal etiquette of social behaviour, doing the appropriate thing in each situation, respecting  the solemnity of certain occasions, sharing hilarity at suitable moments; how to dress, how to behave, how to speak. In Rhetoric, Decorum expresses the concept that every small detail should be suited to, fitting with every other detail and with the overall design.

Decorum is the craftsman’s discipline that the woodworking on the inside, never seen by anyone else, is as fine as the outside work. Decorum is the scientist’s discipline that the smallest discrepancy challenges a hypothesis and can even shift a paradigm. Decorum is the artist’s discipline that every tiny detail must be absolutely right. Decorum is the Historically Informed Performer’s discipline to review every aspect of performance in the light of newly emerging Performance Practice insights.

Decorum is the discipline of Rhetoric.

Certainly it is appropriate to consider parallels between Music and other Rhetorical arts. In particular, we can hope to find links between period sources on Rhetorical speaking – the origin and central meaning of Rhetoric itself – and musical delivery. And we would expect to find devices from spoken Rhetoric already at work in the music we are studying, manners of Rhetorical speech already prescribed in treatises on musical delivery. It would be surprising, even alarming, if this were not the case!

 

Of Pavans

We might recognise the falling tear melody in the first four notes of Dowland’s Lacrime, and see it as an imitation of the gesture of crying (the finger drawing a tear from the eye and down the cheek) that we see in paintings, in literature, and in works on gesture.

 

 

This recognition supports our emotional connection to the music, and would encourage us to show in performance this gesture, or another period gesture of Sorrow, in which the hands are squeezed together as if to force tears from the eyes…

 

 

… and even the appropriate body posture (inward focussed, head inclined, eyes downcast etc).

 

 

This Rhetoric of tears is clearly seen in the music of Lacrime, and we should recognise and support it in aspects of Delivery that go beyond music.

But we do not need to redouble the musical gesture itself. Dowland’s music will not be ‘more expressive’ if we add ‘more descending’, and fall a seventh, rather than a fourth. Rather, this attempt would destroy another part of the musical rhetoric, its harmony, wrecking the composer’s dispositio (harmonic structure) and elocutio (harmonic language).

That example might seem so obvious as to be unncessary. But let me present a parallel case.

We might recognise the slow Pavan tempo of Lacrime, and the long first note as a ‘tear’,  slowly welling up, and gathering speed as it rolls down the cheek in the next two downward directed and faster moving notes. We might see not only the written pitches, but also Dowland’s notated rhythm, as an imitation of the gesture of crying, and link it appopriately to slow hand and body movements, and the slow walk of someone in despair. This would encourage us to enact our gestures and bodily actions, even our eye-movements suitably slowly.

Just as with the written pitches, this Rhetoric of Rhythm is already in the music itself, and we do not need to redouble it musically. Dowland’s music will not be ‘more expressive’ if we add ‘more slowness’ to the general tempo, or use romantic rubato to make this particular tear-gesture last more than a dotted minim. Rather, that attempt would destroy another part of the musical rhetoric, its rhythm, wrecking the composers dispositio (rhythmic structure, i.e. Tactus) and elocutio (rhythmic style, i.e. Pavan movement).

 

 

Of Potatoes

 

Some modern-day experts on Rhetoric correctly identify Rhetorical practices of speech and movement, especially elements of dramatic timing, which can also be heard in music. This is very illuminating and inspiring. But before we gleefully apply these practices to our Delivery, we should rather be concerned, even alarmed: why has the composer not included these Rhetorical elements in his own elocutio?

On closer examination, we might find that they are already there, and should not be added again.

Did you already salt the potatoes, dear?

Or we might find that (for one reason or another) a particular element is not appropriate for this application, but was recommended in the context of another genre, national style, or period.

I’ve salted the potatoes, shall I add salt to the rhubarb too?

If something should be added by performers rather than notated by composers, we can expect to find specific advice in sources on musical performance practice.

 

Research into Potatoes

When I googled “Add salt to potatoes?”, I got an immediate, clear answer:

Salting the water in which you cook starches (pasta, rice, potato) is an effective way of enhancing the flavour of the finished product – boiling starches absorb salt well.

Immediately below this, Google informed me that

People also ask… Why add salt to potatoe water? How much salt do I add to water for potatoes? Should you salt potatoes before frying? What does soaking potatoes in salt water do?”

 

As iconographical evidence, there were three images captioned Salt Potatoes.

 

 

And the links below went “Salt your potato-water“, “Why is it important to put salt…” and so on to the bottom of the page.

From this, I quickly deduce that potatoes are not grown ‘ready salted’, and that salt should indeed be added by the cook, later in the process. I did track down one outlier recommendation for the waiter to salt them just before serving, but this was for roast spuds anyway. The vast majority of sources recommended adding salt to the cold water before boiling.

 

Confutatio

 

As Historically Informed Performers, we should take at least this much care, not to over-season our music with salty Rhetoric. We should check if this particular Rhetorical flavouring has already been composed-in. If not, we should check if our favourite flavouring is truly appropriate. And we should check that it is we (performers), who are expected to add it.

We learn good taste in music from the ‘cookery books’ of historical treatises. And those treatises are already applying Rhetorical principles. So we should be highly sceptical, if we feel the need to add some piece of Rhetoric which is neither notated nor mentioned in musical treatises.

And if that piece of Rhetorical Delivery would damage some other element of Rhetorical structure, of dispositio, we should not add it. We would not paint the exterior of a renaissance cathedral with some brightly-coloured paint that had the side-effect of dissolving stonework, especially not if our decorative inspiration comes from pre-raphelite wallpaper!

Yes, this is a strongly-worded confutatio! But we have plenty of treatises on music. If your beloved ‘rhetorical’ practice is historical and appropriate to music, it will be manifest either in composition or performance practice. Certainly it will not be contradicted by period performance practice instructions.

 

Consensus

 

Of course, there are grey areas, and difficult questions where sources (even within one period and culture) genuinely differ. But my example of salt potatoes was deliberately basic, and my Google search can be imitated in scholarly investigation. We should first look at obvious, well-known sources, and see if we can find an overwhelming consensus.

One of the problems of today’s Early Music is that specialist experts discuss abstruse corners of the field so passionately, examining exceptional cases and outlier opinions (in both primary and secondary sources), with the result that historically informed (but non-specialist) musicians and mainstream performers can easily lose sight of standard period practice and the overwhelming historical consensus.

There is such a consensus amongst historical sources regarding rhythm. “Tactus is the Soul of Music.”

In Rhetorical terms, Tactus is part of the Dispositio of music. In choosing mensural music as his Elocutio, a composer has nailed his Rhetorical colours to the mast of Tactus. It is certainly true that Rhetorical speech varies the syllabic pace according to the Affekt, and takes time for structual clarity (punctuation) and dramatic effect. Baroque composers notate this, using Tactus as the measure of Time.

Seicento Recitative notates the dramatic timing of 17th-century theatrical delivery. Peri and Il Corago tell us quite clearly that musica recitativa is modelled on the declamatory delivery of a fine actor in the spoken theatre.  In England, a song-book owned by Samuel Pepys praises Henry Lawes’ precision in notating in music the timing effects of Rhetorical punctuation.

No pointing Comma, Colon, halfe so well
Renders the Breath of Sense; they cannot tell
The just Proportion how each word should go,
To rise and fall, run swiftly or march slow;
Thou shew’st ’tis Musick only must do this …

[From Edmund Waller’s dedicatory poem to Lawes of 1635, reprinted in Henry Lawes, Ayres and Dialogues, for One, Two, and Three Voyces (London: Printed by T. H. for
John Playford, 1653)]

For precision notation of rhetorical timing in Shakespeare’s To be or not to be, see ‘Tis Master’s Voice: A Seventeenth-Century Shakespeare Recording?  in Shakespeare & Emotions (2015).

 

Peroratio

 

In the search for Rhetorical eloquence in our music-making, the appropriate Elocutio will have Decorum. It will be consistent with the material (inventio) and its musical organisation (dispositio). It will also be consistent with what we read of Pronutatio and Actio in musical sources. Where other arts inspire us with examples of Good Delivery, we should expect to find that their Rhetoric is already in our Music.

We should consider whether Rhetorical elements have already been built-in by the composer, before we assume that we should bolt them on as performers. We should test our proposed translation of ‘foreign’ Rhetorical elements (from other arts) against what we already know in music’s ‘native tongue’.

The Practice of Rhetoric in Music is already written, in period treatises on the Practice of Music.

It is wonderful that we can use other Rhetorical arts to fill gaps in our musical knowledge, and to inspire passion in our musical practice. But the Rhetorical discipline of Decorum requires that we remain wary against introducing any contradiction.

For this reason, I do not acccept the argument that ‘Rhetoric’ is a valid reason for abandoning all that we know about Tactus and Rhythm in baroque music. On the contrary, if Harmony is Music’s shapely Body, and Text is her Mind, then Tactus is the Soul of Musical Rhetoric.

 

 

PS
About those potatoes – the Folger Shakespeare Library re-created a c1700 recipe for Potato Pie. It does not use salt!

 

Time: the Soul of Music

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The Primum Mobile (aka Ciel Christallin) in the 1661 Game of the Spheres.

 

 

Time is what gives being to Music

Il tempo dunque è quello che da esser alla Musica. Zacconi Prattica di Musica (1596) Chapter 30.

Rhythm is life.

Paderewski Tempo Rubato (1909)

Many musicians and listeners might agree that rhythm is the life and soul of Music, whilst holding quite different opinions as to what kind of musical time is so essential.

  1. “Just give that rhythm everything you’ve got”
  2. “It’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it”
  3. “Emotion excludes regularity. Tempo Rubato then becomes an indispensible assistant”
  4. “Above all things, keep the Equality of Measure”
  5. “Time, like an ever-rolling stream…”
  6. “Time is a number of motion, in respect of before and after”
  7. “Time is the space demonstrated by the revolution of the Primum Mobile”
  8. “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external”

 

… li cieli, li quali continuamente si girano … sono nove, come di sopra è stato ditto; cioè VII cerchi di sette pianeti e l’ottavo de le stelle fisse dov’è lo zodiaco, e lo nono che è lo primo mobile. E queste revoluzioni sono quelle che dimostrano lo tempo: imperò che tempo non è altro che lo spazio, nel quale queste revoluzioni si fanno; e questo spazio produce Iddio dal suo essere eterno. Buti Commentary on Purgatorio 24: The heavens, which revolve continuously… are nine, as has been said above; that is 7 circles of seven planets and the 8th of the fixed stars, where the Zodiac is, and the 9th is the Primum Mobile. And these revolutions are what show time; therefore time is nothing other than the space/interval within which these revolutions are made; and this space is produced by God from his eternal being. 

Texts from classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages – Dante, Aristotle and Buti – still provide the primary definitions of Tempo in successive editions of the Vocabulario of the Accademia della Crusca from 1612 to 1748.

 

Dante’s Cosmography

 

  1. Irving Berlin It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing (1931)
  2. Chuck Berry It’s gotta be Rock ‘n’ Roll music (1957)
  3. Ignacy Jan Paderewski Tempo Rubato (1909)
  4. John Dowland Micrologus (1609) 
  5. Isaac Watts Oh God, our help in ages past (1708)
  6. Aristotle Physics (4th cent. BC)
  7. Francesco di Bartoli da Buti Commento sopra la Divina Commedia di Dante (end of 14th cent.)
  8. Isaac Newton Principia (1687)


 

Newton’s (1684) MS notebook for De motu corporum in mediis regulariter cedentibus defines Tempus Absolutum three years before the fuller definition in Principia. But the text made famous by the first English translation of Principia by Andrew Motte only appeared much later, in 1729. 

So when we read from many Baroque writers [heartfelt thanks to Domen Marincic and others who sent me numerous citations of this concept] that 

Time is the Soul of Music

 – from Zacconi writing in 1592 (published in 1596 as Prattica Book 2, Chapter XV, folio 95v):  il Tempo….essendo egli nella Musica quasi l’anima [Time… being in Music like the soul] and (Book 2, Chapter III) Il tatto non è altro che il Tempo in esser presente [Tactus is none other than Time in actual presence] to the Biblioteca Universale sacro-profana antico-moderna (1704): la Battuta è la misura, e quasi l’anima della Musica [the Beat is measure, and like the soul of Music] –

we must be on our guard that all three terms lead us into complex semantic fields (Time: tempo, misura, battuta, tatto; Soul: anima, animo, mente, cuore; Music: mondana, humana, instrumentalis, arithmetica) where technical definitions and everyday understandings have shifted over the centuries. Aristotle’s motion-driven Time (which was still the common understanding in mid-18th-century Italy) is not the same as Newton’s Absolute, Mathematical Time, any more than our own intuitive sense of everyday Time corresponds to Einstein’s Relativity or Hawking’s Imaginary Time.

 

Tactus is the Soul of Music

 

Nevertheless, two writers from different countries and periods give strikingly similar descriptions of Tactus, showing a strong continuity from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and a noticeable differences from modern practice. 

Venice 1592

Sotto il tatto si pone questa figura & quella, & per questo si dice che l’harmonia nasce dalla consideratione di diverse figure sotto una determinata quantita di Tempo constituite (Zacconi Prattica Book 1 Chapter 29 Del Tempo Musicale & delle sue divisioni): Under the Tactus you put this note and that, and by this we say that harmony is born from the consideration of various notes organised within a certain amount of Time.

Halle 1789

Der Takt… ist eine Anzahl von Noten in einen gewissen Zeitraum eingetheilt (Türk Klavierschule Chapter IV Vom Takte):  The Tactus … is a number of notes organised into a certain amount of Time.

Semantic Fields

For both writers, the term they are trying to define has a wide and rich semantic field. Time ~ mensuration Sign; Tactus; Measure of duration; Rhythm, i.e. the division of time into note-values, written and performed; a specific note-value; the act of beating time and the Beat itself; speed; Metre.

Venice 1592

Tempo: il quale si forma con un segno che ne da inditio… dal tatto che è la misura (Chapter 28) Time [mensuration sign of Tempus]: which is formed by a Sign that indicates the Tactus and the Measure.

Il tatto e quando dal Tempo in atto le vengan misurate, & che si cantano… il Tatto occupase tutto un Tempo… il Tempo essendo atto a diverdersi (Chapter 30 Del origine del Tempo) The Tactus is when [the note-values] are measured in real Time and are sung. The Tactus occupies a complete [unit of] time… Time [Rhythm] is action of dividing [the note-values] 

Se per vigor di segno vanno due Semibreve al tatto, over due Minime (Chapter 33 Del division del tatto & sua sumministratione) [A specific note-value] Whether according to the Sign two semibreves go to the Tactus, or two minims. [ALK: In the late 16th century, identification of equal Tactus with the breve, i.e. down for one semibreve, up for the second semibreve, was being replaced by identification with the semibreve, i.e. down for one minim, up for the second minim, with triple metre proportions replacing tempus perfectum. The difficulty of reconciling older theory and notation with new practices accounts for much of the confusion about proportional notation in the early baroque period.] 

Onde si come il tatto si divide, nel equale & nel inequale; cosi essi segni contenuti sotto questo nome di Tempo si dividano nel perfetto, & nel imperfetto. (Chapter 29)  So just as the Tactus is divided into equal (duple metre) and unequal (triple metre); so these Signs included under this term Tempus are divided into perfect (triple) and imperfect (duple).

Piu tatti possano essere quali piu presti, & quali piu tardi, secondo il loco, il tempo, & l’occasione (Chapter 33) [Speed] Different [ways of beating] Tactus can be faster or slower, according to the place, the time and the occasion.

Le misure alla fine non son altro che quantità di tempo (Chapter 30) Measures finally are nothing else than amounts of Time [duration]

Quelli intervalli Musicali che sotto il Tempo si misurano… in dua modi… Il modo occulto Modo occulto è quello con cui componendole il compositore le misura & fa che gl’intervalli di tutte la parti correspondino in uno… Il modo manifesto puoi è quello quando le si cantano. (Chapter 29) Those musical durations which are measured by Time in two ways: the hidden [notated] way is whilst composing them, the composer measures them and makes the durations of all the parts correspond in unity; the revealed [performed] way then is when they are sung.

L’attione o l’atto che si fa… alle volte si chiama tempo, alle volte misura, alle volte battuta et alle volte tatto (Chapter 32 Che cosa sia misura, tatto, & battuta) The action [beating Time] which is actually done… is sometimes called Time, sometimes Measure, sometimes Beat and sometimes Tactus.

Halle 1789

Takt… die Noten, welchen in einem einzigen, zu Anfange des Tonstückes bestimmten Zeitraume enthalten, und zwischen zwey Stricken eingeschlossen sind. [Mensuration Sign & notation of rhythm]: the notes contained in a single amount of time [duration], specified at the beginning of the piece [sign], and enclosed by two lines [bar-lines].

Unter Takt, in sofern von der Ausübung die Rede ist, versteht man daher gemeiniglich, die richtige Eintheilung einer gewissen Anzahl Noten &c, welche in einer bestimmten Zeit gespielt werden sollen. Tactus, when we talk about performance, is commonly understood to be the correct organisation of a specific number of Notes etc, which should be played in a certain time [duration].

Takt… die ganze Taktnote [A specific note-value] … the whole-note [semibreve]

Takt … Taktart, z.B. dieses Tonstück steht in geraden Takte. [Metre]: Type of Tactus, e.g. this piece is in equal [duple] time. 

Takt … Bewegung, z.B. dieser Satz hat sehr geschwinden Takt  [Speed]: Movement, e.g. this composition has a very fast Tactus

Takt… von der äusern Abtheilung durch die Bewegung mit der Hand, z.B. den Takt schlagen.  About the showing of division [i.e. beats within a bar] by moving the hand, e.g. beating time.  

Der Takt ist das Maß der Bewegung eines musikalischen Satzes Tactus is the Measure of the movement of a musical composition.

Takt… ist das Zeitmaß der Musik, die Abmessung der Zeit und der Noten Tactus is the Measure of Time [duration] in music, the measuring of Time and of the notes. 

 

Differences between 1592, 1789 & 2020

 

Barlines

As we still do today, Türk associates Takt with notated bar-lines, which are not part of Zaconni’s practice. In the ‘new music’ of early seicento Italy, barlines are either absent, or irregular, and there is no association of bars with a fixed duration in notation or in real-time, and certainly no principle of ‘bar = bar’ for navigating proportional changes.

Accent

As we still do today, Türk associates Takt – in the sense of Metre – with accent. And so his first definition would have shocked Zacconi:  Wenn man, bey einer Folge mehrerer äuserlich gleich langen Töne, einigen derselben, in einer gewissen anhaltenden Ordnung, (Einförmigkeit), mehr Nachdruck giebt, als den andern: so entsteht schon durch diese Accente das Gefühl, welches wir Takt nennen. When, in a succession of many apparently equally-long notes, you give some of them more emphasis in a certain consistent pattern (uniformity): then these Accents produce the feeling that we call Metre.


 

In sharp contrast, Zacconi discusses Tactus, Time, Measure, Beating Time, Beats and even Metre without any reference at all to accents. In old-fashioned polyphony and in the new music of the 1600s, although the accented syllable of a word often falls on the Tactus-beat, quite frequently it does not. Even if there are bar-lines, they too do not imply accentuation. Tactus is a feature of the measurement of Time, whereas accents are determined by words. Metre – as notated and shown by Tactus-beating – does not necessarily match the poetic scansion of the words, or the dance-rhythms suggested by harmonic changes.


 

 

In this oft-cited excerpt from Monteverdi Orfeo, published in 1609, the mensuration mark of C indicates an equal (i.e. duple, down-up) Tactus beat on minims, something around minim = 60, and the barlines are every four minims. But the harmonic metre is clearly in groups of three minims [as shown by the red brackets] and the word-accents fall mostly (but not exclusively) on the first and third minims of these groups. Thus the notation of musical Time is not matched to the metrical structure of harmony and accents. This allows Monteverdi to notate a steady speed, with three minims corresponding to three one-second Tactus-beats to the metrical unit. Contrariwise, if he had used the triple-metre notation of his time, e.g. a tripla Proportion, this notation would direct the singer to fit the whole metrical unit into one Tactus-beat, three minims in one second of actual time: the music would be heard three times as fast. 

Unfortunately, many modern editions rebar this song under a 3/2 time signature, which performers then interpret as if it were Monteverdi’s tripla porportion  – we often hear this music much too fast! 

And failure to understand the subtle relationship between Tactus and word-accent (sometimes coinciding, but not always) has led many singers to disregard Monteverdi’s precisely notated rhythms in so-called Recitative.  See It’s Recitative, but not as we know it.

Re-discovering 17th-century, non-accentual, Time is a considerable challenge for modern-day performers. Well-intentioned 20th-century attempts to ‘escape the tyranny of the bar-line’ have led us to rhythmic Hell: the rejection of the stable self-government of Tactus, even to the anarchy of free rhythm. There is still much work to be done, in learning (not only in theory and practice, but as an instilled habit) how to manage stable, but non-accentual, Tactus-time, and how to weave complex patterns of word-accents (imitated also in instrumental music) around that Tactus. This learning cannot take place in an ensemble directed with modern conducting.

Speed

For both Zacconi and Türk, there is a closer and more specific relationship than for modern musicians between Tactus as sign, notation, duration in real time, a way of beating time, a specific note-value and sub-division of that note-value into various rhythms. Although both writers allow the possibility that the speed of Tactus-beating can vary somewhat, this variation (I would argue) was small: gross changes in the speed of the music (as heard) were acheived by changing the notation whilst the beat remained (more-or-less) constant. 

After the slow song cited above, Monteverdi continues with the same Tactus and the same relationship between notated Time, indicated Tactus, and note-values as performed. But the sound changes noticeably, as singers, violins and continuo-bass suddenly move in bursts of quavers rather than semibreves & minims. It feels faster.


 

In the following Ritornello, the Tactus again continues unchanged. But the relationship between that Tactus and notated Time is altered by the sign of Proportion. The black minims now come three to the Tactus – the effect heard is that the music feels three times faster than the first song. 

 

 

There is academic debate about the details of precisely how Proportions should be interpreted. But there is general agreement on the essential principle that the Tactus is maintained (or varied only subtly) whilst a proportionally greater amount of music happens within the real-time duration of that Tactus. See Tempus Putationis: getting back to Monteverdi’s Time. Proportions feel faster.

One of the challenges when studying the subjective feeling of Speed in baroque music is that Zacconi and his contemporaries did not share our concept of Newtonian Absolute Time. Within their Aristotelian understanding of Time as dependent on motion, the Tactus did more than indicate a musical beat, it created Time itself. That real-world time was related to notated durations by the signs of tempus and Proportions. We encounter not only differences in period nomenclature, but conceptual gaps in historic language, when we try to unpick ‘the feeling that we call Speed’ for baroque repertoire, just as Türk encountered a similar gap amongst established authorities when trying to define the emerging concept that ‘Accents produce the feeling that we call Metre’.   

Addition or Division?

Türk’s statements on Takt seem to be ordered with the most up-to-date ideas first, established views next, and citations of older authorities (some which might even derive from Zacconi) in a footnote. Following his description of Takt as accentual metre, his next remark would have struck musicians of previous generations as fundamentally incomplete.

Jeder längern oder kürzern Note, Pause &c ihre bestimmte Dauer geben… so spiele man nach dem Takt. Giving longer or shorter notes, rests etc their proper duration… this is playing in Time. 

Here is an early indication of what was to become the most significance difference in the management of time in practical music-making of the Baroque period from modern-day practices. From the first teaching-book (Milán’s 1536 El maestro, discussed here) and even in Türk’s following remarks, it is not sufficient that performers add up the durations of each individual note and rest… they must also ensure that the total duration of the note-values that add-up to a unit of notated time corresponds to the duration of real-world time, as shown by the Tactus.

Saber quantas de las sobredichas cifras entran en un compas (Milán, 1536) Know how many of the above-mentioned notes come in a Tactus [in notation, and in performance]. 

The essential control of period rhythm was not by adding-up small note-values, but by maintaining the relationship of notated Time to real-world Time through (and at the level of) the Tactus. As Roger Mathew Grant aptly expresses it in Beating Time and Measuring Music (2014), notation is “calibrated” to real-world Time by the Tactus. Smaller note-values were found by dividing the Tactus – a universal principle underlying the specific practice of ornamental ‘diminutions’ or ‘divisions’.

This is the concept of Tactus as the Measure of Time. In actual music-making, it’s the practice of using Tactus to measure Time. And it’s what most musicians do not do, nowadays.

Tactus as Measure

 

In theory, and purely mathematically, it should make no difference whether one adds or divides – the rhythmic total is the same either way. But in practice, and with human performers, there are considerable differences in the resulting delivery and even greater differences in the subjective ‘feel’ of the music. I’ll try to illustrate this visually, by means of the Cuisenaire Rods used for learning mathematics from the mid-20th century onwards.



 

In theory, a performer (or conductor) counting with a short beat (e.g. 4 crotchets to the bar) and adding-up the various note-values should arrive at the same total duration as one counting with the long beat of Tactus (one minim down, one minim up).




In practice, small errors and/or deliberate choices accumulate so that modern counting/conducting and historical Tactus sound – and, even more importantly, feel – noticeably different.


 

Ironically, amongst today’s Early Music perfomers, stylised articulations and ideas of ‘musical gesture’ etc often result in even greater disconnect from Tactus-Time. Many of those articulations are based on historical evidence and period principles: good/bad notes here , silences of articulation, over-dotting, etc. Caccini gives examples of how to sing typical phrases more gracefully: the common feature of all his examples is exaggerated contrast in note-values – long notes are lengthened, short notes are shortened.

 

 

There is no denying the historicity of ‘non-mathematical’ rhythm  – varied lengths for notes written as equal, extra contrast for dissimilar note-values, varied articulations between notes etc –  but all these subtle adjustments should happen within the Tactus. The note-values affected are shorter than the Tactus, and the cumulative result is determined by lining-up with the next Tactus beat. 

This is the essential difference between modern playing and Tactus-playing: whether or not musical Time is measured by Tactus. And the only way to do Tactus-playing is – to adopt Zacconi’s form of words – by actually doing the action! Unless you study initially and then practice regularly with actual physical Tactus (the down-up motion of hand or foot) then you are not using Tactus to measure your music-making. Unless you rehearse Proportional changes with a Tactus hand-beat, you are not managing Proportions according to Tactus. 

In the hope that you would like to try it for yourself, here is the first part of my free online course on The Practice of Tactus.

 



Frescobaldi explains here that (physical) Tactus facilitates even those difficult (and carefully delimited) moments where the Tactus itself should change. And Monteverdi notates what may well have been a common feature of performance, that soloists may choose to sing elegantly off the beat, whilst the continuo accompaniment remains in Tactus, like a jazz-singer syncopating against the steady groove of the rhythm section. See Monteverdi, Caccini & Jazz.

The Tactus-beat is human, rather than metronomic. The down-up movement has the almost imperceptible ebb and flow of arsis & thesis (look very carefully at the Tactus-Cuisenaire rods in my last example). And the Speed of the movement, which in principle is always the same, changes subtly in practice according to performance venue, ensemble forces, emotional state etc. It does not have to be precisely the same, from one occasion to another [for all this, see Zacconi, above], but you should keep it steady, as much as humanly possible.

Ideally, we do not force the Tactus to be faster, in order to mimick emotional agitation; rather we feel the emotional effect of the words, and even though we think we are keeping the same Tactus, actually we are going faster. Tai Chi master Sifu Phu expresses this idea – what actors call ‘working from the inside outwards’: Feel the Force, don’t force the feel! See also the discussion of the psychology and physiology of the Four Humours in Joseph Roach’s (1985) survey of the historical Science of Acting: The Player’s Passion. 

It should feel as if the Tactus is always the same, but since we are human, it will not actually be the same, if we were to measure it objectively with modern equipment. Nevertheless, this subjective feeling of, and striving for perfect steadiness and consistent speed is utterly different from the arbitrary choices and changes of modern conducting. In this sense, Zacconi’s description (Chapter 33) of how the Tactus feels is both what performers should strive for, and what we hope our audiences will perceive.



 

Tactus is regular, solid, stable, firm… clear, sure, fearless, and without any perturbation.

Il Tatto… deve essere si equale, saldo, stabile e fermo… chiaro, sicuro, senza paura & senza veruna titubatione, pigliando l’essempio dell’attione del polso o dal moto che fa il tempo dell’Orologgio… following the example of the pulse [heart-beat] or clockwork.

 

When we have come to appreciate the effect of measuring our music-making with Tactus, and remembering Zacconi’s identification of tatto [Tactus] with tempo [real-world time, and the notation of tempus], the full force of his comment that Tempo is ‘soul of music’ becomes apparent. The element that ‘gives life to music’ is not just rhythm in general, but the interconnected working of notation, physical time-beating, real-world time and musical performance, all co-ordinated at the heart-beat level of approximately a minim per second, and (like a heart-beat) rocking to-and-fro in what we feel to be subtly uneven pairs.

This is not only the sound of Baroque music, it is the shape of Baroque Time. 

(ALK, 2020)

Senza misura

There are fascinating repertoires in baroque music that are written with specific note-values, but carry performance instructions for senza misura. Caccini specifies this (once only!) in his example song in Le Nuove Musiche (1601), here.  But there are many pieces from the mid-17th century by Froberger that are marked to be played with discrétion, and some of these have the additional instruction in some sources sans observer aucune mesure [without observing any Measure]. See Schulenberg on Discretion here, and on Froberger sources here.

 

Froberger Lamentation “sans observer aucune mesure”

 

There is plenty of academic discussion of the challenge that Froberger and his copyists faced in trying to notate his highly idiosyncratic performance style. But for today’s performers, rather than taking discrétion as an invitation to introduce 20th-century tempo rubato, a possible approach based on period evidence could be to apply all that we know about articulation, rhythmic adjustments (following Caccini and Monteverdi), good/bad notes, dissonance/resolution etc etc, but without any obligation to make all this add up to the Measure of Tactus.

One might almost suggest that since the standard practice of much of present-day Early Music is to play without observing Tactus, that Caccini’s senza misura and Froberger’s discrétion are heard in almost every performance of every baroque repertoire, robbing [sic] audiences of the emotional impact of what should be a special effect, by soul-destroying [sic] over-exposure.

Conclusion

Zacconi’s concept of Time as the Soul of Music is much more than a trite platitude to remind us that rhythm matters. Rather, he expresses a fundamental element of Baroque practice, that music (and even the ‘affections of the Soul’ i.e. affetti, emotions) are created by a life-giving three-in-one of notated tempus, physical Tactus-beating, and real-world Time, operating (in early-seicento Italy) at the level of a semibreve ~ down/up ~ approximately two seconds.

Today’s Early Music performers mostly fail even to try this: instead we argue about pitch, temperament and vibrato. “Doh!“ (Dan Castellaneta as Homer Simpson, 1988 – but I use the Oxford English Dictionary spelling from 2001) See Music expresses Emotions?

I give the last word to Türk, who proclaims his continuity with centuries of music-making measured by Tactus, by his translation (explicit) and updating (implicit, since his Takt – however similar – is no longer exactly the same as Zacconi’s tempo and tatto) of that period mantra, as his own last word on the subject. Der Takt ist … die Seele der Musik.

Tactus is the Soul of Music 

 

 

 

Baroque Opera then and now: 1600 & 1607, 1970-2020

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How did Baroque ‘opera’ develop in the first decade of the 1600s?

And how have our modern-day performances of early music-drama advanced in a half-century of Historically Informed Performances?

This post is based on an interview for Radio Orpheus (Moscow)  in which the presenter, Russian poet, novelist and dramaturg, Alexey Parin asked me to compare and contrast two of the earliest surviving baroque operas: Cavalieri’s Anima & Corpo (1600) and Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607). Both operas can be seen in regular repertoire at Moscow State Theatre ‘Natalya Sats’, in award-winning productions by Georgy Isaakyan, and in collaboration with OPERA OMNIA, the Academy for Early Opera & Dance.. My thanks to Alexey for his profound enthusiasm for opera, for his translation of the libretto of Anima & Corpo, and for his provocative questions in this interview.

 

With his long experience of opera in Russia, Alexey Parin finds the audience’s experience of the two works very different from one another.  Both productions succeed admirably, but why are they musically so different?

 

I think the first thing that strikes us, looking at the scores and listening to the music, is the similarity between the two works. Both composers are starting from the text, as if they were setting a spoken play to music.

But Monteverdi’s subject gives him the possibility for a lot more music, arising ‘realistically’ out of the drama. Since the protaganist is Orpheus, the great musician, the famous singer, of course we want to hear him sing and make music. And so he sings a magnificent Aria in Hell, accompanied by all the latest instruments of the early 17th-century Italian baroque. These are actually the same instruments that we hear in Cavalieri – violins, cornetti and the double-harp – but what’s now very different, is that with the excuse of Orpheus, Monteverdi writes virtuosi solos for these instruments. So although we have similar instruments, the sound of Monteverdi’s music begins to change.

Also in the earlier scenes, we are in pastoral Arcadia, and the shepherds of Arcadia all sing. They invite the Muses to descend from Parnassus to play instruments. So once again, Monteverdi has the chance to bring in a lot more ensemble music, proceeding ‘realistically’ from the mythological story.

Comparing the libretti

Another difference between the two works comes also from the text. With Orfeo, we are following one protagonist, we could almost say that the other characters are two-dimensional, only Orfeo is truly ‘there’. So while earlier operas exist on the same story, called Euridice, this drama is really the story of Orpheus. Eurydice has only two lines in the whole opera, but nevertheless what she says is extremely important, and perhaps her lines are the clue for understanding the whole opera. More about Eurydice here.

At the beginning when Orpheus sings beautifully of all his love for Euridice, her reply is that she cannot speak, and we should just ask Love, in order to know her feelings. And so we realise that Orpheus is perhaps speaking too much.

And this suspicion is reinfored with Eurydice’s second speech at the crucial moment in the drama, when Orpheus fatally turns to look at her. She says that the sight of him is too sweet, but also too bitter, and for the sake of too much love, he is going to lose her. And so in this very short speech, the word troppo, too much, comes three times. The poet is making it very clear for us here: this is the message. Orpheus was ‘too much’: too happy, too sad, too much love, too excessive in every way.

And so the message of the opera is then to look for the golden mean, for the perfect balance. But nevertheless, I think that Striggio as librettist and Monteverdi as composer both know that the audience enjoy the excesses. More about the message of Orfeo here.

And this brings us right back to Cavalieri again, because in his Preface, Emilio de’ Cavalieri says that the emotions in this kind of music come from rapid contrasts of opposites. More about Cavalieri’s Preface here.

Comparing the scores

It’s important to realise that a score in the early 17th-century had a very different purpose. It was not there for musicians like me to create a performance four hundred years later. More than anything, it was a souvenir for the public who had been to the performance and wanted to study the work further.

This reminds us how new this style of music-drama was. Cavalieri’s religious music-drama was so different from what had gone before, that he wanted to give his audience a chance to look at it again.

Nowadays, if we go to an opera we like, we might listen to the CD afterwards, as a nice memory of the real theatrical experience. So in Cavalieri’s score there is a lot of detail to help the reader remember the whole experience. He prints the music and the libretto and cross-references one to the other with numbers, number 1 in the music corresponds to number 1 in the libretto.

But, from the performers point of view, other information is missing. Many musical details are not specified in the score, and must be decided by the performers. In particular, the score provides no information about the orchestration of the instrumental parts, which instruments should play where.

In contrast, Monteverdi working at the Ducal court, wants to show off not only the opera, but also the court orchestra. So in his score, which is also a kind of souvenir-edition, he includes not only details of the drama but also a lot of information about the instruments. Especially at very strong dramatic moments…

This focus on moments of high drama shows us the purpose of publication. It’s not a score for musicians to work from. It’s to help audience members remember the show they saw. And so the score makes a kind of ‘close-up shot’ of the orchestra when it comes to the most dramatic moments. This gives us today, as musicians working with this historical material, vital information.

From the score, we know that in the original production of Orfeo, the instrumentalists appeared in different positions around the stage. We know that sometimes the instruments were part of the stage action. In a new piece of research, part of my investigation reveals that in one particular scene, when the Muses appear and the character La Ninfa says “you Muses have come with your instruments, so we’ll sing and you play, and everyone’s happy”, the score describes precisely which instruments play, and there are 10 of them – Apollo and the 9 Muses. So here the instruments are not just the accompaniment, they are part of the stage picture, and essential to the poetic concept.

 

Combining the information

But these differing levels of information in the two scores make today’s artistic process different for historically informed performers. Often Monteverdi writes details about the instrumentation that we don’t know from Cavalieri. For example, at the beginning of Act III, Monteverdi is extremely clear: the scene changes to Hell, the violins, the theorbos, the harp and the beautiful organs stop playing, and instead we have the cornetti, trombones and the regal. And so we can understand the two worlds, Hell and Arcadia, in Monteverdi’s opera. And this gives us a suggestion for the two worlds of Cavalieri’s opera, again Hell, and (now) Heaven. So from the point of view of a researcher and music director working with the score, it’s good to combine the information from both scores, to help us understand the cultural context of the period.

We don’t know if the Maenad ending was ever composed or not, but for sure it’s now lost. There’s a hint of  how the lost music might have been, in the Moresca that survives as the finale of the happy ending with Apollo. This Moresca starts in the score without time signature – there is no 3/2. This is very strange, and perhaps it’s because this Moresca was the continuation of something else, and that something else, whatever it was,is now lost. A Moresca, which is a danced battle, would also be an appropriate finale after the Bacchic ending with the Maenads. On the other hand, we should remember that often they would put a dance at the end that had no relation to the rest of the drama. After one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the actors – including characters who had died – would all stand up and dance a jig. Cavalieri says that you can put whatever dance at the end of a show, but then what he actually writes is the perfect dance finale, actually, yes, very connected to the show. More about dancing in Orfeo and Anima & Corpo here.

Personally, I’m fascinated by this question of the end of Orfeo. In another production, in Helsinki, we showed both endings (with my reconstruction of the Maenad scene from the 1607 libretto), and I’m intrigued by the idea of letting the audience vote: should the final triumph be for Apollo, or for Bacchus?

Here in Moscow, in this production, in Georgy Isaakyan’s particular style, it seems to me that he doesn’t tell the audience what happens, he encourages them to ask themselves: does Orpheus live or die?

7 years of Early Opera, half a century of Historically Informed Performance

As we work on Orfeo at OPERA OMNIA, we now have the advantage of 7 years of work together in Theatre Sats on the baroque style of Cavalieri. More about how to study early operatic roles here. No doubt 17th-century musicians also developed their ideas in the 7 years between Anima & Corpo and Orfeo. And I think it’s also fair to say that Monteverdi is musically more difficult than Cavalieri. In our production of Orfeo, we have the opportunity to sing in the Italian language, which makes some things easier for the music, but challenges the actors to make that direct contact with the audience that we have when we sing Anima & Corpo in Russian. More about OPERA OMNIA here,

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the musical approach for the Orfeo production is that we have effectively two musical directors, in the same way that Monteverdi effectively had  two orchestras: the orchestra of the violins and wind instruments who play written parts; and the orchestra of the continuo who improvise their parts. And just as Georgy Isaakyan’s staging is an encounter between Monteverdi’s 17th-century story, and Russia of the 1970s and 1980s; so there is a similar contrast within the musical realisation. Amongst the continuo and soloists, we share the latest ideas of Monteverdi’s baroque style; whilst in the orchestra and chorus the audience are presented with the Russian way to play baroque from the 1970s.

 

 

This juxtaposition of fundamentally differing approaches to early opera within one production has led to me reflect on how Historically Performed Performance of Monteverdi has changed in my own lifetime. In the table below, I attempt to identify some key topics and trail-blazing pioneers associated with significant re-discoveries. Any serious early opera production should at least consider these topics. Nevertheless, even decades later, some findings are still considered too “radical”, whilst others are routinely ignored, even by ‘historically informed’ ensembles.

 

How HIP is your Monteverdi?

 

  • Chitarrone  1960s Robert Spencer

 

  • Cornetto  1970s Bruce Dickey
  • Vocal ornamentation    1970s Nigel Rogers
  • Quarter-comma meantone   1970s Mark Lindley
  • Negri/Caroso dance  1970s Julia Sutton
  • Renaissance recorders  1970s Bob Marvin, Martin Skowroneck

 

  • No conductor  1980s Roger Norrrington
  • Recit without bowed bass  1980s Graham Dixon
  • Baroque harp  1980s Frances Kelly, ALK
  • Led from continuo  1980s Ensemble Tragicomedia
  • Renaissance violin band  1980s David Douglass, Peter Holman
  • Count recit in minims  1980s Ensemble Tragicomedia
  • Metre in Music  1980s George Houle
  • Baroque Gesture  1980s Dene Barnett
  • Il Corago  1980s Fabbris & Pompilio
  • Chiavette  1980s Andrew Parrot
  • Vibrato  1980s Greta Moens-Haenen

 

  • Proportions  1990s Roger Bowers
  • Pitch  1990s  Bruce Haynes

 

  • Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre  2002 Tim Carter
  • 1615 print free online  2009 IMSLP

 

  • Tactus throughout  2010 ALK
  • Historical swordsmanship  2012 Guy Windsor
  • 1609 print free online  2013 IMSLP
  • Beating time & measuring music  2014 Roger Mathew Grant
  • Arianna a la recherche  2017 ALK

 

  • Violini alla francese  ?
  • 5 trumpets  ?

Of course, this list reflects my own personal experiences and fortunate encounters with individual experts. So I look forward to your comments, corrections and additions. And most importantly, I look forward to new research findings in the 2020s, which will provide new impetus for re-thinking, re-imagining and re-working Monteverdi’s theatrical music.

 

Understand, enjoy and be moved! Listening to the Rhetoric of Orfeo

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This article is based on a pre-performance talk for the production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the Vaasa Baroque Festival and in Helsinki, October 2019.

Many audience members seeing performances of Orfeo in 2019 will encounter a more-or-less familiar situation: a baroque opera with Historically Informed Performance of the music, shown in a thoughtful and sympathetic modern production. Nevertheless, a staged production of Monteverdi’s 1607 music-drama is a special event. This beautiful and moving work is justly famous as one of the very first operas, admired by Early Music fans for its varied ensembles and rich instrumental writing. But it is not often staged: Opera Houses tend to favour more the austere scoring and stark psychodrama of Poppea (1643).

What’s different now?

In this particular production, some features that are different from mainstream opera reflect the situation at the first performance in Mantua. The venue is a hall (originally a room within the Ducal Palace) not a purpose-built theatre. The performing space is small, there is no stage machinery. The cast is just 9 singers, some of them doubling roles, and all of them combining to form various vocal ensembles – there is no separate chorus.

Other features of this project reflect the latest research findings in Historical Performance Practice. The instruments are distributed in contrasting ensembles (strings, flutes, continuo, cornetti & sackbuts) across various positions behind and to the sides of the stage. Cello and violone play with the string ensemble, not with the continuo. The default scoring for continuo is organ & theorbo. Singers and continuo alike avoid ornamentation in this stilo rappresentativo – theatrical style.

There is no conductor, not even someone waving their hands whilst using a harpsichord as a very expensive music-stand!  The anonymous writer of a c1630 manuscript for a Baroque Opera Director, Il Corago, rules out even the Tactus-beating that would be usual in madrigals and religious music. Nevertheless, as Frescobaldi describes in 1615, the whole performance is ‘facilitated by Tactus‘, a slow, steady pulse around one beat per second, which changes slightly according to the emotional affetto from one movement to another.

What was different in 1607?

But if the concept of Baroque Opera is familiar to us, then we might question how today’s situation differs from the experience of the audience in 1607. Certainly, they would not have viewed Orfeo as the beginning of a ‘History of Opera’. They could not know the future, but they were well informed about the recent past and excited at the on-going development of new genres of music-drama.

These were not yet called opera. Orfeo is favola in musica, a story in music. That music was only rarely called recitativo: the usual word (as for Orfeo) was rappresentata, a show, a theatre-piece. In the following year, 1608, librettist Ottavio Rinuccini made the bold move to claim for Monteverdi’s lost masterpiece Arianna the grand status of Tragedia (Tragedy) rappresentata in musica.

There was not yet any specific training for opera-singers. The 1607 cast were court and chapel musicians, all male, who brought to the stage their rhetorical skills of presenting poetry, of narrating stories, of expressive gestures and court decorum – how to stand, where to position oneself, how to behave in the presence of a Prince, or (in this case) in the presence of the demi-god Orpheus, or of Pluto, King of the Underworld. This all changed the following year, when professional actresss Virginia Ramponi-Andreini, known as La Florinda, brought her stage-skills to Arianna, performing the famous Lament to great acclaim.

But even though there was no word for it, by 1607 opera was already a ‘thing’. Peri describes in the Preface to Euridice (1600) how to turn theatrical speech into music; Cavalieri gives detailed instructions for opera-composers and performers in the Preface to Anima & Corpo (1600), the earliest surviving such work. In 1601, Caccini proclaims the priorities of the nuove musiche – new music – as Text and Rhythm.

Research into ancient Greek drama and experiments with new genres were supported by renaissance Academies, including the Mantuan  Accademia degli Invaghiti (music-lovers) who promoted Orfeo. The aristocratic and artistic membership of the Academy would have regarded the work as Striggio’s verse-drama set to music by Monteverdi. And much of what we might today analyse as Musical Forms comes from the poetical of the libretto. But Monteverdi sometimes chooses to disregard Striggio’s blue-print, tending to prefer expressive Monody even where the design of the verses suggests Aria.

As Tim Carter writes in his survey of Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (2002), Academy members’ chief delight was in a show of Rhetoric.  Rhetoric is the use of persuasive speech to explain, to entertain and to stir up the emotions. This focus on words might surprise us, as a way of listening to Monteverdi’s music, but if we think of Shakespeare’s plays (e.g. Anthony and Cleopatra, also in 1607), then we can understand such delight in the powerful use of heightened language.

So in the Prologue to Orfeo, as La Musica tells the story of Orfeo, the sound of instruments tickles your ears, and the supernatural power of Music moves your soul. At the gates of Hell, Orpheus’ song delights Charon’s heart, but does not arouse any emotion of pity in this tough male. Several decades before Descartes, period Medical Science did not consider a mind/body dualism, but more complex models with mind, spirit, soul, heart and lower-body emotions all interacting.

Academicians admired ancient Greek drama for its capacity to move the audience’s passions ‘to tears or laughter’. And Monteverdi’s reputation as ‘the divine Claudio’ was precisely for his ability to compose music that profoundly affected listeners, even if such contemporaries as Artusi complained about technical breaches of the rules of counterpoint.

As music, Monteverdi’s Orfeo was rappresentata – staged, a show. As literature, Striggio’s Favola d’Orfeo was rappresentata in musica. And according to the new concept of Personation – the ‘realistic’ embodiment of a character on stage, for example in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c1600) – Orpheus himself is ‘represented’ in this drama. We listen to the words, we hear the music, we watch the action, and we are moved also by seeing Orpheus’ reactions.

But the decorum of Greek drama would not allow death to be enacted, and in Classical Theatre the most dramatic events were presented as Narration. This tradition of stage Messengers suited baroque singers’ skills in presenting Rhetorical speech in music: telling a story, delighting in detail, moving the listeners’ passions.

We tend to hear baroque opera as Recitative and Aria, in which Recitative is the ‘boring bit between the nice tunes’. This is problematic, since Monteverdi writes only a few ‘nice tunes’. His audience was – of course – unaware of Mozart, Handel and Vivaldi’s operatic recitative, or the story-telling Evangelist in Bach’s Passions. The words Recitative and Aria were used. but around 1600 they had different meanings. New scholarship on this subject is crucial for a better understanding, not only of how to perform, but also of how the 1607 audience would have heard Orfeo.

Recitare means ‘to act’. According to Doni’s (1640) Annotazioni it is incorrect to apply this word to dramatic Monody.  Il Corago explains that there are three ways to act – recitare: with music, with plain speech, and in silent mime. So musica recitativa simply means ‘music for acting’, everything that is delivered by a soloist. including Aria. Aria in this period is any repeated structure in music, rhythm or words. So in period terms, Shakespeare’s ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ [Richard III (c1593)] is an Aria within the Recitative of the whole speech.

In the 20th century, it was assumed that expressive recitative required romantic rubato. But Monteverdi’s rhetorical purpose is not to express the performer’s emotions, but to move the audience’s passions. He does this with subtly composed and carefully notated contrasts of pitch, harmony, rhythm and speed of declamation, controlled by the steady pulse of the Tactus beat.

 

How to listen?

Concentrate on the words.

Let the poetic imagery create Visions in your imagination, as if the events were happening before your very eyes.

Let the power of your own imaginative Visions be supported and enhanced by what you see on stage and what you hear in the music.

What does it mean?

In Monteverdi’s dramatic Monody – music for acting – contrasts in pitch represent the impassioned speech of a great actor. Speaking on a monotone is code for ‘Let me tell you a story’ – if there is no music, concentrate on the words.

Contrasts of syllabic speed indicate heightened passion. Crescendo on a single note carries the emotion to the listener. Speaking on the Tactus beat suggests stability, whilst being off the beat or syncopated shows agitation.

The continuo bass is structured to convey emotions: a sustained pedal-point signifies seriousness; slow movement of the bass accompanies a serious or sad subject; fast movement creates the lightness of happiness and dancing. Dissonances of many different types show varied emotions.

Typically, there are many changes of emotions, often with rapid contrasts between opposites.

Ensemble music, vocal or instrumental, on stage represents diegetic, ‘real life’ music. The string ensemble symbolises the mythical Lyre, associated with boh Orpheus and Apollo. Strings, flute and harp are played by the nine Muses. A pair of flutes suggest pastoral pan-pipes. The snarling Regal is the organ from Hell. Cornetti and sackbuts evoke the horror of Hell or the power of sacred music.

In a humanist opera, we might well ask, to Whom is music sacred? To Apollo? Apollo and Orpheus were understood as allegorising God and Christ. Or to Bacchus? Whilst the 1609 and 1615 prints of Monteverdi’s music have a happy ending in which Apollo rescues Orpheus from despair, Striggio’s 1607 libretto ends with a glorious triumph for the opposing team, Bacchus and his hard-drinking, hot-loving Maenads. Andrew Lawrence-King has reconstructed music for the original ending, and you will have to wait till the end of the show to find out who triumphs in the end.

So, in the best traditions of Rhetoric, I hope that this Explanation helps the music move your Emotions, and that you Enjoy the show!

Read more at the ORFEO Page by Il Corago

The Art of Time: Tomas de Santa Maria on performing renaissance Fantasia

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Tomas de Santa Maria’s Arte de tañer Fantasia (1565) free to download here is a teaching book for keyboard instruments and vihuela. Like Milán’s (1536) book for vihuela El maestro read more here, this publication is intended not only to teach the rudiments of notation and instrumental technique, but also to give detailed information for high-quality performance and to empower students to improvise their own Fantasias, in the strict polyphonic style of the late renaissance. Thus, the second part download part 2 here offers a complete introduction to 16th-century counterpoint.

In this post, I offer a brief overview of the contents of the two volumes of the Art of playing Fantasia, and analyse in detail Tomas’ comments on his highest priorities, Time and Rhythm, as well as his remarks on Ornamentation and on Performance Practice in general.

 

 

The Art of Fantasia

 

Tomas presents improvised Fantasia-playing as a renaissance Art, a term which had quite a different flavour almost half a millennium ago. Whilst the 20th century has taught us to regard art as the triumph of a lone genius over rules and restrictions applying only to ordinary folk, in the 16th and 17th centuries Art was defined as a system of coherent principles that transformed raw nature into artful creativity, full of life and grace. More about the period meaning of Art and period terminology here.

As Renaissance Art, Tomas’ fantasia is improvised within the rigorous structures of Franco-flemish polyphony, inherited and developed by such composers as Antonio de Cabezon (who checked and approved Tomas’ work), and his arte is indeed a book of rules: 78 chapters of detailed prescriptions, plus several bonus sections on key Performance Practice topics.

The remainder of this article consists mostly of extensive quotes from Tomas’ book, so for clarity my brief comments below are in blue.

Prologo: principles & fundamentals

El fin de este libro es arte de tañer fantasia – “the aim of this book is rules for improvising, divided into two parts. The first deals with all the pre-requisites that are necessary to begin improvising… the second part deals with everything necessary for this purpose, which is to improvise counterpoint, all put into a system (puesto en arte) and into universal rules (reglas universales)…

“In this first part we proceed by way of easier and clearer matters, beginning with the names of the notes (signos), but our principal intention is only to teach young professionals in this discipline (arte) what they need to put into practice, step by step from the most obvious and lightest matters, towards greater matters, and not [beginning] with the most demanding and difficult matters, which would tend to confuse and intrigue experts in such questions rather than enlightening and educating those new beginners, who like children should be nourished with light sustenance, easily digested, and later with more solid food!”

“In all the sciences and disciplines such order is essential… we see the same in Nature, which proceeds from imperfection to perfection… This has been the reason and motivation for our setting out to begin the first part with the notes, not as they have previously been analysed, but from first principles and fundamentals.”

Science, Art & Use

Tomas’ Prologue also includes a discussion of the need for arte – a coherent set of principles, contrasting this with uso – use, i.e. the habitual way of ‘just doing it’. Such use is not necessarily bad – a good habit can be a useful skill – but it must be guided by arte – rules. Our modern-day understanding of ‘art’ as the engagement with mysterious beauties beyond everyday rules is Renaissance Science.

Tomas’s personal connection to the ineffable, divine aspect of Music is proclaimed in a lengthy exposition of the role of Music in the Bible and in Christian doctrine. Reluctantly, he leaves this topic, to focus on the subject of his book – arte as a set of principles.

‘But I wish to leave this [Science], about which much more could be said, so as not to depart from my main purpose. And I say that although I have served the institution of my Order by playing organ wherever my duties took me, I considered many times the great effort required until now, and the many years taken up by learning singing and playing. Moved by emotions of love and charity, I began to investigate and re-examine how all this might be expressed as arte – a set of principles, so that in a short time and with less effort one could acheive the goal, and not merely as uso – habit, ‘just doing it’.

‘Because habit is broad and risky, whereas principles are narrow and sure. And so we see from experience that no-one without principles is perfect in their skilled discipline (facultad); because those who go without principles are like those don’t know the way and go without a guide; and like those who go in the dark without light. Since principles are the guide and the light, then it’s quite fair to say that those who do creative work (obran) without observing principles are ignorant.

‘This is the declaration of the Philosopher, who was asked what knowledge is; and who replied that knowledge is understanding the matter from its causes and first principles (primeros principios), which is what arte consists of.’

And so Tomas spent 16 years of ‘incalculable and incredible work‘, consulting with high-level colleagues, in particular Antonio de Cabezon, in order to perfect his set of principles, and teach his arte as ‘universal rules‘.

Contents

Part 1 begins with the names of the notes in plainchant (canto llano) and staff-notation (canto de organo); the three Hexachords (propriedades); the contradiction between the hard and soft Hexachords (see below); changing Hexachord (mutacion); the two pre-requisites for singing from staff-notation.

Then follows an extra section with ‘advice for maintaining the Tactus (compas) well, analysed in detail below.

Chapter 6 continues with note-values; introduction to the keyboard; semitones; black and white keys; intervals etc. Chapter 13 deals with Performance Practice, setting out eight conditions for fine playing (see below), which are discussed point by point in the following chapters.

From Chaper 20, Tomas explains how to perform polyphonic works on vihuela or keyboard, including advice on ornamentation. Then he analyses the Church Tones, Renaissance Modes, use of remote tonalities and Cadences.

Part 2 is devoted to the rules of counterpoint in 51 chapters: dissonance and consonance; suitable progressions, ascending and descending, whether in slow notes or faster; voice-leading; formal design. Chapter 52 has advice for new players (see below). The final chapter shows how to tune keyboard instruments and vihuela (in meantone).

Hexachords

Whilst every musician understands that one shouldn’t mix up B-flat and B-natural, Tomas’ comments on the contradiction of the hard and soft Hexachords – la contradicion que ay entre las dos propriedades de bequadrado y bemol (Part 1, Chapter 3) are interesting in the context of musical expression and History of Emotions.

‘Of the three Hexachords, the two that are B-natural and B-flat are notorious for being mutually repugnant and contrary – muy notorio ser repugnantes y contrarias entre si – and to such a degree that in no way can they suit or conform one to another nor vice versa, unless there is a particular necessity to make some perfect fifth or perfect fourth, or to excuse some dissonance of fa against mi… Finally, if we are singing or playing in B-natural, we must necessarily avoid singing or playing with B-flat [and vice versa].

‘The reason and cause of this contradiction and repugnance is because song with B-flat is a soft, sweet and smooth song (blando, dulce y soave), and on the contrary, song with B-natural is hard, strong and bitter (duro, rezio y aspero), and so – like soft and hard  – they are manifestly opposites and contraries.’

The natural Hexachord [C D E F G A, containing neither B-flat nor B-natural] is halfway between the hard and soft Hexachords, conforming with either of them’. Tomas links this ‘convenience and conformity’ to the structure of eight-note modes, which combine notes from two six-note Hexachords. ‘The natural Hexachord is halfway, a tempering and concord … with which every mode (tono) can complete its perfect operation.’

Pre-requisites

Part 1, Chapter 5 De dos documentos para en brevemente cantar canto de organo – two pre-requisites for quickly [learning] to sing from staff-notation

‘It is certain and evident that staff-notation – canto de organo – is highly important and necessary for the player, both to understand what they are playing as well as to set a work [i.e. arrange polyphony for solo instrument] and gain advantage from [studying] it. Just as a scholar to complete his diploma has to read many learned writers every day… so the player should… set works in staff-notation by selected composers every day, enriching his knowledge of new and fine things… Por falta de fundamentos se gastava mucho tiempo…‘

If you lack fundamental skills, you’ve been wasting a lot of time!

Tomas’ emphasis on staff-notation and deep understanding of counterpoint takes his book into territory beyond that explored by Milán in El maestro (1536). Milán uses tablature notation, which tells the vihuela-player which string to pluck with the right hand and which fret to stop with the left hand, note by note, and with careful control of rhythm. But this notation does not show the movement of the individual polyphonic voices, and Milán allows more freedom than Tomas de Santa Maria in adapting the strict rules of counterpoint to the exigencies of a particular instrument. Although Milán requires basic knowledge of staff-notation, his students learn to improvise polyphony mostly by ear and by ‘muscle memory’, by learning the stops and plucks that create the progressions and cadences of each mode. Tomas teaches staff-notation in detail and wants his students to learn counterpoint as an academic, as well as practical, exercise. But both writers encourage students to play good music, in order to learn by example, reproducing and imitating learnt musical fragments in their own improvised fantasias.

Tomas gives ‘two very brief and comprehensive rules (reglas), with which in a very short time one can easily learn and understand in depth: the first deals with  compas and the second with written note-values.’

As for Milán (read more here), so also for Tomas, the term compas combines the philosophical concept of Tactus (the slow, steady pulse governing renaissance and baroque rhythm) with the practical, physical representation of that pulse as a down-up movement of the hand (or foot) and with the notation of the duration of a down-up pulse unit by the note-value of a semibreve and by a bar of staff-notation enclosed by bar-lines. Tomas distinguishes clearly between Tactus (the complete down-up movement, corresponding to a semibreve) and semi-Tactus – medio compas (downbeat only, or upbeat only, corresponding to the duration of a minim).

Tactus

‘Quanto al compas, que es como fundamento del canto de Organo, por quanto siempre estriva en el, sea mucho de notar que la llave y govierno de toda la musica, assi del cantar como del tañer, es el compas y medio compas, de los quales el que bien supiere usar, terna bien fundamento para bien cantar y tañer, por que el compas es ciera guia en toda la musica mensurable que por su certidumbre le dezimos ser el freno de la musica, porque nos detiene para no cantar ni tañer desatinada y desconcertadamente, sino conforme a razon, por peso y medida, y por preceptos y reglas de musica. Y assi con justo titolo el compas es llamado el govierno con que se concierta y rige toda la musica, assi del cantar como del tañer, dandole toda gracia y ser. 

‘Regarding Tactus, which is like the foundation of staff-notation, since it is always based on Tactus, it should be carefully noted that the key and government of all music, whether sung or played, is the Tactus and semi-Tactus. If you know well how to use them, you’ll have a good foundation for singing and playing well, for Tactus is a sure guide in all measured music [i.e. not plainchant], which for its certitude we can say is the musical brake which restrains us from singing or playing recklessly and in disorder, but instead rationally, by weight and measure, and by precepts and rules of music. And so it is the appropriate title to call Tactus the government with which all music (both sung and played) is brought together and ruled, giving it all its grace and its very existence.’

Tomas now links the practical purpose of Tactus as the basis of musical ensemble to its formal definition in relation to Aristotelean Time: ‘a number of movement in respect of before and after’ Physics (4th cent. BC). We should keep in mind that Isaac Newton’s theory of Absolute Time was not published until more than a century later.

‘Compas es medida, en la cantoria tomado a intento que las bozes concurren en consonancia a un mesmo tiempo. Tactus is Measure, used in choir so that the voices come together in consonance at the same time.’

‘Compas es la cantidad a tardanca de tiempo que ay del golpe que hiere en baxo a otro siguente baxo. Tactus is the amount of duration of time from one down-beat to the following down-beat.’

In the next paragraph, he links the physical hand-movement and practical purpose of Tactus-beating to the notation of musical time with bars and note-values.

‘El compas con que se mide toda la musica practica assi del cantar como del tañer fue sacado del compas con que se mide y inivela la cantidad a cuya semejança el compas de la musica practica mide el tiempo que se gasta en las figuras del canto de Organo… The Tactus that measures all practical music-making both vocal and instrumental is taken from the Tactus that measures and determines the quantity represented by a bar of musical notation which measures the time taken up by the note-values of staff-music.’

Tomas makes it abundantly clear that all measured music (i.e. all music except chant) is governed by Tactus, and the music has to conform to the Tactus, not vice versa.

‘El compas, en el qual estriva toda la musica practica… Tactus, on which all music-making is founded. ‘Toda la musica, assi del cantar como del tañer, esta subjectada y atajada al compas, y no la compas ala musica. All music, both vocal and instrumental, is governed by and founded on Tactus, and not the other way around.

About this, students who want to excel in this art should be well admonished.

‘The Tactus is divided into two equal parts, that is into two semi-Tactus… by the upbeat, so that the Tactus is always on the downbeat and the semi-Tactus on the upbeat’. Tomas emphasises that in binary metre every semi-Tactus is of equal duration.

‘There are two different types of compas in music-making – in one the Tactus is divided (as above) into two equal parts. In the other type into three equal parts: this is the compas of Proportion, also known as Triple metre, in which of the three parts that it has, two are spent on the down-stroke and the other one on the up-stroke. This is done singing two Semibreves on the downstroke  and one on the upstroke [slow, Sesquialtera proportion] or two Minims on the downstroke and one on the upstroke [fast, Tripla proportion].

Four requirements for maintaining Tactus perfectly

  • Beat time with the hand, down-up, with each stroke of equal duration

‘Even though the upstroke should not have a ‘bump’ [topar] as the down-stroke does, nevertheless the down-beat must hit as if it struck something.’ He mentions two faults to avoid: ‘often we see imprecise Tactus-beating without any ‘bump’ neither on the down nor the up, or hitting with the hand as if it struck something on down and up’. This subtle difference between down- and up-strokes is the concept of arsis and thesis.   ‘Every bar has these two beats.’

  • The hand stays down for the entire duration of the semi-Tactus

‘It is not lifted until the note on the upstroke. Similarly on the upstroke the hand stays up for the entire duration of the semi-Tactus, until the downstroke.

‘For this it is necessary to raise and lower the hand with equal regularity – una misma ygualdad.

  • The up- or down-beat and the note on which it falls are struck together simultaneously – juntamente a un mesmo tiempo –

‘The beat is not before or after the note, the note is not before or after the beat, but absolutely together at once. For this, it’s necessary that each beat, both down and up, should be struck with a certain force or impetus, and in addition both should be struck equally, that is one doesn’t strike the downbeat harder than the up, nor the up harder than the down.

  • Every bar goes as measured and determined by the measure of the first bar

‘The measure of tempo maintained in the first bar is maintained in every bar that follows, by reason, that one doesn’t take more time for one bar than for another.

‘We give this advice to new players,  that they basically count by semi-Tactus [minims] … and this way they cannot fail to play in Tactus with all the rigour that is required. because by experience we see that those who don’t play in Tactus err in the semi-Tactus.’

Note that Tomas is encouraging beginners to count relatively quickly, in minims [about MM 60], whereas more experienced players might count the whole Tactus [semibreve ~ MM30]. Modern-day musicians are so used to a fast count, that even Tomas’ easy option of 60 bpm is challengingly slow for many nowadays

.

 

 

‘If you want to maintain Tactus and semi-Tactus well, practise a lot maintaining it for yourself [i.e. within your own body] with the hand and with the foot… for players, maintain Tactus & semi-Tactus with your foot, since whilst playing you can’t do it with your hand.’

 

Mensuration signs & note-values

Part 1, Chapter 6 De las figuras

‘We are discussing the figuras – written notes – according to their note-value sung in compasete [indicated by C, modern ‘common time’], which is  now commonly used by everyone…. even though  [C-slash, modern ‘alla breve’] is also called compasete by many, which if taken strictly we would have to sing by whole compas [down-up Tactus, and also bar-length], which is breve or two semibreves.  Nevertheless we use it [in the same way] as C, a half-circle without the slash, with the result that using one or the other [mensuration sign, ‘time signature’] we now sing in compasete. What is strictly called compasete  in this period, which is C without slash… the Semibreve is one compas [down-up Tactus, and also bar-length]’

So by Tomas’ time, the strict definition of compasete (Milán calls it by another dimunuitive, compasillo) as C is informally extended by many to include C-slash; and the realisation of C-slash strictly according to theory, i.e. counting by breve and semibreve (which would suggest double tempo, though Tomas does not clarify this explicitly), seems to have been abandoned in practice.

Bar-length

Although period use of the term compas often includes the meaning ‘a bar of notated music’, Tomas’ basic explanation of note-lengths clearly shows that bar-lengths can be varied in practice. In his table, the numbers viii, iv, ii and 1 count the number of Tactus beats.

 

 

This defining exemplo shows:

  • Bar-lengths are expanded as necessary to accommodate large note-values

 

  • The primary meaning of compas is Tactus (as a duration of time corresponding to the movement of the Tactus-hand)

 

  • Note-values are defined in relation to Tactus

In theory, the relationship depends on mensuration sign, but the theoretical distinction between C and C-slash no longer applies in practice.

 

  • A single mensuration sign (i.e. C) allows varying bar-lengths

This contrasts with the modern use of C as a time signature requiring a consistent bar-length of one semibreve.

 

  • There is no assumption of maintaining duration as bar = bar.

This has implications for triple-metre proportions, which today’s performers sometimes describe as ‘bar=bar’. That might be an accurate description in some circumstances, but ‘bar = bar’ is not a period principle that can be used to determine proportions.

Tomas’ (1565) principles of rhythmic notation are entirely consistent with Milan’s theory and practice in El maestro, three decades earlier.

The fundamental quantity is Tactus. Relative durations are specified by note-lengths. The notated bar-length framed by bar-lines  is essentially a visual convenience, no more.

Two Principal Requirements for singing from staff notation

Dos cosas se reguieren principalmente para saber cantar canto de Organo.

  1. Give each note its written time-value
  2. Know which note is on the up- or down-beat, and which is not

For minims it’s easy… with each beat down or up, you sing a minim… if one minim comes with the downbeat, the next is with the upbeat and vice versa.

Tomas now gives examples for various note-values of how notation is linked to Tactus beats.

8 conditions for playing with total perfection and beauty

Book 1, Chapter 13 ‘So that all music might have that grace and essence (ser – literally, ‘being’) which it deserves, it’s necessary to play with all the delicacy that is required, which is repaid in much gold and creates yet more essence and grace. Without this, all that is played, however good it might be, will not have grace nor brilliance. Here is the clear difference between the same work played by a perfect and refined player, or played by another, imperfect and coarse; because played by the expert it will appear to be delicate and high art, and played inexpertly it seems low-class and coarse, as if it were two different pieces.

‘The conditions which thus beautify the music can be reduced to eight:

  1. Play in Tactus (compas)
  2. Place your hands well.
  3. Strike the keys well.
  4. Play cleanly and distinctly.
  5. Let the hands run well up and down the keyboard.
  6. Use appropriate fingering
  7. Play with good groove (ayre)
  8. Make good ornaments and trills (redobles y quiebros)’

‘Playing in Tactus … is the first condition’

For more on Tactus, Tomas refers his readers back to his previous remarks (analysed above).

Chapters 14-18 are specific to keyboard, in particular clavichord, technique. Chapter 14: Fingers are numbered from thumb 1 to little finger 5. Hands are curved like cat’s paws, fingers close together, thumb underneath and close to the 5th finger. All this is close to period harp-technique too. Elbows are dropped, relaxed and close to the body.

Chapter 15: strike the keys with the flesh of the finger; with impetus; equally strongly with both hands; don’t strike from too high above the key; press down into the key, but not so much as to raise the pitch; don’t raise the fingers too much away from the keys.

Chapter 16: for clarity, release one key before playing the next. Lift the finger a little after playing, but don’t take them too far away from the keys.

Chapter 17: for facility throughout the whole range, keep the hand compact, turn the hand slightly in the direction of movement (especially for fast notes), keep the active fingers close to the keys.

Chapter 18 defines Principal Fingers as those that strike the first note of trills. Thumbs are not used for black notes, except for octaves in one hand, or when there is no possible alternative. One should not use the same finger twice in succession for crotchets or (especially) quavers. Consecutive semibreves, on the contrary, are played with one finger repeating. Melodic crotchets are taken pair-wise, alternating two fingers. This is the familiar Renaissance concept of Good and Bad notes, corresponding to the accented and unaccented syllables of a song-text: more on Good & Bad here. Quavers and semiquavers are fingered four-by-four. 

Tomas analyses fingering in considerable detail, confirming the importance of fingering in creating short-term phrasing and articulation. His fingerings for two-note chords require changing fingering on consecutive thirds, which has implications for facilitating particular ornaments (page 45). 

Groove and Swing

 

Chapter 19 introduces the concept of ayre – particular ways to apply rhythmic freedom to fast notes, within the regular pulse of the Tactus. Ayre sometimes refers to melodic tunefulness, but more often to subtle rhythmic patterning. Depending on context, I translate it as ‘groove’ (dance patterns and/or medium- term patterning) or ‘swing’ (changeable, short term patterns), in the jazz sense of subtle rhythmic adjustments that give a particular character or elegant shape without disturbing the fundamental beat.  

‘The way to play with good ayre… requires playing the Crotchets in one way [groove] and the Quavers in three [alternative options for three different ways to swing].’ Thus these adjustments are within the fundamental steady pulse of Tactus (semibreve, down-up) and semi-Tactus (minim, down or up).

‘The manner – manera – you must have for playing Crotchets is to wait – detenerse –  on the first and hurry – correr –  the second; and neither more nor less wait on the third and hurry the fourth; and in this way for all the Crotchets. As if the first Crotchet were dotted, and the second a Quaver… and take note that the Crotchet that hurries should not be very hurried, but a little moderate – un poco moderada.

 

 

‘Of the three manners of [playing] Quavers, two are done almost the same way, which is waiting on one quaver and hurrying the other one… In one manner you begin by waiting on the first Quaver, hurrying the second; and neither more nor less waiting on the third and hurrying the fourth; and in this way all of them… As if the first were dotted and the second a Semiquaver. This manner is suitable for works that are contrapuntal throughout – todas de contrapunto – and for passages of decorative fast notes both long and short – passos largos y cortos de glosas.

 

 

The second manner is done by hurrying the first Quaver and waiting on the second; and neither more nor less hurrying the third and waiting on the fourth; and in this way all of them… As if the first were a Semiquaver and the second a dotted Quaver. In this manner, the dotted Quavers are never on the beat, but in-between. This manner is suitable for short decorations – glosas cortas – which are done like this in [composed, contrapuntal] works as well as in [improvised] fantasia.  And note that this manner is very much more galana (elegant, showy) than the other one, above.’

 

 

The noun gala and its related adjective galana occupy an area of meaning that extends from ‘decorative’ or ‘elegant’ to ‘luxury’ or ‘ostentation’. Milán discusses tañer de gala, which seems to be well towards the ‘showy’ end of this semantic spectrum, as suggested by my translation ‘bravura playing’. More on Milán here.

‘The third manner is done by hurrying three Quavers and waiting on the fourth; and be warned that the waiting has to be all the time that is necessary so that the fifth Quaver comes to be struck in time on the semi-Tactus; and in this way all of them. With the result that they go four by four… as if the three Quavers were Semiquavers and the fourth a dotted Quaver. This third manner is the most galana of all, and is suitable for long and short decorations – glosas largas y cortas.

‘Take note that the waiting on the Quavers should not be much, but just enough to show and be understood a little, because waiting a lot causes great gracelessness and ugliness – desgracia y fealdad – in the music. And similarly for the same reason, the three Quavers that hurry should not hurry too much, but with moderation, conforming to the waiting on the fourth Quaver.

 

The soundscape of Renaissance rhythm

Tomas’ instructions for Renaissance ayre create a rhythmic soundscape that differs sharply from 20th-century assumptions about art-music and improvisatory fantasias. He demands that the player count in minims, which should be completely steady. From other evidence, it is plausible that this count would be somewhere around minim = 60. Within that slow steady beat, crotchets are good/bad (i.e. subtly long/short), quavers are subtly shaped in one of three specific ways, the choice depending on the genre of music and the length of the decorative passagework. Whichever groove or swing is applied, it is maintained consistently throughout the passage in question.

There is no trace of 20th-century rubato, nor of its early-music derivative, phrasing that ‘goes towards’ a certain point. There is none of the hesitancy and pauses that often characterise modern-day performances of ‘improvisatory’ music: on the contrary, even if the player is genuinely improvising, Tomas and his advisers, the Cabezon brothers (as well as Luys Milán before them) expect Tactus, Groove and Swing to be maintained.

Nowadays, one might describe Tomas’ sound-world as steady pulse at approximately 60 bpm, with regular groove at the subordinate level around 120 bpm, and various options for swing at the most rapid level of rhyhmic activity, around 240 bpm. But in that pre-Newtonian age, Tomas has no concept of Absolute Time on which to base such a description; he has no clock precise enough to measure such short durations: rather, he has Tactus, which counts Aristotelean Time as ‘a number of movement in respect of before and after’ (Aristotle, Physics). The essential quality of that Tactus movement is that it is consistent – within the limits of human perception – so that Tomas’ minim is always about one second in duration (though he has no machine to measure it, and no conceptual framework for comparing it to anything more objective than his own feeling of consistency).

It is this essential consistency that allows Tomas to map specific performance practice instructions onto particular note-values (minims are steady, crotchets groove good/bad, quavers swing in one of three ways). Such linkage, which is seen also in Ortiz’s instructions for viola da gamba,  strongly implies that the absolute duration in time of any given note-value is approximately fixed within the whole repertoire:  e.g. minims are approximately one second. If the durations of note-values could vary arbitrarily (as they can in modern practice), this linkage would be meaningless.

Nevertheless, Milan indicates subtle changes in tempo from one piece to another, centred on a default tempo of ‘well measured Tactus’ that is ‘neither very fast nor very slow’. But these changes are not imposed arbitrarily by performers’ artistic choice: performers are required to follow the composer’s directions. So – in contrast to the 20th-century concept of ‘artistic freedom’ for performers, the period attitude is that there is a correct tempo, and that it is the performers’ job to find it.

Ornamentation 1: Graces

Chapter 20: How to make redobles and quiebros 

Summarising Tomas’ definitions & examples: Redoble is a reiterated upper-note trill, starting on the written note, and turned at the beginning.

 

Quiebro is an upper- or lower-note trill, starting on the written note, but without initial turn. Quiebros can be senzillos (simple, i.e. one flip) or reyterados (reiterated).

 

The difference between redoble and quiebro is that the redoble has the initial turn through its lower note.

 

 

‘Redobles are only made on complete bars, i.e. on Semibreves. And Quiebros are made on MInims and on Crotchets and, as a marvel, on Quavers. Reiterated quiebros are made on Minims, simple quiebros on Crotchets; except for one which is not reiterated, and always made on Minims on the [hexachord] pitches sol fa mi fa. This is called the Quiebro de Minima.

‘Reiterated quiebros are made on every Minim where the fingering permits. But simple ones are not made on every Crotchet, but alternately yes and no.

‘There is only one way to make Redoble … with whole-tone and semitone combined. Quiebros are made with tone or semitone, except for the Quiebro de Minima, which is always made … with the lower semitone and upper tone.  The other way would produce gracelessness and displeasure – desgracia y desabrimiento – to the ears, for which reason it must not be made where it would finish on mi…. But it can finish on any other note ut, re, fa, sol, la.

Redobles can have the semitone above or below, ‘but note that in no way is it permitted to make a Redoble with two whole-tones combined, because this is very graceless and displeasing to the ear.’

Redobles permitted and prohibited

 

Tomas gives specific fingerings for each ornament, for the keyboard, left and right hands.

‘These styles of redobles and quiebros … are very new and very elegant – galanos – causing such grace and tunefulness – melodia – in the music, which bears them in so many degrees – grados – and with such contentment to the ears, that it seems something quite different from playing without them, so much so that there is every reason to use them always, and not others which are old-fashioned and not graceful.

‘Simple quiebros … for ascending are made with tone or semitone below. Those for descending are made with tone or semitone above.’

Tomas describes a very fast ornament, in which the principal note is not actually repeated, but sustained whilst the auxiliary is played almost simultaneously and quickly released. There is no conventional notation for this technique (described also in some harp sources), so he does not provide an example. With this type of fast mordent, Tomas prefers the descending version (with upper auxiliary) to the little-used ascending version. 

Quiebros on Crotchets, both ascending and descending, are sometimes made on the beat, and sometimes on the off-beat, and this [on the off-beat] is the better and more elegant – galana – manner, because it gives more grace to what is played.

Tomas gives keyboard fingerings for each option, for each hand.

The upper-auxiliary Minim quiebro normally used for descending can be used ascending if the principal note is a mi.

‘Sometimes, and only descending, one can make quiebros on two consecutive Crotchets. which is done for grace and elegance. This occurs when after an ascent to a Semibreve there are two Crotchets descending. 

‘When there are ascending Crotchets which then descend, one must always make a quiebro on the highest note, which is done for descending [upper auxiliary]’ ‘Similarly, when there are descending Crotchets which then ascend, one must always make a quiebro on the lowest note, which is done for ascending [lower auxiliary].

‘Similarly, to give more grace to the music, one must always make quiebros on every Crotchet that follows immediately after a dotted Minim.’

‘So that the music should have more grace and thus give more contentment to the ears, it’s necessary that redobles and quiebros de minimas should be done by either hand, a redoble with one hand, another redoble with the other; and similarly a quiebro with one hand, another quiebro with the other; responding to each other.’ The fingerings for consecutive thirds (above) facilitate a similar effect between two voices in one hand.  ‘This is heard when both hands play Semibreves or Minims which can have redobles or quiebros, playing them one after another, which greatly adorns the music and gives it grace, especially when there is a chain of Semibreves or Minims.’

‘When the Mode – tono – avoids certain notes … the ornaments should also avoid them.’

Tomas gives technical advice for executing ornaments at the keyboard, repeating his earlier comments about keeping the fingers close to the keys. That advice might well be adapted for vihuela and harp, as keeping the fingers close to the strings.

Tomas characterises his ornamentation as ‘new’, and it is intended for the relatively short sustain of the clavichord. Fewer, or different ornaments might be appropriate to Milán’s period and/or to other instruments. Nevertheless, it seems likely that all renaissance music was ornamented considerably more than the raw notation suggests.

Tomas demands almost ceaseless ornamentation, more-or-less on every second note, as well as strict adherence to rules of ‘grammar’ for ornamentation. Such florid playing in regular Tactus, and with the groove and swing of ayre, creates a sound-world for the late 16th century that contrasts notably with 20th-century assumptions about art-music, the ‘purity’ of polyphony and what ‘improvisatory’ playing might mean.

 

Setting polyphonic works

Chapter 20. ‘Playing polyphonic works on the clavichord is the font and origin from which are born and proceed all the fruits and benefits, and all the art of playing for players.’

‘It should be noted that in whatever work of any kind, all the voices are interdependent and linked one to another, that no individual voice can move a single note without having specific respect and regard for all the other voices. And similarly voices are measured and counted, linking voices Tactus by Tactus, semi-Tactus by semi-Tactus.’

‘Two things have to be kept with all rigour, which rule and govern the arranger so that they never err: these are count and measure, which are interdependent… Measure is the same as compas (Tactus, also bar-length), by which all practical Music is ruled and governed.’

Tomas also explains vihuela tablature, and how to set polyphonic works for vihuela.

Tips for understanding polyphonic works

Chapter 21. ‘Brief advice for new players to master quickly any kind of work’

‘Three things are necessary to understanding any kind of work quickly, and thus to play it more perfectly.

1. Play in Tactus

‘maintaining it always with the same equality of time, i.e. not changing it from more to less nor from less to more. For this, it’s necessary to maintain Tactus with the foot and similarly to take great care with the semi-Tactus… in addition, it’s necessary to understand note-values and give each of them their full duration.’

2. Sing through each individual voice in turn

3. Understand all the Consonances and Dissonances in the work, whether in 2, 3 or 4 voices.

How to obtain benefit from studying polyphonic works

Chapter 22. ‘Five things have to be noted:

1. Understand profoundly the invention and artfulness in the contrapuntal progressions – passos – whether the response or repeat is at the fourth, fifth, octave or other interval… in two, three, four or more voices; with or without imitation. The Art of Fantasia consists of all this, which above all one has to get to know; because in everything it is only arte [i.e. a coherent system of rules]  that makes a Master. And from that it follows that all those who ignore the rules are imperfect.

2. Note the entrance of each voice, to know if it enters before the cadence, in the cadence, or after the cadence; with what invention or subject it enters; for the entry of each voice is the most delicate matter, of greatest subtlety and arte that there is in music. So this must receive great attention and care, in order to apply it in the works.’

3. Note all the styles of Cadences which are used in the works, undersanding them profoundly and memorising them, in order to make similar cadences when improvising [fantasia].

4. Note all the Consonances and Dissonances… and memorise them, in order to create varied progressions, for this is of great benefit in acheiving flow and abundance of spontaneity [fantasia].

5. When a progression is repeated, note the differences in the repeated version, whether in 2, 3 or 4 voices.

‘For new students to apply these benefits in improvisation – fantasia – it’s necessary that they practise constantly with the same progressions that they have learnt, so that with this practice – uso – they become accustomed to the [rules of] arte, and then they can easily play other progressions. Similarly, it is very advantageous to transpose a particular progression into all possible keys. For this, take note that wherever you want to transpose them, they must keep the same [Hexachord] solmization.

‘To gain the great fruits and benefit for improvising of all the above, it’s necessary to practise many times each day, with great perseverance, never mindlessly – desconsiando – but trusting for certain that work and constant practice – uso – conquers all and creates a maestro… A drop of water can carve out stone, not in one or two droplets, but falling constantly.’

Tomas recommends frequent, mindful practice, repeating the same material many times in order to perfect, memorise and internalise it. Although his comments are consistent with the modern-day understanding of learning elite skills, he expresses himself through the period meaning of such terms as uso (practical techniques) and arte (a coherent set of rules for effective creativity). What we mean nowadays by ‘art’, the ineffable mystery of the emotional power of music, is Renaissance Science. More about period terminology here and here.

Tomas’ emphasis on learning progressions and cadences echoes the approach of Milán’s El Maestro.

 

Ornamentation 2: Divisions

How to add divisions to polyphonic works. Chapter 23 Del glosar las obras

Renaissance ornamentation is categorised as Graces on a single note (the redobles and quiebros discussed above) and Divisions or Diminuitions – glosas –  where the interval between two long notes is ‘divided’ into many shorter notes. Tomas gives several examples for each interval, ascending and descending.

‘To add divisions – glosar – to polyphonic works one must be advised that glosas are only made on three note-values – Semibreves, Minims and Crotchets – even so, least often on Crotchets.

‘To glosar a work well, there are two things to note:

  1. All the voices should have equal amounts of glosas
  2. If the voices repeat something, the glosas are also repeated in all the voices

unless something prevents this, which is often the case.

If it is necessary to glosar Crotchets ascending or descending [four by four, stepwise], one must take the glosas for Semibreves ascending or descending a fifth. 

Helpful Hints & Improvisation

Book 2, Chapter 52.  Useful advice for new players.

Tomas’ purpose is not only to teach the instrument and basic musicianship, he also gives advice on how to learn to improvise within the demanding style of 4-voice Renaissance polyphony.

1. Practise running the hands throughout the whole range of the instrument, with appropriate fingerings, observing all the conditions and circumstances already discussed.

2. Practise making redobles and quiebros with both hands.

3. Maintain Tactus very well with hand or foot… give each note-value its precise value

4. After studying a piece well in a class, write it out just as the master taught it, with the glosas etc. Similarly, sing through each individual voice.

5. Understand well how to play the instrument

6. Take as your foundation and guide the Eight Conditions for playing perfectly [above].

7. Understand and be able to play in all possible keys

8. Practise easy works first, and then progressively more difficult ones

9. Practise transposing works into every possible key.

Similarly, try to take from each work those progressions which have graceful melodies, and memorise them, so that afterwards you can improvise on them spontaneously.

Once you are expert in all these things, try to start to play improvisations, based on some melodious progressions. In addition, try to play the progressions with different imitative counterpoints – fugas – i.e. at the fourth, fifth and octave, which greatly beautifies the music.

Similarly, try taking one voice from a work (whichever you want, soprano, alto, tenor or bass), and play it as the treble in four-voice harmony, making up three voices in your head… with a variety of harmonies, which greatly exalts and beautifies the music.

Similarly, once you are already a little expert in playing a given voice like this as the treble, trying playing it as the alto, tenor or bass [with three new voices created around it]. This suggests the Renaissance technique of composing a Parody Mass, in which the counterpoint of a pre-extant motet is re-worked and greatly extended to create an entire mass setting. This technique could be a model for improvisation in Tomas’ style, as could the fantasias compiled for keyboard, harp and vihuela by Henestrosa, ‘cutting and pasting’ contrapuntal progressions from various works into a new creation.

If you want to be a perfect player, try to apply yourself and practise little by little, playing counterpoint that has a good feeling – ayre – and graceful melody; on plainchant; and especially polyphonic music, until you are perfect at it. For this is the root and source from which grow and proceed all the skills applicable to the keyboard, and also the perfection and grace which it gives to all the music that is played.’

Tomas final words perfectly capture the essence of Renaissance improvisation: Practise by playing good music well; strive for total perfection; this will improve your skills, your improvisation and your playing of written music.

Modern-day performance

Three significant differences stand out from Tomas’ rules of arte, when compared to today’s HIP approach to fantasia and renaissance polyphony.

  1. Many modern-day performers choose not to play in rhythm.
  2. Few modern-day performers add much ornamentation.
  3. Few modern-day improvisers maintain correct counterpoint to Tomas’ standards.

Tomas’ comments on Tactus are so strongly worded that it is beyond any doubt that all the music of this period should be played in Tactus, counting regularly on a minim beat, and controlling this with the physical movement of hand or foot. Unless you frequently practise and problem-solve with a physical Tactus-beat, you are out of touch (sic) with Renaissance rhythm.

This insistence on Tactus is certainly fundamental, but it is not merely elementary. On the contrary, Tomas associates it with ‘a perfect and refined … expert’, and with playing that is ‘delicate and high art’. 

The amount and detail of ornamentation specified by Tomas is alarming for those of us accustomed to ‘the pure lines of renaissance polyphony’. Our ears, as well as our fingers, will need plenty of practice with so many redobles, quiebros and glosas in all the voices, on almost every second note.

We might assume that improvisation excuses sloppy rhythm and bad counterpoint, even that ‘art has no rules’: Tomas’ book exists to teach the contrary!

 

El Maestro on Tactus: Luys Milán’s renaissance instructions for well-measured Tempo

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Luys Milán’s (1536) book of music for the vihuela de mano entitled El maestro is the first collection of music for this renaissance instrument, tuned like a lute but shaped like a guitar and played similarly to the lute by plucking rather than strumming. It is also the first teaching book for any instrument, intended for complete beginners (a basic knowledge of singing from staff-notation is assumed) and structured progressively from the rudiments of tablature notation to elementary solo pieces, more demanding fantasias and dance-music, and song accompaniment in various styles.

 

Milán’s purpose is not only to teach how to play the instrument, but to show his students how to create their own fantasias in the formal contrapuntal style of the high renaissance. Right from the first example, his tientos (musical ‘essays’) are of the highest artistic quality, beautifully expressive as well as gramatically correct.

 

Of particular interest are his detailed comments for each piece, holding firmly to his declared priorities: tempo and tones. His renaissance ‘tones’ are the eight modal scales which define the ‘key note’, progressions and final cadence of each piece.

Freely available online, you can download the original print (full colour, high resolution, Spanish language and tablature) and also a transcription into staff notation, transposed for modern guitar (with some errors and omissions, without Milán’s tempo indications, with note-values halved or otherwise reduced) My recording, with Jordi Savall, is here, but it does not reflect my more recent research into Tactus.

 

 

 

Compas, mesura & ayre

In this post I analyse Milán’s remarks on Tempo, his highest priority. His Spanish terms are mesura (the ‘measuring’ of music in time); ayre (musical ‘feel’, rhythmic patterning, we might well translate this as ‘groove’); and (most frequently) compas. The significance of compas is broad, combining the philosophical concept of Tactus (the slow, steady pulse governing renaissance and baroque rhythm) with the practical, physical representation of that pulse as a down-up movement of the hand (or foot) and with the notation of the duration of a down-up pulse unit by the note-value of a semibreve and by a bar of tablature enclosed by bar-lines.

 

 

The pre-requisite for studying with El maestro is that the student should understand as a singer, how one must keep Tactus and Measure: basta que sepa cantando entender como se ha de traer el compas y mesura.

Tactus is the slow, steady underlying pulse, Measure is the sub-division of that slow pulse into all the various rhythmic combinations of differing note-values. Milán’s ygual compas is remarkably parallel to lutenist John Dowland’s insistence on the ‘equality of measure’ in his (1609) translation of Ornithoparcus’  (1515) Micrologus. 

 

It is also consistent with baroque lute/theorbo-player Thomas Mace’s (1676) Rule of Time-keeping, requiring ‘Exact, Equal, Constant, True and Even Motion… like the Balance of a good Clock… in all musical performances whatever’ read more, and with such theorists as Zacconi (1592), who characterised Tactus as r’egular, solid, stable, firm… clear, sure, fearless, and without any pertubation.’

 

 

Contrary to the present-day fashion for artistic freedom, Milán’s language (in common with most period sources) is strongly prescriptive. His oft-repeated formula is se ha de… – one has to: se ha de tañer con el compas – you have to play with the Tactus. This theoretical understanding and practical skill in maintaining steady Tactus should similarly be the pre-requisite for all modern-day HIP performances of renaissance and baroque music.

Milán begins with this essential requirement:  es menester que sepays que mesura y ayre se ha de dar a la musica – you need to know what measure and groove have to be given to the music. Pues sabemos que cosa es compas, vengamos a saber quantas de las sobredichas cifras entran en un compas: pues por esto se ha de saber el ayre y mesura – once we know what Tactus is, we can learn how many note-values fit into one Tactus: then from that you have to know the groove and measure.

In the detailed comments that follow, Milán’s starting assumption and ‘default setting’ is steady Tactus, maintained throughout the piece: ‘you have to play it all with an equal Tactus, without making any change’ – la [musica] aveys de tañer toda a un igual compas sin hazer mutacion.  That Tactus should be well-measured, neither very fast (rushed) nor very slow (spacious) – con un compas bien mesurado… ni muy apriessa  ni muy a espacio.  In practice, the Tactus is shown by a down-up movement of the hand or (more conveniently while playing) an up-down movement of foot, in steady time – El compas en la musica no es otra cosa … sino un alçar y abaxar la mano o pie por un ygual tiempo.

As notated in tablature, the combined up-down movement corresponds to the standard bar-length of a semibreve, so a single beat (either down or up) corresponds to a minim. This is consistent with many other sources, and in Spanish practice was referred to as compasillo. Milán shows one piece with bars of double length, which is a notational convenience designed to be easier on the eye, but seems to have no implications for the beat or the tempo.

 

Default Tactus: ‘ygual tiempo’ & ‘compas bien mesurado’

 

The ‘equality of measure’ characteristic of Tactus is certainly the default setting for any particular piece. This ‘equality’ probably continues between one piece and another across the whole repertoire, since Milán is careful to specify when any piece goes even slightly faster or slower. And it is these painstakingly described exceptions to the default tempo that make this vihuela book a crucial source for anyone working with renaissance music.

From the very outset, Milán is clear that the performer should not select their own tempo at will, but should respect the composer’s intentions. se ha de considerar en las siguentes fantasias la una: que se ha de tañer con el compas apressurado o espacioso como el auctor quiere – the first thing one has to consider in the following fantasias is that one must play with the Tactus fast or slow as the composer wants. [His second priority is to identify the tone].

The default setting for any given piece is an equal Tactus for the whole piece. But Milán asks for that Tactus to be selected (according to his wishes, not the performer’s whim!) within a range centred on ‘well-measured, neither very fast nor very slow.’

 

Milán’s range of tempo indications

 

compas a espacio – slow Tactus

compas bien mesurado– well-measured Tactus

compas algo apressurado – slightly fast Tactus

compas apressurado – fast Tactus

quanto mas se tañera con el compas apressurado mejor parecera – the faster the Tactus, the better

Note that it is the Tactus itself that goes slow, well-measured, slightly fast, fast or ‘the faster, the better’. The note-values within the Tactus can be anything from breve to quaver. The physical action of beating time with the hand makes even a small change of Tactus feel quite different – a different groove or ayre. And we can assume that even the biggest change of Tactus is distinctly less than a doubling/halving of tempo, since this could be better shown by halving/doubling note-values.

I suggest that Milán’s compas bien mesurado might be approximately minim ~ MM60, and that his other tempi would be subtle adjustments to that default setting. In the language of jazz, Milán’s apressurado could be ‘up-tempo’ and his a espacio ‘laid back’.

Milán states that compas batido (literally, ‘beaten’) means the same as apressurado (literally, ‘pushed’), i.e. ‘fast’.

Changes of Tactus within a piece

The reader should experience a frisson of shock at the above sub-heading: in the renaissance context of equal, steady Tactus ‘without any perturbation’, the idea of changing Tactus at all is surprising, and changing it within a piece is almost alarming. Milán recognises that to play like this ‘has litttle respect for Tactus or for most music’: it is appropriate only in a certain bravura style, tañer de gala, with long passages of fast notes, redobles, contrasted against slow harmonies, consonancias. 

This is musica con diversos redobles … y tiene mas respecto a tañer de gala, que de mucha musica ni compas – music with various fast notes… and it has more respect for bravura playing than for formal musical construction or Tactus.

Its particular style is tañer de gala con estos redobles largos – bravura playing with these long passages of fast notes.

The noun gala and its related adjective galana occupy an area of meaning that extends from ‘decorative’ or ‘elegant’ to ‘luxury’ or ‘ostentation’. Milán’s tañer de gala with its disregard for the normal rules of Tactus and musical structure would seem to be well towards the ‘showy’ end of this semantic spectrum, as suggested by my translation ‘bravura’.

Writing his own Arte de tañer Fantasia for keyboards and vihuela in 1565, Tomas de Santa Maria similarly emphasises steady Tactus in all music, and offers suggestions in Book 1, Chapter 19 for the ‘groove’ – buen ayre – of crotchets and quavers within the regular minim (semi-Tactus) beat. Crotchets always go long-short (i.e. good-bad), with the long crotchet on the Tactus beat. Quavers can go long-short, or short-long. This second style is only suitable for short passages of fast notes – glosas – but is much more galana (elegant) than the first. The third way is in groups of four quavers, short-short-short-long: this is suitable for long or short glosas and is the most galana (showy) of all. Perhaps Tomas’ third style would be appropriate for Milán’s tañer de gala. Whichever style is chosen, it should be maintained consistently through that particular glosa. More on Tomas de Santa Maria in another post.

Milán repeats many times and with small variations in wording his instructions for changing Tactus, but only in this context of tañer de gala – music which is like ‘trying out’ the vihuela, mixing harmonies with fast notes:  una musica la cual es como un tentar la vihuela a consonancias mescladas con redobles…

para tañerla con su natural ayre haveys os de regir desta maniera. Todo lo que sera consonancias tañerlas con el compas a espacio y todo lo que sera redobles tañerlos con el compas apriessa. ‘To play it with its natural groove, you have to rule yourself in this way: everything which will be harmonies you have to play with the Tactus slow and everything which will be fast notes you must play with the Tactus fast.’

Milán is quite specific that he asks for something beyond normal rhythmic accuracy – it’s not enough for him that the small note-values are faster notes anyway. He insists (many, many times) on changing the Tactus itself, so that the written contrast in note-values is exaggerated by the change in Tactus.

Modern performers might be tempted to interpret ‘fast’ as ‘twice as fast’, but this robs the listener of the sensation of a change of pulse, since the doubling of speed will be heard as halved note-values within the same underlying pulse. The shock of changing Tactus is greater if the change is noticeable, but small, and not proportional.

Similarly, modern performers might want to add accelerando or rallentando, but Milán does not suggest this, and again, the effect of an abrubt change is greater. I tell my students to

use the gear-shift, not the accelerator or brakes!

Milán is very clear that change of Tactus is only allowed in particular circumstances: Esta fantasia que sigue es de la misma arte de la passada fantasia tentando la vihuela con redobles y consonancias; y que vos he dicho de que manera y compas se han de tañer estas fantasias que mas propriamente se pueden dezir tentos – This fantasia that follows is in the same style as the preceding fantasia, trying out the vihuela with fast passages and harmonies: and I have told you in what style and Tactus you have to play these fantasias, which more properly might be called tientos [essays].

Y por esta mutacion de compas os dire que no la aveys de tañer como tañereys esta musica que de aqui adelante torna a proseguir la qual es como la del principio que la aveys de tañer toda a un igual compas sin hazer mutacion. And about this change of Tactus, I tell you that you must not play like that in the music that returns in the following pieces, which is like the pieces at the beginning, which you have to play all in an equal Tactus without making any change.

 

Technique & Phrasing

Milán distinguishes between two different techniques for playing fast notes. Both techniques produce an alternating pattern, but with different sound-quality: alternating two fingers dos dedos is considered more elegant than back-and-forth with a single finger dedillo, but particular melodic patterns suit one or the other technique.

y parar de tañer en cada coronado un poco – and stop playing a bit at each fermata mark.  This could be interpreted in the modern sense of breaking the time and waiting longer at the pause mark, but is more likely to imply creating a silence (literally, stop playing for a bit) within the notated value. This is consistent with the Rhetorical (i.e. word-based) principle of making the last note of the phrase ‘bad’, i.e. short/un-accented, and with period use of this sign (historically not a pause but signum congruentiae – the sign of harmonic resolution, the end of a phrase). More on good/bad notes here.

In the slow tempo that Milán requires, the vihuela’s final chord would need to be sustained for more than four seconds. There is little hope that a vihuela-player could prolong this even further, as a modern fermata: it is almost inevitable that the sound will stop before the notated duration – the usual situation for final notes in this period.

 

Romances

Some songs – romances – have similar passages of instrumental redobles between the vocal phrases, for which Milán suggests a variety  of performance options. The passages in fast notes can be omitted entirely, or the song can be performed with two different Tactus speeds, in the bravura tañer de gala style described for those particular fantasias. han se de tañer lo que fuere consonancias a espacio, y los redobles que ay a las finales quando acaba la boz muy apriessa – it has to be played with the harmonies slow, and the passages at the end of phrases when the voice stops very fast.

For the first romances in the book, Milán requires the singer to sing llano – plain, sustained – whilst the vihuela shouldn’t go very fast, nor very slow: la vihuela ni ha de yr muy apriessa ni muy a espacio. This might rule out the tañer de gala approach, or it might be an instruction applying to the vocal episodes only.

For each vocal genre, there are specific instructions song-by-song for the differing roles of singer/instrumentalist. Sometimes the singer may improvise ornamentation whilst the vihuela plays slow chords, and sometimes the voice is ‘plain’ and the instrument has discanto – counterpoint.

The alternative version of the first villancio has the instruction: el cantor ha de cantar llano y la vihuela algo apriessa – the singer has to sing plain and the vihuela slightly fast. Note that this is not an instruction about the compas (Tactus), it clarifies the different levels of activity in the voice-line and instrumental-part respectively. Singer and vihuela must keep the same Tactus (of course!), but within that Tactus there can be various levels of activity.

Similarly, the second villancio has the instruction: el cantor puede hazer garganta y la vihuela ha de yr muy espacio – the singer can make throat-ornamentation and the vihuela has to go very slowly. This song also has an alternative version with the singer llano and the vihuela apriessa.

For the first soneto (sonnet), Milán writes that the singer can add some trills- algun quiebro – whilst the vihuela goes at moderate pace. Other sonnets have similar instructions: el cantor glose donde huviere lugar con la boz y donde no cantar llano – the singer ornaments where he has an opportunity with the voice, and otherwise sings plain. El cantor ha de cantor llano. Y donde cabera glosar con la boz sea quiebro o trinar que dizen – the singer has to sing plain. And where it fits, to ornament with the voice, which should be quiebros or trills as they are called. The last sonnet has to be played algun tanto regozijado – with rather much rejoicing.

It’s worth noting that Milán distinguishes carefully between different genres – Spanish or Portuguese villancico, Italian soneto and the romance.  Each genre has its own performance practice. Milán leaves no doubt that romances are a special case, and the fast instrumental solo passage-work within them has to be treated differently from the rest of the song: lo que de musica se sigue despues de las finales es para solo tañer y ha de callar la boz donde acaba la cifra colorada – the music which continues after the end of phrases is instrumental only and the voice has to be silent where the coloured notation ends.

Pavan

The Italian Pavan is also a particular genre with its own performance style. Milán presents 4 of his own compostions, and 2 Italian melodies set by him for the vihuela. The first pavan-like fantasia se ha de tañer ni muy a espacio ni muy apriessurado: sino con un compas bien mesurado has to be played neither very slow nor very fast, but with a well-measured Tactus. el ayre della remeda al ayre de las pavanas que tañen en ytalia – Its groove resembles the groove of the Pavans that are played in Italy.

The Pavans that follow are to be played with a slightly fast Tactus, algo apressurado. Milán asks for this dance-music to be played two or three times through. The last Pavan is in triple metre (often found in Spain, not in Italy) with the [slow, sesquialtera] proportion of three semibreves.

 

Proportions

Milán shows two triple-metre proportions, notated with three minims to the bar and three semibreves to the bar. We can observe the notated bar-lengths of Milán’s two proportions, but there is no explanation of how to measure those triple-metre bars in time, i.e. with the hand-movement of the Tactus.

Most of the pieces (in common time), and the examples of proportions in the introduction, have no mensuration sign (time signature) at all. For changes between duple and triple metre, Milán uses these signs without explanation:

 

The modern reader might well wish that the Maestro would have distinguished more clearly between the inter-linked concepts of compas as bar-length, hand-movement and time-duration.  But whatever significance might be read into the mensuration signs, the musical content seems to argue against the hypothesis of  “bar = bar” as a universal rule for linking compas as notated bar-length to compas as time-duration/Tactus. A large variety of rhythms, including short note-values, is found in Milán’s proportion of 3 semibreves to the bar; whereas the episodes in 3 minims to the bar are almost entirely in the jig (canario) rhythm of dotted minim, quarter, minim. This suggests a fast proportion for 3 minims (tripla, 3 minims to one tactus beat, 6 minims to the complete down-up cycle: minim ~ MM180), and a slow proportion for 3 semibreves (sesquialtera, 3 semibreves to two tactus beats = the complete down-up cycle: semibreve ~ MM 90).

This would be consistent with what appears to be Monteverdi’s practice in the early 17th-century: read more.

 

 

Temperament

For certain pieces, Milán asks for the 4th fret to be adjusted. Alçareys un poco el quarto traste de la vihuela para que el punto del dicho traste sea fuerte y no flaco – raise the 4th fret a bit so that the stop at this fret might be strong and not weak. This appears ambiguous: which way is ‘up’? Moving a fret towards the bridge raises the pitch of the note and might seem to be Milan’s meaning. But when he repeats the instruction later for a song accompaniment, he clarifies: haveys de alçar el quarto traste un poco hasta las clavijas de la vihuela – you must raise the 4th fret a bit towards the tuning-pegs. This has the effect of lowering the pitch of the stopped note, which is what we would expect for the sharps and hard-hexachord notes on this fret in the meantone temperament typical of the period.

 

From a History of Emotions perspective, it is interesting that the low (i.e. in-tune) major third is characterised as fuerte, and the out-of-tune high third (characteristic of modern Equal Temperament) is ‘flaccid’.

 

Time & Free Will – Historical & Psychological Time

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Musical Rhythm connects our human, Psychological Experience of the Duration of Time to the Quality of Emotions, going beyond the scientific precision of Quantitative Clock-Time, con-fusing or permeating our perception of the spacious Present with an awareness of the Past.

 

 

Persuasive though this view might be for today’s performers, it is not an aesthetic absolute. It’s just my summary of Bergson, whose views dominated the philosophy of culture in the early 20th century. It’s easy to see how Tempo Rubato fits neatly into this view, and why Bergson’s fusing together of Time and Free Will still resonates for modern-day musicians.

 

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

 

A Philosophy of its Time

My point is that Bergson’s philosophy was part of the aesthetic of his period, the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His ideas were opposed (though Bergson himself might have said, complementary) to Einstein’s concepts of Relativisitic & Quantum Time, and depended on (as a limited, out-dated concept, to be argued against) Newtonian Absolute Time, the ‘ever-rolling stream’ that had come to be the dominant view during the late 18th century. (This was long after the publication of ‘Principia”: Newton’s radical new concept met with heavy resistance from late-baroque philosophers).

The Aristotelian Time of The 16th and 17th centuries (and earlier) was utterly different… Monteverdi’s operas & Vespers, Frescobaldi’s Toccatas, Mersenne’s Harmonie Universelle,  even Mace’s Practical Music are

Music of an Earlier Time.

 

Is Rubato an Absolute? Or is it one of many performance variables that are subject to changing performance practices over the centuries? Read more…

Water has no taste?

 

As Historically Informed Performers and Researchers, we must try to separate our intuitive sympathy for persuasive philosophies of the recent past … even if they seem to speak to us as “absolutes” (because we imbibed them uncritically at an early stage in our cultural education)… from historical, source-based evidence of chronological changes in the aesthetics of performance.

 

 

There’s very little History of Philosophy on the early 20th century, surprisingly little.

Now… there’s sufficient distance between ‘now’ and ‘then’, it’s as if Bergson has finally and properly entered the canon of the History of Philosophy and we are now treating the beginning of the 20th century as an object of historical enquiries in philosophy.

Quotes from the May 2019 BBC Radio Four “In our Time” discussion on Bergson & Time here.

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

Can anyone help me identify this last quote? I read it, I didn’t make it up myself, but it perfectly sums up the Early Music dilemma, in which our present-day investigation of Historical Practice is itself embedded in the aesthetic of the recent past.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend – Bergson

 

The Best Practical Musick: Thomas Mace’s Rule of Time-Keeping

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The Best Practical Music

 

In a recent online discussion in the Historical Performance Research group, I gave

a timely warning to anyone who might be tempted by the idea that Rhetorical Eloquence is somehow contrary to rhythmical or harmonic structure.

My provocation drew the hoped-for riposte, with a suggestion that 17th-century lutenist Thomas Mace thought that ‘playing in time is [only] for beginners’. This suggestion, and the mis-reading of period texts as if they supported it, is so commonly encountered, that I took up the challenge, and re-read the whole of Mace’s 1676 treatise Musick’s Monument to find out what Thomas actually wrote.

 

 

Time-keeping

 

The book includes many music examples, even complete pieces and suites, in tablature. Its 272 pages are divided into three parts, on the Necessity of Singing, the Noble Lute and the Generous Viol. Concerning time-keeping, Mace’s instructions for beginners and comments for advanced players are found in the The Civil Part: or the Lute made Easie, starting at page 78:

In all musical performances whatever, if they be done according to Art, they are done according to the Rule of Time-Keeping

This alone should be enough to settle any debate. And Mace gives us plenty of further detail of how to keep time.

 

 

The inter-dependence of Time and Motion is rooted in Aristotle’s definition of Time as ‘a number of motion, in respect of before and after’. Not until a century or so later would Newton’s concept (Principia, 1687) of Absolute Time gain general acceptance. Mace’s Aristotelean time requires steady motion to drive it, and – according to the philosophy of the Music of the Spheres – the motion of music imitates the perfect movement of the stars and the harmonious nature of the human body.

On the lute, ‘an instrument on which both are hands are employed, we must therefore keep time with a foot’. Muffat gives the same advice for violinists in his preface to Florilegium Secundum (1698).

 

 

Mace’s requirement for

Exact, Equal, Constant, True and Even Motion… like the Balance of a good Clock

carries forward from 1592 the principles of Zacconi’s (hand-beating) Tactus:

regular, solid, stable, firm… clear, sure, fearless, and without any pertubation

 

 

Mace’s time-keeping foot moves just like Zacconi’s tactus-hand: down for one minim, up for the next minim, so that the complete tactus-motion occupies a semibreve.

 

 

The instruction (page 79) that there should not be ‘the least Difference’ during the piece is supported by Muffat’s repeated insistence that the vrai mouvement (true movement) of French dances should continue from the beginning to the end. And as a good teacher, Mace recommends that beginners ‘carefully practise; so that the good habi acquired ‘at the first’ will ‘ever continue’ for the rest of the player’s career.

In contrast, many of us who nowadays play Early Music, received our first training in the post-romantic school of the 20th-century, with its tacit assumption that the vacillating rhythm and wayward tempi of Rubato are the secret of advanced expression. We have to read Mace’s words carefully, if we are to escape our own assumptions and inhabit his world of Aristotelean time.

In chapter XI, Mace recommends a pendulum as an aid to learning how to keep time ‘by the most Exact, Easie and Infallible Way’, and as a test for ‘masters’ even for an ‘Artist of the Highest Form… a very Master’ that should ‘be able to keep Exact True Time’. The length of the pendulum should be adjusted so that one can count from one to four ‘with Deliberation, as a Man would speak Gravely or Soberly, and not Hastily or Huddlingly; yet not Drawlingly or Dreamingly; but in an Ordinary Familiar way of Speaking’. These four crotchet-beats, i.e. one semibreve, occupy the time for the pendulum to swing one way and then the other way, i.e. a complete oscillation.  The pendulum, as an ‘assured time-keeper’ should be the musician’s Director.

Mace’s advice for students concludes with a reminder (page 81) that

The Exact Motion of True Time-Keeping is one of the most Necessary and Main Things in Musick

Liberty

In this familiar 17th-century context of true time-keeping, which is supported so strongly by period French and Italian sources, Mace’s next remark might well seem contradictory:

Although in our First Undertakings we ought to strive for the most Exact Habit of Time-Keeping that we can possibly attain unto (and for several good Reasons) yet, when we come to be Masters, so that we can command all manner of Time, at our own Pleasures, we then take Liberty (and very often for Humour and good Adornment-sake, in certain places) to break time; sometimes faster and sometimes slower, as we perceive the nature of the thing requires, which often adds much Grace and Lustre to the performance.

How are we to reconcile such Liberty with Mace’s uncompromising remarks on the ‘Exact, Equal, Constant, True and Even Motion’ of Time-Keeping’ … ‘in all musical performances whatever;?  Mace, a cleric in divine orders, greatly admired the lute-playing of John Dowland, who similarly preached

Above all things, keep the Equality of Measure. For to sing without law and measure is an offence to God himself.

 

 

And according to Shakespeare’s Richard II, sweet music becomes sour ‘when time is broke’.

 

 

It would be foolhardy to turn a blind eye to all this period context of ‘exact Time-Keeping’, and leap to the conclusion that Mace’s Liberty is an invitation to apply 20th-century rubato indiscriminately to 17th-century music. Rather we must search for evidence of precisely where the ‘certain places’ are, and of how to ‘perceive the nature of the thing’.

 

Humour

Above all, we need to understand Mace’s concept of Humour – not as a modern performer’s personal ‘interpretation’, but as a quality that already resides within the composition, and which the performer must perceive, so that the listener may understand, enjoy and be moved. In a philosophy of performance that goes back to the trobadors and trouveres, Mace requires players to find the Humour, not invent it.

17th-century ‘Humour‘ does not mean comedy: we might roughly define it as ‘Emotion’, ‘Mood’, or (to use another period English term) ‘Passion’. As a term for musical performance, Humour is rooted in period Science, where the doctrine of the Four Humours offers a self-consistent and practicable system for understanding and working with the psychological and physiological effects of emotions. Words and music that are heard and understood in the mind (see Enargeia, Visions in Performance) send signals (Energia) down to the body, creating changes in various body-fluids. The changing balance of those fluids creates the physiological effects of emotional change.

The Sanguine Humour is linked to blood, associated with healthy red cheeks, or a delicate blush, with love, courage, hope, with the enjoyment of music, good food and red wine. The Choleric Humour is linked to yellow bile, associated with desire, anger and the urge for strong drink. The Melancholy Humour (beloved of John Dowland and Shakespeare’s Jacques) is linked to black bile, paleness in the face (lack of Sanguinity, the opposite humour), associated with sleeplessness, too much study, unlucky love-affairs, and academic precision! The Phlegmatic Humour is linked to green phlegm, and lack of any emotional response: a wet blanket.

 

Of course, these four Humours are not a complete catalogue of the vast array of human emotion; rather, like the four cardinal points, North, South, East & West, they indicate primary directions within the whole area being mapped.

Like those cardinal points, the Four Humours focus attention on opposites: North & South, Sanguine & Melancholic. This supports the tendency in 17th-century music to contrast one Humour (in Italian, affetto) with its opposite (oposto) – see Motion and E-motion in the First Opera. In common with opera- and ballo-composer Cavalieri’s advice for singers, Mace’s instructions for lutenists ask for contrasts of loud and soft.

And Mace’s linking of three concepts: specific musical situations (‘certain places’), affetto (Humour), and subtleties of Time recalls Frescobaldi’s (1615) Rules for toccatas (applicable also to madrigals and other genres with contrasting movements). All too often, modern performers take Frescobaldi’s remarks as an encouragement to rhythmic anarchy and Rubato; but close reading of his carefully formulated Rules reveals both the underlying assumption of steady Tactus, and the precisely delimited circumstances under which the Tactus can change. See Frescobaldi Rules – OK?

To summarise, Frescobaldi advocates using Tactus to control the music, even if that Tactus sometimes changes. He limits the opportunities for change to the break between contrasting movements with contrasting emotions. He also allows a momentary pause, on the upbeat. Caccini suggests, and Monteverdi notates another practice of rhythmic freedom, where the accompaniment continues in steady measure, but the solo melody drifts around, like a jazz singer syncopating against the rhythm section. See sprezzatura.

And 17th-century musical Time has its own special shape, described by the concept of Arsis & Thesis and illustrated by the non-linear movement of a pendulum swing. Tactus is not ‘metronomic’, in the perjorative sense. See The Shape of Time

Time & Humour

So now let’s study Mace’s remarks about Time and Humour – all of them – and see what we can discover about the ‘certain places’ where the music might go ‘faster or slower’, and how it might thus go.

Page 97 – Brisk

In describing the character – we might well say, Humour – of the key of B major ( not Bb!), rarely encountered in 17th-century lute-music, Mace uses for this Key the words ‘Noble, Brave and Brisk-Lively’. This usage reminds us that, for Mace, the words Brisk and Lively convey character, not merely speed. It would be nonsense to write that B major is a ‘fast key’, but the quality of Brisk-Liveliness is shown by the dotted notes that Mace uses in the music example that follows.

Mace’s focus in these chapters is on correct left-hand fingering and right-hand strokes, preparing “by setting your Left Hand upon the Stops, and your Right Hand upon the String, ready to strike. yet

 

Strike them in their due time… according to their true Quantities

Page 101-102 – gentle

In his discussion of Full Plays (chords using many strings, for example at cadences – Full Stops), Mace describes the ‘Fashionable way of Playing them (now used)’ which ‘is much more easie’, in which the thumb plays the bass note, and the forefinger rakes down all the other strings, rather than playing each string with a different finger. He defines the word ‘rake’ as ‘smoothly stroke… very gently’. There is no suggestion of slowness, indeed Mace emphasises that an intervening short note ‘will not admit of any delay’.

From this, and my previous citation, it is apparent that Mace perceives two opposing types of Humour, in which Brisk Lively is contrasted with Smoothly Gentle, but without linking these qualities to any change between Fast and Slow.  As readers of modern English, we should be careful not to add any present-day connotations of brisk = fast, gentle = slowly, when we see these words in Mace’s next pages.

Page 103-104

Mace gives a ‘General and Certain Rule (never to be altered)’ for ornamentation – Graces or the Adorning of your Play (note the use of the word ‘adorn’, which he links also to the concept of Liberty), that ‘All Shakes’ must be made according to

The Aire and Humour of your Tuning and Lesson

He then sets down the Aire as a scale, determined by the nature of the tuning of the lute, not by the tonality of the piece at hand.

He rules out the idea that rhythm might be bent for the sake of prolonging ornaments – whatever his concept of Liberty might be, it is not this.

When I have thus continued Beating, so long as my Time will allow me

Page 109 – vibrato

I can’t resist this brief digression to note that Mace’s Sting, ‘a very Neat and Pritty Grace’… ‘for some sorts of Humours very Excellent’ is vibrato, “as to make the Sound seem to Swell with pritty unexpected Humour, and gives much Contentment, upon Cases”. Thomas believes that vibrato adds a pleasing emotional quality, but only in certain circumstances.

But the Sting is ‘not Modish in these days’.  It would seem that Dowland used more vibrato than Mace….

Page 109 – Loud & Soft

Mace gives great importance to dynamic contrasts:

Play some part of the Lesson loud and some part soft

‘which gives much more Grace and Lustre to Play, than any other Grace, whatsoever: therefore I commend it, as a Principal and Chief-Ornamental Grace (in its Proper Place)

Page 109 – the Pause

At the end of this chapter on ornamentation, we have the first mention of modification of Time.

‘The thing to be done is but only to make a kind of Cessation, or standing still, sometimes Longer and sometimes Shorter, according to the Nature, or requiring of the Humour of the Musick’

If this is done ‘in its due Place’, it is a ‘a very excellent Grace’.

In subsequent pages, Mace gives many examples of ‘due Places’ for the Pause. The effect recalls Frescobaldi’s description of the Tactus hand ‘hesitating in the air’  at certain moments. For both writers, the effect is used very sparingly, and as a one-off event. It is not applied repeatedly or continuously throughout a passage, in the manner of 20th-century Rubato. There is no suggestion of rallentando approaching the Pause, indeed Mace’s words ‘but only to make a kind of Cessation’ seem to rule out any anticipatory slowing-down.

Page 115-116 – touch, humour, key, conceit

In this discussion of improvisation, Mace celebrates the ability to manage contrasts in four inter-related qualities: touch (the sounding of one or more notes), Humour (emotional quality), key (what we would today call tonality), conceit (a musical idea, subject or theme). Once the particular key is established, ‘some little Humour’ (a few more notes, a fragment of melody) allows the listener to ‘discern some Shape or Form of Matter’.

The ‘Shape or Form’ is also called a Fugue, i.e. a contrapuntal point, a fragment of melody suitable for polyphonic imitation.

‘This term Fuge is a Term used among Composers, by which they understand a certain intended Order, Shape or Form of Notes, signifying such a Matter, or such an Extention; and is used in Musick as a theme, or as a subject-matter in Oratory, on which the Orator intends to discourse.

‘And this is the Nature and Use of a Fuge in Musick.’

‘Maintain a Fuge or Humour’

In this context of improvised playing, ‘maintaining’ seems to combine the compositorial skill of working a point of counterpoint (Fugue) and the performer’s skill of maintaining an emotional mood (Humour).

Page 117 – Fuge & Humour

‘As to the Humour of It, you may observe that it all tastes of, or similises with the first bar in some small kind; yet not too much of the same Humour…the last part is a little akin to the Fuge; yet perculiarly a Humour by itself. For you may carry on and maintain several Humours and Conceits in the same Lesson, provided they have some affinity or agreement one to the other.’

Mace criticises composers of the previous generation for too many contrasts of Humour in one piece. But in the following page (118) he declares that music is a language that can express any emotion, and that it is even more powerful than rhetorical words.

In Musick any Humour, Conceit or Passsion may be expressed, and so significantly as any Rhetorical Words or Expressions are able to do

‘If any difference be, it is in that Music speaks so transcendently, and communicates its notions so intelligibly to the internal, intellectual and incomprehensible Faculties of the Soul, so far beyond all language of words…. Those Influences that come along with it, may aptly be compared to Emanations, Communications or Distillations of some sweet and heavenly Genius or Spirit, mystically and unapprehensibly  (yet efectually) dispossessing the Soul and Mind of all irregular disturbing and unquiet Motions; and stills and fills it with quietness, joy and peace. absolute tranquillity and inexpressible satisfaction.’

 

On page 120, he observes the ‘Fugues, Orders and Forms’ of his first three examples, in which the Humour of the first two bars is maintained in the next two bars, then for the remainder of the piece there is ‘another Humour or Fuge’, distinct from the opening, ‘but alluding to it’.  Mace’s ideal contrast in Humour is subtle and simple, rather than dramatic or manifold.

Page 120 – Suite

 

A Sett or a Suit of Lessons… may be of any number as you please, yet commonly are about half a dozen. The first always … in the nature of … [an improvised] Prelude…. Then Allmaine, Ayre, Coranto, Saraband, Toy or what you please, provided that they be all in the same key; yet (in my opionion)… they ought to be something akin, or to have some kind of resemblance in their Conceits, Natures or Humours.

 

In the example prelude that follows, ‘the whole Lesson alludes to the same thing, and yet with pleasant variety.’  We might therefore assume that in such a piece , with no significant change of Humour, there will be no need for the Liberty of making any significant change in tempo.

 

Page 121-124 – The Author’s Mistress

Mace tells a touching personal story about the inspiration for the composition of this piece, 40 years previously, in passionate longing for his wife-to-be. He considers it ‘the Best Lesson in the book’ and its powerful emotional associations make it an important test-case for the realisation of Humours in performance.

 

Mace declares that the first two bars give the Fugue, which is maintained through the whole Lesson. The Form and Shape consists of two uniform and equal strains, but the Humour of it ‘which you may perceive by the marks and directions is not common’.  The only marks and directions in the tablature are contrasts of loud/soft, ornaments and slurs.

These three terms ought to be considered in all performances of this Nature (Ayres and the like): Fugue, Form & Humour

The Fugue is Lively, Airy, Neat, Curious and Sweet – like my Mistress.
The Form is Uniform, Comely, Substantial, Grave and Lovely – like my Mistress.
The Humour is singularly Spruce, Amiable, Pleasant, Obliging and Innocent – like my Mistress.

Mace’s verbal directions are ‘to Play Soft and Loud, as you see it marked’; ‘use the Sting (vibrato) where you see it set, and the Spinger after it’; ‘observe the slides and slurs, and you cannot fail to know My Mistress’s Humour, provided you keep True Time, which you must be extremely careful to do in all lessons:

For Time is One Half of Musick.

Thus in his best composition, a work of powerful emotions and deep personal meaning, Mace looks for expression of passions by dynamic contrasts, by subtle use of vibrato and by elegant slurs, whilst insisting on ‘True Time’.  There is no place here for Rubato. Even contrasting tempi for the two sections are not suggested, probably because the nature of the piece is uniform, without contrasts between the sections.

 

Page 125-126 – The Offspring

 

This piece was composed to create a consort, combining with My Mistress as a lute-duo. It can also be played as a solo, continuing on from a solo performance of My Mistress. When it is played as a solo:

 

You must for the Humour’s sake make Pauses

 

Mace marks where the three pauses should be made, in the last strain of the piece: on each of the pause-notes, vibrato should be added. As previously, he emphasises the need for ‘soft and loud, as you see it marked’, and to ‘take notice of the Fugues, which are … maintained to the end, yet various from each other’. The Fugues determine the Humour, the Humour requires dynamic contrasts, and (for the first time) here Mace applies his concept of Liberty, for the sake of Humour.

As we would expect, the Pauses come at the end of (short, internal) phrases, on a consonant, sustained harmony, and on the up-stroke of the lutenist’s time-keeping foot. This corresponds closely to Frescobaldi’s identification of consonant, sustained harmonies as the mark of the end of a section, and with the hesitations of his Tactus hand being also on the up-stroke.

Page 126-129 – Uniformity & Contrast

Mace is teaching the student to improvise, as well as to perform composed music. So he emphasises that renaissance compositorial skill, of working out a contrapuntal point (managing a fugue) and creating ‘a True and Handsome Form or Shape’. Uniformity of Form consists of matching the number of bars between strains, and having an even number of bars in each.

The Fugue or Humour may be whatever one wants, yet they should be neat and spruce, and they should be maintained uniformly and evenly.

Uniformity is especially desirable in short dance movements: Allmaines, Ayres, Corantoes, Sarabands should always be Uniform and Even. But longer pieces – Preludes, Fancies, Pavans etc – often have ‘Humours of Pauses and Flourishes in a wild way, according to their Nature’.

Some pieces have ‘Fansical, Humorous or Conceited Names’ yet have regular ‘Forms, Shapes, and Order of their Time, or Proportion’ and may be called Allmaines or Ayres.

Mace now describes the various movement-types in a suite, He criticises some improvised Preludes as ‘confused-wild-shapeless-kind of intricate-play … in which no perfect Form, Shape or Uniformity can be perceived…. and has an unlimited and unbounded Liberty … of Forms, Shapes and all the rest.’

Pavans are ‘very Grave and Sober; full of Art and Profundity’.

Allmaines are ‘very Airy and Lively’;

Galliards ‘are performed in a Slow and Large Triple Time …. grave and sober’.

Corantoes are ‘shorter … and quicker triple-time, full of sprightfulness and vigour, lively, brisk, cheerful’.

‘Sarabands are of the shortest triple-time, but are more toyish and light than Corantoes’

A Tattle de Moy ‘is much like a Sarabande, only it has more of Conceit in it’ as if ‘speaking the word Tattle de Moy, and of Humour.

‘Chiconas are only a few conceited humorous notes at the end of a suite, very short … commonly of a Grave kind of Humour’

‘Toys or Jiggs are light-squibbish things, only fit for Fantastical and Easy-Light-Headed people’

Common Tunes are popular street songs: Mace praises them as ‘very excellent and well-contrived, neat and spruce’.

‘The Ground is a set number of slow notes, very Grave and Stately … expressed once or twice very plainly … then several Divisions upon it.’

We must understand the word ‘conceited’ in its period meaning, as ‘full of clever and witty ideas’.

Page 130 – Another Liberty

Mace calls the fourth lesson a Coranto, ‘and properly…. by the Time and Shape of it.  However [Mace] would have it played played in a Slow and Long proportion, for the Nature of it is far more Sober than a Coranto.’

‘The Fugue is seen in the first 3 notes, and perceptible’ throughout. ‘The Form is Even, Uniform and Perfect. The Humour is a kind of sorrowing, pitying and bemoaning.’

We can see something of Mace’s underlying assumptions from these instructions. He considers that there is a standard tempo for a Coranto, but that for the sake of the Humour one should adopt a different tempo, in this case slower. His ‘slow and long proportion’ might be a specific tempo, Sesquialtera proportion (rather than the usual Tripla) based on a standard tempo of common time.

Here we see one ‘certain place’ where Liberty is appropriate: for the sake of the Humour, a particular piece may be played slower (or faster) than the standard speed. Nevertheless, within that piece, the (unusual) tempo would be maintained. This application of Liberty still satisfies the absolute requirement for accurate time-keeping. Mace mentions the possibility of varying the length of the tempo-pendulum, and Frescobaldi allows certain movements to be faster or slower, but still ‘facilitated by Tactus’.

In short, performers may take an unusual tempo, if the Humour suggests it, but that tempo should be maintained accurately.

Page 130 – Finding the Humour

One short paragraph gives valuable advice for finding the ‘General Humour of any Lesson’,

by observing ‘its Form or Shape’. If it is ‘Uniform and Retortive’ with ‘Short Sentences’, then ‘you will find it very easy to humour a lesson by playing some sentences loud, and others again soft, according as they best please your own Fancy; some very Briskly and Couragiously and some again Gently, Lovingly Tenderly and Smoothly’.

Here the performer has free choice of where to apply Loud and Soft. But there is no indication of contrasting tempi. From Mace’s usage in previous chapters, we know that ‘Brisk’ and ‘Gently’ do not imply changes of tempo, but are character words, linked here and elsewhere in the treatise to Courage or to Love, Tenderness and Smoothness. Notice that according to the doctrine of the Four Humours, these are all aspects of the one, Sanguine Humour. So the contrast of Loud and Soft is not so great, as to require change of tempo.

 

Page 130 – The Pause

 

The ‘choicest lustre… in such Humours’ is given by making ‘your Pauses at Proper Places, which are commonly at the end of such sentences, where there is a Long note.’

This advice correlates well with Mace’s own practice, as observed in earlier chapters.

 

Page 131 – A Humour

This is another coranto-like piece, which Mace calls ‘A Humour’.

 

The Fugue or Subject-Matter … is throughout maintained. with handsome and various intermixtures. The Form is Uniform (each Strain within itself), though not all of the same number of bars’.

 

Here, the strains vary in humour.

‘Sometimes (for Humour-Sake) more Pleasant and Delightful… Humorous and Conceited… and seems to mock, or mowe, or jest; to be blyth or merry, as if it were telling some jiggish story, and pointing at this or that body … In the four last bars … you must pause and use the stinging Grace [vibrato] a pretty while; and then softly whirl away and conclude.’

This delightfully whimsical description conveys a vivid impression of the character of the piece, without resort to any suggestion of tempo change, until the Pause just before the end. Notice that the Pause is all the more prolonged in this witty and active piece; and that after the pause the ending ‘whirls away’ softly, but not slowly.

In this piece, the Liberty is not that the time is altered, but that the Humour is so witty that the performance departs from the normal mood of a Coranto.

‘And although it be Coranto-Time, yet (in regard of the Conceitedness of the Humour) I give it that name.

The title over the tablature reads ‘The fifth lesson of the first set, being a Coranto, but called I like my Humour well‘

Page 132 – A perfect Coranto

‘This … perfect Coranto … has its Fuge ,,, throughout maintained. Its Form is Uniform … the Humour is Solid, Grave and very Persuasive… Expostulating the Matter with great Ferventness, which you must humour by performing Soft and Loud-Play in Proper Places, where you may easily perceive such Humour to lie’.

 

Page 133 – Tattle de Moy

 

Mace helps students to find out for themselves Fugue, Form and Humour. But notice that students should find these elements, and not invent them for themselves.

The Fugue is in the first two bars. The Form is absolutely Perfect and Uniform … Its Humour is Toyish, Jocond, Harmless and Pleasant, and as if it were one playing with or tossing a ball up and down; yet it seems to have a very Solemn Countenance, and like unto one of a Sober and Innocent condition or disposition; not Antic, Apish or Wild etc’.

‘Remember [as always] to play Loud and Soft …  Briskly and Gently, Smoothly, as your fancy will (no doubt) prompt you’

Memento, that Soft and Loud play is a Chief Grace.

Mace encourages students to persist, even if his advice at first seems strange – this is welcome support for today’s Early Music performers too!

These ways of discourse will seem strange to very many at the first, because they are unusual.

 

Page 142 & 147 – Observations

The Humour must be found out, by playing Soft and Loud, and making your Pauses

‘When you meet with such Seeming-Single-Moving-Walking things; and find Affinity between parts and parts, or bars and bars… then Soft and Loud play is the most necessary for to Humour it…

In modern English: if you find a movement that seems rhythmically consistent, with affinity between one part, or one bar and another, then the way to Humour it is by dynamic contrasts.

‘Many drudge and take great pains to play their lessons very … fast [but] you will perceive little Life or Spirit in them…. they do not labour to find out the Humour, Life or Spirit’

 

Page 149 – a Grave Galliard

For the preceding Coranto, Mace writes ‘Loud and Soft, which is enough’.

The next piece has the form of a Galliard, but should be played ‘in a very Sober and Grave Proportion; for it has a most singular Humour in the way of Expostulating Grief and Sorrow’. Here again, the Humour suggests taking the Liberty to play in an unusual tempo, but there is no suggestion of rhythmic irregularity.

The Galliard on page 171 is marked ‘Play this Lesson in very slow time’

 

Page 152 – Slow with Pauses

‘Play it slow, make your pauses, and observe the Humour’

Otherwise, pauses seem to be used mostly in fast pieces.

 

Page 153 – Tattle de Moy

 

‘Find the Humour yourself, by Soft and Loud play’

 

Page 170 – Crackle the crotchets

This special effect on three-note chords consists of arpeggiating each chord, causing them to ‘sob’ by slacking the left hand grip as soon as the note is struck, suddenly deadening the sound. Mace is careful to specify that this is all done in such a way

‘so as not to lose time, but give each crotchet its due quantity’

 

Conclusion

It is beyond debate that the underlying context for all Mace’s advice is of regular Time-Keeping. That time-keeping is by Tactus, counting by minims in common time, and with proportions for triple time. There are standard expectations for the speed of common time, and for the appropriate proportion for particular dance-types.

The model of perfect time-keeping is the Pendulum. The practical means of time-keeping is by moving the foot, down for one minim, up for the next.

The performers’ role is not to impose their own ‘interpretation’ on the piece, but to find out the Humours that are already there. Keeping Time is essential, for finding out the Humours.

The principle means of expressing changes in Humour is dynamic contrast.  A secondary means of expression is the Pause, in particular places.

Dfferent movements can have different tempi, even tempi that are unexpected for the dance-type that the piece seems to resemble, if the Humour demands it.

Fast pieces, and even some slow pieces, can have one or pauses before the end, but the conclusion ‘whirls away’ without rallentando.

I see no evidence at all for Rubato within a phrase or movement.  Mace’s Liberty of ‘fast and slow’ is between one movement and another, or between the standard tempo for a certain dance-type and the specific tempo for a piece in a particular humour. The only other Liberty in time-keeping that he mentions is the Pause.

All this is consistent with what we read in other sources of this period, whether English, Italian or French.

I give Thomas the last word:

Keep True Time

 

In modern English: Keep True Time, which you must be extremely careful to do, in everything you play (page 124).

 

Fake News? Early Opera, aka Seicento Dramatic Monody

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Monteverdi would have preferred a modern concert grand piano to the continuo instruments of his own time.

FAKE NEWS??

Don’t believe what conductors tell you, don’t take on trust what your teacher says, don’t accept what I write in this blog:

READ THE SOURCES FOR YOURSELF!

This blog includes many links to original sources, and you can find many more at Early Music Sources .com

Meanwhile, one of the following twelve statements about early opera, i.e. seicento dramatic monody, might be true: but which one?

 

One of these statements might be true:

  1. Monteverdi would have preferred a modern concert grand piano to the continuo instruments of his own time.
  2. In early opera, conductors used their hands, not a modern baton.
  3. Singers should add ornamentation – gorgi and passaggi.
  4. Harpsichordists should create a decorative accompaniment from the written bass-line, with improvised ornamentation.
  5. Rhythm is not significant.
  6. Recitative imitates the natural speech-rhythms of Italian conversation.
  7. The harpsichordist should beat time in Tactus.
  8. The most important consideration is beautiful vocal sound.
  9. Rubato is the key to ‘moving the passions’.
  10. Caccini frequently recommends sprezzatura.
  11. Frescobaldi dismisses the concept of Tactus: in this kind of music you can change the tempo whenever you want.
  12. The audience’s passions are moved by making an emotion more and more intense.

While you are thinking, here’s a quick advert for a forthcoming publication:

 

And now, here’s the answer to the quiz:

The first statement might be true: unlikely, but we have no evidence either way.

Period sources contradict all the other statements.

 

FACTS CHECKED

Monteverdi would have preferred a modern concert grand piano to the continuo instruments of his own time?

Maybe! I consider it unlikely, but we don’t have any evidence either way, so it’s hardly worth arguing about.

 

In early opera, conductors used their hands, not a modern baton?

There was no conductor: you knew that already!

 

 

Singers should add ornamentation – gorgi and passaggi? 

No ornamentation in this style: Cavalieri, Il Corago, Monteverdi Combattimento etc

 

Harpsichordists should create a decorative accompaniment from the written bass-line, with improvised ornamentation?

 

Harpsichords should provide a fundamental accompaniment grave , continuo should not ornament in this style. – Agazzari, Cavalieri.

 

Rhythm is not significant?

“Music is text and rhythm”– Caccini.

Recitative imitates the natural speech-rhythms of Italian conversation?

It imitates the stylised, rhetorical declamation of a great actor in the spoken theatre – Il Corago , Peri

 

The harpsichordist should beat time in Tactus?

The principal continuo-player can beat time to start ensemble music, but not in theatrical monody. – Il Corago.

 

The most important consideration is beautiful vocal sound?

“Sound last of all, and not the contrary” – Caccini

 

Rubato is the key to ‘moving the passions’?

Caccini writes many times that it’s crescendo/diminuendo  on a single note– exclamatione.

 

Caccini frequently recommends sprezzatura?

He mentions it twice, applies it only once; whereas  exclamatione is mentioned and applied many, many times.

 

Frescobaldi dismisses the concept of Tactus: in this kind of music you can change the tempo whenever you want?

He writes that toccatas and ‘modern madrigals’ are ‘facilitated by Tactus’, and prescribes  very specific circumstances under which the tempo can change.

The audience’s passions are moved by making an emotion more and more intense?

Not just one emotion, but by frequent changes between contrasting emotions. Cavalieri.

 

See also these links:

Monteverdi, Caccini & Jazz

How to study Monteverdi’s operatic roles

Tactus, Sprezzatura & Drama

How did it feel? A history of heaven, hearts & harps

The wedding dance: Monteverdi’s Lasciate i monti

Emotions in Early Opera

Lamento della ninfa

Re-making Arianna

Monteverdi Vespers

How to Act: preliminary exercises for Baroque Gesture

The Philosophy of La Musica

and many other articles in this blog.