Science

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!

 

Movement & Baroque Music: Mind, Body & Spirit

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MUSIC
In 17th-century philosophy, the movement of the stars creates a perfect Music of the Spheres, which is reflected in the harmonious nature of the Human body, and imitated in actual music, played or sung.
This is a hierarchical connection, with heaven at the highest level. Human-beings are a microcosm, the cosmos reflected in minature. Musical performance imitates the perfect movement of the cosmos.

 

“Ex motu Armonia” – “The movement of the heavens creates Harmony” Detail from the frontispiece of Agazzari’s “Del sonare sopra ‘l basso” (1607).

Read more about Agazzari & continuo here.

TIME

The movement of the stars also defines Time, which is measured in musical notation, perceived as the feeling of tempo and the quality of movement, and indicated by the beat of the Tactus-hand. [All of these were far more precise than period clocks.]

Again, there is a hierarchical connection with heavenly time at the highest and slowest level of years (Sun), months (Moon), days (Earth). Embodied time (pulse, heartbeat and the Tactus-hand) imitates cosmic perfection at a human level of seconds. Music sub-divides this time into even shorter durations, faster movement.

Musical notation – i.e. Measure – is calibrated to real-world Time at the level of the Tactus-Beat (Zacconi 1596).  Tempo literally means Time – not the ‘speed’ of a performance, but the duration in real-world Time of a Measure. In this philosophy, musical Time imitates the constancy of cosmic Time.

There is a gradual change during the 17th & 18th centuries from this Renaissance concept (that musical notation is a representation of real-world Time, defined by the cosmos) towards the modern assumption that Tempo is subjective, a perception of speed. Another modern assumption takes hold in the 19th century, that performers can choose their own speed, even vary the speed from bar to bar.

MOVEMENT & SOUL
Baroque Time is not Newton’s Absolute Time, “like an ever-rolling stream”, it is Aristotle’s “time as a number of motion”. In Aristotle’s Physics, this movement (and therefore, Time itself) can only be perceived by a Soul.
When Baroque writers call Time “the Soul of Music”, they mean that Time gives the dry numbers of musical-notation meaning in the real world, transforming them into living sound, what we would call ‘live Music’.
LIFE, MOVEMENT & PASSIONS
Music seeks to ‘move the Passions’, to sway emotions, which are ‘the affections of the Soul’, Affekt (German), affetti (Italian). The effects of soul-musical emotions are felt in the mind and in the body.
17th-century Pneuma, mystic breath, is the divine energy giving the breath of life (from heaven), and also the networked energy connecting mind, body and soul (human, rather like oriental Qi), and also the artistic Energia that communicates between musician and listener (in performance). This is the same hierarchy as in Music.
Read more about baroque Emotions here.
CAUSE & AFFEKT
Perfect heavenly Movement creates Time, which gives life to Music, which moves the Passions. Perfect heavenly Movement also creates Music. The heavens are turned, and the human soul created, by the Divine Hand. These relations are causal: one creates another.
MIND, BODY & SPIRIT

If you keep this in mind, whilst you move your hand in the embodied time of Tactus, you may feel something of the baroque Spirit of Music, maintaining a constant connection to cosmic Time, Music & Pneuma in order to communicate every-changing Passions to listeners.

This connection is also causal and embodied. It’s not enough to think about it, you also have to beat Tactus, otherwise it won’t happen.

Prattica di Retorica in Musica – Dispositio

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This is the second 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, starting several trains of thought: Why does such a book not exist? What might it have contained? What would we hope to learn from it? What is lacking in modern-day writing on Musical Rhetoric? And why shouldn’t I try writing it for myself?

 

 

The first post in this series,  Prattica di Retorica in Musica – Inventio, introduces the project by means of the Five Canons of Rhetoric and imagines the first pages of our Unicorn-Book, which might include an Address to the Reader and a Dedicatory Poem.

The next pages would probably consist of the Table of Contents, i.e. an ordered list of chapter-headings. For a book-printer, this table would only be assembled once the main body-text was complete. But for a rhetorical writer, these chapter-headings are advance planning of the structural organisation of the material: they present that second Canon of Rhetoric, the Dispositio (Arrangement).

 

 

Arranging the Dispositio

 

In an endlessly recursive process, the structuring of any writing on Rhetoric is itself a work of Rhetoric. My material for this project is the Practice of Rhetoric in Music, and the organisation of this material is inspired by the Modes of Rhetoric, in the style of a list of book-chapters, which I have considered – consciously and subconsciously – over the last month. Turning ideas over in your mind is linked to the processes of memory, which (as modern science tells us) is not merely the recall of fixed data, but a creative process of apprehending, reviewing, connecting and reassembling complex understandings. And now I deliver this structure to you…

In this blog-post, the Dispositio is now my material, which I have organised into two sections (this discursive article, and – below – the presentation of the list itself), in two contrasting styles (modern-day semi-formal prose and 17th-century formal list), carefully considered, and delivered in this blog-post.

The style – a list of chapters – has also become material to be discussed here, and functions as an organising device that delivers new thoughts.

The processes of memory and thought likewise are now material to be written about, functioning to organise themselves by thinking about thoughts, to refine style, and (by remembering memories) to deliver results.

Those results are the material that will be organised, stylised, considered and delivered as the output of the entire project.

And – just in case you didn’t notice – that 5-paragraph description of the nested processes of writing rhetorically about Rhetoric was itself rhetorically made: its material was the rhetoric of Rhetoric, its organisation was iteratively rhetorical, the style was as rhetorically clear as I could make it, it seemed to spring from my mind as if I were remembering something I already knew, and I delivered it in a happily spontaneous flow.

So now you have a rhetorical account of a rhetorically made description of the rhetorical process of writing about Rhetoric. And we could continue this all night, unless you counter with a refutatio or I reach a peroratio!

 

Digressio – an allegorical digression

 

One of the period delights of Rhetoric was the enjoyment of rhetorical discourse for its own sake, like an athlete enjoying the working of their own muscles during training, or a spectator watching that athlete. If the spectator is also an athlete, there is an opportunity to learn, or to sharpen ones analytical insight. Which muscle moved there, and what effect did it have? We can compare the trained and untrained body, we can notice the physical results and competetive benefits of particular training exercises for specific applications. If we are fans or practitioners of Rhetoric, we can observe its work whenever we encounter words.

 

Thesis – back to the underlying concepts

 

I will probably re-organise this Dispositio as I go along. But it is currently linked to these thoughts:

The ‘original book’ does not exist, perhaps because Rhetoric was so deeply internalised for musicians of this period that they applied it, without needing further instruction, to any means of expression. In another sense, every period treatise on music discusses the Practice of Rhetoric because music itself is a rhetorical art: to practise music is to practise rhetoric. My task is then not to invent new principles, but to identify (from amongst well-researched historical practices) instances where rhetoric is at work in music.

As musicians, we hope for clear practical advice, for tools that can be applied in the rehearsal room and in performance. As performers, we hope for ideas that will be effective with our audiences.

This is perhaps what is lacking in the modern literature on musical rhetoric. After reading some scholarly tome, we may think “how interesting, how beautiful!”, but we may not have a clear strategy of how to apply its ideas in our next rehearsal. At best, we might hope that it has given us some inspiration that will emerge in our musicking, by some mysterious process. I do believe in inspiration and mysterious processes, but in the rehearsal room (or as an individual’s pre-performance mantra), we usually need concise, precisely encapsulated suggestions, rather than yards of woffle and dollops of hope.

What period sources there are, and also much modern writing on musical rhetoric, tend to concentrate on Figures and Tropes. And whilst knowing stuff is fun, and knowing what anaphora is helps one notice when anaphora is at work, that doesn’t necessarily let you know what to do with anaphora, no matter how many times you see or hear anaphora in an aphorism, no, no! And even if you know that the use of adnominations and homophones is not strictly anaphora, this doesn’t necessarily help your audience. So although it is not wrong to define Rhetoric in terms of Figures and Tropes (and indeed, this definition becomes increasingly relevant during our period), it is not the most direct path towards practical application in music.

Since Rhetoric is directed outwards – to persuade the listener; to delight, teach and move the passions of the audience – and since we, as performers, want to put it into practice, the book we need must tell us how to apply Rhetoric to good effect. So my dispositio focuses on fundamentals of good Oratory in musicking, ideas that performers can apply in order to produce results that audiences will appreciate.

 

Hypothesis – focus on particular ideas

 

Words: Readers would expect the introduction to discuss what Rhetoric is. But we also need to consider what Music is – and what Science, Art and Practice are too – because our modern assumptions differ from period understandings.

Ethos: Rhetoric is delivered by one person to others: we must consider who does what.

Logos: The most important section of the book should link the performance of music to Good Delivery in Oratory. The more our musicking deals with words, the more eloquent its oratory will be.

Pathos: The most profound result we hope for is to move the passions of our listeners. This Part tells you how to do it.

Kairos: How does the moment of opportunity for Rhetoric present itself? Shifting the focus from historical practices to the ephemeral instant of performance, Plato’s eternal now, this Part attempts to reconcile period understandings of Rhetoric and Humours with 21st-century neuro-science. What is the structure of magic in music?

 

Peroratio

 

The vital heart of Rhetoric, which sends the life-giving Sanguinity of passion to the singer’s voice and the instrumentalist’s hands, is structure. How dry that might seem, how Melancholy! But this sturdy, earthborne structure supports a mighty tower, rising proudly as if with Choleric ambition to reach the highest heavens of eloquent beauty.

The achievement of our art must be to conceal the scaffolding and reveal the architecture. But the process of building begins with a well-wrought foundation. Dispositio precedes elocutio.

 

 

 

DISPOSITIO

 

The Introductory Part: on Words

 

What is Rhetoric?

What is Grammar?
What is Logic?
Eloquentia Perfecta

What is Music?

What is Practice?

What is Art?
What is Science?

What is the Practice of Rhetoric in Music?

What is the Art of Rhetoric in Music?
What is the Science of Rhetoric in Music?

 

The First Part: on Ethos

 

The Practice in Music of the Five Canons of Rhetoric

The Practice in Music of the Three Aims of Rhetoric

The Practice in Music of the Topics of Rhetoric

The Practice in Music of the Four Modes of Rhetoric

 

The Second Part: on Logos

 

The Practice in Music of the Decorum of Rhetoric

Of Oratory
Of Syllables
Of Consonants
Of Vowels
Of Joining & Separating
Of Meaning
Of Intention
Of Genres
Of Place
Of Time

 

The Third Part: on Pathos

 

The Practice in Music of the Four Humours of Rhetoric

The Practice in Music of the Gestures of Rhetoric

The Practice in Music of the Figures of Rhetoric

The Fourth Part: on Kairos

Of the Mind

Of  New Language of Persuasion

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prattica di Retorica in Musica – Inventio

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What started out as a bit of fun for April Fools’ Day – faking up the frontispiece of an imaginary 17th-century treatise on the Practice of Rhetoric in Music – got me thinking more seriously. This is just the kind of book I would love to study – many other Early Music scholars and performers too, I’m sure. So why doesn’t it exist? And, what would it say, if we were to find it after all? 

 

 

What’s the Use?

Those are deep questions to consider carefully, but after three weeks the title of my imaginary treatise – stolen from Zacconi (1596) read more here – which I chose quickly, on impulse from the Subconcious, has revealed to my Conscious mind the gap in HIP sources and practice. We have an overwhelming abundance of primary sources to tell us what Rhetoric is, and some fine modern-day writing that describes how Rhetoric was written into renaissance and Baroque Music. The vital question is how we can apply the Art of Musical Rhetoric in Practice – in individual study, ensemble rehearsals and public performance. We have studied the Science of Music, we are learning the Art of Rhetoric, but we want to acquire practical skill in its Use. More on the period concepts of Science, Art and Use here. 

To bridge this gap, since the late renaissance or early baroque Prattica di Retorica in Musica seems not to exist, I decided to write it myself. Remembering medieval trobadors and trouvères,  ‘such as found out musical tunes and recited verses in writing’; and inspired by the rhetorical canon of Inventio, by which one seeks to discover the best arguments for the case at hand; my aim is not to invent but to search for a true resemblance of this unicorn-book. 

Clearly, there is some serious work of Dispositio (organisation of the material) to be done. Perhaps the most effective format – Elocutio – could be to adopt the position of a blog-poster, discussing the Prattica chapter by chapter, supported by ‘citations of the original’. My hope is to instill Memoria, as if recalling an elusive memory; for my Retorica should deliver nothing new, but should rather be a declaration – a oratorical Pronuntiatio – of truths that we already hold to be self-evident. And all this should lead to Actio: putting rhetoric into practice in Musica. 

So perhaps you can imagine what follows as a modern editor’s commentary on a recently discovered historical source…

 

 

Foreword 

 

It was Monteverdi scholar Tim Carter (don’t miss his inspiring yet thoroughly practical survey of Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre ) who first guided me towards an unorthodox and creative way of investigating historical performance practice: beyond the analysis of surviving works, have a go at creating (re-constructing would be too strong a word) what is missing. The idea is to confront the same questions and challenges that creative musicians encountered back then, starting from a tabula rasa and testing, questioning, reviewing everything you create, to complement the standard approach of gazing at the beauty of an extant masterpiece.

It’s like lifting the bonnet of the car and tinkering with the engine – you will learn from your mistakes, and you’ll certainly learn more than by merely reading the workshop manual. After all, mathematics students have to solve problems themselves, as well as studying worked examples by famous mathematicians of the past. And Rhetoric itself begins with three Canons of creativity, and continues with the reflective process of Memorisation, before culminating in the final Canon of Delivery.

 



In 2017, with expert guidance and thought-provoking challenges from Tim, I re-made Monteverdi’s lost masterpiece Arianna based on the surviving libretto, a musical fragment – the famous Lamento – letters and other music from the time of the first performance in 1608.  The resulting work, Arianna a la recherche was performed at the OPERA OMNIA International Baroque Opera Studio, re-establishing Rinuccini’s Tragedia as the fourth opera in the Monteverdi trilogy. Why re-make Monteverdi’s Arianna? here

 

 


And now, for this project on the Practice of Rhetoric in Music, I’m once again investigating by creating. Of course, Creative Research is no longer a new concept, and it has already been applied to Early Music, but usually by creating something new out of old material. My aim is different – I want to supply new material that will fill a gap in what has come down to us, like a restorer patching a threadbare section of an old tapestry, weaving strands of carefully researched threads into a plausible picture that fits well with the old stuff.  Or like a luthier, who constructs a ‘historical instrument’ that is simultaneously a carefully researched ‘replica’ of a period original, and a creative work of art in its own right. 

In the workshop of Rhetoric, my power-tool is energia – the communicative spirit that energises the mind in performance. To drive forward the research process, I imagine how such a historical treatise might have been read aloud by a fine orator, and how we today might apply its period pedagogy to training and rehearsal for future concerts, recordings and opera productions.

 

Teaching Rhetoric in a Knight-academy. The listener in the foreground left (as seen by the viewer: this is the privileged position forward-right on stage) leans his head on his left hand in the classic gesture of Melancholy: not sadness here, but deep thought, careful concentration on precise detail.

 

Exordium


Before I can look for answers to the big questions of Musical Rhetoric in Historical Practice, I first have to find out what those questions are. See Deep Thought. In the search for better questions, I’ve started by pondering why we, today’s Early Musicians, want this book. And why was it not written back then?  These deceptively simple questions are fundamental to the project, and need careful consideration.

 

John Bulwer scratches his head in Deep Thought (1644). Another historical gesture of intense cogitation is to chew on your finger (not the thumb, that means something different!).

 

For now, I decided just to have some more fun, by cooking-up an ‘original Preface’. Don’t panic, I have no intention of switching permanently to Ye Olde Worlde style. But I am thinking seriously about how a 17th-century writer would frame his address To the Reader, and taking the opportunity to practise a bit of Rhetoric myself. 

So how would you feel, if you discovered an exciting, hitherto unknown, historical source in the original? You might savour the promises offered by the Frontispiece, and get a first taste of food for thought from the formal Dedication and Preface, before settling down to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the detailed chapters of the principal text.  In that spirit, I invite you to consider this ‘modern editor’s introduction’ and the ‘original Preface’ below as hors d’oeuvres. Bon appetit! 

Adieu, good Monsieur Melancholy!  This cheerful chap might be good Signior Love. Certainly, he embodies the Sanguine Humour: warm red colours in his ruddy cheek and in the curtain behind him, abundant red-brown hair and bright eyes, a generous gesture, a confident smile, a jaunty feather in his cap, outward-directed energy, red wine and perhaps offering the hope of dance-music soon.

 

To the Reader

Transcriber’s note: We are fortunate that a period translation survives, apparently made from a holograph now lost. Sadly, the original date is indecipherable. Nevertheless, the handwritten annotations in faded red ink appear to be contemporary with the document itself.


 

PRATTICA DI RETORICA IN MUSICA

To the musicall Reader

Exordium

In the beginning was the WORD, & the Word was spoken in the ORATORY of the Holy Prophets, & the same was sung in the MUSIC of King David, whose Harp could soothe the wrath of Saul; and in the image of the Word was man created: wherefore my Heart is inditing of good Matter, whence I do make the Things of which I speak & sing;  the  Instrument of my Tongue being like unto the Pen of a ready Writer: for, as my Mind  was taught by the Orators of Ancient Greece & Rome, as my Ears delight in Dante, Shakespeare & other Poets of our times, and as the affections of my Soul are moved by the Music of Heaven, by the Harmony of Human Hearts, & by the Sound of earthly Instruments and Voices; so am I persuaded that such a Book as this was never seen, though greatly needed: and Necessity is the Mother of INVENTION.

Partitio

Thus may my Words, though few and unworthy, light the true Way, & illumine certain sure Principles, by which you may make practicall Use of the ancient Art of Rhetoric, even in the very  Science of Music: fitting the Pronouncing & the Action of your Delivery to the Matter of the Invention, as well as to the Arrangement of the Verses, & the Eloquence of the Music; and through the Mystery of Memory, from time to time both recalling & re-creating what hath been already made: according to the Aims & Canons of Rhetoric, the Virtues & Graces of Writing, the Devices & Figures of Speech, & the Art of Gesture: and such will be this Book’s ARRANGEMENT.

Confirmatio

The ancient Poet sang of Arms and of a Man, & this my Book will speak of Instruments as well as of Voices; for Rhetoric may be expressed with the sound of the Trumpet, with the Psaltery & Harp, with the Timbrel and Dance, with stringed Instruments and Organs, and upon loud Cymbals & high Cymbals, as well as by everything that hath Breath: for Love of the Word maketh sounding Brass to become the tongues of Men & Angels; and giveth even a tinkling Cymbal ELOQUENCE.

Confutatio

And let none say that Rhetoric & Rhythm are not Brethren, nor that they cannot dwell together in Unity; for the Master cannot teach, who comes not betimes to School; the very  Whirlwind of Passion cannot move, if the Actor misseth his Entrance; the Dancers cannot delight, who reel to & fro, and stagger like a drunken man: for the Eloquent Orator is like unto a Knight on Horseback, whose one Hand must hold the Reins of Rhythm, that the Steps and Pace be in good Measure; whilst the other Hand doth strike with the Sword of Rhetorick, that toucheth even unto the Heart: and this in Music requireth great Skill, & diligent Study, whether the Song be pricked on Paper, or printed in the MEMORY.

Peroratio

The End of all this my RHETORICK being Practicall, let the attentive Reader also take Pains to practise the Examples that follow, pronouncing them in Action; that, by sowing the Seeds of Rhetorick in the fertile Ground of Music, ye may know the Fruit of good DELIVERY,

And live happily!

Dedicatory Poem

As in many such treatises, the following page contains a poem in support of the author’s work. The content of this sonnet strongly supports the indicated connection to Richard Barnfield, whose most famous work was attributed to Shakespeare in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), though it had previously appeared in Barnfield’s Poems in Divers Humours (1598). 

A SONNET

on

THE PRACTICE

OF RHETORIC IN MUSIC

By a Friend of Mr Richard Barnfield

 

If MUSIC & sweet POETRY agree,
As they must needs, the Sister & the Brother.
Then let this Book create twixt me and Thee
Accord, pronouncing one alike the other.

Dowland to us is dear, whose heavenly Touch
Upon the Lute doth ravish human Sense;
Shakespeare strikes Hearts, for Plays of Words are such,
As playing Instruments need no defence.

We practise the high Art of charming Sound
That Phoebus’ Lute, the Queen of Musick, makes,
Yet Listeners in deep Delight are chiefly drowned
Whenas our Musick moveth Passions for their sake.

Guard Harmony & Verse, mark the Words well,
That RHYTHM & RHETORIC as one may dwell.

 

 

                                       

 

 

 

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 

 

 

 

A Tai Chi state of mind

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To celebrate a personal milestone of 5 years studying Tai Chi Chuan with Master Ding Academy, this article reflects on my understanding of Tai Chi as an intermediate student, in the light of my academic research in Consciousness Studies and my practical experience as an international musician and opera-director.

 

 

Zhan Zhuang

 

Many oriental martial arts value zhan zhuang – Standing like a Tree – as a fundamental practice. In Tai Chi Chuan, Standing Practice trains mind-body balance in stillness; the Form trains balance in movement; Push Hands trains balance in interactions. As an Internal Martial Art, Tai Chi encourages an inner focus, teaching us to find strength in softness. Sometimes called Standing Meditation, zhan zhuang not only aligns our posture, but also prepares the mind for study and for action.

More about zhan zhuang here.

There is a similar linkage of physical and mental conditioning when warming-up for sports or preparing to go on-stage for a concert or theatrical performance, in Mindfulness training, Alexander Technique and many other disciplines. Zhan zhuang and other preparation-rituals create a particular state of mind that optimises highly-skilled physical actions. Psychologists call this state of mind Flow; artists call it Inspiration; elite sportsmen and athletes call it the Zone; it can be analysed as an Alternative State of Consciousness; it could also be called Self-Hypnosis.

Therapeutic hypnotism is a ‘resource state’ similar to the REM-stage of dream-sleep. Modern medical science respects these states as normal and vital for health. As we sink into dreamy relaxation, the Unconscious mind can re-process learning, re-align our spiritual balance and re-integrate conscious awareness. As a student, I may not yet fully understand what it means to ‘stick the qi to the spine’, but if I relax whilst focussing on this phrase, I can enter a special state in which my Unconscious (which understands ‘better than I do’) can work on re-educating the body. Rather than forcing things to happen, we can create suitable conditions (relaxation and focus) and observe what happens. Even if the process remains hard to grasp, over months and years of practice the conscious mind gradually becomes aware of tangible results.

Academics love to reduce broad phenomena to narrow categories, so theorists distinguish between different experiences of the altered consciousness familiar to us all as day-dreaming. Flow is characterised by a fine balance between the challenge you are facing and your level of skill. Too easy, and you are bored; too difficult, and you are discouraged. In Flow, you are utterly focussed on the task at hand, yet at ease with yourself. When you are in the Zone, it seems that your body knows what to do ‘instinctively’, as the movements you trained slowly and gently are released in a flash of smooth, powerful action. You might experience Dissociation, the sensation that you are not ‘doing’ anything, you are just observing your body’s actions with calm attention, as if in a dream or hypnotic trance. As you let go of ego, you feel more connected to the universe: Tai Chi artists use Sticking Hands to  link with their partners; doctors care for their patients with ‘unconditional regard’;  hypnotists and performers create Rapport with their listeners.

These experiences are central to many elite-level skilled activities. Hypnosis research shows that reducing conscious control whilst maintaining calm and concentration allows the Unconscious to guide the body at extraordinary levels of performance. Whether you are landing an airliner on the Hudson river, playing a harp concerto, or competing in a fencing championship, focused calmness links your Unconscious to the surrounding energy field so that your body does it ‘better than you could do it yourself’. The mind-body connection can be re-aligned to powerful effect: a hypno-therapist colleague of mine assists during surgical operations by inducing a special, pain-preventing state of mind for patients who are allergic to conventional anaesthetics.

Words have power

By subtle choice of language, a poet or an expert in neuro-linguistic programming can sway your emotions; a politician can alter public opinion; an advert can influence your choices; a sports coach or opera-director can raise you to the next level of performance; a teacher can shift your conscious understanding and enhance your physical abilities. A mere hint, spoken or recalled, can transform (trance-form?) Standing Practice into a Guided Meditation. In Tai Chi, we encourage Dissociation with such instructions as “Allow the hands to rise”. This is a hypnotic suggestion that your hands ‘have a mind of their own’, encouraging you to observe more, do less. Paradoxes and Nominalisations (unfamiliar words) facilitate the inner focus of trance, as the mind searches within itself for meaning. Tai Chi is full of paradoxical sayings and evocative words – ‘invest in loss’; ‘use the mind, not force’; qi; kwa and dan-tien; peng, liu, ji and an – whose meaning we explore over years of study.  

 

 

The choice of terms is personal, and highly significant for practitioners. If a teacher or hypnotist’s vocabulary jars, the listener will resist, and rapport is broken. Hypno-therapists are taught to ‘accept and utilise’ a client’s resistance. If the first choice of imagery and terminology doesn’t work, it’s time to try another approach. Tai Chi practitioners will recognise the principle: don’t fight force with force, yield and re-direct your opponent’s energy! Students and teachers should be aware of the power of names, making flexible choices of language to ‘go with the Flow’ of what works for each individual. Some like to talk of the ‘magic’ of Tai Chi; others explain it as Mechanics or applied Psychology; some visualise qi as similar to the Star Wars Force; others analyse body-energy through the concepts of Chinese Medicine. Since the true Tao cannot be spoken, ‘correct’ nomenclature doesn’t matter. Language is only a path towards an internalised mind-body understanding.

In another way, choice of terminology is vital, because your Unconscious can respond to the most subtle distinctions. In hypno-anaesthesia, some patients receive the suggestion that they will feel no pain; others are told that they might feel pain, but it will not bother them. Neurological scans show that these contrasting instructions produce different interactions between brain and nervous system. Words can change your mind.

 

Going with the Flow

 

The state of Flow is often associated with time- distortion, when we are so absorbed in our study that we don’t realise how much time has passed. But in the Zone, time is distorted the other way, so that our perception is speeded up, and we can successfully manage complex techniques within the briefest instant of time.

Elite performers of all kinds use Flow for optimal learning, working slowly over a long time, and the Zone for optimal performance, producing instantaneous results just when it matters most. This is paralleled by the slow study of Tai Chi Forms and the split-second timing of combat applications. The Feldenkrais Method similarly improves proprioception and body flexibility by slow, gentle movements. The calm acceptance and subtle suggestions typical of a Feldenkrais session could be appropriate to zhan zhuang: “That’s good….”; “Don’t do anything, just notice.” Engineer/healer Moshe Feldenkrais was also a judo black belt and one of the first to bring judo to the West.

The Trager Approach uses repetitive, relaxed movements and a special state of consciousness called Hook-Up to teach and heal. The imagery of a ‘sky-hook’ is sometimes used in Standing Practice to intensify the suggestion that the ‘head is suspended from above’. This is not just good posture, it is also a recognised route into trance, meditation or what we might choose to call a ‘Tai Chi state of mind’. If sometimes it’s difficult to be relaxed, we can just pretend to relax, and imagine that we begin to feel relaxation: ‘fake it till you make it’. Regular practice of zhan zhuang will re-calibrate our ability to relax, as ting-listening reveals tensions we never knew we had, which are gradually dissolved into song-release.

Like Pavlov’s dogs, our minds and bodies can be conditioned by training so that we respond ‘automatically’. Tai Chi Forms guide our body-movements into highly specific pathways, whilst Standing Practice focuses our concentration inwards, calming the mind. Those Russian dogs learnt to associate a bell with dinner-time, and the meditation timer on your phone can ring a Chinese bell to induce inner peace!

To enter Flow, the Zone, or hypnotic trance, i.e. a Tai Chi state of mind, you just relax and focus – song and ting. We learn this from Standing Practice, and try to maintain it in the Forms, Push Hands and applications training. As a musician, I must relax and focus whilst I’m playing, always listening attentively to my own instrument and to the other performers. I tell my students, “It’s 80% listening, 20% playing”. As Tai Chi students, we can try to be more aware of our own body and that of our partner/opponent by ‘doing’ less, and ‘listening’ more. In life, we can adopt a Tai Chi state of mind, becoming calmer ourselves and more open to others. Lift the Spirit and sink the qi; relax and focus, song and ting. That’s good…

 

 

 

Read More…

 

Master Ding Tai Chi Academy

Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key

Zhan Zhuang:

Zhan Zhuang

Stand like a Tree

Feeling the feet (comic-book style illustrations)

Foundation of Internal Martial Arts

Wuji Standing Posture

The most powerful exercise in the Tai Chi curriculum (video)

Flow and The Zone

Flow: What’s in a name?

Flow & Creativity

Flow: The Cambridge Talks

Flow Connections

The Flow Zone  

Self-Hypnosis

Uncommon Knowledge (mp3)

Introduction

Reference: The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis

Hypnosis in 17th-century Opera

Opera director and internationally recognised academic Prof Dr Andrew Lawrence-King is the world’s leading exponent of historical harps. He investigates Historical Rhythm, Baroque Gesture and Music & Consciousness. He studies Tai Chi with Master Ding Academy and 17th-century rapier with the Helsinki Swordschool. He is a qualified hypnotist.

 

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

Challenge your assumptions

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This motivational text popped up in my FB feed. Not withstanding the split infinitive, this is what high-quality academic research should be about… and it’s not a bad motto for political opinions either.

 

Learning from errors

The realisation “Aha, I made a mistake” is the first step towards self-improvement. We musicians do this all the time when we practise, athletes and martial artists do this when they train… but it’s harder to do in the academic or personal context.

In the context of Historical Performance Practice, “I don’t know” is the first step towards becoming more Historically Informed. Whereas “I can’t be bothered to find out” is a step backwards, in any context.

In a leadership role, it can feel awkward to admit to errors. But whatever respect you lose or gain from declaring an honest mistake, it cannot compare to how foolish you look when your colleagues know that you are bluffing.

I can’t pretend I manage 100% compliance with this ideal. But I do try… And I think this principle is so important for intellectual research, that I’ve devoted this entire post to it.

 

Accept the challenge

I’m well aware of the phenomenon of ‘researcher bias’, whereby investigators subconsiously select evidence that will support their pet theory. To combat this inevitable tendency, I have made a point of following up citations posted by my academic opponents, and investigating their chosen sources in detail. This allows me to use their researcher bias to counter-balance my own, and has been a most fruitful way to extend my reading list. In academic research as in martial arts, your fiercest opponent can be your best training partner!

If we consider that Musicology – in German Musikwissenschaft – is a science, then the scientific method demands that we constantly test our hypotheses experimentally, and that we re-test frequently, to find out if our initial findings hold consistently.

In this sense, every rehearsal, every practice session, as well as each performance is a new experiment. We should hope that we learnt something from the previous experiment, so we are already in a new situation, even if we tread what might seem to be a well-worn path.

For this reason, I consider it very worth while to re-read familiar and “obvious” historical sources, just as often as I look for a “new” source to read.  Those familiar texts, which were perhaps our first steps into Early Music, can reveal startling new insights, if we approach them with an updated understanding of the context, and with the readiness to re-consider, to challenge our assumptions.

 

 

Challenge the accepted

Scientific scepticism is the aittitude that everything should be experimentally tested, and verified as replicable. The musicalogical equivalent in Historical Performance Pract ice is being ready to question the ‘standard operating procedures’ of today’s Early Music, whilst constantly challanging our own assumptions. What is even more difficult is to become aware of assumptions that we didn’t even know we had made, until some piece of period evidence proves them false…

 

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

L. P. Hartley The Go-Between (1953)

 

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

Michael Howard The Lessons of History (1991)

 

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

Andrew Lawrence-King A Baroque History of Time (2014)

Rhetoric, Rhythm & Passions: Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 2019

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This article is posted in connection with the production of Orfeo in Vaasa and Helsinki, October 2019.

With the golden harp I charm mortal ears,
With the powerful harmony of the cosmos I touch your soul.

La Musica, Prologue to L’Orfeo

More about the Philosophy of La Musica here…

The Theatre of Dreams: La Musica hypnotises the Heroes here…

Monteverdi’s music is Rhetoric that tells a story, delights the senses and stirs your emotions. Although it is one of the earliest music-dramas to be presented in today’s Opera Houses, L’Orfeo was not the ‘first opera’. The designation in Striggio’s (1607)  libretto here… as favella in musica… (a story in music) …rappresentata ( a theatrical show) in Mantua, associates this music-drama with Cavalieri’s (1600) Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo in Rome, and with Peri and Caccini’s Euridice,  performed in Florence later that same year.

 

 

Monteverdi’s Score was printed in 1609 here…, not to facilitate future performances, but as a souvenir of the original production, with many details of instrumentation and staging not often found in early baroque sources. There were three groups of instruments distributed around the stage: strings and flutes, cornetti and sackbuts, and the Basso Continuo who ‘supported and guided the whole ensemble of voices and instruments’ (Agazzari, 1607). There was no conductor: rhythmic precision was based on the steady pulse of Baroque Tactus more about Monteverdi’s rhythm here…; rehearsals were led by the Corago (opera director) more about Il Corago here… 

For this new genre of music-drama, the performers were not theatre actors but court singers, with star tenor Francesco Rasi in the title-role. And the first performance was not in a purpose-built theatre, but in a small hall inside the Ducal Palace, without the grandiose stage-machinery used in the 1589 Florentine Intermedi. Nevertheless, the show was a great success, and the following year the spirit of this music led to the birth of the Tragedy, Arianna, Monteverdi’s  lost masterpiece (reconstructed by Lawrence-King in 2017 from the surviving Lamento). More about Arianna a la Recherche here…

Libretto and Score offer alternative endings, in which Orpheus either encounters a gang of Bacchus’ followers, or is rescued by Apollo. In the 2019 staging in Finland, you must wait and see who triumphs in the end: Apollo (Monteverdi’s original setting) or Bacchus (in Lawrence-King’s reconstruction for this production)?

 

 

Whilst we might today view L ‘Orfeo as a symbolic journey, 17th-century audiences appreciated it as an allegory of music-drama’s power ‘move the passions’. They experienced the emotional impact of hearing the story narrated by La Musica and the Messaggiera, watching the same story dramatised  by actors on stage, whilst both seeing and hearing how Orpheus himself reacts to each new  event. As courtiers, the Mantuan spectators were accustomed to watching their Duke, in order to gauge his reaction to any happening. On stage, Orpheus’ Shepherds represent a pastoral ‘court’ surrounding the semi-divine singer.

 

A stage court, a dramatised wedding more about the Ballo for Orpheus’ wedding here…, and a mythical singer as protagonist all serve to make music ‘realistic’ within this story. The Muses themselves appear from Parnassus, and baroque audiences were thrilled by the horrors of Hell. Striggio’s inferno is deliberately modelled on Dante. Ordinary speech is represented not by the Recitative more about Recitative here… that we know from Handel and Vivaldi, but by earlier modulatione, Monody, in which Monteverdi’s precisely notated rhythms and pitch-contours imitate the rhetorical delivery of a fine actor in the spoken theatre (Peri, 1600, Il Corago c1630). More about Peri’s monody here…

Tim Carter’s survey of Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre here…

 

Caccini defines this ‘new music’ (1601) as “words and rhythm, with sound last of all, and not the other way around”.  More about Caccini here…  Monteverdi, Caccini and Jazz here… Cavalieri (1600) alerts us to abrupt contrasts in emotion. More about Cavalieri here… Monteverdi declares (1638) that his purpose was to bring narration, action and music together into ‘a unified representation’. In this Gesamtkunstwerk, centuries before Nietzsche and Wagner, Apollo and Bacchus contend to charm your ears and touch your soul.

The Orfeo page by Il Corago here…

 

 

 

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