Author: EMR2015

University of Rochester Press
266pp. £60
ISBN 978-1-58046-533-5.

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ames Tyler’s The Early Guitar (OUP, 1980) was the groundbreaking work which introduced the baroque guitar and its repertoire to musicologists and guitarists alike. The chapters on the baroque guitar in Tyler’s (and Paul Sparks’) later work The Guitar and its Music from the Renaissance to the Classical Era (OUP, 2002) are largely derived from The Early Guitar, and so the present work is the first major one on the subject since 1980 to be widely available. It is in every sense a worthy successor to The Early Guitar.

Its main focus is on the Italian repertoire but the author’s thorough approach means that earlier Spanish music is discussed (since the guitar came to Italy via Spain) as well as the later French school of guitar composers (initiated by the peripatetic Italian virtuosi of the later 17th century). As well as repertoire and players the book also examines the role of the guitar as a continuo instrument (very common in solo song, very rare in larger ensembles) and the variety of possible tunings in use.

Both of these subjects are contentious, particularly the latter, and all out of proportion to its actual importance – non specialists can get an idea by imagining heated controversy over the use of 4’ registration on the harpsichord – but such is Mr. Eisenhardt’s mastery of the varied source material that he is able to give all the information available in a very clear and concise manner. Where matters are ambiguous or the sources are contradictory he simply says so and, while his own opinions are always perfectly clear, he is very straightforward about urging players to make their own choices. This approach is as welcome as it is novel.

My only reservation about the book concerns the penultimate chapter which is largely devoted to the unusual harmonies found in the work of Francesco Corbetta, the greatest of the 17th-century guitarists. Particularly in his last two books, Corbetta enjoyed a very free and often dissonant harmonic palette with many chords saturated with 4ths. These are the chords which worry Mr. Eisenhardt and he has evolved a rather tortured explanation of why these notes (engraved in their hundreds, very clearly, in the tablatures) are meant to be fingered but not played. While this can’t be disproved, it requires significantly less effort to simply accept that Corbetta liked unusual harmonies and meant what he wrote. I would suggest that Corbetta himself alluded to the matter in the preface to his last work La Guitarre Royalle of 1674. This book is dedicated to Louis XIV and Corbetta writes ‘I had wanted to conform to the manner [of composition] most pleasing to your Majesty: The most chromatic, the most delicate and the least encumbered [by rules, i.e. rule bound]’. If we take this at face value then not only are these interesting harmonies (also found in the work of his Italian contemporaries Valdambrini and Kapsperger) explained, but we can also enjoy the refreshing image of Louis XIV as a connoisseur of chromatic harmony. The author’s theory may not convince all guitarists but he is, again, very respectful of the reader’s intelligence and urges each to make his own choice.

Mr. Eisenhardt has long been known as a skilful and sensitive performer on a wide variety of historical guitars and with the present work he has shown himself to be equally impressive as a scholar and writer. This book is not just valuable to players of the baroque guitar but also well worth the attention of anyone with an interest in the music of the 17th century.

William Carter

Rivista semestrale di Musicologia, 2015
Florence: Leo S. Olschki
ISSN 1123 8615 €64,00

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he first of the two 2015 issues of Il Saggiatore Musical contains, with regard to early music, two studies, both in English, a brief article, and various informative book reviews.

In Notions of Notation Around 1600, Anthony Newcomb points out something that performers who play or sing from original prints might not have imagined, namely, that unbarred individual part books were only for performing from, not being very conducive to analysis, and open scores (n.b. the words partitura and spartito originally meant ‘barred’) were luxury items printed in order that their contrapuntal complexity could be appreciated by the elite patrons commissioning them, and would elicit admiration for themselves as well as for the composers from anyone acquiring, playing, or reading the music. Naturally musicians today seek comprehension and legibility, and therefore a specific genre of contrapuntal music, which might have almost never been played, deserves first of all analysis.

There are several insights in Newcomb’s discussion. One is that the challenging contrapuntal recercar genre that developed between 1560 and 1600 in Ferrara, Rome and Naples (Brumel, Luzzaschi, de Macque, Gesualdo, Mayone, Trabaci, Frescobaldi) awarded absolute prescriptive value to every note. The pieces, being the object of study and discussions, were to be played, if at all, exactly as written. This is quite unlike all other contemporary lighter pieces, such as madrigals, canzonette and instrumental works, which could be adapted for performance, accompanied according to prevailing contingencies, simplified, transcribed, improvised upon, ornamented. We tend to consider this latter trend progressive, perhaps because we ourselves want such interpretive prerogatives. But, in fact, musical art proceeded (and still does) along both routes, those Newcomb calls ‘performer-centered’ and ‘composer-centered’ musical culture.

The article gives three illustrations from Trabaci’s Secondo libro de ricercate (1615): the table of contents listing the page numbers and bar numbers of the most ‘notable passages and things’ (Tavola de i passi et delle cose più notabile [sic]); verbal identifications of inversions of the subjects in the score; and in addition, a little hand with index finger pointing out the entry of a subject borrowed from Luzzaschi.

Newcomb’s Appendix is a detailed outline of relevant quotations from historic and contemporary sources (with their English translations). An amusing one is a letter of Luigi Zenobi’s (1600) comparing contrapunto buono, meaning almost the opposite, alla buona, to contrapunto artificioso that shows isquisitezza d’arte: the former ‘good’ counterpoint is like garlic, for rustic tastes, whereas the latter ‘contrived, exquisitely artful’ sort pleases those of more delicate, elevated, ingenuity.

Michael Talbot, in Francesco Barsanti and the Lure of National Song, goes into one area of Barsanti’s work mentioned in the major article by himself and Jasmin Cameron that appeared in Recercare XXV (2013). Here he retraces Barsanti’s career, this time describing his empathetic production of popular song settings:

• His eclectic, sensitively arranged 1742 Collection of  [28] Old Scots Tunes (without texts, to be played by violin or flute and continuo) convey the traditional manner of Scottish singing.
• As one of the scribes compiling keyboard music and songs for a 1743 manuscript possibly destined for Princess Louisa, the youngest daughter of George II, Barsanti anonymously inserted six easy French airs, recognizable by his hand, copied from unknown sources.
  Around 1750 he published (Op. 4) Nove overture a quattro, in three of which he used popular English tunes or dances as the themes of the fugal sections. His carefully reworking of them, and naming of them, no doubt brought smiles of recognition to listeners.
• At the same time he produced a Hebrew motet! His Amsterdam supporters included Sephardic Jews, and the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam wanted contemporary settings of Biblical texts. Barsanti set the first stanza of Psalm 75 for four voices, inserting the piece in an anthology of madrigals and motets which he was hired to copy (for the Academy of Ancient Music, Talbot surmises). Most interesting here is that its unusual modal structure coincides approximately with a simple 19th -century arrangement by Emanuel Aguilar, a British pianist and composer (1824-1904). Talbot does not indicate whether both composers used a traditional Sephardic chant of the psalm as the soprano melody, or whether Barsanti did and his version became regarded as the “ancient melody” surviving a century later, in 1857.

This unpretentious aspect of Barsanti’s output adds much to his biography, that of amateur, musician of all trades, a scholar sensitive to what would become ethnomusicology in the following centuries.

Archeologia musicale dei Greci e dei Romani: una breve introduzione by Daniela Castaldo is not really a study. However, it does trace and inspire interest in the emergence in the 17th to the 20th centuries of what is now called ‘musical archeology’. She mentions the key scholars, publications, conventions and trends that gradually came to better define its vast scope.

The Book Review section includes reviews of P. Memelsdorff, The Codex Faenza 117: Instrumental Polyphony in Late Medieval Italy, an introductory volume and a facsimile (M. Caraci Vela); T. Carter – R. A. Goldthwaite, Orpheus in the Marketplace. Jacopo Peri & the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence, the first socio-economic biography of a late 16th to early 17th-century composer and singer (F. Fantappiè).

Critical Summaries are by G. Nuti on G. Sanguinetti: The Art of Partimenti: History, Theory, and Practice; M. Giuggioli on St. Rumph: Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics; F. Lazzaro on W. Gibbons: Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in Fin-de-Siècle Paris.

Barbara Sachs