Category: Book

ed. Guido Olivieri and Marc Vanscheeuwijck
(LIM, 2015) In Italian and English.
xxviii+538pp. €50
ISBN 9788870967975

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]f the 16 papers delivered at the 7th Corelli convention held in Fusignano, ‘Arcomelo 2013’ in honour of the 300th anniversary of Corelli death, six are in English, as are all 16 abstracts. One aim of the congress was to connect musicians and musicologists, applying the latest research to questions of musical analysis and performance. The volume places the papers in five areas of study, though they can be read in any order. I decided to begin with one paper from each group, making the rounds successively, in order to let the historical, musical, technical, and documentary contributions relate to each other. The considerable size of this volume (566 pages counting the preface by Enrico Gatti and the introduction by Guido Olivieri and Marc Vanscheeuwijck) should insure its value to many readers.

Corelli and the Bolognese Instrumental Music Tradition
The opening ‘prosopograhical’ essay by Sandro Pasqual is on violinists, violins, and violin teachers in Bologna in Corelli’s time, along with the rise of music publishing houses and violin makers there. Pasqual, a cellist, historian, and economist, sets the stage for Corelli – whom his contribution doesn’t include. His aim is to show to what extent the violin created a revolution in Bologna in the mid-1600s, what activities and sectors offered work to violinists, what repertoire emerged, and therefore why one can speak of the Bolognese ‘violin school’ between 1660 and 1720. The violinists were street musicians, part-time well-trained free-lance players, professionals, and teachers of several generations of pupils. Their prestige grew in the 18th century as Bologna became the fertile centre reflected in the seminal influence of Corelli himself.

Andreas Pfisterer’s contribution Corelli and Vitali: On the Reworking of Dance Movements  compares the former’s Op. II, no. 9/1 of 1685 with the latter’s Op. 8 no. 8 Balletto Largo  of 1683. He considers Allemande  and Balletti  here as identical, and I imagine that at the Convention he must commented on the Balletti  and Allemande  in the Assisi manuscript attributed to Corelli. His analysis is enlightening, in that Corelli apparently adopted the Vitali piece as a model, but reworked it in significant, idiosyncratic ways, all illustrated well by his musical examples.

Guido Olivieri introduced Enrico Gatti’s edition of 12 ‘sonatas’ from a manuscript of 1748, I-Af MS 177, in which they are attributed to Corelli. (See the review of their edition for more about these brief suites.) At the convention, Olivieri’s longer paper Le Sonate da camera di Assisi: una nuova fonte corelliana?  investigates the plausibility of the attribution. He compares the form, harmony, cadences and melodic characteristics of these Preludi  and dances to examples from Corelli’s op. I-IV, and to works of other composers active near Bologna in the 1660s, 70s and 80s. As ‘Devil’s Advocate’ he makes hypotheses about conceivable motives for a deliberately spurious attribution, but these are not convincing; instead, as hoped, the existence of a complete set of sonatas that could have been composed by Corelli for violin and cello in the 1670s, formally dissimilar to the mature solo sonatas of Op. V, makes the case all the more interesting.

The complete Assisi manuscript is in two hands and was made in Bologna. One copyist wrote out these sonatas, as well as Corelli’s 12 sonatas of Op. 5, Albinoni’s sonata op. 2 no.10 and part of no. 6, a sonata attributed to Torelli, and the parchment cover, dated 1748. The other scribe inserted arias and minuets for trumpet. It belonged to a Franciscan lay brother in Assisi, who was praised as a cello player and bass singer, Giuseppe Maria Galli (ca. 1720-1781). He must have personally used the music; he may have been the main copyist.

Aspects of Composition and Performance
Gregory Barnett, in Tempo, Meter, and Rhythmic Notation in Sonatas of the Corellian Era, begins with three cases requiring interpretation in performance, supported by indisputably clear examples: (1) mensural proportions, which only occur marginally in music as late as Corelli’s; (2) successive meters devised so that the same pulse in one section could be indicated by different note-values in the next; and (3) verbal tempo indications altering the durations of the same note-values. It is the second case that interests me the most, because it requires the intuition of performers: infrequently if ever mentioned in writing, this occurs over and over again in vocal music (I’m thinking of Monteverdi, Purcell, Tenaglia, Steffani, and many others), enabling smooth transitions from one section to another which the other sets of early notational rules cannot define. The author also touches on the unsolved problem of Gigues. The article contains 28 musical examples, 4 tables of tempo indications (those in combinations, those projecting affects, those implying articulated bowing, and those implying sustained bowings), and a long bibliographical list of the compositions referred to.

The title of Alberto Sanna’s Between Composition and Performance: Generic Norms and Poetic Choices in The Work of Arcangelo Corelli  would have been more inviting had it referred to Corelli’s compositional priorities or the protracted debate over ‘The Affair of the Fifths’ that raged from 1685 into the early 1700s, and which still gets treated polemically today, most recently as a confrontation between the musical circles of Rome and Bologna. Even though Sanna devotes half of his paper to the disputed parallel intervals, with redundant examples and explanations of how suspensions save the fifths, he only cites one sentence of Corelli’s defensive arguments, which allegedly were long and detailed. So the impression I was left with, besides appreciation of my responsibility as a continuo player to bring out the harmonic complexity that Corelli had in mind, was that Sanna’s conclusions about how Corelli’s practical experience informed his aesthetics were too generalized to be supported by what he actually showed. His discussion of Corelli’s Allemandes ties in nicely with Pfisterer’s contribution.

Pierre-Alain Braye-Weppe, a composer and teacher of basso continuo, discusses in the most organized and well-illustrated manner the various roles and sonorities Corelli used the viola for. The Viola Part in the Concerti Op. VI  is long but quickly read, and parts tie in beautifully with Salvatore Carchiolo’s treatise-supported recommendations for passing-note contaminations of simpler harmonies. Like Sanna, Braye-Weppe attributes Corelli’s compositional bravura to his innovative ‘thinking outside the box’, as well as to his experience as a violinist and conductor. But he doesn’t just say so: the strength of this paper is the analytical grouping of musical examples.

Bass instruments and Basso Continuo Realization in Rome at the Time of Corelli
In the 17th and early 18th centuries the violin family included a variety of instruments larger than the viola. They differed in size, tuning, playing technique, and especially in nomenclature. Marc Vanscheeuwijck has reviewed the specific situation in Bowed Basses in Corelli’s Rome. Corelli used the designation violoncello del concertino  only once, in his Concerti Grossi, Op. VI, generally calling the instrument that plays the bassline – in sonatas and trios – a violone. The article adds other data to be considered, without claiming to solve the confusing regional and organological distinctions. Although the study is in English, I think Vanscheewijck assumes that we all know that the Italian diminutive suffix ‘-cello’ is not a common one. More usual ones are -ino, -etto, -cino, -ello, some of which express affection or suggest ‘cuteness’; but ‘-cello’, also a quantitative modifier, means ‘slight’. It qualifies the suffix already present in violone  (i. e. a large viola) to distinguish the various slightly smaller large violas from each other, and from the contrabbasso, before standardization, when some players could play different sizes of instruments in more than one tuning. One other thing leaves me not quite appreciative of this dilemma: why not examine the basslines themselves, their ranges, and the techniques they require, in order to conclude definitively what the violone  in question had to be?

Previously enigmatic archlute tablatures, which seemed to produce senseless or bad voice-leading, are solved by restringing the 4th, 5th and 6th stopped double courses in octaves instead of unisons. Marco Pesci in L’arciliuto e il basso continuo nella Roma di Corelli: osservazioni sull’uso di ottave e acciaccatura, thus confirms these tablature readings, which are shown to produce the type of full (and harmonically contaminated) accompaniment specifically called for in Corelli’s time. The stringing required is an older, 16th century one. Therefore the Roman 17th-century “earlier music” practitioners reinstated it in order to have three extra voices adding and resolving dissonances, thanks to three octave doublings, and also for playing higher melodies at the same time. All the examples are given in notation as well as tablature, and the article should be read together with the following ones of Salvatore Carchiolo and Giovanni Togni. It is too bad for English readers that all three of these articles are in Italian, but they do have a great number of musical examples, and their abstracts are in English.

Salvatore Carchiolo, as expected from the highest authority on Italian continuo practice as a performer and researcher, takes a group of related anonymous treatises, establishes their appropriateness to Corelli’s music by their date and Roman origin, and applies their very particular recommendations to passages from Corelli’s opera I, II, III and V. La prassi esecutiva del basso continuo al clavicembalo nella musica di Arcangelo Corelli alla luce delle ‘Regole per accompagnar sopra la parte’ della Biblioteca Corsiniana di Roma  therefore is not only detail-specific for those wanting to accompany Corelli better, but explains ‘Rules’ which are still little known, or, when known, often conflated with every other style of accompaniment. His illustrative realizations may speak for themselves, but for those who read Italian, the distinctions he draws about them are most illuminating. Harmonic contamination has its rhyme and reason, its means and place, in short… its rules.

Giovanni Togni also analyzes the various uses of extemporized and almost ubiquitous dissonances in full accompaniments of Corelli’s time – those discussed in the above study by Carchiolo and referred to as ‘false’ in the writings of Gasparini (1708), Marcello (1705), and the anonymous tract Regole per accompagnare sopra la part d’autore incerto  (circa 1700). His contribution is titled Le ‘false’ che dilettano  (The ‘inharmonic notes that delight’), a phrase from the tract, which included an illustrative arietta written and realized by the ‘uncertain’ author, showing chords with five to ten notes (some held, some released). Carchiolo applied the technique to music of Corelli. Togni instead compares these various writings, adding illustrations from still other printed pieces and manuscripts (one from 1680-90), noting differences in their usage of the terms. His examples enable him to specify where they can be employed, which is the main value of his study. His statistical analysis might raise some eyebrows (e. g. 16 acciaccature  in 89 bars of a set of Passagagli, or 5.8%, versus 51.66% in the first 23 bars of the anonymous arietta), but he admits that this serves to measure the huge discrepancy between actual pieces and theoretical examples, which ought to warn us not to overdo techniques recommended for wherever appropriate, not for wherever possible.

History Context Documents
The title of Teresa Chirico’s ‘Et iusti intrabunt in eam’. Committenza ottoboniana, macchine e musiche per la festa delle Quaranta ore (1690–1713)  is a challenge, but in fact the study is concretely descriptive of the theatrical machinery, the elaborate staging and the exact musical forces used in the Church (of San Lorenzo in Damaso) in Cardinal Ottoboni’s residence for an annual marathon of solemn celebrations in the presence of the pope. Corelli’s contribution (composing, directing and playing) was essential, and after his death this so-called Roman ‘Carnival’ continued until 1740 in a reduced form.

More than 30 of the 49 documents that constitute the second and main part of Luca Della Libera’s Nuove fonti corelliane: il Fondo Bolognetti nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano e i documenti nell’Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu  contain references to Corelli’s work as a performer or conductor in Rome. They are single journalistic paragraphs from 1691-1703 describing occasions, the music performed, by whom; or lists of payments from 1676 to 1692 for sacred music performed in Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (renovated by Bernini with funds from G. B. Pamphilj). Musicians are named (e.g. Carlo Mannelli, Bernardo Pasquini), or listed by first name and function or provenance (e. g. Violino Archangelo; Perugino della Chiesa Nuova) or by surname (e. g. Organista De Sanctis), or function (e. g. Alza mantici or Bellows pumpers). The journal entries are selected from over 200 published by Della Libera and J. M. Domínguez in 2012. The payment lists from the Bolognetti family and Ottoboni court are published here for the first time, and in their entirety.

Constance Frei I tipografi romani e bolognesi di Corelli. Stampa e ristampa. In the 17th century Corelli’s works were printed by various typographers. In Rome, Op. I and II by G. A. Mutij, Op. II and IV by G. G. Komarek, and Op. V by G. Pietrasanta. All these were reissued in Bologna numerous times during the composer’s lifetime by the printing houses of G. and P. M. Monti and M. Silvani. This essay asks whether these prints and reprints were identical, whether movable-type prints could reproduce the complex bowings, articulations and innovative ideas of the composer, or rather what limitations movable type imposed, and what was the relationship of the typographers to the musical text. It compares the Roman and Bolognese editions, underlines aspects of Corelli’s style, defines the characteristics of each typographer, and enables players to better interpret the passage-work as presented by these prints. Appreciating the decisions the printers made is actually fundamental to reading printed music, and even the small number of examples given to support her answers will perhaps generate other questions in interested readers. I would like to ask her why groups of four semiquavers were so rarely spatially separated, and which printing houses had, or didn’t have, demisemiquaver characters.

Agnese Pavanello, in her study Corelli ‘inedito’: composizioni dubbie o senza numero d’opera. Percorsi tra fonti, attribuzioni e fortuna della trasmissione, while acknowledging with appreciation the immense cataloguing work of H. J. Marx, a pioneer of Corelli studies, shows how the works without opus numbers (WoO #) and the works catalogued as dubious or even spurious (indicated Anh. #), were not so deemed according to sufficiently clear criteria. Many of the latter are now turning out to be good attributions, and this involves over a hundred ‘dubious’ violin sonatas, and other works. Therefore her study underlines how important the situation is. A very large number of so-called dubious works are from English sources: Anh. 16–18 from the 1680s contain Op. I, II and III and WoO5. James II married Maria Beatrice d’Este, and Christina of Sweden used her influence in Rome to sustain the Catholic king of England, organizing large spectacles led by, played by, or composed by Corelli. This was but one channel for the spread of Roman music (not only Corelli’s). It is an example of how dating, transmission and style must all be considered, as well as concordances with other sources, an example of which ties in with the article by Guido Olivieri. And perhaps some of the dubious works, which we have thanks to the foreign channel of diffusion, simply did not enjoy the ultimate care that Corelli devoted to his published works (especially Anh. 62–64). This study is, by the way, a good read, even though and indeed because (!) it points out what a staggering amount of research remains to be done on Corelli as a composer.

Influences
Lowell Lindgren’s ‘Fugga, Fugga, or the Italian Rant’, which Supplied Corelli, Cosimi and Haym with ‘the Sense of Sound’  does well to show that Corelli’s pupils, in their flight from the Roman musical scene after the pope closed opera houses and banned secular music in 1697, carried away to England the excited, passionate, eloquent, even ranting (really?) style of their master in their performances and compositions. But the knot of cross-references Lindgren tries to knit, identifying Corelli’s ‘Non udite lo parlare?’ (Do you not hear speaking?) or R. Frost’s ‘the sound of sense’ (sic) with the joyful-wistful Renaissance tune called ‘The Italian Rant’ by Playford (1652) – a traditional melody that reappears in many guises (he mentions Smetana’s The Moldau, which in turn summons up HaTikvah) – only takes away from the evident influence of Corelli’s music on Geminian, Nicola Cosimi and Nicola Haym. It is hard not to lose the tenuous thread, but various movements of Cosimi and Haym, which Lindgren considers ‘rants’, are described in detail.

No need to fear for the robust mental health of Veracini from the complicated title of the paper by Antonella D’Ovidio, Corelli e «l’angoscia dell’influenza»: declinazioni corelliane nelle sonate di Francesco Maria Veracini. The subject is influence, one which was profoundly retrospective, innovative, voluntary and hardly anguished. This is a very observant and useful account of Veracini’s lifelong, conscious debt to Corelli, not to mention his passionate aesthetics of music. D’Ovidio compares Veracini’s three collections of violin sonatas, 1716, 1721, 1744, quotes from his preface to Op. 2 (1744) and his treatise Il trionfo della pratica musicale  (1760), and underlines the importance of his Dissertazioni sopra l’opera quinta di Corelli  in which, at the end of his life, he rewrote Corelli’s Op. V in his new style, which was not at all the one in fashion, as he extended their contrapuntal potential and the role of both the solo violin and the basso continuo, making the sonatas closer to concertos.

Barbara Sachs

The Boydell Press, 2015. xvii + 515pp, £30.00.
ISBN: 9781783270613.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] wasn’t too impressed at the start of this volume, but it grew on me. I started making notes, but realised that I couldn’t write in any great detail, and anyway it wasn’t easy to make notes while reading on a ship in the Caribbean. Each chapter has an individual subject, which includes a large amount of information that is not just checking all the details of what is known about Handel or how he fitted into England. Handel’s position there was very much of the upper circle: he was attached to royalty (who paid him £200 a year) before he was famous. He had written a few operas and also spent some time with James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, producing 11 anthems before 1720 and two works not called oratorios – Acis & Galatea  and Esther. His first London opera was Rinaldo, though it isn’t as important as most Handelians have thought: much of it is adapted from previous sources, but Agrippina  (1706 perhaps) is a more impressive opera in a very different style. He was strongly involved in the Academy planned in 1719 with the first performance of Radamisto  in 1720. For 21 years, he maintained his activity in the theatre, though his financial “success” was dubious. The clientele was a small element of the top members of society. In the early 1720s, however, Handel had significant respect, and Orlando  and Alcina  of the mid 1730s are now particularly popular – at least, to my taste!

His health deteriorated in the latter part of the 1730s. There are various reasons, one being his excess of food and drink, the other the ubiquitous danger of lead, whether drinking water or wine. Whatever his earlier health (which probably wasn’t particularly good), in 1737 he was struck by saturnine gout, and used spas at Tunbridge Wells and Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen); he also suffered with a palsy in Dublin in 1741-42. His final weakness was blindness, one eye being weak in 1751 and lost in 1752; the other eye failing (or ruined by his oculist) in 1758.

Handel probably didn’t have much of a different clientele for the oratorios. Finances were low, since he only performed in Lent. However, from 1723 till his death he received £600 per annum. (He wasn’t renowned for spending more than the normal fees for performers, but the charity for the Foundling Hospital Messiah  from 1754 was not connected with Handel.) He had invested finances abroad, and, despite problems, on his death he left aroud £20,000. Hunter assumed that Handel held responsibility for slavery in 1720, but I wonder whether he just offered money for income without considering whether slavery was mentioned when experts laid out a good scheme –more information is needed.

I wasn’t too happy about Chapter 1 –The Audience: Three Broad Categories, Three Gross Errors. The rest are mostly fine, though some are longer than necessary:

2. The Audience: Partner and Problem

3. Musicians and Other Occupational Hazards

4. Patrons and Pensions

5. Musical Genres and Compositional Practices

6. Self and Health

7. Self and Friends

8. Nations and Stories

9. Biographers’ Stories

Conclusion

Here are just a few comments:

• Hunter hasn’t realised (pp. 215-6) that The Ways of Zion do Mourn  (subsequently Act I of Israel in Egypt) isn’t just taken direct from Handl/Gallus, published in the 1580s. In fact, Ecce quam modo  was familiar in Germany, and no doubt elsewhere, for funerals. Queen Caroline was German but came to London at almost the same time as Handel. The funeral was in Westminster Abbey on 17 December 1737 with a large number of performers (around 130) but not for the public. It is rarely performed, but there was an excellent day’s rehearsal and run-through in Cambridge in October last year, with Peter Holman at his best.
• Hunter concentrates on the public rehearsal at the pleasure gardens of the Music for the Royal Fireworks  at Vauxhall. All the relevant numbers are exaggerations, including the travel from north of the Thames. Incidentally, there’s a nice story of John Byrom, who was sitting under one of the trees on St James’s Park on the night of the Fireworks, writing a letter to his wife. He saw the fireworks, but didn’t mention the music. He was also the writer of Christians, awake, salute the happy morn…
• A more general point is that the oratorios from the 1730s are based on the Old Testament, except for two exceptions. Handel took Theodora, a Christian martyr, from around 304 AD, based on a more recent source that was borrowed from what we would now call a historical novel. It has become popular over the last few decades, and is sometimes staged. The other is Messiah, which is mostly Old Testament but has a few direct quotes from the New and is unlike any normal oratorios.

I leave it to the readers to judge the book for themselves though £30 is certainly very good value for so substantial a book!

Clifford Bartlett

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

Journal for the study and practice of early music
LIM Editrice [2014]
160 pp, €24 (€29 outside of Italy)
ISBN 978 88 7096 8125

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he current issue of Ricercare is slightly shorter than recent preceding ones and without a book review section. It presents five studies, four with useful summaries in English and in Italian by the authors – at about 10% the length of an article, they aren’t substitutes, but they give more substance than abstracts do.

The issue is dedicated to the memory of Saverio Franchi, a recently deceased scholar whose impressive work (musicological and more) is appreciatively outlined by the chief editor, Arnaldo Morelli, in ‘Una minuta, caleidoscopica visione del mondo’ (‘a detailed, kaleidoscopic vision of the world’). A long article by Franchi – unfinished and completed by his wife and collaborator, Orietta Sartori – follows. On Roman printers of the early 16th century (Andrea Antico, Giacomo Giunta, Valerio Dorico and Antonio Barrè), it was probably too detailed to be summarized, and it got past the editors with ungainly single paragraphs spanning two, three or four pages. Nevertheless, readers should start again if on the first try they get lost in titles, dates and the relationships between printers, composers and patrons. Franchi’s fact-finding was complemented by his intuition, reasoning and speculation. The titles call up the compositions; the reproductions of woodcuts from the prints are interpreted; and his chronological ordering of the information assembled (from 1509 to 1574) adds almost a sense of suspense.

The other papers, two in Italian and two in English, do have bilingual summaries. The first three are in historical order by subject matter, and in order of length, with the third designated a “Communication” and the fourth an “Intervention”.

Paolo Alberto Rismondo presents new documents in ‘ “Il genio natio contaminato da conversationi composte da inevitabile fatalità”. Biagio Marini a Brescia, Neuburg e Padova’, about Marini’s life, training, positions (in other cities abroad as well as in the Veneto) and events probably contributing to the end of his life. The title includes the incipit of a long citation from the composer’s anguished plea to the authorities to commute his son’s death sentence to imprisonment. It expresses his desolation at having generated an inexcusable son, but so truncated it is totally obscure. Its predicate reads: “has put sour [immature] fruit on my most embittered palate [which] if not tempered by clemency … will give off juices poisonous to my life”.

Nichola Voice is a New Zealand flautist whose doctoral dissertation for the University of Otago (n.b. not ‘Otago University’ as in the profile of her) is on northern Italian craft guilds in connection with instrument making. In the extract ‘Venetian woodwind instrument makers, 1680–1805. Their interaction with the guild’, her meticulous examination of documents from Venetian archives reverses some previous conclusions (including work by Federico Sardelli and Careras) about restrictions compromising the development of a wind-instrument industry in Venice, and finds makers named in one multi-media guild, the Arte de’ tornidori (i.e. ‘tornitori’, wood and ivory turners and reamers).

The orchestral natural horn was not only called the ‘corno da caccia’, or hunting horn, in Italy (indeed up to the mid 19th century, I believe), but associated with the Austrian Empire and generally used for that connotation or as a symbol of monarchy in general, from 1714 on. In 1748 all wind instruments were banned in sacred music by papal bull. In ‘New findings on the use of the corni da caccia in early eighteenth-century Roman orchestras’ Teresa Chirico says where and when horns (sometimes also called ‘trombe da caccia’) were used elsewhere in Italy (Naples, Venice, Mantua), and then gradually in Rome, especially by various composers (such as Bononcini, Vivaldi, Caldara, Vinci) and patrons who wanted them, and mainly for secular works. Symbolically and systematically standing for Austrian culture, hunting as a sport, and nobility, they were included for occasions celebrating English and French royalty as well. In Roman churches, Girolamo Chiti used them as early as 1720 and until the ban 1748. Thereafter, elsewhere in Italy, they became an accepted ‘naturalized’ orchestral instrument.

Giuseppe Clericetti’s ‘La verità e altre bugie’ presents an entertaining array of literary, pictorial and musical counterfeits, some of staggering erudition, others playfully strewn with anagrams or other clues to the forgers. As examples he gives works by figures of the stature of Erasmus and Leopardi, an instrumental hoax craftily perpetrated by Leonhardt and his harpsichord maker Skowroneck, a bio of an invented painter teasingly named Nat Tate for the gullible, brilliant parodies, and the accepted authorial pretence of discovered manuscripts by Cervantes, Scott, Manzoni, Eco, etc., which don’t really count. One musical fake continued to reappear in print, in English, German, French and Italian, from 1925 until 2000: The Little Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach actually by Esther Meynell. The list goes on. Musical hoaxes fooled the likes of eminent scholars (Howard Robbins Landon and Paul Badura-Skoda in 1993 over the ‘discovery’ of six lost early sonatas by Haydn, published by Winfried Michel, who took their incipits from Haydn’s catalogue and then composed 99% of the music). Clericetti arranges these thoughtfully, but doesn’t anticipate what the computer-savvy will get up to. He is quite respectful of these endeavours, no indignant class-action suits are urged: rather he points out the fundamental tradition (he says 17th century, but it certainly goes back to before the invention of musical notation) of constraintes or compositions with an obbligo, new works based on other works, which marked the evolution of all the arts.

Barbara Sachs

Compositional Proportion and Significance
xviii + 411pp, £84.99
Cambridge University Press, 2015.
ISBN 978-1-107-08860-3

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he very subject matter of this book might be enough to send you screaming to the hills. Hand on heart, I am a sceptic. My understanding of proportion in music has been (naively?) based on early musical notions that the circle of perfection represented triple time sub-divided into three elements. When I hear music compared to architecture and how the parts must relate proportionally to the whole, I think (again simplistically?) of the folly of having three consecutive phrases of 5, 17 and 11 bars. Surely things that feel  balanced are  balanced? The notion that Bach sat down like an architect and spanned out not only movements but also entire works (and then collections of works!) based on the number of bars involved would strike me as preposterous. And yet, when you sit down and draw up tables, as Ruth Tatlow has done by the dozen, the numbers stack up to support the theories she passionately advocates.

This becomes all the more clear when Bach revises his works when he is assembling them into sets. He removes entire movements, re-writes others, all seemingly with the sole aim of making the total bar counts match over huge spans of his output. Suggesting that the numbers at the end of his scores representing the bar count is strong evidence for a pre-occupation with such things simply ignores the fact that other composers do it, too – and more often than not professional copyists do the same – quite simply in order to ensure that each of the separate parts they copy out has the same number of bars! I have some difficulty accepting in larger works that Tatlow’s 1:1 and 2:1 proportions are justifiable when the selection of movements that adds up to one or other total is so random within a sequence; make a different selection from the list of movements and the maths does not work. Must we assume that Bach got to the “Dona nobis pacem” of the B minor mass knowing exactly how many bars he had to write? Presumably – since it is a repeat of an earlier movement – he already knew that, so had to be more self-controlling in composing the “Agnus Dei”?

There is a huge amount of information in these 400+ pages and the book is anything but an easy read. In her Appendix (“A theology of musical proportions and Harmony in Bach’s time”), I do not see anything that talks to me of numerical proportion and counting bars; rather it is harmony that is seen as the root of perfection, including reference to numbers (7 is omitted from the sequence of “the whole of Harmony”).

There are some slips that copy editors really should have caught (“Leh-rmeister” at a line end on p. 16 is dreadful, for example; there is also a stray dash on p. 17), but on the whole the book is beautifully laid out and printed.

Brian Clark