Category: Book

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

Edited by Samantha Owens, Barbara M. Reul and Janice Stockigt
Boydell Press, 2015 ISBN 978-1-78237-058-3
xx + 484pp, £19.99

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he hardback original dates from 2011. At fractionally under a third of the price, this is an excellent opportunity for students and researchers to own what remains an excellent guide to music throughout the German world between the dates given, with contributions by leading scholars on music in Berlin, Dresden, Darmstadt, Gotha, Stuttgart, Weissenfels, Zerbst and elsewhere. There is a wealth of primary source detail that is unrivalled in similar volumes which could make the text heavy going, but the writing (and translation into English where this was necessary) ensure that the narrative is always clear. So few books on the music of this period avoid concentrating on the works of a single composer; the broad expanse of musical life throughout Germany at this time is explored in all its guises. The volume also contains a foreword by Michael Talbot, an introductory essay by two of the editors on what constitutes a “hofkapelle” and a concluding article by Steven Zohn on musicians’ reflections on their lives at court in the 18th century. Essential reading for anyone working in this field!

Brian Clark

Susanna Pasticci, ed.
Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale XX n. 1-2, 2014 (Edizioni LIM, 2014)
ISBN 9 788870 968064 €30

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he editor’s “In search of a passacaglia Principle” about how such an unusual issue came to be and the “Notes on contributors” are in English and Italian. After vetting abstracts about a possible construction principle behind passacaglia-inspired compositions from different periods, the scientific committee of the GATM (Gruppo Analisi e Teoria Musicale) selected the eight studies in Italian and English to be included, with abstracts in both languages.

Five are beyond the pale of ‘early’ music, even though the interdisciplinary aim of the volume leads those discussions to refer to a passacaglia ‘tradition’. There was no bias that I can see in favour of authors who did find evidence for a
‘passacaglia principle’, and the two articles I liked best reach opposite conclusions.

My review is not comprehensive, however, because RATM is a journal on music theory from all periods and cultures. I won’t describe the studies on

• on 20th-century opera, by Rostagno;
• on Ligeti, by Meneghini;
• on compositions written in 1944 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, by Debenham; and
• on Schönberg’s Variations on a Recitative for organ, by Mastropasqua.

I will comment on Allan F. Moore’s “An Outlandish As-If: The Rock and Pop Passacaglia” which ends the volume, because he reflects profoundly on the central, challenging question. In order to make the comparison in such a way as to draw significant conclusions, he first gives thoughtful descriptions of some historical types of ground-bass pieces, because it doesn’t really matter if a rock piece was actually conceived as a passacaglia or just used an ostinato for a possibly similar effect. (The 26 examples, discussed in detail, are certainly far easier to read and hear in one’s head than Ligeti’s and Schönberg’s, adding to the interest! Only one, from Primrose Hill, Moore must have transcribed by ear, because he notates it in the outlandish key of A-flat minor, instead of deciphering the A-minor guitar tabs or just guessing that it was played with 415 tuning, as many rock pieces are!) What he found has nothing to do with an intention to follow a tradition: he says ‘I am asking what might be learnt from hearing [these pieces] as if they were passacaglias’. He found the regularity, the frequently descending bass patterns, and a sense of progressing in intensity toward an emotional climax. He then addressed the meaning of these key aspects: that since time doesn’t stop repetition in itself transforms our experience of it; that downwardness is experienced and its significance interpreted – it ‘carries the embodied sense of being pulled down’; and the weightiest lyrics may occur in conjunction with the timeless ongoing or the stopping of a single bass note. I must say that this is a study to be read a second time after it has brought you to its open-ended conclusion. Honestly, even though it is about rock and pop, I will think of it when hearing or playing Frescobaldi, Purcell, and Bach.

The three studies on early music begin the volume. Stefano La Via’s, the longest in the volume, compares the 16th/17th-century descending tetrachordal passacaglio as a topos (in verbal contexts as well as musical) with 20th/21st-century examples. From the establishment of the strong, harmonic (as opposed to modal) implications of the i-v6-iv6-V pattern in Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa to quite a surprising development of alternative schemes (e.g. Ray Charles’ 1961 Hit the Road Jack’s i-i4/2-VI9-V#9), La Via identifies the thematic idea of a plaint present despite rhythmic and tempo changes or accelerations to dance tempos. His discography gives the numerous pieces he analyzed by English, American, Spanish, French and Italian pop singers from the 1940s to 2010, of which I recognize only a few names (Charles, The Beatles, De André, Zeppelin, Morricone/Baez, Sting). But I felt reluctantly drawn into agreement with his qualified conclusion that, rather than the existence of a ‘passacaglia principle’, there is at least, if we don’t want to ignore it, and if we look at the theme from the viewpoints of sociology, psychology, and even neurology, and if we are considering ‘popular’ music of a certain qualitative level, an expressive or symbolic or semantic common denominator connected to the passacaglia figure. He refers to it not as a ‘common place’, but as a ‘place of common emotive resonance’ which we can be sensitive to. His analysis always distinguishes this quality from one of pure convention, a distinction readers should bear in mind while reading the studies to follow.

Vincent P. Benitez’s “Buxtehude’s Passacaglia Principle” compares the composer’s D minor Passacaglia with his C minor and E minor Ciacconas, all for organ (BuxWV 159-161). It moves from the style of such northern German works generally, and as described by Walther, to analyses of his formal structures, and to his influence on Bach’s C minor Passacaglia for organ (BWV 582). Ostinato pieces, consisting of variations, obviously lend themselves to comparison through harmonic analysis, but their ‘large-scale formal schemes…truly tell the musical stories of these pieces’. That sounds easier to discern than it actually is, since every sort of textural modification contributes to the grouping of variations into sections, which are rarely explicitly defined by the composers. In his analysis and conclusion Benitez shows that Bach was not just an heir to such a remarkably solid and unconventional composer as Buxtehude, but in fact emulated (and went beyond) him.

‘Emulating Lully? Generic Features and Personal Traits in the Passacaglia from Henry Purcell’s King Arthur (1691)’ is the interrogative of Stephan Schönlau. He reaches a qualified “yes”, more in relation to strong similarities found between the text of the Passacaille from Armide and Dryden’s for “King Arthur”. Somewhat less convincing are the melodic parallels, because it isn’t surprising that simple versions of a similar bass can produce identical melodic lines. Once Purcell’s rhythmic and melodic adaptations of the bass are taken into consideration, and his treatment of cadences, not to mention his originality in placing or displacing the vocal line above it, the coincidences or lack thereof do not seem so relevant to the question of his possibly taking Lully as a starting point. Let’s say that the comparison itself is interesting, and the analysis for its own sake. I was surprised by one detail: citing P. Holman, Schönlau calls a b6/#3 on the dominant ‘the “English sixth”…a favourite with Restoration composers’. Salvatore Carchiolo, in his brilliant tome on Italian continuo practice, Una perfezione d’armonia meravigliosa. Prassi cembalo-organistica del basso continuo italiano dalle origini all’inizio del XVIII secolo, reviewed twice by me in EMR, considers this chord to be typically Italian. This example, therefore, might have gone into the last section of this study, on ‘ “Italianate” features’ and shows other influences actually in play. Nor does it hurt to note that Lully himself was born and trained in Florence!

Barbara Sachs