Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music 9780520952065

Citation preview

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Sonia H. Evers Renaissance Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

Susan McClary

U ni v ersit y of C alifor ni a Pr ess Berkeley  •  Los Angeles  •  London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McClary, Susan.   Desire and pleasure in seventeenth-century music / Susan McClary.    p.  cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978–0-520-24734-5 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Music—17th century—History and criticism. I. Title.   ml194.m35  2012   780.9'032—dc23 2011041887  

 

Manufactured in the United States of America 20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

Contents

Acknowledgments Prelude: The Music of Pleasure and Desire

vii 1

Part I. The Hydraulics of Musical Desire 1. The Expansion Principle

21

2. Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject

45

Part II. Gendering Voice 3. Soprano as Fetish: Professional Singers in Early Modern Italy

79

4. Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in the Operas of Cavalli

104

Part III. Divine Love 5. Libidinous Theology

129

6. Straining Belief: The Toccata

159

Part IV. Dancing Bodies 7. The Social History of a Groove: Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and the Chaconne

193

8. Dancing about Power, Architecture about Dancing

215

Part V. La Mode Française 9. Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-Century French Music

241

10. The Dragon Cart: The Femme Fatale in Seventeenth-Century French Opera

258

Postlude: Toward Consolidation

275

Notes Index

305 333

Acknowledgments

Machaut once wrote, “My end is my beginning.” But in my case, the beginning turned out to be pretty nearly the end. For although the ideas that form the core of this book first appeared in my 1976 dissertation, it has taken me a full thirty-five years to develop a scholarly terrain within which these ideas might seem to make sense. Anyone familiar with my work might find it difficult to believe that all of it stemmed from those initial inquiries into seventeenth-century musical syntax. Indeed, when I first set out to try to explain how music of the seicento works, I could never have imagined that my path would lead me through feminist theory, popular music, and a deconstruction of the European canon. But baffled by readers’ reports advising me to abandon this project because “this music does not work,” I found it necessary to figure out what precisely it might mean to say such a thing about a repertory, especially one that includes the likes of Monteverdi. If a belief in eighteenth-century tonality and its masterworks grounds our discipline, implicitly dismissing all Others (early music, women’s music, postmodernist music, world music, African-American music, pop music, etc.) as unworthy of serious consideration, then that belief itself begs to be dismantled. To be sure, no one much cared then about the no-longer-modalnot-yet-tonal repertories I deal with in this book. But plenty of people responded to the vade mecum I extended in the context of those other Others. Along the way, I gained enough gravitas to persuade University vii

viii   |   Acknowledgments

of California Press to take a chance on my latter-day formulations of my earlier ideas. A project that has taken thirty-five years to reach fruition owes too much to too many individuals for me to name them all. Virtually all my colleagues, friends, and students have contributed to its present formulation. My late father, Dan McClary, blasted me with classical music when I was still in the crib, with the hope that I would grow up with the canon as my vernacular. I am, consequently, his Frankenstein monster. As an undergraduate piano major at Southern Illinois University, I learned from Robert Mueller and Steven Barwick how to link scores and history with performance decisions, while Wesley Morgan instilled in me my obsession with seventeenth-century music. During my graduate training, Anthony Newcomb showed me how to teach effectively, and Earl Kim encouraged me to theorize about temporality in music. At Harvard I also met my former husband, Daniel Garber, who had to endure the period during which I was deep in the abyss of working out the theoretical models I introduced in my dissertation and now present here in somewhat more refined versions. A scholar of seventeenthcentury philosophy and its quirks, Daniel helped me find ways of thinking about early modern Europe. When Daniel moved to the University of Chicago in 1975 to take up his first job, I went along as a faculty wife. While finishing my dissertation in Chicago, I had the privilege of hanging out in Regenstein Library with a host of graduate students who have gone on to become stars in their fields and close friends, among them Bill Caplin, Peter Burkholder, Jann Pasler, Ellen Harris, and Louise Stein. I also met and worked with the late Howard Mayer Brown. Although I resented it mightily at the time, Howard gave me the much-needed kick in the pants that made me stop moping around as a faculty wife, even if the alternative was a commuting marriage. He and the late Leonard B. Meyer championed my theoretical models when few others gave them a second look. In 1975 I met Rose Rosengard Subotnik who was just starting her career at Chicago, and it was she who first suggested that I read Adorno and Foucault, both indispensible thinkers for all my subsequent work. Together with Richard Leppert, who became my principal source of intellectual sustenance during my years at the University of Minnesota (1977–94), and Lawrence Kramer, we forged what we prefer to call critical musicology, better known by the name given by our detractors: New Musicology. Dissatisfied with the methods and historical narratives then

Acknowledgments   |   ix

dominant in musicology, we sought to find ways of opening the field. I could never have survived without their support and friendship. At the University of Minnesota, I encountered two other groups that changed the course of my project. First, I became involved with feminist theory and criticism, which was then transforming most disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The questions feminists were asking at the time seemed to me remarkably like those I was posing in my studies of music. I owe particular thanks to Naomi Scheman, Nancy Armstrong, and Ruth-Ellen Joeres for welcoming me into their community and helping me in my struggles to bring feminist theory into musicology. When I began presenting some of these ideas in the context of musicology venues, I found nurturance and intellectual support from Catherine Clément, Eva Rieger, Ruth Solie, Judith Tick, Ellen Koskoff, and Jane Bower. While at Minnesota, I also allied myself with the newly formed Center for Humanistic Study, which brought to campus figures only starting to be known in North America: Derrida, Foucault, Ricoeur, Said, Kittler, and many others. Lindsay Waters and Terry Cochran, who directed the University of Minnesota Press while I was there, brought out the first English translations of several of these cultural theorists. Lindsay commissioned me to write the afterword to Jacques Attali’s Noise, which appeared as my first publication, as well as the foreword to Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women. A bit later, Terry dared to publish Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Donna Przybylowitz founded the journal Cultural Critique, which published some of my most important early pieces. Most important, I met Robert Walser at Minnesota at the moment when I first decided I should incorporate jazz and rock into the twentiethcentury segment of the music history survey. I had managed to live the previous forty years of my life without paying attention to pop music, and I relied on Rob to teach me how to do this without making a total fool of myself. We have been together since 1986 and have blazed many new trails we never could have foreseen. I cannot leave my Minnesota phase without mentioning the colleagues who worked with me as performers. Chris Kachian, Merilee Klemp, Randall Davidson, and I formed an early-music ensemble we called Antiquarian Mofos. Strangely enough we stopped getting gigs when a hapless interviewer on NPR asked what a “mofo” was—and we answered her question. To my great surprise, I also got swept up in

x   |   Acknowledgments

the experimental theater scene in the Twin Cities. Matthew Maguire of Creation Company invited me to serve as dramaturg for his Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, and Patty Lynch guided me through the stage direction for my Susanna Does the Elders, underwritten by the Minnesota Composers Forum in 1987. In the late 1980s I met Philip Brett, Joseph Kerman, and Richard Taruskin, the Berkeley trio who have stood as crucial interlocutors for over twenty years. Philip Brett was trying to formulate gay music criticism when I was struggling with feminist theory. I was privileged to have him as a colleague at UCLA only one year before his premature death. He is my model for humane political activism. I am grateful to the Berkeley faculty for inviting me to deliver the Bloch Lectures in 1993, and the ideas developed in Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form permeate this present book. Rob and I moved to California in 1994. At UCLA I had the privilege of working with Peter Reill, then director of the Center for Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Studies. Several of the chapters included in this book started life as presentations at the Clark Library, and even those written first for other venues received intellectual inspiration from the Center’s conferences. A year after I arrived at UCLA I was the happy and surprised recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. The resulting boost in confidence gave me the courage to return to my long-abandoned work on modal theory and seventeenth-century music. I was sustained by many colleagues and friends in Los Angeles: Mitchell Morris, Roger Bourland, Joanne Jubelier, Sara Melzer, the late Robin Shlien, and Nicholas Entrikin. In July 2011, I joined the faculty at Case Western Reserve University, where my new intellectual community includes Georgia Cowart, Ross Duffin, Daniel Goldmark, and David Rothenberg. My ideas concerning seventeenth-century music have benefited greatly from exchanges with other scholars working in this same area, especially Gary Tomlinson, Wendy Heller, Martha Feldman, Kate van Orden, Georgia Cowart, Eric Chafe, Louise Stein, Suzanne Cusick, and Ellen Rosand. Quite recently I have found myself welcomed into the music-theory community, and I owe much to intense theory conversations I have had over the years with Leonard Meyer, David Lewin, Bill Caplin, Michael Cherlin, Robert Gjerdingen, and Thomas Christensen. Both the Orpheus Academy in Ghent and the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory have invited me to present my theoretical work in resi-

Acknowledgments   |   xi

dencies, and Wayne Alpern has included me among the workshop leaders for the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory. Whereas many scholars teach to support their research, I have always written in order to have the privilege of teaching, and I have developed most of my ideas though interactions with students. I cannot mention all the students who have influenced my work over the years, but I will list at least some without whom I could not have formulated this book: David Ake, Paul Attinello, Kate Bartel, Marcel Cobussen, Stuart De Ocampo, Barbara Engh, Daniel Fritzen, Daniel Goldmark, Namhee Han, Gordon Haramaki, Marischka Hopcroft, Ljubica Ilic, Christopher Kachian, Loren Kajikawa, Maiko Kawabata, David Kopplin, Julia Koza, Erik Leidal, Julianna Lindberg, Jeremy Mikush, Elizabeth Morgan, Thomas Nelson, Stephan Pennington, John Richardson, Marianna Ritchey, Ryan Rowen, Grace Tam, Janika Vandervelde, Eric Wang, Jacqueline Warwick, Bruce Whiteman, and Lawrence Zbikowski. University of California Press has published two of my previous books, and I cannot imagine trusting anyone but Mary Francis with my efforts. Infinitely patient and encouraging, though stern when she finds it necessary to curb some of my impulses, Mary has taken a chance on this, yet another of my tomes. My readers, Georgia Cowart and Robert Gjerdingen, offered sage advice and helped me to eliminate at least some of the gaffes it had in its prior versions. I was fortunate to have Kate Warne, Sharron Wood, and Eric Schmidt working closely with me on production. •

•

•

Over the course of the last fifteen years, I have had the honor of counting the late Christopher Small among my dearest friends. I wrote much of this book in Sitges, Catalonia, where Chris lived with his partner, the late Neville Braithwaite. Like many musicians concerned with the endeavor Chris termed “musicking,” I have been greatly influenced by his work and humane example, which deepened the philosophical and ethical dimensions of my work. I dedicate this book to the memory of Christopher Small—a great thinker, educator, musician, and mensch. Cleveland Heights, October 2011

This page intentionally left blank

Their world fell into disarray. An earlier generation had acted out impudently against what it had dismissed as stifling but immutable certainties. Now such certainties as they could muster had to be fabricated out of rhetorical gesture. Assurances of continuity evaporated, replaced by feeble assertions linking cause with effect, God with Man, ruler with ruled. They pinned their hopes on air by means of sound, the most ephemeral of media. But the arcs they created between agitation and delayed repose traced patterns to which they clung when all else so evidently failed. The seventeenth century sustained itself on gossamer threads of its own manufacture, a network reliant for its power on simulations of pleasure and desire. We—their children who still inhabit the modern world they ushered in, with all its arrogance and anxiety— prefer to hear their devices as natural and universal. I understand them as smoke and mirrors, the scant comforts of a society grown too cynical for the fairy tales (scriptural or scholastic) of its forebears. This book concerns some very sophisticated whistling in the dark. S. M.  

 

This page intentionally left blank

Prelude The Music of Pleasure and Desire

Historians like to study blocks of time demarcated in terms of centuries. To be sure, political and cultural events rarely accommodate themselves to the arbitrary rolling over of a fresh set of zeroes. Yet our love for this mode of classification leads us to accept as reasonable such unlikely designations as “the long eighteenth century”—a period that lops past its proper edges to colonize the late 1600s and early 1800s; it also predisposed many of us to approach with apocalyptic dread the advent of the year 2000. Early modern music history, however, graciously obliged this craving for tidy calendrical boundaries, for right on the downbeat of the year 1600—as though motivated by digital clockwork—the priorities of European musical processes changed radically and permanently. The ensuing aesthetic debates and the fierce quarrels over rightful claims to invention testify to the fact that musicians recognized immediately at least some of the profound implications of these innovations. But even the most prescient of cultural observers in the early seventeenth century could not have anticipated that audiences four hundred years later would still reside comfortably inside the genre labels—opera, sonata, symphony, concerto, cantata, oratorio—that suddenly popped up like mushrooms after a rainstorm; nor that music theorists would come to construe their still-controversial rhetorical devices as, quite simply, the way music is supposed to go; nor that a culture industry (e.g., sound recording, motion pictures) based on technologies unimaginable at the  

 

 

 

 

1

2   |   Prelude

time would thrive on the musical language and marketing strategies they first developed. On The Jackie Gleason Show, comedian Frank Fontaine used to play an intelligence-challenged character named Crazy Guggenheim. In one of his sketches, Crazy impersonated Columbus as a schoolboy, boasting in response to queries about his career aspirations, “When I grow up, I’m gonna ’scover ’merica!” Pseudo-Columbus then went on to describe in enthusiastic detail the United States of the 1950s, which served as Crazy’s only point of reference. To latter-day music lovers who treasure Mozart’s enactments of Enlightenment reason, the motivation for the sudden changes in musical style in 1600 may seem self-evident: the madrigal composers of the late Renaissance had decided they wanted to ’scover tonality, as though they could discern already in their minds’ ears the monuments of Lutheran faith produced by J. S. Bach, the tumultuous symphonic narratives of Beethoven, the ravishing bel canto arias of Bellini, the heartbreaking leave-taking of fin de siècle Mahler. But no more than the young Columbus could Jacopo Peri or Claudio Monteverdi have foreseen the eventual consequences of their relatively slight shifts in emphasis. Indeed, far less than Columbus (who at least knew of the riches potentially awaiting him in Asia) did these composers concern themselves with the possible long-term ramifications of their explorations. If a teleological version of music history tends to distort the motivations and accomplishments of these heroic innovators, it damages even more the denizens of the following few generations: those who inhabited a time frame we have long characterized as “no longer /  not yet,” who had at their disposal all the tools they needed to create the Brave New World but who somehow failed to ’scover ’merica—to produce tonality as we know it today. We sigh impatiently at the primitive imperfections of pieces that continue to fall into modal potholes, that cannot sustain a key area for more than a couple of measures, that still rely on verbal texts to provide them with their formal structures. And we long for the appearance of repertories with sufficient tonal integrity to allow for genuine analysis. This book offers another set of approaches to the music of early modern Europe. Those antiquarians who have read my very old dissertation will recognize many of its themes: a belief in the efficacy of modal theory for the analysis of sixteenth-century and much of seventeenthcentury music; a concern with accounting for the precise changes that took place between repertories based on modal syntax and the logic of seventeenth-century musical procedures; and an overriding insistence  

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   3

on the historicity of “tonality.”1 At the time I wrote my dissertation I prided myself on the “hard-core” theoretical orientation of my work, and I worked hard to present my findings in the objective style then de rigueur for academic success. But, as Petrarch writes at the beginning of his Rime sparse, I was then in part another man than I am now.2 Beginning with my introduction (thanks to Rose Rosengard Subotnik) to the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault, I learned ways of addressing questions concerning the kinds of relationships between culture and music that had hovered beyond my methodological grasp. A bit later, feminist theory offered me many of the techniques I needed to interrogate such obvious (if still unspoken) dimensions of seventeenth-century repertories as desire, pleasure, gender, sexuality, the body, and emotions—all of them now widely understood as culture-specific rather than trans­ historical, all of them now fundamental terrains for scholarly research rather than “subjective” distractions. The late poet and theorist Audre Lorde claimed that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”3 I didn’t plan to bring down the house, but I did want to gain access to some of its cordoned-off rooms. The tools made available by feminism helped me to unlock the doors.4 I already had some inkling, however, of what I would find behind those doors. Long before feminist theory bestowed legitimacy on the study of pleasure and desire, I had resolved to focus my efforts on seventeenth-century music precisely because it was quite simply the sexiest music I had ever heard. Of course, my musicological training prohibited me from speaking publicly about such matters: the sensual power of this music had to remain the big unstated motivation behind all my quotations from Zarlino, my theoretical formulations, my desiccated charts that intended to capture the Syntactical Essence of those overheated madrigals and operatic duets. It was because I had experienced the music’s extravagant power that I cast aside all advice or readers’ reports cautioning me that “this music does not yet work.” Together with my graduate school colleagues Melissa Black Cox and Lisa Goode Crawford I could revel in the astonishing eroticism of Schütz or Frescobaldi; at the typewriter, however, I pulled the requisite long face and wrote of diapente descents. So here is the book I wanted to write, with all the music’s graphic imagery discussed without apology. Still, I am not so entirely different a man that I want to leave theory and analysis behind. A large part of my purpose here involves trying to account for the procedures of unfamiliar repertories and the mechanics  

4   |   Prelude

of style change. To be sure, others have addressed such issues. When I first embarked on this project a good forty years ago, I had close at hand Carl Dahlhaus’s then-recent book on the emergence of harmonic tonality.5 For all its obvious erudition, Dahlhaus’s project seems to me teleological in its approach; it presupposes eighteenth-century procedures as the goal toward which European music was developing and attempts to find similar configurations in earlier repertories. Such an approach may appear to find evidence of progress in one piece but then must consider those on adjoining pages in the same manuscript as incoherent. I have never found this method satisfactory. The late Harold S. Powers, long regarded as the principal authority on modality, also dealt extensively with questions of this sort. He did not, however, acknowledge modes as viable compositional frameworks for sixteenth-century polyphony and offered in their place his own theory of “tonal types” for purposes of consistent classification.6 Yet tonal types get one no further than the ability to label a particular composition as belonging to one category or another; they may help explain the rationales behind modally arranged collections, but they do not allow for the analysis of a piece as an internally coherent entity; indeed, Powers rejected quite vehemently the possibility of engaging critically with music from before the later seventeenth century. As was evident from my previous book, Modal Subjectivities, I disagree fundamentally with Powers’s premises—as, indeed, he did with mine.7 I regard the versions of mode presented in Renaissance treatises as providing a more-than-adequate basis for critical analysis and interpretation of the music they seek to illuminate, and I do not believe we can account for the developments manifested by repertories of the seventeenth century without having a firm grasp of sixteenth-century practice as coherent for their own cultural purposes. Nor does Eric Chafe, whose work on Monteverdi closely resembles my own in many respects.8 At the same time, I am not offering here a study in the history of music theory, even though I have the highest respect for that enterprise.9 For seventeenth-century treatises do not address most of the questions I wish to pose—questions undeniably related at least as much to present-day cultural concerns as to those of the past. Gary Tomlinson has warned us (and sometimes me specifically) of the ethical problems involved with interpreting the work of those who can no longer answer for themselves, and many scholars of seventeenth-century music avoid dealing with the music at all.10 In their preface to the recent Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, for instance, Tim Carter and  

 

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   5

John Butt explain that their invaluable resource of nearly six hundred pages has no music examples or analyses, in part to conform to the other volumes in this series, but also to open this period to “the cultural conversations of its time and of ours.”11 The treasure trove of information and insights in Carter and Butt’s collection testifies to the efficacy of this approach, as do the insights presented by Tomlinson and many others, and the chapters in this volume will also necessarily grapple with contextual issues. But my chapters concentrate as well on the music itself, which has long posed difficulties (sometimes unacknowledged) in our ability to assess and understand seventeenth-century repertories. I engage in analysis not for the mere sake of analysis, but rather because I believe that musical scores qualify as crucial repositories of evidence for anyone seeking to understand the people who lived in another time and place. More concretely than verbal documents, music can grant us at least provisional access to a period’s assumptions concerning temporality, affect, the body, the divine, sexuality, sociality, ethics, and selfhood. In short, taking such traces seriously is my way of honoring the Other. Those bizarre pitch configurations and erratic shifts between open-ended sections that consternate latter-day musicologists are not simply perverse displays of baroqueness; they were calculated to produce immediate and powerful effects in listeners of their own time. Inasmuch as some (but by no means all) of the experimental structures of feeling developed during this period eventually became solidified into something we call tonality, then it behooves us as cultural historians to grasp how these functioned when they first appeared and why they mattered. But we must also attend seriously to contemporaneous compositions—often by the same composer and within the same collection—that pursue strategies significantly different from those that sound tonal to us. I hope to be able to offer theoretical models that allow for a consistent approach to a wide variety of styles. I also engage with analysis because of my long-standing concern with performers, who need to be able to deal critically with scores as they go about their business of converting the dots on the page into dynamic sound. I have spent much of my career as a coach, pointing out in rehearsal which configurations qualify as normative within a given style and which count as disruptive, thereby helping interpreters to arrive at effective renditions. As we shall see, many features that strike us as unusual to us today—for example, the absence of consistent leading tones—were standard practice at the time, whereas a cadence on the  

 

 

 

6   |   Prelude

dominant in an Aeolian piece (a maneuver we now accept as perfectly ordinary) often qualified as violent transgression. I spend a good deal of this book discussing musical details of this sort because musicians at the time produced their meanings and rhetorical effects through such strategies, many of them no longer legible to us today. My broader claim is that the history of musical syntax cannot be understood apart from the effects it was designed to produce at various moments in history.12 During the seventeenth century, pleasure, desire, and the body became crucial preoccupations in most cultural enterprises, and the music of this period yields innumerable simulations of precisely these qualities, even if treatises do not address them (the silence of seventeenth-century writers concerning these issues should not seem surprising; after all, musicologists only began acknowledging these elements in the 1990s). Yet such simulations cannot be treated as essences to be perceived directly from the notated scores that bear their traces; they stand rather as highly mediated cultural configurations, themselves further mediated by the properties of the styles through which they receive their particular articulations. Thus, for instance, Monteverdi’s swerve into Marinist decadence is relevant not only to the poetry he chose to set but also to the grammar of his compositions (see chapter 2). In other words, when it comes to accounting for seventeenth-century music, no sex without theorizing—but also no theorizing without sex. Or at least desire. I will argue over the course of this book that the single most important technological innovation in music of the seventeenth century—in Italy and all its international copycats, at any rate— involves the simulation of desire. This is not to suggest that desire entered into music only around 1600. It stands as one of the priorities of the sixteenth-century madrigal, for the classic polyphonic madrigal treats desire in myriad ways in the contexts of intricate tailor-made allegories.13 As I demonstrated in my chapter “The Desiring Subject, or Subject to Desire” in Modal Subjectivities, Jacques Arcadelt singlehandedly produced many different versions: “O felic’ occhi miei” construes desire as a passion that causes lofty reason to collapse in response to the demands of the lower body, while “Ahime, dov’ è ’l bel viso” grounds its universe on a pitch that (like the deceased beloved) remains permanently beyond reach.14 Yet none of these corresponds to the teleological urges whipped up to simulate desire in later musics, beginning quite abruptly around 1600. Why did cultural notions of desire change so radically and so quickly? If we cannot easily answer that question,  

 

 

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   7

we can certainly trace the ways musicians worked to produce this sudden transformation in their responses to texts or dramatic situations. As is the case with most apparently cataclysmic shifts in culture, the radical style changes in seventeenth-century music involved the subtle redeployment of elements that had been lying close at hand for generations. Foremost among these was the leading tone, the artificially raised scalar seventh degree that enhances the expectation of and longing for cadential arrival. Over the course of the seicento, composers converted this mechanism into the very foundation of their musical language, thereby ushering in new desire-saturated conceptions of the self, the body, sexuality, religious devotion, and—perhaps most important—temporality. Eventually this procedure would inform all Italianate music, whether the lyrics refer to love or not. Indeed, it made textless instrumental music viable, and it would eventually come to sustain the nineteenth-century symphony as well as our present-day vernacular musics. The history of the leading tone remains somewhat clouded by its long-term status as “musica ficta,” a theoretically irrational inflection not designated in the written score but added on the basis of oral tradition by knowledgeable performers per causa pulchritudinis, for the sake of beauty. The musicological search for the elusive leading tone encounters many frustrations, including the fact that different regions evidently held different standards of pulchritude: Renaissance Spaniards seem to have adored sticking such spiky ornaments all over their music, while Germans proved stingy, reserving their sharps for the purpose of marking only the strongest cadences.15 Because these inflections rarely show up in part-book notation, they went undetected in preparations of the first musicological editions, and old performances of Renaissance music often sounded the uninflected seventh degrees of the original scores, producing the archaic sound still beloved of period-film soundtracks, folk revival ballads, and even heavy metal.16 But European musicians had made regular use of leading tones at cadences at least as far back as the fourteenth century, when they preferred even to double their pleasure with raised seventh and fourth degrees: a singularly astringent sound that urgently catapults all musical activity onto the awaiting perfect consonances of the open fifth and octave. Thus although the leading tone itself counted as nothing new by 1600, it still appeared only when the contrapuntal configuration announced an impending cadence. Yet far from betraying a faulty sense of musical  

 

8   |   Prelude

propriety, the restriction of leading tones to cadences allowed for the greater cultivation of simultaneous multiple meanings than is typical or easily achieved within standard tonal practice. As I argued throughout Modal Subjectivities, the superimposed linear patterns characteristic of sixteenth-century composition operate with tremendous subtlety to draw the ear here, then there, constantly suggesting but rarely divulging their allegiances until absolutely necessary. It could be argued, in fact, that the continual presence of leading tones in subsequent musics betrays an intolerance on the part of later composers and listeners for ambiguity, paradox, and shaded nuance. Tonality insists that we must mean what we say,17 in contrast with the veiled utterances cultivated in the aristocratic hothouse environments of the Northern Italian courts within which the polyphonic madrigal flourished. The question I want to pose is not why it took so long for musicians to figure out how to discover tonality, but rather why—given the extraordinary sophistication of their musical procedures—they suddenly decided to alter their orientations so radically. What, precisely, did the consistent leading tone offer that it managed to displace the complex practices of the High Renaissance? I do not believe that it makes sense to imagine these musicians and their audiences sacrificing their own modus operandi in the interest of later generations of Mozart lovers who would called them blessed; not until well into the twentieth century did composers posture as research and development agents, experimenting for the future good of humankind. Except in very rare situations, we should assume that musicians produce the kind of music that appeals to them and those for whom they write and perform. It is the job of historians to reconstruct the contexts within which those preferences prevailed and made sense. And no one in the early seventeenth century sought to invent a new theoretical abstraction. I would go so far as to assert that the principal motivation behind most of the innovations we will examine is not pitch per se but rather temporality; pitch may supply the materials needed for sculpting new ways of experiencing time and affect, but it might be better compared with the marble from which Michelangelo worked than with his astonishing artistic effects. Put quite simply, composers in the early seventeenth century harnessed the leading tone in order to create extended trajectories of desire. If the leading tone heralds expected closure, then damming up that expectation can produce a long-term cadential effect. As soon as the leading tone appears, the ear (even more so the relatively unjaded  

 

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   9

Renaissance ear) anticipates its implied resolution. A single pitch—the designated tonic toward which the leading tone points—becomes an object of desire, the demand for which can be sustained and intensified for as long as the leading tone pushes and the arrival is resisted. The myriad styles of the 1600s qualify as diverse implementations of this new technology, which rapidly transformed virtually all existing procedures into new shapes and forms. But why? What was it about this new technology that so appealed at this moment in history? Or, to pose the question from a slightly different angle, why was the musical simulation and manipulation of desire so attractive to early modern culture? The romantic who conceives of eros as standing in opposition to institutional power might jump to the conclusion that this music was subversive. And, indeed, the harangues of Monteverdi’s nemesis Giovanni Maria Artusi or French Absolutist proscriptions of Italianate music would seem to support such a position.18 Yet such an interpretation would not help us understand why both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as well as the Medici court, embraced these musical strategies, wielding them for their own political purposes. Over the course of this book I examine several seventeenth-century repertories, locating each within a network of cultural agendas and also demonstrating how each deploys the musical devices at hand to produce particular effects. I harbor no naïve illusions about metaphysical “presence” in the music; I am not searching, in other words, for some kind of absolute meaning when I scrutinize scores, nor do I claim to have the only correct way of approaching these repertories. But music articulates more vividly and with greater specificity than any other cultural medium the constructions of subjectivities, bodies, genders, temporalities, and emotions available at any given time, and musicological training can give us access to an invaluable repository of human knowledge. I want to bring the particularities of the music together with these historical issues. Throughout this study I continually relativize standard tonality, often emphasizing its limitations as much as its capabilities. I do this not for the sake of cultural relativism, but rather for the purpose of comprehending more fully some of tonality’s Others: the music of the sixteenth century, the “no longer / not yet” strategies of the 1600s, the post-tonal and neo-tonal styles of our own time. And, strange to say, I also query tonality partly in order to appreciate what remain perhaps the least understood of musics—the repertories of the later seventeenth  

 

 

10   |   Prelude

and the eighteenth centuries that finally manifested common-practice procedures. For at the very moment when our evolutionary theories finally proclaim the arrival of tonality, musicologists by and large find themselves unable to say much more than: “Yep, it’s tonal all right!” This fact was brought home to me forcefully a few years ago when I reviewed a scholarly edition of some early eighteenth-century sonatas, introduced with an essay offering lavish biographical information and only the most meager statistical account of the music (i.e., the average number of bars per movement). Bereft of the (not yet tonal) eccentricities of the previous generation but yet lacking the rebellious deviations of incipient Romanticism, this repertory regularly receives bland C+ grades at the hands of historians; it registers as competent though utterly devoid of imagination.19 In other words, our a priori assumption of tonality as a self-evident goal also hampers our ability to deal with the thing itself when it finally does appear. This methodology offers no insights into why musicians and their audiences might have preferred these particular procedures over the ostentatiously “baroque” strategies of their forebears—unless, that is, one wants to posit an early eighteenth-century listener sighing with relief, “Thank God, it’s finally tonal!” I don’t think so.  

•

•

•

Although I am concerned with tracing the development of certain musical devices, I also wish to examine the cultural constructions of human subjectivity during the seventeenth century, thereby continuing the project presented in Modal Subjectivities and elsewhere.20 As I mentioned briefly above, I do not want to underestimate the degree of mediation posed by musical processes between any given articulation and “reality.” First, musical styles have their own internal priorities—indeed, ones that shifted with dizzying rapidity over the course of this period. Put differently, we do not have a transparent or steady lens through which to observe; we have still to learn how to accommodate ourselves to the basic syntactical assumptions and expressive conventions of those various moments, even as we attempt to discern their content. Moreover, we have only inert, silent scores from which to operate. Imagine if we were to try to reconstitute the power of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” on the basis of a bare transcription without ever having heard his implausible sexual persona or his manic delivery! We must bear in mind the far greater challenge we face with seventeenth-century  

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   11

music, given our temporal and cultural remoteness from that era and the complete absence of sonic evidence or native informants who could help us ground the music in experiential or insider terms. Many of the figures who most influenced the course of performance practices during this period (e.g., Giulio Caccini, François Couperin) stated forthrightly in their prefaces aimed at contemporaneous musicians that notation could not properly convey their artistry, that would-be emulators would need to hear them in person. Johann Jacob Froberger even resisted allowing his music to circulate, so sure was he that the uninitiated performer would make a travesty of it. Finally, the repertories of the 1600s no less than musics today were open to a wide range of potential interpretations. If moments of ideological contestation (e.g., Artusi versus Monteverdi, France versus Italy) offer some of our most valuable verbal information, they also point to the instability of intended meanings. From our own vantage point nearly four hundred years later—with our ears accustomed to Beethoven, Debussy, Ligeti, Coltrane, and Missy Elliot—we must acknowledge the hopelessness of any attempt at recapturing it “as it really was.” No hermeneutic method, regardless of its sophistication, can bring back that world in anything like its original condition. Yet we too often give up right at the outset, permanently daunted by the formidable obstacles that stand between us and absolute knowledge. For there exists a wide spectrum between the poles of the relatively scanty amount of concrete information we now possess and the impossible goal of completely reconstructing a vanished culture. If we can never know it all, we can surely get a good deal closer than we do at present. Consequently, I quite resolutely rush in where postmodernists fear to tread—not because I don’t know any better (I have read all those books, too), but because I believe that many of the theories intended to signal caution have been construed as excuses for not even attempting to understand cultural artifacts and practices.21 And far too much of our own prior history resides in the music of the 1600s to declare it off-limits for reasons of methodological undecidability. It is, for instance, in the burgeoning opera of this period that representations of gender first become a central (if curiously unspoken) concern of European composition. Although some of the types presented in early opera persist to our own day, many do not; in fact, a rather different, often alien economy of gender becomes apparent as one studies these works, proving not only the constructedness of their notions of gender, but also—given that notions of universality cannot embrace  

 

 

 

12   |   Prelude

both worlds—ours. Moreover, even if there always exists a discrepancy between the theatricalized representations that circulate in a society and actual lived behaviors, those images still bear some relationship to the ideologies of those who produced and witnessed them. If we cannot read cultural texts as cold, objective evidence of everyday reality, we can still glean a good deal about a historical moment—its fantasies, projections, comic exaggerations, and anxieties—by studying them. As I claimed above in the brief sketch of leading-tone effects, much of the music of this period focuses on images of desire. Yet seventeenthcentury conceptions of desire do not always coincide with our own— neither in their musical structures (what does desire sound like?) nor in their social locations (in what contexts is the simulation of desire an admissible or legitimate impulse?). Musicologists have little difficulty identifying the exchanges between Monteverdi’s Nero and Poppea as libidinal, especially when buttressed by Tacitus’s explicit historical account of their lurid affair and a libretto dripping with sexually explicit language. But what of the church music of this period, much of which exceeds in its passionate expressions of desire even the staged encounters between profane lovers? And what of textless (some have claimed “defenseless”) keyboard toccatas and violin sonatas? I will argue in this book that desire mechanisms pervade and animate even those (to us) unlikely repertories. Tracing the implications of these patterns points to a culture even less like our own than we may have previously imagined: a world in which mysticism draws heavily on metaphors of sexual ecstasy for communication, in which the aggressively voiced violin replaces the genteel viol as a stand-in for the human soul. Over the course of the seventeenth century, music was frequently the focus of debates concerning the body and its proper deployment or about newly minted theories of affect.22 Most important, it began to produce vastly different ways of experiencing time, sometimes resembling the dizzying distortions of fun-house mirrors, though eventually stabilizing into the linear models most often identified with modernity. In short, these various aspects of the music contribute—and contribute quite self-consciously—to the constitution of new subjectivities, perhaps the most important single cultural project at any given moment. Yet all of these enterprises unfolded under the attentive ears of ecclesiastical, aristocratic, commercial, and state powers, institutions that cared deeply about the kinds of representations that circulated and the kinds of subjects likely to be produced through these aurally simulated subjectivities. As José Antonio Maravall has argued in his Culture of  

 

 

 

 

 

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   13

the Baroque, the artworks produced in the seventeenth century operated quite unapologetically as propaganda for the purposes of securing the emerging centralized state, shoring up public confidence in a divided and weakened church, and making commercially viable the kinds of entertainments formerly nurtured within the rapidly declining courts.23 If many of the images produced at the time now seem startlingly uninhibited, that very quality more often than not contributed to the changing strategies of control and influence implemented by those in charge. Thus far I have addressed only the “desire” part of my title, in part because of the centrality of mechanisms devised to simulate this particular quality to the history of music as we usually regard it. But pleasure also played a crucial role in seventeenth-century cultures and their repertories; this was, after all, the great moment of libertine movements. From the poet Giambattista Marino and the Accademia degli Incogniti, which fostered Venetian opera, to the French dissidents at the end of the century, artists celebrated in their imagery the unbridled pursuit of both illicit desires and sensual indulgence.24 Sometimes desire and pleasure complemented each other or were treated as virtually interchangeable. In many of the repertories we will examine, however, pleasure seems to have been considered antithetical to desire, for the two conditions often provoked quite different musical strategies. When Cavalli’s Giasone, for instance, can no longer muster the energy necessary for ardent lovemaking, he falls back to wallow in passive jouissance (see chapter 4 and the postlude). The myriad ostinato-based pieces that emerged during this period maintain by definition a single, immutable state that may register ecstasy, as in the final duet in L’Incoronazione di Poppea (see chapter 3), or inconsolable grief, as in laments; in either case, they refuse the option of progressive action in favor of prolonged, yet affectively heightened, stasis. And the dances written for festivities at the French court cultivate images of timeless pleasure in self-conscious contrast to future-oriented impulses that might detract attention from an infinitely sustained condition of plenitude (see chapters 7 and 9). In fact, many of the compositions examined in this book will move back and forth between these poles, as they now strain forward toward goals, now fall back in satiated bliss; one of the most disorienting dimensions of Monteverdi’s Book VII involves his willingness to interrupt trajectories of desire for extended passages of hedonistic ecstasy (see chapter 2). If desire and pleasure often find themselves at odds in the music of this period, both qualify as highly charged erotic states, ways of expe-

14   |   Prelude

riencing the body and agency itself. And both prove indispensable for our understanding of how seventeenth-century music works. •

•

•

I originally planned to begin Desire and Pleasure with an opening chapter that examined a series of sixteenth-century madrigals, selected in part on the basis of their wide circulation in anthologies compiled both then and now. I hoped thereby to demonstrate that Renaissance practices needed no improvement, that they worked perfectly well to satisfy the aesthetic demands of the time, which were formidable (their patrons and audiences were, after all, the same as those who commissioned the works of Michelangelo and Shakespeare). But although the chapter got longer and longer, it still seemed to me too brief to do justice to the task at hand. Eventually it turned into a whopping nine-chapter book by itself, Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal. Modal Subjectivities thus serves as a prequel to Desire and Pleasure, which tracks the emergence of a particular set of devices (some of them later codified as “tonality”) and attempts to understand why these devices might have seemed advantageous for specific kinds of cultural work. For modal polyphony did not disappear over the course of the seventeenth century because of inherent shortcomings; indeed, the last decades of the previous century had only revealed its astonishing flexibility, complexity, and sophistication. In other words, the traditional teleological answer to why musical practices changed so radically in the 1600s simply makes no sense once we take the trouble to learn to follow the premises of the former repertory. This style wasn’t broke; there was no reason to fix it. And yet music history has rarely witnessed such a thorough transformation as that which occurred during this period. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, the principles of modal polyphony continued to govern most repertories for several decades after 1600. If we throw away or choose not to learn those principles, we will have a difficult time understanding compositions from the first half of the seventeenth century as anything but half-incoherent hodgepodges. And we will also fail to understand the relationships between earlier procedures and those that coalesced into the standard practices we now regard as the way music is supposed to work. I have divided this book into five sections. I label the first “The Hydraulics of Musical Desire” after Descartes’ technology-inspired models for explaining affect. The two chapters in this section concentrate heavily on issues connected with syntax and formal strategies,

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   15

largely because I cannot deal satisfactorily with the expressive or ideological qualities of any of this music without establishing such a foundation. Once I have presented this larger, overarching argument, I will turn to a number of chapters that focus on cultural phenomena as well as on more specific analytical problems. In one of the readers’ reports commissioned by the press, a colleague likened the structure of this book to that of an Oreo, with bitter chocolate cookies on the outside and sweet white filling in the middle. Of course, the reader may choose to pry off the theoretical sections and just consume the chapters less oriented toward analysis, though doing so would make the musical observations less easy to follow when they do crop up. But I regard this first cluster of chapters as crucial not only with respect to problems of grammar but also to understanding the cultural priorities of this tumultuous era. My opening chapter, “The Expansion Principle,” examines a series of pieces that help to illustrate the mechanisms of the change. Although I will deal with each piece within its cultural context and discuss how it produces its effects, this chapter more than any of the others seeks to engage theoretically with alterations in syntax. Chapter 2 turns to the ways these expansion devices operate within the context of multisection pieces, such as continuo madrigals, sonatas, and secular cantatas. The second section of the book deals with the cultural constitution during the seventeenth century of what recently has been too often idealized and reified as a transhistorical essence, “voice.” Chapter 3, “Soprano as Fetish,” traces the contexts within which a craze for female singers emerged in the late sixteenth century and eventually influenced nearly every aspect of music making. Among the most puzzling yet prominent descendants of those women were the castrati, male singers who managed to challenge the apparent monopoly of females to sing in that coveted register. Chapter 4 examines the gender bending that held center stage in the Venetian operas of Cavalli, in part because of the blurring of conventional distinctions between male and female produced by the prominence of soprano masculinities. But opera was not the only domain to offer erotic images strange to our present sensibilities. In an attempt at maintaining the attention of the dwindling number of faithful, the Counter-Reformation Church nurtured the development of music that simulated experiences of divine love, the topic of the third section. Chapter 5 concerns the theological underpinnings of this phenomenon, as well as the ways composers worked to simulate conditions that surpassed the bounds of ordinary

16   |   Prelude

rationality. In chapter 6 I deal with the keyboard toccata, an instrumental genre that pushes simulations of unbridled desire to unsurpassed limits, often in the service of representing mystical transport. The fourth section turns away from these repertories that address “baroque” subjective states and toward the music designed for or related to social dance. Chapter 7 concentrates on the cultural adventures of a crucial genre of the 1600s: the chacona, which came to Europe from the New World by way of the Spanish conquistadors. A remarkably minimalist pattern, the rowdy chacona made its way into Italian high culture, then migrated to France, where it became the very pinnacle of aristocratic poise. The chapter concludes with the most famous product of its rather unlikely career, J. S. Bach’s Ciaccona (the Chaconne) for unaccompanied violin. The eighth chapter takes up the heavily regulated dance forms that appeared in all court cultures but that held a position of particular authority in France. These, too, converged on something we recognize as tonality, though they do so from other directions and under the sway of vastly different cultural priorities. It is in the context of the dance that musicians accept the discipline of going to the dominant for the first repeat sign and coming back to the tonic for the second. This isn’t as obvious a strategy as one might think. How do the modally oriented dance forms of the sixteenth century become the basis of eighteenthcentury sonata procedure? A final cluster of chapters turns exclusively to France. Chapter 9 considers the timeless mode of temporality cultivated in many cultural forms in seventeenth-century France, but with a special focus on the keyboard music of Jean-Henry D’Anglebert. Chapter 10 examines the unexpectedly powerful presentation of women in French opera— femmes fatales who throw off the delights of the pleasure-saturated court and flaunt instead forbidden trajectories of desire. My postlude brings us to the composers who might be regarded as the first champions of tonality: the artists who cemented the standard forms and procedures that underwrote eighteenth-century repertories, thus shutting down the often-wild exuberance of seventeenth-century experimentation. Their choices have appeared overdetermined to those waiting to ’scover ’merica, but they ought to look rather different in light of the earlier chapters of this book. What was at stake in the turn to the conventions of Alessandro Scarlatti’s opera seria, the sonata da chiesa format of Corelli? As a staunch partisan of the 1600s, I find it historically understand 

The Music of Pleasure and Desire   |   17

able but also sad when my favorite tunes get pushed aside for the sake of Enlightenment reason. Please do not assume that I am dismissing eighteenth-century procedures, which I defended at length in “What Was Tonality?” (though I would be less than honest if I didn’t confess my great preference for the still-unstandardized stuff they supplanted). Yet I’m not convinced that we needed tonality to save the musical world. The victors get to write the histories, however, and the eighteenth century—the period fixated on diatonic tonality—managed to disparage the previous century as “baroque,” as misshapen pearls. Not coincidentally, the chaotic political world within which seventeenth-century music unfolded itself also stabilized. Social priorities manifested themselves differently in the procedures honed in the 1700s, and our liberal Enlightenment sympathies tend to regard these transformations as evidence of progress. But tonality’s victory qualified as only partial, even during its zenith. In the second half of the postlude, I examine composers who continued to draw upon elements of mode even after its (to us) more familiar alternatives were fully available. Giacomo Carissimi, for example, structured his oratorios as if they were huge madrigals, with interdependent parts held together allegorically through modal principles. Buxtehude and Bach often turned to older procedures for particular expressive purposes. And in the 1820s, Beethoven famously experimented with what I call the persistence of mode, thereby calling into question the hegemony of diatonic tonality that had dominated eighteenth-century practice. If we take Beethoven’s critiques seriously, we might find that the age of tonality lasted for only about a hundred years, a mere blip on the screen. Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music focuses on the 1600s, and my principal goal is to make this music intelligible. I hope, however, that the book will also encourage us to rethink some of our fundamental assumptions concerning European music in its relationships to culture. Tonality was never the only game in town.  

 

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

The Expansion Principle

The shaping of time counted among the highest priorities for seventeenth-century musicians. Of course, temporality always qualifies as a fundamental dimension of music making. But in the 1600s, composers sought to produce radically new, frequently extravagant experiences of time, alternately expanding and contracting, rushing impetuously forward only to hover in a state of apparent motionlessness. The arrangement of elements we recognize as tonality figured among these, but it often operated within contexts that also encouraged erratic fluctuations or nearly flat, virtually minimalist options. In this chapter, I wish to ask not why musicians persisted in using perverse procedures (the focus of several subsequent chapters), but rather why they occasionally found what we might regard as “tonal” arrangements advantageous. Along the way I will attempt to explain the mechanism that transformed particular modal patterns into tonal configurations. Present-day discussions of early modern music too often bracket off as “tonal” those elements that seem familiar, leaving as “modal” vestiges those passages that do not work according to later premises. As a consequence, many of these compositions appear incoherent—as odd jumbles of progressive and reactionary features. Bear in mind, however, the fact that seventeenth-century musicians continued to make full use of other options long after they had “discovered” the one traced in this chapter; from their vantage point, the resources deployed in sixteenth-century modality and those characteristic of tonality were not mutually exclusive.  

21

22   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

As always, I proceed with the assumption that changes in style and syntax are driven by expressive demands.1 If there exists no abstract reason why tonality should have developed, plenty of historical ones do present themselves, which is why cultural contexts matter even to questions of musical process. Over the course of the seventeenth century, composers assembled the devices at hand in many different ways, only some of which resulted in patterns that sound familiar to us today. Over the course of this book, I will introduce models that allow for cogent, internally consistent accounts of these repertories within their own contexts, paying attention to the aesthetic reasons why the pieces that move in the direction of tonality do so within the framework of their own range of choices. Before we can plunge into what appears to be more familiar territory, we need to ground ourselves in the grammar that musicians around 1600 would have understood as transparent. By tracing transformations in a small sample of modal compositional strategies, I hope in this chapter to throw into relief the changes that occurred within the first decades of the seventeenth century.2 I should warn the reader that this process will require a considerable amount of rewiring. As I have learned through experience in graduate seminars, anyone who simply plugs in Roman numerals during these discussions, dismissing the modal parts as “yadda, yadda, yadda,” will not be able to follow the arguments. Try not to succumb, in other words, to the temptation to read everything as always already (sort of) tonal. •

•

•

I shall begin with a composition that operates entirely according to sixteenth-century modal premises. Giulio Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia bella” would scarcely seem to need an introduction (ex. 1.1a). Initially published in Caccini’s celebrated Le Nuove Musiche of 1601, it quickly became an international hit; a keyboard arrangement by Peter Philips appears, for instance, in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Moreover, it still occupies a place of honor within vocal pedagogy as one of the very first songs typically assigned to voice students. We are so accustomed to seeing it in anthologies for beginners—and to hearing their still-wobbly voices negotiating its melody—that we may think of it as a baby piece. Few other pieces designed for babies, however, include a graphic image of sexual penetration. “Amarilli, mia bella” operates within the Hypodorian mode, trans 

 

E x . 1.1a. Caccini, “Amarilli, mia bella.”

. &b c ú ? cú b

A

-

#ú

ú

ma - ril

ce de-si

-

ú

o,

D'es

11 # 10

6

& b .. ú . Cre

-

di - lo pur,

? b .. ú b Ï Ï

ú

7 6

16

?b

Ï

11

ú.

ú -

-

ser tu

le,

Ï ú

A

-

ú

ú

6

Ï Ï Ï ú 6

-

le,

o.

Pren - di ques-to mio

Ï

ú

#6

e ve - drai scrit-to in co

ú

ú

5

-

Ï . Ïj Ï Ïj # Ïj

j j Ï # Ïj Ïj Ï Ï Ï ú

prim' il pet - to,

w

5 11 # 10 14

w

nÏ Ï ú 7

Ï Ï J J ú

b

Ï

ú

ú

Î # Ïj Ïj

-

re:

ú

Ï ÏÏ ú #

11 10 14

j j j ú. & b ú Ï # Ï . Ï Ï # ú Î Ï Ï n Ï ú n Ï . Ï Ï ú Î # JÏ JÏ 21

ril

-

?b ú ú

-

-

li,

ú

ú

A - ma - ril

ú

-

-

ú

-

bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w

e se ti - mor t'as - sa

#10

dol

Ï Ï ú

l'a - mor mi

ú

ú

ú

mio cor

j Ï Ïj Ï ú

Ï Ï ú

j j Ï Ïj ú ä # Ïj Ïj Ï Ï # Ï ú

11

cre - di, o del

# 10

11

Ï #Ï ú

ÏÏ Ï J

Ï Ï Ï.

bel - la, Non

Ï bÏ ú

ú

? b bÏ Ï Ï Ï ú

stra

li, mia

6

6

&b ú

-

6

& b Ï ÏJ JÏ ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . ÏJ ú

ú #Ï Ï ú

Ï

-

li,

ú ú

A-ma - ril

-

A - ma -

r Ï. Ï J

li è 'l mio a -

#ú ú

(continued)

24   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire 26

2 .. ú Ï Ï n ú Ï Ï n Ï . Ï ú . Ï. nÏ Ï Ï nú Ï Ï nÏ. Ï ú. Ï. nÏ J R 2 J re. .. ú A - Ïma Ï- ril n ú- -Ï Ï n Ï- . Ïli ú R. è 'l mio Ï . naÏ- li è 'l mio a A - ma - ril J R .. ú ú re. ú A Ï- maú Ï- rilÏ - - n-ú li # ú è 'l mio a Ï nú #ú ú# .. ú Ï Ï nú #ú ú ú

2 & b E xw. 1.1a.1 (continued) w . b w . 26 & w ú 1 mo - re. b w w re. mo ?-& ú - re.Ï Ï w b ? b ú Ï Ïmo - - re. .. w 14 # ú 11 # 10 ? ú Ï Ï # 11 10 b14 # w # 1

6

# 10

#

#

Ï & b n Ï . Ï ÏÏ . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w Ï Ï Ï . . Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ w & b n Ï 31 Ï W mo -Ï Ï Ï Ï . . b n-Ï - Ï - Ï- Ï - Ï Ï Ï -Ï Ï -w - re. mo? & Ï b ú .mo - - Ï - - - Ï- Ï - ú W?b Ï Ï ú# ú. ? 11 10 14 Ï Ï Ï #ú # b ú. 11 10 14 31

11

1

14

-

W

WW

re.

-

#

re.

W

# 11 # 10 14 Example 1.1b. Hypodorian Species Examplespecies. 1.1b. Hypodorian Species E x . 1.1b. Hypodorian

ww w w W b ww w Example w 1.1b. Hypodorian Species w & w w ww w w w W w w Octave & b www w Octave w wdividedww at A divided at G b ww at Gw w w Octave w at Aw w w www W divided Octave& divided w Octave divided at G

Octave divided at A

1.1c. "Amarilli," of “Amarilli,” mm. 1–10. E x . 1.1c. Reduction Example

reduction Example 1.1c. "Amarilli," reduction

b w w & Ï Ï5 b w ?&b w w Ï Ï ?b w 5

&b ?b

5

Ï Ï Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï ú Ï 5

4

Ï ú Ï Ï ú

ú3 ú 5 ú(4 3ú) 2 Ï 1Ï ú ú ú 5 ú4 Ï3 Ï ú 5 ú(4 3 ) 2 1 ú ú ú ú ÏÏú ú w ú ú ú úw ú ú ú ú w ú ú ú ú ú

5 4 5 2 4 3 5 (4 3 ) 2 3 Example 1.1c. "Amarilli," reduction

ú2 ú 5 ú 4 ú3 ú 2 5ú 4 Ï ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú Ï Ï ú ú ú 3

1

posed—as it usually is—to G, with Bâ in the key signature. In a plagal mode such as Hypodorian, the octave stretches from the fifth degree of the mode down to the octave below, with the final (marked here as a double whole note) located in the middle of the terrain (see ex. 1.1b). More so even than is typical of pieces in this mode, the melody of “Amarilli” stays almost exclusively within the diapente from D to G; only once does it descend into its diatessaron (the fourth reaching from  

 

The Expansion Principle   |   25

the lower D up to the final, G), but it does so in a most dramatic way. Not only does this move produce a temporary modulation suggesting D as a rival final and A rather than G as the proper divisor of the D octave, but it also produces the effect of penetration mentioned above and discussed in greater detail below. Amarilli, mia bella,

Amarillis, my fair one,

Non credi, o del mio cor dolce desio,

Do you not believe, o sweet desire of my heart,

D’esser tu l’amor mio?

That you are my love?

Credilo pur, e se timor t’assale,

Believe it, though, and if doubt assails you

Prendi questo mio strale,

Take this, my arrow,

Aprim’il petto, e vedrai scritto in core:

Open my breast, and you’ll see written on my heart:

Amarilli è’l mio amore.

Amarillis is my love.

I want to concentrate on the unfolding of Caccini’s melody in “Amarilli,” for that is where his grammar resides. The opening section (ex. 1.1a) presents a series of interrupted descents from D toward G: some of the gestures halt at 3, others at 2, but within a framework that makes its orientation toward G abundantly clear from the outset. The withheld final, G, appears finally only on “mio,” thus matching the rhetorical conclusion of the lyric statement. We are accustomed to tracking melodic trajectories in tonal compositions, of course: think, for instance, of the chorale in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or nearly any hymn or folk tune. But Caccini’s modus operandi differs from these in the relationship between its melody and harmony. From the point of view of functional tonality (the harmony-oriented syntax of later music), “Amarilli” plops into a modal pothole on the word “credi,” and it also seems to vacillate indecisively between G and Bâ as potential key centers. Caccini’s contemporaries, however, would have regarded his harmonies as immediately comprehensible, even transparent in their implications—especially so in the context of the diapente-oriented melody to which they lend their inflections. For nearly every pitch in Caccini’s tune qualifies as a node of crucial modal information, each one confirmed on a one-to-one basis by harmonic support. Thus the move to Fà on “credi” (m. 4) serves within the conventions of the day to put special stress on the descent to scale degree 4 (melodic C), which might otherwise escape  

26   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

notice as a mere passing tone. Moreover, the swerve to Bâ in m. 5 counts among the most powerful means of articulating the top pitch of the G diapente—so common as to sustain a vast body of improvisations (see below, ex. 1.2). Because of this one-to-one relationship between fundamental pitches and harmonic changes, the music remains tethered temporally to the exigencies of the poetic phrases, allowing for an expressive effect Caccini (following Castiglione) called sprezzatura, an attitude of nonchalance or unstudied grace. Each tiny lyrical phrase points in the same direction as the others, but the harmonic choices offer various shades of coloring, a spectrum of accents, before the inevitable final appears. A singer who focuses on that very low level of activity and nuance may hope to pull off that quality of aristocratic ease so valued in the Renaissance courts. To be sure, Caccini makes liberal use of leading tones, though he does so intermittently and always for local purposes rather than as a given of harmonic syntax. For instance, the harmonic Fá marking the very first move ensures that we hear everything at the outset within the context of G, as does the melodic Fá that follows. Indeed, we could consider this first three-bar phrase, with its consistent leading tones, as tonal, though if we were to do so, we would fail to grasp Caccini’s choices as significant. From Caccini’s vantage point, those Fás freeze us into a holding position, as does his choice of weakly voiced chords with Fá and Eâ in the bass, for both of which he designates a sixth (not a solid fifth) above the bass. The opening three bars consequently serve to outline the terrain of the diapente, always pointing through Fá to G as the final yet also delaying any “real” move from the initial modal function, D, the fifth degree. Within the context of “Amarilli,” this strategy counts merely as a short-term special effect, though it is precisely this ability of leading tones to prolong that will open up the new world. And thus the significance of that modal pothole—the emphatic move in the bass to Fà on “credi.” If the first phrase sustains D (despite the apparent mobility of the melodic voice), the appearance of Fà in the bass forcibly pulls the controlling modal line down from D to C, thence to Bâ and the still-unresolved A, all articulated as genuine syntactical moments. Stopping tantalizingly short of the final, G, the melody returns to its opening position in m. 5, now harmonized with a powerful Bâ in the bass. But this time the melodic line halts lovingly (“dolce desio”) on Bâ. At last, with the poetic punch line (“d’esser tu l’amor mio”), Caccini allows for a direct diapente descent all the way from D to G. Note, however, that the quick reference to Fá in the bass in m. 7 holds us up on D,  

 

The Expansion Principle   |   27

while weak harmonies permit the melody to slide unimpeded down to A, which accumulates considerable gravity before it finally resolves to G in m. 10 (see the reduction in ex. 1.1c). I have trudged laboriously through these few bars in order to tease out how Caccini wields the leading tone—and, more important, his other harmonic options—for the purpose of inflecting his melody, most of which remains identical with the generating modal line. He did not write “Amarilli, mia bella” as a theory exercise, however. His melody line flirts and teases, always stopping short just before divulging its secret, each time starting all over again at D but shading its approach differently. If the tortured melodic and harmonic contour of the first phrase underscores the singer’s pathos, the move to C on “credi” insists on his sincerity, and the brief arrival on Bâ pauses to savor Amarilli’s beauty. Only the last phrase completes the message delivered so haltingly with all those fits and starts. Understanding how all these minute details signify can help the performer make this song something other than just a repetitive melody with a modal pothole in the middle. Imagine the late Marlon Brando reciting the opening terzet with his usual self-indulgence, inserting pregnant pauses between each phrase, putting mannered emphasis on the odd word here or there. Caccini’s heavily weighted modal line invites just that kind of rendition. Now for the middle section, beginning in m. 11. Here our speaker becomes more ardent, pleading his case to the point where he offers up an image of masochistic submission. For the purposes of this argument, Caccini alternates between melodic 3 and 2, with leading tones appearing consistently under the second scale degree, heating up the need for some kind of resolution. Yet regardless of the pressure, the second degree remains in place, creating a kind of membrane that resists further action. At last, recalling the opening section’s success with descents from the top of the octave, the melody commences an approach from D on “Aprim’il petto” in m. 17. But when it comes into the vicinity of the barrier pitch A in m. 19, the harmonic Fá (reliable thus far at moments of would-be cadence) suddenly gives away to Fà, thereby reinterpreting A as the fifth degree of the lower D (confirmed by a Cá in the bass). All the urgency aimed at transcending A suddenly breaks through to a terrain of interiority not yet even hinted at. That A becomes the surface of the body opened up for a moment of profound erotic surrender. This moment lasts for only for the duration of three melodic pitches: Fà–E–D. Almost immediately, the speaker seizes onto his beloved’s name  

 

 

 

28   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

and hauls himself hand over fist back to the outside world of the diapente. The ascent requires the assistance of leading tones for what we would call secondary dominants (Bà, Cá), all perfectly available and comprehensible within sixteenth-century modal practice; within this context, they contribute to the impression of intense physical effort. And just in case you thought you had imagined that moment of penetration, Caccini lets us hear the entire sequence again, note for note.3 A brief coda elaborates a major-key plagal (“Amen”) effect with Eà blossoming out on top, before the voice concludes with a chain of ornaments to be executed deep in the back of the throat—a wordless orgasm of sorts. Caccini composed his songs in Le Nuove Musiche within a court context. He had first attracted the attention of patrons as a solo singer in Rome; when he put this collection together, he was affiliated with the Medici cultural establishment in Florence. Just the previous year he had engaged in a sordid squabble over the invention of opera, and he had rushed his own setting of Ottavio Rinuccini’s Euridice into print after he had recognized in Jacopo Peri’s original the wave of the future. In his preface to that publication, Caccini set forth the now-familiar story of the Florentine Camerata as a way of backing up his own claim. Le Nuove Musiche, with its detailed account of Caccini’s celebrated performance style, meant similarly to nail down his right to having developed the new style long before Peri.4 But Le Nuove Musiche principally showcases Caccini’s talents at setting lyrical verse, for which he had few peers. His songs served as vehicles for his own chamber performances, as well as for those of his wife and daughters (including Francesca, a prolific composer in her own right).5 By publishing Le Nuove Musiche he also entered into the burgeoning commercial market, and his songs were evidently sung in households eager to emulate aristocratic culture. Caccini’s versions of temporality, subjectivity, and syntax, however, are identical to those of the court madrigal. As exquisite as these songs certainly are, they do not engage the expansion techniques Peri and others brought to the table.  

•

•

•

In order to track the prehistory of what gave Peri the edge in this competition, we have to turn to improvisatory practices—practices also fundamental to court entertainments, such as instrumental dances or the recitation of epic poems such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. These practices date back to periods during which no one felt the need to notate them, but they begin to appear written out in the “teach yourself to  

The Expansion Principle   |   29

improvise” manuals that proliferated in the second half of the sixteenth century.6 Much like the blues progression of a later time, the formulas that served as the basis for elaboration rely on the most fundamental of patterns: in this case, the diapente descent harmonized in its most powerful and straightforward ways. We know the most popular of these patterns best from “Greensleeves,” sometimes attributed to Henry VIII and sometimes to the unfortunate Anne Boleyn. Like most other aristocratic amateurs at court, Henry and Anne would have known how to ring changes on these familiar formulas, whether or not he or she actually “composed” this particular song. The first part of “Greensleeves” unfolds over a passamezzo antico harmonization of the diapente descent, the second over the romanesca. In each half, the generating descent pauses on 2, then repeats the pattern for a full cadential arrival on the final (ex. 1.2). In the first strain of “Greensleeves,” the passamezzo antico formula harmonizes the fifth degree, D, with the final in the bass, making the mode’s identity fully audible right from the outset. To our ears, the first move in the progression may sound abrupt and archaic: indeed, it presents an instance of parallel fifths. Nonetheless, this progression occurs very frequently in modal music (recall the weighted arrival on scale degree 4 discussed above in “Amarilli, mia bella”), even if composers usually worked to hide the baldness of the parallels.7 The romanesca—represented here by the second strain of “Green­­ sleeves”—differs from the passamezzo antico only in that it leads off by harmonizing the fifth degree with a mediant rather than the final in the bass.8 When the bass moves to Fà this time (in support of the descent to 4), it sounds as if it is establishing Bâ as a tonic—and, indeed, it would have had that implication in the Renaissance as well. The arrival on the third function, however, clarifies the situation by pointing to G as the final. It is crucial to realize that this formula counts as perhaps the most powerful available harmonization of the G Hypodorian diapente descent, and it should not be regarded as simply flipping from one key (Bâ) to another (G).9 Composers chose one or the other of these bass lines on the basis of expressive strategy; but with respect to modal syntax, which is located in the diapente descent, they are virtually interchangeable. What differentiates “Greensleeves” and pieces of this sort from “Amarilli, mia bella” with respect to musical procedure, however, is a new level of melodic activity. Whereas nearly every pitch of Caccini’s tune operates as a full-fledged function in the generating modal line,  

 

 

E x . 1.2. “Greensleeves” (with generating modal line in top staff).

. & b 68 ä ú

ú.

ú.

ú.

j j j j j j .Ï & b 68 Ï Ï ÏJ Ï ÏJ Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ïj Ï Ï A - las my  love, you do me  wrong  to cast me  off dis - cour - teous-ly, for ú. ? b 68 ä ú . ú. ú. . &b ú 5

ú.

Ï.

Ï.

ú.

Ï.

Ï.

ú.

j j j . Ï & b Ï ÏJ Ï ÏJ Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï # Ï . Ï Ïj Ï 5

? b ú. I

9

&b 9

&b

ú. Ï.

have lo -

ú.

. &b ú 13 Ï. b &

ú.

Ï. Ï Ï Ï j Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï. J

Green -  sleeves ? b ú. 13

vŽd you  so long, de - ligh - ting in

ú.

was all

my joy,

ú.

ú.

your com - pa - ny.

ú.

ú.

j Ï. Ï Ï Ï

j Ï Ï.

ú.

Green -  sleeves was   my

Ï.

de - light,

Ï.

ú.

Ï.

ú.

r Ï. Ï Ï Ï j j J R J Ï Ï . Ï Ï ÏJ . Ï Ïj# Ï . Ï Ïj Ï .

Green -  sleeves was my heart ? b ú. ú.

Ï.

j Ï Ï.

Ï.

of gold, ah who but my la -   dy Green- sleeves.

The Expansion Principle   |   31

each move articulated by a new harmony, romanesca formulas present the corresponding functions in the background; over that background progression, the tune we sing as “Greensleeves” flows with rhythmic ease and melodic freedom: it does not, in other words, just hammer down four times through the diapente (as in my reduction line above), but rather spins a graceful, imaginative web. Yet we do not get lost syntactically, for even if we do not hear the generating modal pitches directly, we can rely on the long-standard harmonic pattern to keep us oriented. Note that the harmonies in “Greensleeves” are not, except for the standard cadence formula, “tonal.” What I referred to in the Caccini example as a modal pothole occurs right on schedule here and for exactly the same purpose: to project strongly the descent to scale degree 4 in the generating line. The harmonies still qualify, in other words, as a secondary parameter, as elements that inflect the steps along the modal line. The guidance of the harmonic pattern absolves the singer from having to stick to the literal presentation of the modal line, as in the Caccini. With the more widely spaced harmonic moves, this new melodic line moves around in a relatively relaxed manner; the melodic pitches that emerge to configure the sung tune qualify as ornamental with respect to syntax. The downside (for we always lose something for every advantage in a style change) is that this kind of music making relies heavily on formulas to make sense. Moreover, it depends—like the 12-bar blues— on a pre-set rate of harmonic rhythm: in this case, one change per measure except in the approach to the cadence. But by means of those formulas, the melody of “Greensleeves” can range from its lower D in the first strain to the F a tenth above in the second. Note that we are no longer grammatically required to specify a plagal or authentic arrangement of species, for this mechanism operates solely on the basis of the generating diapente.  

•

•

 

•

Jacopo Peri excelled as an improviser within such formulas. Even his contribution to the 1589 Medici wedding festivities—the lavishly decorated “Dunque fra torbide onde”—operates according to such models, as does the celebrated “Possente spirto” in Monteverdi’s Orfeo.10 When Peri turned his hand to writing the speechlike recitations for Euridice, he brought with him, as though by second nature, this double-level sense of melodic activity, and he used it to produce the highly directed yet easygoing style of recitation that made Euridice a historically sig 

 

32   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

nificant event. As Howard Mayer Brown has demonstrated, Caccini failed to grasp the foundation of Peri’s technique, and his resettings of Rinuccini’s speeches stagnate in rudderless monotony.11 But Monteverdi, an artist then celebrated for his polyphonic madrigals, more than met Peri’s challenge in his Orfeo (1607). A veritable compendium of compositional possibilities available at the moment, this favola per musica boasts every device Monteverdi had ever employed, plus those Peri had introduced onto the stage.12 In contrast to Caccini, Monteverdi managed to figure out how Peri had accomplished his trick. After a prologue, in which he displays his ability to turn out variations over a set formula, he opens his first act with a dazzling instance of the new stile recitativo as a shepherd exhorts his companions to join in celebrating Orfeo’s marriage. In questo lieto e fortunato giorno

On this happy, fortunate day

ch’ha posto fine a gl’amorosi affani

that puts an end to the amorous longings

del nostro semideo,

of our demigod,

cantiam, Pastori, in sì soavi accenti

let’s sing, shepherds, in such sweet accents

che sian degni d’Orfeo nostri concenti.

as will make our strains worthy of Orfeo.

Our shepherd’s speech derives its directionality from Monteverdi’s use of a single diapente descent in the background: the entire statement occurs under the umbrella of that powerful trajectory. In this sense, it merely harnesses the energies available within the familiar romanesca-type formulas to perform its rhetorical task. In contrast to a standard, evenly paced romanesca, however, Monteverdi dictates the rate of change in the background. The kind of melodic flexibility already noted in “Greensleeves” here becomes even more elastic, as the composer determines how quickly to proceed through the standard progression, and the degree of expansion increases enormously. For instance, Monteverdi prolongs the initial fifth degree, A, for more half the length of the entire speech (ex. 1.3). He begins by harmonizing it through alternations between D and A in the bass, thus producing a holding position. No leading tones occur here, for this is not a cadential situation. But that very indeterminacy allows the melodic line to move sometimes through Bâ to circumscribe A as the upper boundary of D (m. 2), at other times through Bà to imply A as a potential final (m. 3).

The Expansion Principle   |   33

Monteverdi’s holding position matches, of course, librettist Alessandro Striggio’s rhetorical ploy, which gets our attention but then defers delivering its message until the arrival of the words “cantiam, Pastori.”13 At this point Monteverdi reharmonizes his still-reigning A with the mediant in the bass, and with this romanesca rendering of the fifth degree he commences his more or less straightforward diapente descent. But, of course, we do not hear this display as compositional experimentation but rather as the speech delivered by a character in a dramma per musica. By means of this quite audacious expansion effect, the shepherd reveals himself as an orator quite worthy of belonging to Orfeo’s entourage. He has not been hanging around with this rhetorical demigod, son of Apollo, for nothing; he has picked up some of the boss’s techniques along the way. Note that I have indicated a potential return to the fifth degree in parentheses in mm. 9–13. And indeed, this monody has a middle section (not shown) that reinterprets the apparent closure of m. 13 as temporary, and it proceeds to explore extensively a much longer series of inflections. Following this section, the portion of the monody displayed as example 1.3 returns for full closure. In other words, the arrival on D in m. 10 can be heard either as a step on its way toward the final or as the reestablishment of the fifth degree, depending on the larger context. But in either case, the fact that the singer returns to a melodic A in mm. 9–10 is not the deciding factor any more than his opening pitch on scale degree 8 determines the grammar of this little piece (recall the similar disengagement between the melodic line of “Greensleeves” and its syntax). Whereas the tune in Caccini’s “Amarilli” also functions as its governing modal line, the shepherd’s tune in “In questo lieto e fortunato giorno” qualifies as a new level of melodic activity over and above the diapente descent that generates it. Orfeo’s wedding song, “Rosa del ciel” (not shown here), begins with an even riskier maneuver in which he addresses an extended apostrophe to the sun over a single sustained pitch in the bass. As I have argued elsewhere, Orfeo thereby commands the very sun (that is, Apollo) to stand still until he releases it with the verb of his main clause.14 The rhetorical control required for meeting this challenge would have translated into personal power in the Renaissance courts that so treasured oratorical skill. We do not have to be told explicitly why Orfeo has acquired so much personal clout: we hear it with our own ears as he sweeps us into his thrall during his wedding vows. Clearly, Orfeo’s deputy—our shepherd who opens act 1 with “In  

 

 

E x . 1.3. Monteverdi, Orfeo, act I, scene 1 (with modal line in top staff).

&c w

Ï Ï Ï Ï &c Î ä J J J ?c w

In que-sto lie

w

-

4

&w

r r r r & Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. ? 7

-

&Ï

ä Ïj Ï .

ú

ú

7

? 10

& ww

w

can-tiam,

?w

ä Ïj Ïj Ïj Ïj j Ï Ï Ï

del nos-tro se - mi - de - o,

w

ú

( úú

ú

w -

j r Ï ä Ïj Ïj Ïj Ï . Ï Ï ri,

ww

in

s“

ú

j j Ï Ï w

che sian de - gni dÕOr - feo no - stri con - cen -

ú

ú

w

ú Ï

so - a - vi ac-cen - ti,

ww )

ww

j n Ï j j Î & Ï Ï Ï Ï JÏ ú 10

w

w

Pas - to

r Ï. Ï J

w

j Ï Ï ú

j Ï ú

n

Ï

to e for - tu-na - to gior - no chÕha pos - to

ne a glÕa-mo- ro - si af - fan - ni

w

&w

Ï Ï Ï . b Ï Ï . Ïj Ï Ï J J J R w

4

fi

w

-

w

- ti.

w

ú

The Expansion Principle   |   35

questo lieto e fortunato giorno”—cannot be allowed truly to rival his mentor, even if his own exhibit of rhetorical prowess identifies him as the spokesperson of the shepherds, as a character with a degree of social prestige second only to Orfeo’s. As Suzanne Cusick and Nina Treadwell have demonstrated, the Medicis were so jealous of the simulation of authority afforded by the stile recitativo that they wanted to be recognized as the source of the energies generated by these devices. Consequently, much of the monodic music produced in their court remains anonymous, making it difficult to establish with certainty who actually composed it.15 The widespread perception of these expansion devices as performances of power explains in large part why such apparently simple mechanisms suddenly took over the whole field. Although they enable a radically new temporality, the harmonic changes in “In questo lieto e fortunato giorno” operate according to modal convention: they still serve to articulate the moves—or to delay motion—in the modal line. Those two opening harmonies that rock back and forth under the sustained modal A do not qualify as tonic and dominant: they are but harmonizations of the fifth scale degree with the final and the fifth degree in the bass. Indeed, the basso continuo refuses to include a leading tone until the penultimate chord for a standard cadential formula.  

 

 

•

•

•

But Orfeo also offers up some genuine instances of what I will count as tonal strategy. Orfeo himself opens act 2 with a little song in which he celebrates his marriage. A dancelike lyrical piece, “Ecco pur” unfolds over an active, rhythmically shifting bass line rather than the sustainednote bass of the shepherd’s speech-oriented “In questo.” Moreover, the harmonies all work to circumscribe a succession of local key areas, each with its requisite leading tone. As it turns out, the succession itself traces the familiar romanesca background. But now each node along the way becomes a tiny key area in its own right (see ex. 1.4). Ecco pur ch’a voi ritorno,

Behold, I return to you,

care selve e piagge amate,

dear woods and beloved hills,

da quel sol fatte beate

made blissful by that sun through which

per cui sol mie notti han giorno.

alone my nights have turned to day.

If “Greensleeves” and “In questo” offered an added melodic level to produce their expansions, “Ecco pur” also presents another level of har-

E x . 1.4. Monteverdi, Orfeo, act II, scene 1 (with background progression in outer staves).

w. w. w. w. & b 32 î j j . . & b 32 Ï Ï ú . Ï Ï . Ï Ï ú Ï ÏJ ú . Ï Ï . Ï ú ú Ï Ï ? 3ÏÏ b 2 w

ú

w.

w.

Ï Ï

Ec-co pur chÕa voi ri - tor-no, ca - re sel - ve e piag-ge a- ma-te, da quel

? 3 î b 2 w. 5

&b

. &b ú ? ú b

sol

? w. b

w. & b w.

ú

? ?

pur

b w

b w.

w

w.

úú

w.

ú

w.

w

w

w.

( úú

j Ï Ï. Ï ú ú Ï Ï ú. Ï Ï. Ï ú ú Ï Ï J ú

Ï Ï

fat - te be - a - te per cui sol mie not-ti han gior - no. Ec-co

w.

ww ..

Ï Ï . Ïj Ï ú .

chÕa voi ri - tor-no,

ú

w

w.

ú

w

w.

9

& b ú.

bú

w.

ww

Ï. Ï ú. J

w

úú

w.

ww )

j Ï Ï. Ï ú

ú

ca - re sel - ve e piag-ge a - ma - te.

bú

ú ú

w

ú ú

w w

The Expansion Principle   |   37

monic activity: one of them still marking the modal progression in the background, the other sustaining each point in the background through cadential harmonies. I will define this particular hierarchical configuration as tonal, insofar as it makes use of circumscriptive chords to sustain each moment along the way in a single, nonredundant teleological progression. In “Ecco pur,” all parameters point forward to implied conclusions: the background to its arrival on the final, the surface harmonies to cadential confirmation of each immediate tonic. However brief this song may be, it operates according to fully tonal premises. Because the background still lies very close to the surface, however, we ought to be able to hear the effort exerted in keeping each moment going until the eventuality of the next. For example, both melody and harmonies strongly suggest closure at the beginning of m. 2. Only the infusion of additional energy produced by the voice’s sudden leap from the final, G, up to D prevents the piece from ending almost before it has begun. Against what Monteverdi stages as great effort, Orfeo’s melody delays the arrival until m. 4: the friction between harmony and melody in mm. 2–3 derives from Orfeo’s resistance to what would otherwise be just a chain of parallel sixths (C/Eâ, Bâ/D, A/C) pulling down forcibly through the diapente to the cadence on G. None of these would qualify as “real” moves in modality, however; they participate as middlelevel devices in the prolongation. Yet rhetorically this passage offers the impression of Orfeo defying even the gravitational pull of cadential harmonies, as he puts a drag on each step, finally allowing the cadence to occur only when he deems fit. A four-measure-long prolongation may not impress us much, given the epic expansions of, say, Bruckner. But it all starts here—with the pitting of cadential harmonies against their own fundamental tendencies. A pattern that arouses the expectation for immediate closure produces a spark of energy that a composer can harness for ever-greater extension. That desire for closure—indeed, the assumption that it always lies nearly within our grasp—cannot be allowed to dissipate; it has to be channeled by means of middle-level tactics such as the ones just discussed until closure is truly granted. Note that the cadential premise always announces itself with the appearance of the leading tone, signaling the arrival on melodic 2 that is poised to descend to 1. Consequently, the double levels already discussed in the previous example appear here as well: although my top line traces the diapente descent that constitutes the backbone of the piece, most of the activity within the closed key areas concentrates on  

 

 

 

38   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

the vacillation between 3 and 2, with the tonic or final withheld until the point of closure. Accordingly, a Schenkerian analyst might well read the opening key area of “Ecco pur” as sustaining 3 rather than 5, as in my reduction—or, indeed, as I have chosen to indicate when this same four bars recurs at the end. But however much my reductions may resemble Schenker graphs, they have a significantly different purpose: namely, to demonstrate the gradual emergence of tonal procedures from units of meaning well established in earlier repertories.16 In 1607, a descent from 3 in G Dorian would have made little grammatical sense; a modal analyst would always seek the generating 5. Moreover, the Bâ area within a G Dorian context always signals D, the fifth degree of G. As the expanded steps of the diapente descent become standard modulatory schemata, however, the interest for composer and analyst alike properly gets transferred to the middle ground—to strategies for simultaneously maintaining and postponing the inevitable point of arrival. The question of whether “Ecco pur” qualifies as tonal really depends upon the degree of prolongation one requires. Like the other pieces just discussed, Orfeo’s song is based syntactically on a descent through a minor-mode diapente. I use the term “minor mode” here because the diapente of Dorian and Aeolian have identical interval structures; the same is true of Mixolydian and Ionian. So long as all activity occurs only within the species of fifth (as in “Ecco pur”), we have only two procedures: major and minor. Moreover, each point along the diapente descent in “Ecco pur” features nothing but cadential prolongations. None of the ambiguities or exploitations of modally sensitive pitches beloved of Monteverdi and his colleagues in other contexts (including the rest of Orfeo) arise here. Still, each of these “keys” is so brief that it hardly warrants our opting for an entirely different brand of analysis, especially when “Ecco pur” can be understood more fruitfully from a vantage point that makes it consistent with other sections of the opera.17 Consequently, I prefer to hear this little aria as performing a particular rhetorical role, which returns us to the issue of power. Orfeo’s fakeout at the beginning of m. 2 (where he suddenly pulls away from the cadence in which he seems to have acquiesced) and his series of dragged resistances against the bass in the next two measures contribute immeasurably to his aura of personal charisma. Those cadential harmonies, which would have sounded definitive to Renaissance listeners, want to slam the door shut, but he inserts himself as a sonorous wedge, preventing—or at least postponing—the gratification of closure until he can do  

 

 

 

The Expansion Principle   |   39

it his own way. “Ecco pur” demonstrates, in other words, a particular way of deploying the techniques at hand for expressive purposes. •

•

•

I will flash forward about forty years for my next example: the opening section of Antonio Cesti’s chamber cantata “Pose in fronte.” In this aria Cesti manages to extend his diapente descent for a full forty-four measures, as each step of the descent balloons up to the length of a fullfledged key area by means of cadential harmonies. Yet the dynamic tension between surface and background remains quite palpable: repeatedly the harmonies attempt to cadence, only to have the melody refuse immediate gratification, demanding a renewed pursuit of the goal. Like many midcentury pieces trafficking so obviously with dammedup desire, Cesti’s cantata presents an explicitly masochistic scenario. The cantata’s final aria (taken up in chapter 2) simply murmurs over and over, “I love the arrows and adore the chains.” This opening segment, however, has the task of whipping up (as it were) the energies that will carry the entire multisection composite to its languid, satiated conclusion. And for this purpose Cesti employs the most teleological devices he knows: the expanded diapente descent. Pose in fronte al mio tiranno

Proud Love sets chains and arrows

fiero Amor catene e strali;

down in front of my tyrant;

queste schiavo il cor mi fanno,

the former enslave my heart,

quei mi dan piaghe mortali.

the latter give me mortal pangs.

The cantata starts with a brief continuo introduction, a slightly elaborated tetrachord descent from B to Fá in the bass (ex. 1.5). When the voice enters, the bass tries to repeat its easy confirmation of tonic, and at m. 8 both parts appear poised for cadence; one has only to allow the voice to descend to B and we’d be off and running toward the next goal. But instead the bass veers off to Dá (leading tone to an implied E), driving the voice up to cry out “proud Love” in its high register. With the reappearance of Aá in the voice and Fá in the bass in m. 12, we seem once again on the brink of closure on B. This time, however, the melody refuses to comply with the powerful arrival in the continuo. Marshalling all its energies, however, the voice pulls itself up—apparently dragging the bass up with it—to a definitive cadence only in m. 17. Just as Orfeo in “Ecco pur” interposed melodic leaps, refusals to follow the lead of the continuo, and even grinding dissonances to per 

 

E x . 1.5. Cesti, “Pose in fronte,” section 1.

# 3 & # 4

∑

∑

? # # 3 Ï . ÏJ Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï 4Ï J J ú # & # Ï 6

? ## Ï

Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏÏ J

Ï. ú

Ï ú

fron - te

10

&

## ú

al mio ti

mor

ca

? ## ú

Ï

-

ú

te

-

ran - no

ú

#

Ï.

Ï

#Ï

-

-

ú.

# Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & # #Ï. Ï Ï. Ï.

18

&

##

Ï

Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï

Ï

Ï

schia - vo

il

? ## ú

Ï

Ï Ï Ï.

Ï

cor

ú

#3

Î

Ï

Ï Ï

Ï. Ï #Ï. Ï ú

fier-ro A -

#

-

14

? ## Ï

4

ú

Po - se in

Ï Ï J . Ï #Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï.

Ï

ne

Î Ï. Ï J

∑

∑

e

#

-

Ï

stra -

Ï

-

ú ú 4

-

-

-

Ï

Ï.

ú.

- li;

#3

Ï

j Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï mi fan - no, Ï Ï ú

Ï.

Ï J

-

j Ï

ques - to

Ï. ú

quei

Ï J

Ï J

mi

## Ï Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú J &

j # Ï Ï Ï. ghe mor - ta li; ques - to ú Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï

22

? ## ú

Ï

ú.

dan, quei mi dan

# & # #Ï Ï Ï

pia

? ##

ú

schia - vo

# & # Ï 31

Ïil

Ï.

#ú

cor

Ï

? ## Ï # ú

mi dan

# j ú & # Ï Ï. #Ï Ï

ú

pia

? ## Ï Ï Ï # & # ú. 40

? ##

Ï

-

∑

-

Ï #ú

Ï.

quei

Ï

mi

ú

4

#

Ï J

Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï -

-

- ghe mor -

Ï.

Ï Ï J

Ï nÏ Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï ú

Ï. Ï Ï Ï J pia

Ï ú

fan - no,

Ï Ï Ï Ï.

35

ta - li,

Ï

mi

Ï J Ï.

dan, quei

Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï

Ï ÏÏÏ

27

-

Ï . JÏ ú

ghe, pia

∑

- ghe mor - ta

Ï Ï ú 4

∑

∑

Ï. Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï J Ï . ÏJ Ï Ï J ú

li.

4 #3

ú.

-

#3

42   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

petuate his expanded first key area (if only for four bars), so Cesti’s melodic line must suggest immanent closure while doing everything in its power to postpone that inevitability. Cesti’s interpolation of the secondary dominant implying E as a possible final, the willful avoidance of the potential cadence in m. 13, and the deliberate annexation of the bass in mm. 14–15 all qualify as strategies for expansion: once the desire for a cadence on B is whetted, the voice works to postpone the gratification of that event, thereby luxuriating in the mixture of pleasure and pain so loved by the libertines. In order to mark m. 17 as an arrival, Cesti disrupts the moto perpetuo of his bel canto triple meter with a hemiola pattern.18 Still, the voice has virtually no time to revel in that accomplishment, for the following beat announces the move forward to the next stage in the background—D major—and the first of two settings of the second two lines of text. Like many arias of this period, “Pose in fronte” unfolds in an ABB' formal schema, whereby the initial section (A) sets out the tonic key area and the opening lines of text while the second moves twice through the remaining text (B and B'), accomplishing whatever secondary key areas the composer wishes to touch upon before returning to tonic for ultimate closure. In this particular aria, Cesti chooses to remain within a single harmonically stable (though rhythmically turbulent) key the first time through. What might have produced an arrival in D major in m. 20 gets finessed, as the voice pushes onward, extending this key area forcibly until m. 26. The reiteration of these same two lines proves rather more intricate, however, even though it does eventually work its way back to the closing tonic. For fast on the heels of the D major cadence in m. 26 comes what at first seems a return to the tonic, which could materialize as soon as m. 31. But the bass delivers a deceptive sixth degree in place of the expected B. Moreover, the melody flips up to E, which maneuvers the piece into a circumscribed area on A, the typical romanesca harmonization of scale degree 4 with the subtonic in the bass; as in our previous examples, this move announces a genuine descent from the background fifth degree, which has been sustained by both B minor and D major. The descent continues to 3 in the modal line, harmonized first as if returning to D, then with G, as the voice’s abject Cà seems almost to concede to yet another key area before a last-ditch effort pulls us back to the safety of Cá (2) and a final, hemiola-marked cadence on B. The continuo rounds out the aria by repeating its ritornello. To sing this aria one is forced to become breathless, to pant urgently  

 

 

The Expansion Principle   |   43

after every designated goal, only to be goaded mercilessly on to the next. Both performer and listener are hurled forward in time, the present moment never anything more than a prod toward an ever-retreating future. Because of this breathless quality, whereby the singer marks each arrival with a gasp, we can still hear the generating background progression relatively easily and also the drastic means necessary for maintaining each area. As in the previous examples, the descent to 4 in the background sounds disruptive, even as it serves to pull us on toward closure. Only when the final itself appears as the goal does the trajectory come to some sort of halt—a halt that within this style always sounds provisional and even artificial, despite the broadening effect of the hemiola. For once the desire machine gets wound up, it proves very hard to shut it down, to make any particular prize sound commensurate with what had compelled us there.19 In this case, the prize sought after so fervently and with so much genuine heavy breathing is a B. No big deal— until it becomes grist for the mill of tonality.  

 

•

•

•

Everything necessary for the standardization of tonality exists at this point. In their respective pieces (or at least the segments discussed here), Monteverdi and Cesti not only make use of functional harmony, but they also reveal that they grasp the concept of hierarchical nesting, the process that would enable the repertories of the next three hundred years. If only seventeenth-century composers had recognized the potential of “Ecco pur” or “Pose in fronte” immediately! Alas, historical events rarely unfold in such a straightforward fashion. In fact, the middle sections of Cesti’s cantata exploit the erratic moves of his still fully operative Aeolian (not tonal minor) mode: they do not begin and end in the same key but simulate instead the ambivalences of a tormented, self-divided subject. Only this opening section, which sets the stage, qualifies as tonal—and even here the Neapolitan in m. 37 undermines the strength of this temporary tonic arrival, pointing forward to subsequent sections. In other words, Monteverdi, Cesti, and their colleagues understood perfectly well what to do with the expansion procedures just discussed. Yet they persisted in treating them merely as tools they could implement when they deemed them appropriate for their particular rhetorical purposes—or push to the side when they were not necessary. As it turns out, composers continued for several decades to work within the structures  

 

44   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

already familiar to them from the madrigal, expanding some moments melodically, others by means of circumscriptive harmonic devices. And sometimes, even in music as late as Bach or Vivaldi, a passage of intensive expansion will give way to part of the background line that presents itself as the surface, with no elaboration whatsoever.20 Seventeenth-century composers used expansion devices much as a photographer might a zoom lens. The performer, listener, or analyst must be prepared for a radical change of temporal orientation at any moment. Thus in order to follow their strategies, we need to have at hand—as did they—the potential complexities of modal structures, as well as a number of special operations that allowed for various degrees of expansion. In short, tonality does not actually supplant modality. Mode continues to provide the background of successive modulations that lends a sense of inevitable telos to formally closed sections, such as the ones examined thus far; mode also supplies the logical connections among the series of units in multisectional compositions. Functional tonality then qualifies as but one particular way of construing the available resources. Moreover, for much of the seventeenth century it fails even to count as the most popular of the options. The following chapters examine a wide range of those options and attempt to understand why composers chose to operate as they did in a variety of different cultural and expressive contexts.  

 

Chapter 2

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject

I could easily scroll through the seventeenth century, cherry-picking instances of the particular process discussed in chapter 1, thereby offering an argument for linear historical development. In doing so, however, I would not only falsify the way things actually happened but also impoverish the very rich array of procedures explored in different repertories during this period. Recall that the examples analyzed in the previous chapter all involved the expansion of a bare diapente descent, and they thereby sacrifice for strategic purposes most of the sophisticated ambiguities afforded by sixteenth-century modal structures. Of course, later composers learned how to infuse those diapente expansions with considerable complexity; their forebears, however, did not surrender so readily the parameters traditionally responsible for formal inflection. A typical motet or madrigal unfolds in accordance with its verbal text, granting each line or image its own melodic motive and affective purpose. For the most part, the sections share a common meter (though very occasionally a composer will give a poetic line particular emphasis with a change in meter).1 Moreover, they nearly always operate within the framework of a single mode, despite the considerable stress Mannerist pieces may exert upon the center.2 The outer sections ordinarily take on the responsibility of defining the mode, and they usually stick very closely to the diapente that unequivocally presents the final and its species of fifth. But internal sections explore other potentialities (for instance, alternate divisions of 45

46   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

the octave, as in Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia bella,” discussed in chapter 1) available within each mode. It is here that the modes diverge most clearly from one another: if Dorian and Aeolian contain the same intervals within their diapente, they differ significantly with respect to their formal predispositions, as do Dorian and Hypodorian, for that matter. Renaissance composers apparently recognized the predilections of each mode, for they exploited them quite consistently; they even tailored their formal processes to produce global allegories in response to each set of lyrics. The cadential arrivals that articulate these pieces throw into high relief the particular tensions driving them.3 From our later point of view, it sometimes seems that sixteenthcentury backgrounds operate according to relatively arbitrary premises. In contrast to the linear succession of modulations marking the progress of a tonal piece (i.e., those restricted to expanding the diapente descent), modal compositions will visit the same two or three pitches for cadential confirmation over and over again in the course of their unfoldings. They do so, however, not because they lack control over the formal dimensions of their pieces but because they conceive of background strategies along very different lines. Such multisectional strategies continue to appear well into the seventeenth century; like their sixteenth-century predecessors, these pieces operate within a single mode, with relative stability in their framing segments and explorations of alternatives and tensions within middle segments. It is no coincidence that the prototonal examples analyzed in the previous chapter all function as opening sections within their respective composites. To move beyond these provisional moments of closure, however, is to enter into a world still explicitly informed by modal logic—and mostly incomprehensible when considered through the prism of eighteenth-century tonal norms. Over the course of the 1600s, the application of expansion processes to these sections result in increasingly longer segments. More and more frequently, composers differentiate their ever-lengthening sections through dramatic contrasts in meter, texture, motives, and affect. Gradually, the interrelated segments within composites would take on the proportions and internal coherence characteristic of individual movements. Until quite late in the century, however, internal segments remain formally and syntactically dependent upon the larger context: they frequently start and end in different keys, or they manifest quick juxtapositions of the opposing sides of a mode in their sequence of cadences. As we shall see in the postlude to this book, Corelli’s sonatas even 

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   47

tually bring the expanded-diapente process to all movements of his sonatas, granting them an unprecedented degree of formal autonomy— though the contrasting keys of internal movements (i.e., the tendency to include a movement on IV or vi in major key composites, III in minor) bear vestigial witness to the background structures from which they developed. Moreover, the nineteenth-century push for cyclical integration among movements, which gain momentum in the wake of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” strives to reactivate that level of structure latent but dormant throughout most of the eighteenth century. In other words, if we take a somewhat longer view, we might consider the self-contained movement with beginning, middle, and end as the historical anomaly rather than the universal norm. But I am getting ahead of myself. This chapter examines several seventeenth-century composite structures, instrumental as well as vocal. Although they differ considerably from one another with respect to strategy and expressive agenda, they have in common the lavish expansion of modal surface elements in the service of simulating desire and other out-of-the-ordinary phenomenological states.  

Monteverdi’s “Non vedrò mai le stelle” My first example, “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” comes from Monteverdi’s Book VII, published in 1619. Gary Tomlinson has criticized the influence of Giambattista Marino’s erotic, imagistic, sometimes lapidary poetry on this phase of Monteverdi’s career, and he regards it as having brought an end to the composer’s rhetorically based Renaissance style.4 Indeed, no one would contest the radical shift in the composer’s choice of lyrics and his treatment of them in this collection. If Monteverdi’s previous books present carefully honed settings of densely packed verses by Guarini and Tasso, his Book VII features many texts that count as little better than silly in their sexual obviousness. More to the point, Monteverdi now approaches his lyrics in ways that violate his earlier penchant for preserving the overall integrity of the poetry he selects. Quite often he homes in on a word or a single image and rides it for half the piece, relegating the rest of the verse to perfunctory pronouncement. The scrupulous attention to balance for which musicologists so often celebrate Monteverdi’s Books IV and V gives way to bizarre dilations and compressions that subject the listener to the composer’s ability to bend, stretch, and sometimes even attenuate all sense of temporal duration.

48   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

Non vedrò mai le stelle

I’ll never see the stars

de’ bei celesti giri,

in the lovely celestial spheres.

perfida, ch’io non miri

traitor, without seeing

gl’occhi che fur presenti

the eyes that were present

all dura cagion de’ miei tormenti

at the harsh beginning of my torment,

e ch’io non dicea a lor: “O luci belle,

and without saying to them: “O lovely stars,

deh, siate sì rubelle

ah, be to her as robbed of light

di lume a chi ribella è sì di fede,

as she is untrue to faith—she who

ch’anzi a tanto occhi e tanti lumi ha core

has the heart, before so many eyes and lights,

tradir amante sotto fe d’amore.”

to betray her lover while swearing faith.”

 

Our lover in this anonymous text speaks of gazing at the stars—those standards of Platonic order in this post-Ficino era—and reflecting upon the eyes of his perfidious beloved; he curses her, demanding that the stars withhold their light from her, just as she has betrayed her faith to him.5 A common trope: stars and eyes, the immutable dependability of the one contrasted against the treachery of the other. As Tomlinson and others have pointed out, the text and aspects of this musical setting strongly resemble those of “Sfogava con le stelle,” in Monteverdi’s Book IV.6 And although Tomlinson admires the parts of “Non vedrò mai le stelle” that deploy the intense declamatory devices of the composer’s epigrammatic period, he expresses considerable misgivings about the central component of the madrigal, in which a very small fragment of text (“O luci belle, deh, siate sì rubella”) balloons up to produce an extravagant distortion. In Tomlinson’s words, “the affective use of triple meter in [subsequent madrigals] suggests that Monteverdi perceived the inefficacy of the mixture of Petrarchan and Marinist expressive modes in ‘Non vedrò mai le stelle.’ ”7 Without question, Monteverdi violates the integrity of this poem qua poem. But those latter-day Marinists among us might hesitate to join Tomlinson in his equivocal value judgment of the section in question. A veteran of so much superb text setting, Monteverdi must have been trying to do something quite particular when he indulged so ostentatiously in this extended passage—something not so different from the swirling, vertiginous setting of the words “pleni sunt cieli et terra” in the composer’s “Duo seraphim,” from the Marian Vespers of 1610 (see chapter  

 

 

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   49

3). The fact that other devices emerge over the course of this remarkably long career does not necessarily indicate the composer’s repudiation of earlier strategies. Moreover, the affective and structural ploys of “Non vedrò mai le stelle” also appear in many other contemporaneous composites, instrumental (see the discussion of Dario Castello below) as well as vocal. Evidently, composers of this period enjoyed this effect— and so do I. “Non vedrò mai le stelle” opens with monodic recitation of the first five lines of text (ex. 2.1). Over a prolonged pedal on A, the Aeolian final, the two tenors trace a straightforward (if apparently arduous) climb from A to E. The explicit address in m. 9 to the beloved—“perfida”—brings about a shift in the bass to the dominant, though the angular and dissonant approach to this harmonic half cadence in the voices makes it sound as though this epithet has been resisted and then wrenched from the resistant protagonist.8 Once again the voices strain upward; a chromatically inflected bass, starting in m. 12, grants them greater urgency as the voices sigh, break off, and still continue melodically—as though in spite of themselves— to E. But against the bass D in m. 16, which prepares the harmonic affirmation of a definitive cadence on A (m. 19), the voices crumple again in the abjection of their torments. Following the cadence in m. 19, the voices make yet another effort, this time starting from low E and ascending up a ninth to F in very rapid sequence, only to collapse once again at a half cadence that marks the colon in the text. Something—a struggle to escape the memory of the mistress’s betrayal? an attempt at reaching beyond miserable reality for the stars?—motivates the voices to repeat that labored rise against the pull of gravity, which invariably wins at the cadences. Up until this point, our Petrarchan protagonist has delivered the text in a speechlike manner over the same agonizingly slow bass that characterizes moments in Orfeo (see again ex. 1.3). But what transpires on the other side of the colon derails dramatically the unswerving deliberateness of the declamation up to this point. Of course, this radical break has the effect of separating the narrative component of the poem from what we are to hear as a direct quotation, beginning (as in “Sfogava con le stelle”) with a melismatic wail on “O.” The harmonic disjunction whereby V/A is followed by C rather than the expected resolution to A counts as a modal commonplace, for A, E, and C all serve primarily to maintain the fifth degree, E, which still has not begun a weighted, articulated descent toward the final. Nonetheless, the reharmonization seems  

 

 

 

 

 

 

50   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire E x . 2.1. Monteverdi, “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” mm. 1–9.

Vc î

Î ∑

Vc ?c

j j Ï Ï Ï

Non ve - dr˜

w

VÏ

ÏJ . Ï Ï . R dr˜ mai le stel j r V Ï Ï . #Ï Ï. ? 7

V

w Ï

stel -

VÏ ?

le stel

-

∑

le,

î

mai

Ïj Ï ú

- le, mai, mai,

le stel - le, mai, mai,

Î

Î

Î

Î

w

Ï Ï Ï J J J ÏJ JÏ JÏ le deÕ bei ce - le - sti Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïj Ïj J J J J

Î

w

ÏJ Ï ú

stel - le deÕ bei ce - le - sti

w

mai

Î

ú

w

4

dr˜

j r Ï . #Ï ú

 

w

per

-

-

Ï

Non ve -

Ï. Ï J R

mai

Non ve-dr˜

mai le

fi

-

fi

-

#Ï

Ïj Ïj

Non ve -

Non ve - dr˜

Ï Ï Ï J J

w

Ï. Ï ú J R gi - ri, per j Ïj Ï ú gi - ri,

Ï Ï Ï J J

Ï Ï J J

Ï Ï J J

ú

da,

#ú

da,

ú

#

to clear the air temporarily of the bitterness that had accumulated over the course of the opening sequence. More important, however, the words “luci belle” usher in a different psychological world. If Monteverdi has conceived his task up until now as the plausible simulation of speech, he moves now into another experiential realm for the highly redundant presentation of the next phrases.

le

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   51

He builds by increment, from the warm embrace of the C major cadence in m. 29, to the exuberant duple-meter introduction of the text fragment in m. 30, to its triple-meter dilation that will comprise the formal and affective center of the piece (ex. 2.2). The contemplation of those “luci belle” at the very least distracts the speaker from the immediate memory of his having been betrayed—a memory that will necessarily return along with the long-delayed eventuality of the Aeolian final, A. Yet the extraordinary prolongation afforded by the triple-meter section keeps that return at bay, allowing this bubble of pleasurable ecstasy to postpone nearly indefinitely the dreaded confrontation with reality. At the same time, the triple-meter section also manages to simulate the swirling rotation of the stars, as well as the speaker’s rapt sense of wonder as he gazes at them and recalls the beauty of his lover’s eyes. What enables the swirling, ungrounded sensation of the upcoming section is its subtle manipulation of harmonic progressions through circles of fifths. Musicians today usually associate the circle of fifths with Vivaldi’s intense teleological drive, but one of the least goal-directed of modal composers, Adrian Willaert, also made extensive use of chains of fifth-related bass progressions.9 Monteverdi’s deployment of fifths in “Non vedrò mai le stelle” resembles Willaert’s more closely than it does Vivaldi’s. To be sure, Monteverdi uses it here to produce a sense of inevitable cause-and-effect motion. But that motion turns out to be quite promiscuous, sometimes threatening to bridge back to A, sometimes affirming C as though without difficulty. The delicacy of this mechanism already manifests itself in the duplemeter section just discussed: following the stable C major just established in m. 29, the bass leads by fifth (C–G–D) through terrains (A–E– D–A) in which a mere Gá could void out the fantasy; indeed, a leading tone on the downbeat of m. 32 would confirm 2 in a strongly weighted diapente descent to A, a fate avoided for now only by the withheld leading tone and the continued cycling by fifth. Monteverdi balances precariously on A in m. 33 before pulling the bass down by step to G and thence to a strong cadence on C in m. 37. The risk of pausing on that A (and those that occur subsequently) should be palpable. But having succeeded in resisting the pull back to A in this short trial run, the protagonist throws caution to the wind and embarks on the high-blown triple-meter extravaganza. The mere sight of the stars reminds the speaker of the eyes of his treacherous beloved, but it also helps him to overcome the despair that this memory had previously  

 

 

 

 

 

w w w w w w w. ú ú ú

E x . 2.2. Monteverdi, “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” mm. 38–75.

3w w w V1 3 V1

O

? 31 W .

 

∑

w w w

lu - ci,

∑

W.

O

Vw w w 43

bel - le di

lu - ci,

o

lu - ci

∑

lu - me,

w w w V V

w.

bel - le

-

me

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le

di

?W 53

V

úúú w w w

VW s“

lu

W.

w

W

fe

di

-

W

lu - me,

w

chi

W.

-

W

lu

de,

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le

di

fe

? w w w W.

-

w

de,

w. W

w

W

ri - bel

w

me

w w. ú ú ú w w w w W

w. ú ú ú

sia - te s“ ru -

w w w

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le,

w w w a

w

bel - le, deh,

w . ú ú ú w w ∑

w

w W.

W

48

w W

lu - ci

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le,

di

W

o

W.

V w. ú ú ú w w w W ?w w w

W

w . ú ú ú w w ∑

w w ∑

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le

w w w w w w

bel - le, deh, sia - te s“ ru -

di

-

w W

w

W

di

la è

s“

w w w a

W

chi

w

ri - bel - la è

w W

w w ∑

lu - me,

w

w w w a

chi

ri -

ú ú ú w w w w w ∑ w

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le

di

lu - me

w w w W

w

58

V

W

w W

bel

-

la è

a

chi

w W

s“

di

fe

ri - bel - la è

s“

Vw w w W ?W

-

w W

w

w.

ú ú ú w w ∑

de,

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le,

di

fe

w W

w.

w

-

de,

úúú

sia - te s“ ru-

w W w w w w w w w W w 63 w. ú ú ú w. ú ú ú w. ú ú w. ú ú ú w w ú ∑ V V w w ∑ ?W

bel - le,

68

V

w

w

w

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le, s“ ru - bel - le, s“ ru -

W.

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le,

w

W

W

w

w

bel - le

di

lu

-

me

bel - le

di

lu

W

-

me,

Vw

?W Vú 72

s“

VW bel

? W.

w

W

w w

ú ú ú ú ú -

w. ú ú ú w. ú ú ú

w . ú ú ú w w ∑

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le,

#w

la è

w w

W #W s“

W

w a

sia - te s“ ru - bel - le, s“ ru -

W.

w

chi

∑

w

ri - bel

w

w

w

w

w

w #W

w

w

di

di

W

w W

w a

W.

W. -

w

chi

U

W.

fe

-

de,

fe

-

de,

W

U

W. U

W.

w

la è

w

ri -

54   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

engendered. The process repeatedly skirts over those moves that could bottom out on A, then finds a way to buoy itself up again to keep going, as if by sheer willpower. Neither A nor C can serve as unambiguous finals during this section: the point is to float above both options, for as soon as a cadence of either stripe occurs, the fantasy has to conclude. Just when the modal line seems to have descended to a point where it might resolve, it gets tossed up to work its way down again. I would consider the entire section to have sustained the Aeolian fifth degree by means of shifting harmonic centers on A and C, and it thereby constitutes a very long and constantly swirling duration of trancelike stasis.10 At last, with the coincidence of Gá and E in m. 73, the end to this delirium arrives; a hemiola displacement of the self-perpetuating bel canto impulse forces it to stop and grounds us with a powerful cadence on A. Only with the return to duple meter in m. 76 does the background move (and with stringent effort against its obvious reluctance) to D, thus commencing the descent toward the inevitability of closure. An attempted sidetrack to C in m. 79 does little more than reveal how C serves merely as the alter ego to A, and the passage in mm. 81–86 offers in unexpanded form the diapente descent presaged from the beginning. A final section recalls the superimpositions of lines characteristic of Monteverdi’s earlier works, and it also sums up the tensions and illusions of the present madrigal: an arrival on C in m. 93 that promises release and a walking bass that tries to postpone any necessary choice between C and A, as the voices alternate what could be either an incomplete descent through the A diapente or (depending on harmonization) the span between the mediant of C and its leading tone. This attempt at holding off the inevitable, however, fails to duplicate the apparent success of the previous triple-meter passage of illusory bliss, and the voices concede to the reality of A—but only at the last minute!—for their final cadence. If the outer sections of “Non vedrò mai le stelle” maintain the sense of a public sphere in which rhetorical directness matters, for most of its duration it strives to move into a space where the communication of words no longer matters, where ungrounded, self-induced intoxication manages at least temporarily to eclipse a reality made painful by the memory of betrayal. To the extent that the triple-meter section sweeps the listener up into the orbit of its folie, it succeeds. Note that the words themselves do not identify this bizarre bubble, nor do they directly suggest Monteverdi’s strategies. His musical protagonist just grabs onto the  

 

 

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   55

slightly elevated words “luci belle” and holds onto that artificial ecstasy as if for dear life. And here we might return to Tomlinson’s argument concerning the “end of the Renaissance.” The poetry and music of the sixteenth century typically assumed the efficacy of rhetoric within the social world of the aristocratic courts. But when the social world begins to prove impervious to reasoned argument, many intellectuals and artists—then and now—have opted for radical introspection or any activity that can distract the mind from its powerlessness to effect real change.11 For all the technical ingenuity Monteverdi displays in producing this prolonged bubble, the strategy itself—especially as it shows up with ever-greater frequency in this period—may well be the symptom of a defeatist attitude. Put succinctly, “Non vedrò mai le stelle” advocates escapism. We witness the impotence of monodic recitation in the opening section of the duo and then experience vicariously the pleasures of fantasy; if the real world breaks in at the end to deflate the fantasy, that deflation only underscores the opposition between outside and inside, sending us off like addicts in search of the next fix, the next high.  

 

 

 

Dario Castello’s Sonata No. 1 Dario Castello’s sonatas similarly focus on musical simulations of swirling ecstasy, though they do so without the benefit (or, perhaps better, the hindrance) of words.12 As in “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” the various sections of Castello’s instrumental pieces latch onto a succession of impulses—some ordered with respect to goals, to be sure, but others producing extended passages of hovering. The rationality implicit in the procedures examined in chapter 1 takes a distant backseat behind the extravagant virtuosity and willful shifts in orientation that Castello obviously prefers. I have chosen Castello’s Sonata No. 1 from his Sonate Concertate in Stil Moderno, Libro II (Venice, 1629) as my example, largely because it has been recorded so brilliantly by Andrew Manze (violin) and Nigel North (theorbo).13 As is characteristic of Aeolian compositions, including “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” this sonata resides within the A octave, with the principal tensions centering on the proper divisor of that octave: at E (which maintains the Aeolian species of fifth and fourth) or at D (which forces a reorientation of pitch trajectories, now focused on the Aeolian fourth degree as a potential final). In contrast to Dorian, which manifests a strong tendency to make its fifth degree a secondary final,  

56   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

Aeolian cannot tonicize its fifth degree, E, without an Fá, a pitch unavailable within normative Aeolian practices. To be sure, many Aeolian pieces of the period do occasionally move into—and sometimes even tonicize— the area of the fifth degree, but these exceptions occur for the purposes of extreme rhetorical emphasis; they qualify as flagrant deviations and should be made to sound painful in performance. More typically, the Aeolian fifth degree, E, makes do with harmonic and modulatory support from C, and (again as in “Non vedrò mai le stelle”) A and C become alter egos as they switch back and forth as ways of sustaining E. Castello’s sonata (like Monteverdi’s “Ah, dolente partita”) also ex­­ ploits fully Aeolian’s penchant for cadences on D.14 As a result, the concluding A major triad of the piece hovers undecided between two potential meanings: the Aeolian final with a conventional tierce de picardie or a dominant prepared to confirm D as final. Given the lesser tension of the area on D, the fourth degree, Castello’s strategies give the impression—even without words attached—of repeated surrender to passive swoons. For all the trancelike suspension of animation in “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” our besotted lover never lost sight of the goal: the elevated E stood as a constant, like the stars he addresses, and the requisite weighted linear descent to D only served to advance us toward the longdelayed cadence. But from the very outset, Castello’s persona betrays an ambivalence between E and D, an ambivalence that will inform every section of the sonata. Indeed, this piece takes every opportunity to wallow in D, and only occasionally does it exert the energy necessary to shore up its “proper” identity.15 The sonata’s crucial ambiguity appears right from the very first pitch, A, although we may recognize its equivocation only in hindsight (ex. 2.3). Modal subjects most frequently begin on the fifth degree, though the fact that we hear this pitch initially in the bass increases the probability that A functions as tonic rather than as 5 of D. Note, however, that the bass line is melodically conceived—it turns out to be an imitative subject, answered at the fifth by the violin; if the same pitches appeared an octave higher as a melody, a continuo player might well interpret them as belonging to D. As the bass’s statement of the subject unfolds, the ambiguity persists: the mere addition of a harmonic Cá in m. 3 would tilt the entire phrase toward D. Only with the cadential formula in m. 4 and the imitative entry of the soloist on E (as 5 of A) does Castello fix his key definitively. Because the soloist traces the same melodic contour as the bass, now clearly articulating the Aeolian boundaries, it lends support to our hav 

 

 

 

 

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   57

ing regarded the initial pitch as ambiguous with respect to its key allegiance. And the bass inflection to Cá in m. 8 reveals how delicately Castello has arranged this complex, which can pivot on its axis with the slightest alteration; the sustained D in the bass in mm. 10–11 also pulls the complex in that direction. Of course, this particular Cá counts as nothing more than a quick V6/iv, put straight immediately with the arrival on A in m. 9, and the continuation by sequence in m. 11 takes us to a strong confirmation of A in 16. For all its internal ambivalences, this opening gambit presents Aeolian in a relatively unalloyed version. After this, the alternative divisions of the Aeolian octave will become increasingly pronounced. Immediately following the cadence on A in m. 9, the bass moves down the D minor triad to a sustained D. Though not confirmed through a Cá leading tone, this strategy seems to throw its weight behind the D alternative. But just as in “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” what might have seemed like a gambit for tonicization gets transformed into a game of fifths—not the familiar circle of fifths that travels inexorably in one direction, but a process that can pause and expand on any one of its functions (e.g., C in mm. 12–13), then reverse its direction to end up where it began or elsewhere. This process keeps the listener continually off-guard, as promises of stable key orientation flit by, only to be undermined as soon as we begin to trust them. Thus, we might want to hear the A in the bass in m. 14 as a deceptive move, still related, however, to C; with the arrival of the Gá later in m. 14, however, A becomes the center and the goal of the second major cadence in the sonata. Harmony counts as only one of the operative parameters here. More spectacular is the way this piece that starts out like an imitative canzona—ordinarily a fairly law-abiding imitative genre—rapidly explodes into virtuoso fireworks. As of m. 10, the materials in both voices still resemble their earlier contours, the bass outlining the descent by fifth that it presented in its opening solo measures, the violin taking up the motive it traced in mm. 6–7. But over the sustained D in the bass, the violin begins to use that motive as a launching pad, pushing it into tighter iterations and accelerating into a sequence of continual sixteenths. The violin thus takes leave of its imitative partner, which is left holding down the minimal bass line, and brashly pursues an extravagant path of self-display. If the erratic pattern of fifth-related harmonies did not prove sufficiently disorienting, this dazzling burst of virtuosity makes sure we are continually grasping for a secure anchor. Note that the all-important leading tone in m. 14 is supplied by the soloist, who  

 

 

 

 

 

E x . 2.3. Castello, Sonata I, mm. 1–16.  

&c

Allegro

∑

? c ú. 5

&

∑

î

∑

ú

Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï ú

Ï

Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï.

? ú.

Ï

Ï ä ÏÏÏ Ï Ï &

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . JÏ J Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ

8

? Ï #Ï

Ï

ú

Ï

ú.

Ï ä ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú

Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ Ï ú ú ?ú ú ú ú 11

14

&

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ

?Ï

Ï

Ï # Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï 32 w

Allegro

ú

Ï

Ï

ú

32 w

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   59

suddenly plunges down to grasp that pitch, rather like a trapeze artist who lets go and falls to grasp onto another trapeze. That arrival on A in m. 16, however, only gives way (again as in “Non vedrò mai le stelle”) to a greater dilation of what we just heard (ex. 2.4). The meter shifts, and a motive closely resembling the one that took flight during the previous section emerges. Moreover, the bass line seems inclined to repeat precisely the pattern we have just heard: A moving to a sustained D, then on by fifth to a moderately expanded C major. But this time, instead of moving back immediately to A (as in m. 14), the bass simply coils back through the fifths that had brought it to that point. A plunge down in the violin in m. 27 recalls the one that returned us to security before, but it has no defining Gá this time and serves to reinforce C after all. A dizzying swirl threatens to take us beyond C to F until Castello throws on the brakes with a return to duple meter and an elaborate cadence on C in m. 35. And so it goes—episodes of increasing speed tossing us from pillar to post until relenting for a cadence we could not have predicted in advance: an extravagant arrival on D in m. 51, following a dazzling display of diminution that would feel quite at home in a heavy-metal guitar solo. With respect to the overall schema of the sonata, we seem to have landed powerfully in exactly the wrong place, as if all this energy has now wrested the balance from E as the rightful divisor of the octave (supported by A and C) down to D. Perhaps the most dramatic passage in the piece follows this explosive cadence on D. The headlong rush stops abruptly in an Adagio that features the sustained dissonances characteristic of contemporaneous laments. Charles Le Brun, the seventeenth-century French theorist of physical gesture, offers sketches of grief that continued unabated even into silent film—the forearm thrown up to shield the eyes as the evil landlord evicts the innocent mother—and Castello gives us its musical equivalent here; in fact, he even notates in m. 53 something resembling the whimpering manifested in the empfindsamer Stil of C. P. E. Bach and late Beethoven. A reaction to the loss of identity into which the impulsive soloist has just catapulted us? In any case, this histrionic passage spends most of its time languishing in D. A melodic descent to A in m. 57 is inflected by its surrounding Bâs so that it remains captive to D. Following that abject moment, the violin stretches up the octave whence it presents an elaborate descent that retrieves E as 5 of A leading to a cadence (quite understated, relative to the one on D that had preceded it) on the sonata’s final in m. 62.  

 

 

E x . 2.4. Castello, Sonata I, mm. 16–62.  

Allegro

& 32 w ? 32

w.

ú ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏÏ Ï w.

ú

w

Ï ÏÏ Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ Ï w.

Ï

Ï Ï Ï . ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ & ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ J Ï 20

? w.

w.

w.

w.

j . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï J Ï w. ? w. w. w. 24

ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ & Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ? w. w. 28

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ w. w.

Ï & Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï c Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ú ú ú ? w. cú 32

Adagio

&ú 35

? Ï . b Ïj

∑

î

∑

∑

Ï ä ÏjÏ . Ï Ï . Ï Ï .

ú Ï Ï ú.

ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú

Ï

. Ï Ï. r Ï Ï. r Ï Ï . . Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . . . Ï Ï Ï J J Ï Ï Ï . . & Ï Ï. Ï #Ï Ï Ï ú. ? ú. Ï Ï ú. 40

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏrÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï & Ï R ú ú ú ú ?ú ú Allegro

43

b

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïr Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï Ï Ï b Ï &R Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ?ú Ï Ï 46

Ï Ï b Ï Ï ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & Jb Ï Ï J Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï Ï ? bÏ Ï 48

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï J J J# Ï Ï J Ï Ï Ï Ï

Ï

ú

(continued)

62   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire E x . 2.4. (continued)

Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï & #Ï Ï Ï Ï

50

? 51

&

ú

ú

ú

Adagio

?w

ú

Ï Ï Ï bú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï J ÏÏÏ ú

ú

ú

ú bÏ

Ï#Ï

Ï

Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï j Ï Ï ú # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï b Ï b Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï & 55

? 59

&

ú Ï Ï

Ï. Ï ú J

?ú

ú

Ï Ï bú

ú

Ï Ï

ÏÏ

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏú ú î # Ï # Ï # Ï J Ï #Ï #ÏÏ ú Ï Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Allegro

A sadder but wiser, fully chastened ensemble reestablishes the canzona texture with which it had started. The section comprising mm. 62 through 85 serves the purpose of distilling the tensions between A and D that had manifested themselves over the course of the piece; it juxtaposes the two rival key areas, giving them equal time but refusing to give either the upper hand, leaving them in a draw. Not even the deliberateness of a fugal process can solidify the key center. Indeed, the imitative subject operates to pivot promiscuously from one side to the other.

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   63

The Allegro that begins with the D cadence in m. 86 unfolds as a stately dance, in contrast with the arrogant virtuosity, the cerebral imitation, or the unabashed weeping of prior sections (ex. 2.5). As the voices take turns presenting their versions of the dance, a quality of orderliness enters. No more than earlier sections, however, does this dance have its own internally coherent harmonic logic. Although the bass tends to outline a single key at a time, the violin moves during its passages to other places, which the bass then confirms. Not surprisingly, this courtly process scrolls through the principal areas that have been in contention throughout the sonata: D, A, C. But after pausing for a double period on C (the violin chooses to repeat its passage that had brought it to C), the process of unpredictable fifth motion starts up again. A wide range of possible keys process by, kept in check by the stately rhythms though in fact lacking any particular goal or logic. The violin line, however, mounts steadily upward until it pushes through Gà to Gá and on to A in m. 112. This arrival on A in m. 112 will turn out to qualify as the moment of least ambiguous closure for the entire sonata. Yet it scarcely sounds secure, perched as it is on 8 rather than 1. Moreover, it has reached A not through the usual diapente descent but by scratching and clawing its way up chromatically. Octave equivalence rarely obtains in this repertory, and this high A is not the same functionally as its lower partner. But this is as good as it gets. The bass in m. 112 immediately opens up the floodgates to D again. A brief point of imitation confirming D subsides into a D pedal, over which the violin presents one last extravagant passage blending virtuosity with some of the affective pathos of the Adagio. With great rhetorical effort, the violin pushes down from F in m. 119 to E harmonized by A in the final measure. What does this ending mean? As is so often the case in Aeolian madrigals, this conclusion manages both to bring the piece back to its final (with D serving as iv in a prolonged plagal cadence) and to keep its rival alive and well (the last chord resonating as V/D, its melodic pitch as the penultimate step in a descent to D). Thus a structural ambiguity introduced with the sonata’s very first pitch increases in significance through a variety of sections, until it reaches this moment where it must reveal its true identity as neither one or the other alternative but rather the very state of hanging torn between the two options. The fact that it does so emphatically scarcely ameliorates the equivocal quality of this conclusion: it proudly displays these formal signs of internal contradiction. Certain elements of later multimovement instrumental compositions may already be glimpsed here. The various segments of Castello’s piece

E x . 2.5. Castello, Sonata I, mm. 86–120.

. ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï j Ï Ï Ï î ∑ Ï. Ï Ï Ï J w. ? 32 ú ú ú ú ú ú w . w.  

& 32 w

Allegro

Ï . JÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ïj Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï J w. ? w. ú ú ú ú ú ú w. 91

&w

î

∑

Ï Ï . JÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ïj Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï J w. ? ú ú ú ú ú ú w. w. &w 96

î

∑

j Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & .ÏÏ J J w. ? w. w. ú w 101

Ï . Ïj Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï J & Ï #Ï Ï. J ?w #ú w ú w #ú ú w 105

109

&

# Ï . JÏ Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï ú w

? w

ú

#ú

c

c ú.

ú w.

w

w

Adagio

Ï

Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïj ä J Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ J & ? Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ w ú. #Ï 113

∑

j ÏJ Ï Ï Ï ÏR ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï &Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ ?ú ú w 116

118

&

Ï

?w 119

&

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ

Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w

w

w

w

?w

66   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

distinguish themselves from one another on the basis of meter changes, internal motivic integrity, and affective function. Although I would not want to suggest a direct evolution, the pathos-ridden Adagio resembles a slow movement with respect to its psychological implications, and the appearance of a dance in the penultimate position anticipates the impulse that will later make the minuet the third movement in a symphonic cycle. Both of these distinctive sections clear the air of the flamboyant energies that stamped most of the adjacent sections, allowing moments of interiority or kinesthetic calm before the sonata resumes its overwhelmingly aggressive course of action. Despite such characteristics, however, these segments are far too brief to count as genuine movements. More important, they cannot stand alone formally: they begin and end in different keys, and they remain dependent on the larger Aeolian argument of the sonata. Yet we should not regard this interdependence as immature attempts at doing something not yet on the horizon. Beethoven and Schubert, among others, return to such strategies as ways of ensuring coherence in largescale compositions. Recall, for instance, the fragmentary sections in Beethoven’s Op. 131, which likewise begin and end in different places or break off abruptly in order to pursue the stakes of the quartet as a whole. Indeed, the conclusion of Castello’s sonata brings to mind some of Adorno’s explanations of similar strategies in late Beethoven—again, Op. 131, in which the emphatic final sonority defiantly refuses to confirm either tonic or subdominant. If we do not understand the formal proclivities of Aeolian, we might well hear Castello’s sonata as relying exclusively upon its virtuosity to hold together an arbitrary series of fragments. But like the madrigal from which it descends, this sonata builds its structure tightly from tensions already built into the mode that underpins its moves. Of course, the madrigal can also rely on verbal cues to make intelligible its affective maneuvers and simulations of conflicted interiority. Castello demonstrates that he can perform such divided subjectivities without the assistance of words.  

Antonio Cesti’s “Pose in Fronte” In the previous chapter I dealt with the first segment of Antonio Cesti’s “Pose in fronte,” which traced an autonomous tonal trajectory lasting forty-four measures. The subsequent sections of the cantata, however, resemble more closely the interdependent parts of Castello’s sonata.

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   67

Like Castello’s segments, they hold themselves apart by virtue of their contrasting meters and affective qualities; moreover, as with Castello’s segments, they cannot be taken from their positions within the cantata and still make sense; they operate rather as parts of a larger argument— lyrically, but also musically. Given that this is a vocal composition, the successive sections have the responsibility of setting subsequent parts of the poetic text, and Cesti takes full advantage of shifts in the lyrics to shape his cantata formally. Like Cesti himself, we have to start with the text.  

1. Pose in fronte al mio tiranno

Proud Love hands chains and arrows

fiero Amor catene e strali;

over to my tyrant;

queste schiavo il cor mi fanno,

the former enslave my heart,

quei mi dan piaghe mortali.

The latter give me mortal pangs.

Ma sì dolce è la ferita

But so sweet is the wound

che l’infido al cor mi da,

that the unfaithful one inflicts on my heart,

così sembra a me gradita

that I feel only gratitude

la perduta libertà.

for my lost liberty.

Che per quel volto,

Because they proceed from that face,

onde languisco e moro,

on account of which I languish and die,

Amo li strali e le catene adoro.

I love the arrows and adore the chains.

2. Si begl’occhi io vidi appena

I scarcely glimpsed such lovely eyes

ch’un desire mi punse il petto;

when desire stabbed my breast;

sembra gioia e pure è pena,

it seems like joy and yet is pain,

è cordoglio, e par diletto.

it is grief, yet feels like delight.

Ma sì grato è lagrimare

But I find it so gratifying to weep

per le luci ond’io moro,

over those eyes from which I die,

così dolce è rimirare

that it is sweet to contemplate

la beltà che m’impiagò.

this beauty that wounds me.

Che per quegl’occhi,

Because they proceed from those eyes,

onde languisco e moro,

on account of which I languish and die,

Amo li strali e le catene adoro.

I love the arrows and adore the chains.

68   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

The second section of the cantata begins immediately after the point of closure of the first: a non sequitur follows the B minor triad on the downbeat of m. 44, immersing us with little preparation in D major, a switch to duple meter, and a somewhat chatty style that contrasts sharply with the bel canto flow of the opening (ex. 2.6) With respect to the text, these four lines serve the function of explaining the overall conceit, of unpacking the metaphors that drive the cantata. Similarly, the musical argument proceeds quickly, homing in on and developing the tensions latent in the opening and awaiting resolution only in the final section. Consequently, the D major key area proves very short-lived; a mere three bars later, the “arietta” has touched down in A major in m. 47, then moves on for its principal cadence to E minor. Cesti elaborates this cadence in ways that simulate the bondage at issue in the text— the melismatic voice twists and turns in dissonant resistance against the slowly moving tetrachord descent in the bass line. The four lines of text then repeat, this time exclusively in B minor, which concludes the arietta in m. 59—barely fifteen measures after it started. Moreover, because the tempo is quick, this segment of the cantata is over nearly before it begins. Still and all, it accomplishes a good deal with respect to formal structure. Both A and E have the effect of emphasizing E, the modal fourth degree, as an important boundary. The result is a temporary loss of species identity, as the whole complex lists to the passive side of the mode, a common occurrence in Aeolian-based compositions and a strategy that works particularly well in setting a text that celebrates the pleasures of complacent submission. Yet when Cesti has the vocal line push insistent back up to Fá (the fifth degree) in m. 53, he seems to have his persona rail—at least temporarily—against such servitude. As often happens in madrigals, the musical argument may conform to the lyrics and expand on their meanings or it may violate them; in this short section Cesti does all of the above with his apparently languid free fall to the side of 4, countered with an acute attempt at resistance. In any case, at the conclusion of the arietta, the two sides—self-effacing surrender and last-ditch efforts at holding onto some semblance of identity—have arrived at a standoff. Note that this explanation of the move from D major to A major goes against what we now usually interpret as an impulse toward the more acute: A major sports three sharps, after all—one more than does either D major or B minor. In modal practice, however, the question is  

 

 

 

 

 

 

E x . 2.6. Cesti, “Pose in fronte,” mm. 44–59.

## c Î Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ & J J Ï ä ÏJ J J Ï

Ï Ï JÏ JÏ Ï Ï Ï

 

? ## c Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ma s“ dol - ce

è la fe-ri - ta

che l'in-fi - do al

Ï

#6

Ï

j # Ï jÏ & # Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï J n ÏJ ÏJ ÏJ JÏ ÏJ Ï JÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï 47

Ï

cor mi da, co-s“ sem-bra a me gra-di-ta la per - du - ta

? ## Ï Ï Ï 50

&

##

#

Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ Ï

tˆ,

? ## ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï

Ï

Ï ÏÏÏ

Ï. nÏ Ï nú

#

Ï Ï Ï Ï #

Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ J J Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï la per - du - ta

Ï Ï #

6

7

li - ber -

li - ber -

Ï Ï Ï Ï #

#

# Ï Ï Ï Ï äÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ & # Ï JJ J J J JJJ J 53

? ##

tˆ, co-s“ sem - bra

Ï

Ï

Ï

ú

6

ÏÏ

a me gra-ti - ta la per - du - ta

Ï

Ï

#

6

li - ber -

Ï Ï Ï

Ï

#

## Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Î î #Ï J J & Ï 56

tˆ,

? ## Ï

Ï

Ï. Ï Ï ú

6

7

la per - du - ta li - ber - tˆ.

6

ÏÏ #

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Î î #

#

70   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

not always a matter of sharp versus flat keys, but often (as is the case here) of antagonistic species boundaries. Listen again to this passage, which clearly registers the sequence from D to A to E as a decrease in tension. It might well be understood as heading back to B, which would be the next stop if we continued on by fifth. But Cesti does not position B as the natural consequence of this motion by fifth. Instead, B has to be rescued with considerable effort from this automatic-pilot fall into incoherence. He responds to the cadence on E minor in m. 53 as if in a kind of panic, spiking up the proceedings with the reinstatement of Fá and the return of B minor. A brief three-measure recitative steps outside the fray, privileging neither side but rather speaking from G major, or VI, a function that will prove so crucial to the dilemmas raised in nineteenth-century music (ex. 2.7, mm. 60–62). The lyrics here prepare us for the crucial turnaround; they represent a temporary island of rationality buttressed between the histrionic protests of the cantata’s earlier sections and the concluding aria, which just lies back and delivers itself up wholly to the pleasure/ pain it had pretended to fight against. With respect to the musical strategy of this transitional recitative, Cesti has to play a very delicate game, keeping the ambivalences alive while also pointing forward to eventual resolution. Observe that the melodic line in m. 61 ascends through Cà, while the figured bass specifies a Cá in the continuo, as a secondary dominant to D in m. 62. Notwithstanding this slight discrepancy, the melodic A in m. 62 seems poised to descend to G. Instead, Cesti uses the D major chord (which we first hear as V/G) as the first sonority and opening key center of his final segment. This qualifies as a rather oblique elision, corresponding to the grammatical relationship between the sentence’s antecedent clause (“Per che . . . ”) and its consequent (“amo . . . ”). We have heard D major repeatedly over the course of the cantata, sometimes in its capacity as alter ego to B minor in its support of Fá, other times as the site from which the composer launches the drop by fifth toward E-related keys. Here it serves both functions and also others, much closer to Renaissance convention than one might initially assume. In contrast to the breathless, sometimes frenetic gestural vocabulary of the first two segments of the cantata, this finale presents an image of calm surrender. The crucial fifth degree, Fá, appears as the opening melodic pitch, but it is assigned a position low in the vocal range. One of the tasks of this aria will be to move in such a way as to position Fá  

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   71

in the high octave, whence it can resolve properly to B. This will occur at last in m. 85, but Cesti takes his own sweet time mounting up the scale to get there. Contributing to the relative serenity of this aria is the fact that each of its principal steps gets expanded to the status of a circumscribed key area. Thus a luxuriantly prolonged D major gives way to A major, which arrives at a consolidated cadence in m. 75. At this point the text begins to repeat—and so does the music, hiked up a fifth from its initial iteration. But just as A major seems primed to topple forward by another fifth to E, as happened in the “arietta,” an unanticipated Aá (m. 85) brings us back to B minor and a rectifying Fá. Cesti chooses not to round off the piece just yet, however. Instead, he commences his final diapente descent, its steps—Fá to E—heavily re­inforced by means of secondary dominants. Indeed, we seem to get stuck yet again on E, as both Dá and Gá seem to lead us back to those rival key areas. The return to D (tentatively harmonized at first, then powerfully articulated as a point of arrival) allows for E to become a mere stepping-stone on the way to D. It almost seems that D major is the tonic of the aria, until the Aá two measures before the end returns us to B as the proper key of the cantata as a whole. A summarizing descent from Fá through to an accented Cá (the missing 2) to B rounds off both aria and cantata. By the time B minor appears, however, the vocal line has already performed its embrace of Fá with the effusive elaboration of that all-important pitch with the upper auxiliary, G, in m. 90. Consequently, the final return to B qualifies not as a panicked attempt at reinstating the boundary but as a moment of subsiding back into the tonic. Cesti repeats the melodic contour of his D major climax, but at a lower pitch level, allowing for the accumulated energies to ebb away. It is because the reestablishment of Fá in the upper octave in effect resolves the cantata’s tensions that the actual modulation to B minor can accomplished in such a perfunctory manner. This backdoor maneuver into the tonic also resolves the problem posed by the lyrics: how can the “I” of the text derive pleasure from implements of torture? If Cesti registered B minor (i.e., identity) in the first two sections of the cantata as embattled, here he positions it as truly available only in the aftermath of its surrender to the other side. Reconciliation occurs not by virtue of struggle but rather of submission. Why not just call “Pose in fronte” tonal and have done with it? We may have no difficulty labeling component parts, and most of the key  

 

 

E x . 2.7. Cesti, “Pose in fronte,” m. 60–end.

## c ä Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï n Ï Ï jj & J J J J J J Ï Ï Ï ú.

32

 

? ## c

che per quel vol - to, on-de lan-gui-sco e mo

w

# & # 32 î w

ú

63

? # # 32 w .

a

ú

-

ú

w

#6

7

-

ro,

32

ú ÏÏÏÏ ú ú ú

ú ú ú w. mo li

w

Ï

ú ú ú w

stra

-

ú- ú- wli

e

# Ï ú ú ú ú ú. Ï Ï Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï & # ú ú. Ï ú ú 68

w ? ## ú le ca

#

-

w

te - ne, e

ú w.

le ca - te

# ú Ï Ï ú. Ï ú w & # #ú ú

î ú ú

73

ne a - do

? ## ú w

ú w 4

-

ro, a

#3

w

-

-

-

ú w

ú ú ú

w.

mo li

stra

ú w. -

-

-

ú ú ú

# ú ú ú ú. Ï & # Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú ú ú ú. #Ï Ï #ú ú

78

ú

? ## w

ú #w li

e

ú w

le ca

-

#ú w.

te - ne, e

w

#

# . ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ ú Ï #ú ú ú ú #ú ú & # ú -

? ## î ú ú

-

ú w -

-

w

## ú . ú ú ÏÏw ú Ï Ï Ï & ? ## w

ú

# & # ú.

Ï Ï Ï #ú ú ú

93

te

-

? ## î ú

w

-

ú

-

ú ú w a - do

- ne

ú w

le ca - te

ú w

88

ne

ú #w

- ne, e

-

#

ú

-

ú

ú w

ú ú ú

ro,

w.

w.

e

Ï Ï ú.

a - do -

ca -

ú. Ï Ï Ï

83

te

le

w 4

-

#3

le ca -

Ï w.

..

- ro.

..

w.

74   |   The Hydraulics of Musical Desire

areas relate to one another by fifth. Surely that suffices. I have already offered as justification for my Aeolian reading, however, the fact that the sections of the cantata are so short, that most of them begin and end in different keys, that they depend upon the sections adjacent to them to make musical sense. Moreover, although its internal modulations often become recognizable key areas through tonal expansion, they dovetail into each other in ways that relate more closely to modal premises. We might call them a succession of keys, but we would miss Cesti’s exquisitely wrought ambiguities if we do so. •

•

•

I hope to have demonstrated that the three compositions examined in this chapter make coherent sense; they do not comprise loosely strungtogether fragments but rather carefully crafted components of largescale strategies. In short, Monteverdi, Castello, and Cesti were not trying to articulate (though with still-primitive musical skills) what later composers would put into sound; if their concatenations sometimes sound bizarre to us, it is because these musicians lived in a different, even alien world from the one we take for granted. The structures of feeling they traced differ considerably from those that would prevail in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that would govern the repertories we still tend to regard as universal. Taking their such utterances seriously can allow us some degree of phenomenological access to individuals and communities remote from us in space and time; their strategies offer us insight into significant—if largely unspoken and undeniably mediated—experiences of seventeenth-century subjectivity.16 The pieces examined in this chapter, for instance, perform a split between aggressive self-display and abject passivity. This split cannot be written off as accidental: the technical devices used by all three composers reveal that they understood full well how to set up goals and achieve them: how, in other words, to simulate a sense of successful personal agency in their musical processes. But they deliberately chose to limn this position of energetic resistance in the face of what they posited as sensuous surrender. The chapters that follow examine a range of seventeenth-century repertories, sometimes leading off with the cultural practices that informed the music, sometimes beginning with apparent anomalies within the music and moving back toward the social contexts that helped to shape such procedures. More so than in most musicological studies dealing with the 1600s, I will insist on making sense of the music itself, though  

 

Composites, or the Still-Divided Subject    |   75

I will not always focus as intensively on syntax as I have in this opening section. But the music cannot be understood without a concomitant understanding of the world that produced it. Nor, for that matter, can that world truly be grasped without the evidence offered most powerfully and even viscerally through the music.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

Gendering Voice

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

Soprano as Fetish Professional Singers in Early Modern Italy

In 1580 Duke Alfonso d’Este designed a genre of entertainment for his fifteen-year-old bride, Margherita Gonzaga; as his third wife, she was his last hope for producing an heir and thus securing the estate at Ferrara for his family for generations to come. Eager to entertain his young spouse while sheltering her from the customary revels of his courtiers, Duke Alfonso recruited a small cluster of accomplished female singers to serve as an ensemble for performances in Margherita’s private chambers, concerts that came to be known as musica secreta.1 The duke never achieved his ultimate goal: his wife—however royally fêted—did not give birth, and the Ferrarese estate reverted to papal control when Alfonso died in 1597. Yet despite this personal failure, the duke did manage to bequeath to future generations a legacy of immeasurable significance. For the women he recruited and trained—Laura Peverara, Anna Guarini, Livia D’Arco, and Tarquinia Molza—revolutionized for all time Western attitudes toward the voice. As we shall see in this and subsequent chapters, they also set the agenda for many other kinds of music and shaped the expressive devices developed over the course of the next hundred years. We take for granted today the roster of professional opera singers whose vocal prowess makes them highly paid international stars. We do not expect of these stars that they will also create new music or wield their voices rhetorically to express their own opinions in the political sphere; their fame resides in the sheer glory of their sound and their capacity for  

 

 

 

79

80   |   Gendering Voice

executing the difficult maneuvers plotted out on paper by composers. This division of labor based on the objectification of the voice has not always prevailed, however, and we owe much of it to this moment in the history of Ferrara. Moreover, in addition to bestowing the vocal fetish on the Western art world, Duke Alfonso’s private concerto delle donne also heavily influenced cultural conceptions of subjectivity, gender, the body, musical genre, performance practices, and educational processes. •

•

•

Of course, superb singers had existed long before the Ladies of Ferrara ap­­ peared. The music of Hildegard von Bingen, Perotin, and the fourteenthcentury Mannerists, to name but a few examples, required extraordinarily skilled vocalists, and the sixteenth-century madrigal repertory as a whole demanded an extremely high level of musicianship.2 Moreover, manuals for teaching oneself the art of lavish ornamentation (or passaggi) had proliferated in Italy since the 1530s, and virtuoso players of lutes, keyboards, and viols abounded during this period.3 But the very idea of professional female singers violated a number of deep-seated cultural taboos. Recall that the enterprise of selling the voice—whatever the gender of its owner—had met with resistance at least as far back as the twelfth century, when the city of Paris tried to police the growing number of would-be entertainers crowding into the burgeoning metropolis.4 A motet text from around 1400 explicitly thematizes the anxieties attached to this practice:  

 

Certain merchants are now arising amongst the populace. They turn fine gold into lead, and exchange sweet-smelling flowers for foul odor. These men are called, if I am not mistaken, professional singers. When they see some great man in public, they look for their best song, one that they really like. Then they sing it with a great proliferation of little notes, and boast of their singing. They sing not, I think, for the love of God, but for the love of that great man. You are such hypocrites! Have you never looked at the Holy Gospel, where you may read the word of the Lord concerning such matters? So be it then; you have received your price. [Motetus part of “Arae post labamina,” Old Hall Manuscript, ca. 1400]5

This brief text touches on several important issues. First, it resonates with Saint Augustine’s famous confession that he often found himself seduced by the singer’s sound, which distracted him from the psalm for which the voice was expected to function as mere vehicle.6 The church, of course, has always relied heavily upon the vocal idiom, despite the

Soprano as Fetish   |   81

admonitions of Augustine and many others who shared his apprehensions, but it tried to solve the problem by drawing on those whose vocations cloistered them safely within the ecclesiastical establishment. Even so, the tendency of some musicians to push beyond the bare necessities of liturgical chant and to indulge in increasing spectacularity led to periodic purges of church music: John of Salisbury (twelfth century) and Pope John XXII (fourteenth century) roundly condemned the advent of polyphony—now regarded as the crowning glory of Western music— complaining like our motet text about that “great proliferation of little notes.”7 In the sixteenth century the Council of Trent and the various Protestant denominations similarly attempted to curtail the sensuous excesses of music when used in the divine service. Such controversies attest most obviously to the animosity aroused by virtuosity, but they also bear witness to its undoubted appeal; otherwise there would have been no reason to legislate against it. Second, the motet text registers its disapproval of the practice of singing for hire, the notion that one might lend one’s voice to accommodate the highest bidder rather than using it as an authentic expression of self, God, or community. As the privileged medium linking individuals in the public realm, vocal utterance is highly prized and yet treated with considerable suspicion: the Platonic warnings concerning rhetoric also attend the showy but potentially empty or misleading heightening of speech in song—especially when it enters into commercial exchange. This anxiety still motivates the need for fans to find “authenticity” in their favorite instances of popular musics. Our motet text refers to its pernicious merchants as men, but the threat rises exponentially when the singers in question are women. Warnings about the female voice come down to us from Homer’s story of the Sirens and from Saint Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians that women must remain silent, and both these texts circulated widely in the Renaissance as justifications for outlawing feminine participation in public music making.8 Needless to say, women did sing in the sixteenth century, but respectable ones did so only within the private confines of the court, convent, or household. The majority of skilled female musicians practiced their arts as courtesans, in which case the selling of the voice attached directly to the prostitution of the body and vocal prowess operated quite literally as siren song.9 Thus Duke Alfonso’s fastidiousness in locating women above reproach, in arranging their marriages, and in ruthlessly policing their private lives: otherwise people would have assumed (and often did anyway) that the Ladies waiting on the duchess were whores.10  

 

 

82   |   Gendering Voice

The singing of madrigals occupied a privileged place in the cultural life of the Italian Renaissance. Usually dense four- or five-part settings of complex poetry—the secular equivalent of the sacred motet—these pieces presented intricately constituted analogs to subjective experience: the struggles between inward feeling and outward appearance, between passion and control, between irrationality and reason.11 Although most madrigals included parts notated in the soprano and alto clefs, those roles were often filled by falsettists who knew how to negotiate such registers without difficulty. Sometimes women sang the upper parts, but the fact of higher tessituras did not presuppose female participation. Indeed, the intellectual seriousness of many madrigals made it an elite and predominantly masculine enterprise; mixtures of court musicians and courtiers sang them from part books that required the collaboration of the entire ensemble to produce the image of a single (usually implicitly male) subjectivity.12  

•

•

 

•

Duke Alfonso perhaps got the idea for his concerto delle donne by observing in-house performances by some of the more gifted noblewomen already present as courtiers at Ferrara. But their contributions to the musical life at Ferrara flowed from their status as members of court. They would not have submitted to the functionary roles the duke had in mind when he pushed them aside for his cluster of professionals. Alfonso’s court composers wrote special music to showcase these women, and they subjected them to long, grueling rehearsals in which they impelled the voices of the Ladies of Ferrara to attain unprecedented levels of virtuosity with respect to both range and speed. Specialized coaches also choreographed their physical movements, determining in advance all facial expressions and hand gestures for the purpose of visual spectacle. Although their performances were supposed to remain private, the Ladies quickly became an open secret, and nobility from all over Italy clamored for admission into the chamber where they sang for two to six hours every afternoon. Before long other courts boasted their own all-women ensembles. Only Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga of Mantua scorned Alfonso’s concerto as he stormed from the room muttering, “Ladies are very impressive indeed—in fact, I would rather be an ass than a lady!”13 By the next year, however, he too was hard at work trying to recruit professional female singers to his own court to form a rival group. What did they sound like? Here is a description by a contemporary:  

Soprano as Fetish   |   83

The ladies of Mantua and Ferrara were highly competent and vied with each other not only in regard to the timbre and training of their voices but also in the design of exquisite passages of embellishment delivered at opportune points, but not in excess. Furthermore, they moderated or increased their voices, loud or soft, heavy or light, according to the demands of the piece they were singing; now slow, breaking off with sometimes a gentle sigh, now singing long passages legato or detached, now gruppi, now leaps, now with long trills, now with short, and again with sweet running passages sung softly. They accompanied the music and the sentiment with appropriate facial expressions, glances and gestures, with no awkward movements of the mouth or hands or body which might not express the feeling of the song.14

Unfortunately, we do not have any way of retrieving the actual timbres they produced, leaving (appropriately enough for a chapter with “fetish” in the title) a gaping absence right in the middle of my inquiry. But in contrast to the usual practice of allowing performers to embellish passaggi for themselves extempore, many of those composing for the Ladies left nothing to chance: they wrote the madrigals designed for the concerto delle donne out in full score (a highly unusual mode of presentation for this time), and they meticulously notated every single ornament, leaving us with an extraordinarily detailed record of what the women executed in concert. For obvious reasons, composers of this music protected these scores as trade secrets, and some of the most dazzling examples reached publication only after the duke had died and the court at Ferrara had dissolved.15 But by that time the special effects wrought by the singers in the duchess’s chamber had long since influenced every type of music making in Northern Italy and beyond. In fact, the craze surrounding the concerto delle donne changed fundamentally the course of Western music making in ways that would have astonished everyone concerned. Take, for instance, “Non sa che sia dolore” by Luzzasco Luzzaschi, one of the principal composers for the Ladies of Ferrara.16 Luzzasco’s musical setting of this verse by Guarini resembles in many respects the style of his own five-part madrigals, especially in settings of poems with similar conceits. As in Monteverdi’s “Ah, dolente partita,”17 “Non sa che sia dolore” sets up a desire to cadence: to die and thus to end pain but also to achieve fulfillment. Yet the modal unfolding mitigates against closure: both principal options in this G Dorian piece—G and D—find themselves thwarted just as they seem about to conclude; even the alternative of C fails to work. The conclusion of the piece, which concerns the possibility of endless recycling, arrives dutifully at G with a preparation that makes it seem as though it wants to cadence on C.  

 

84   |   Gendering Voice

Non sa che sia dolore

One does not know sorrow

chi da la vita sua parte, e non more.

who parts from this life, yet does not die.

Cari lumi leggiadri, amato volto,

Dear, charming eyes, beloved face,

ch’Amor mi diè sì tardi e fier destino

which Love gave me so late and proud Fate

sì tosto oggi m’ha tolto!

so quickly today has taken from me!

Viver lungi da voi? Tanto vicino

Live far apart from you? I am so near

son di mia vita al termine fatale,

the fatal end of my live that if

se vivo torno a voi, torno immortale.

I live I return to you and become immortal.18

But “Non sa che sia dolore” differs from the standard genre in several respects that turn out to be extremely important. In contrast with the polyphonic madrigal, which was designed as chamber music largely for the pleasure of participants, the music written for the Ladies of Ferrara means to be consumed as display. Whereas Cipriano de Rore and Monteverdi explored in their madrigals the complex depths of alienated subjectivities, Luzzasco’s pieces for the concerto delle donne focus the attention on the spectacular surface and on the dazzling capabilities of individual singers. In the opening phrase, for example, Soprano I begins alone with a clearly defined Dorian motive, her grief painted briefly by the move up to Eâ. Immediately, however, Soprano II seizes the stage, leaping into a higher register, anticipating the consequent part of the line, and pushing impatiently for a change in orientation from Soprano I’s plaintive, stagnant line. When Soprano III enters, it is at a lower pitch and in imitation of Soprano II, with Soprano I soon following suit (ex. 3.1). Note that the differences in pitch level set out a variety of desire trajectories: S II seems to have wanted to move to Bâ, S III to D, and S I to a secure G. But each of them breaks off, most dramatically S III, who should have descended to E to match the bass harmonies of m. 7 or else to Fá to conform to the implied half cadence on G in the other voices. The unrequited A in S I hangs on by itself, even though it garners only ambiguous support (the pitch begins m. 7 as the penultimate pitch in a descent to G but finds itself redefined as the fifth degree of D). The same situation obtains in the second statement of this line: the voices drop out one by one, leaving a single unsupported voice to languish on “non more.” This time around, however, S III gets the high note! If we were making a video of this madrigal, we would have the cam-

Soprano as Fetish   |   85 E x . 3.1. Luzzaschi, “Non sa che sia dolore,” mm. 1–10.

ú ú ú ú bw w

&b C w w &b C

Non

&b C

sa

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

bw

w

∑

mo - re,

?b w

î ú w.

w ∑

Non

ú ú ú úw

te e non mo

da la

vi - ta sua par-te e non

-

re,

#

sa

da la vi - ta

Chi da la

vi - ta sua par -

ú ú w.

ú w

che

sia

ú ú

do - lo

ú ú î bú Chi da la

-

re

Chi

ú ú ú ú bw ú î

ú úú ú ú

Non sa

ú

îú ú ú

∑

î ú w w.

Chi

îú úú ú Ïú ú

∑

sua par-te e non mo - re,

&b ú ú w

Chi

úúú w ú ÏÏú ú ú

&b ú ú ú ú w w &b

î ú ú ú ú. Ï

ú ú ú ú. Ï ú ú ú ú î

che sia do - lo - re

?b C w w 6

∑

 

che sia do - lo - re

w w

era pan from singer to singer, depending on who has the most glamorous or dramatic material. But even without video technology, we must imagine that spectators had their attention drawn in this way to each performer in turn, as the three voices competed to sing in the high tessitura. Even more impressive are the suspensions produced in the high range among the voices, which rub up against each other in that exposed reg-

86   |   Gendering Voice

ister. If their words speak of absence, their music simulates languorous lovemaking in ways that will be crucial to the argument of this chapter and, indeed, to the expressive vocabulary of the entire baroque period. Like any showman, Luzzasco has to keep the appetites of his listeners whetted, and he does not disappoint. After a dramatic buildup on “viver lungi da voi” (stated twice, with the voices taking turns ending on the high leading tone that yearns upward toward the absent beloved), the Three Ladies break off in quick imitation, each exploring a different possible avenue of continuation. Nothing prepares the listener, however, for the fireworks display that suddenly erupts in mm. 31–32, as S II grabs the spotlight with a quick upward scale. When S I copies that lick, S II spikes up in a dazzling flourish that ascends all the way to a high Bâ; with this flurry of notes, she seems to become airborne—as do those listening to her, if only vicariously. All this energy apparently manages to achieve the cadence withheld until now: the voices all converge on a cadence on D, the fifth degree (ex. 3.2). There would seem to be little left to do, but Luzzasco has still more tricks up his sleeve as he repeats this last line of text. A seemingly staid point of imitation is stopped in its tracks by S III, who presents the cadential formula in the highest range: a jaw-dropping 1–2-1 in the octave above the final in m. 35. All three unite in presenting a rapid turn figure, spreading the hyperanimation released by S II in the previous passage. And this time around it is S II who halts the action with that high-wire cadence. Under her sustained high G, the other two voices offer slowed-down versions of their earlier pyrotechnics, leading to a lavish—though still ambiguous—final cadence. As Anthony Newcomb has demonstrated, the kinds of effects made possible by these professional singers, whose job it was to polish and perfect every nuance, encouraged composers to write specifically for this idiom.19 Because they now could make technical demands of skilled professionals, they began to see how far they could push qualities such as textural discontinuities, difficult melodic leaps, chromatic deviations, or luxuriant ornamentation—qualities not only unfeasible but also aesthetically inappropriate to amateurs singing chamber music at sight.20 The Mannerist avant-garde of the late sixteenth century depended upon newly forged relationships among the composers who set down the blueprint, the singers who spent their time mastering and executing the lavish imagery designated by the composers, and a passive audience that sat spellbound, observing the exhibit from the outside.21 To be sure, Luzzasco still gives us the affective gestures of desire typi 

 

 

 

 

 

Soprano as Fetish   |   87 E x . 3.2. Luzzaschi, “Non sa che sia dolore,” mm. 27–36.

&b C

Î Ï Ï Ï ú

∑

Ï Ï bÏ ú &b C Î &b C

î

Î

Ï ú. ?b C Î Ï Ï 30

& b ú. ter

&b ú

ne

&b ú ?b ú

-

ú

fa

ú

vi - ta al

ú

ú

mi - ne

fa

mia

-

ta al

Ï Ï Ï ú

ú ú

vi

vi - ta al

ter

-

mi -

-

ta

-

ú

ú

ú

ter

ú

mia

Ï Ï

Ï Ï Ï Ï

ta

-

-

-

ú

Ï

di

Ï Ï Ï ú

Ï ú

ú.

vi - ci - no Son

tan - to vi - ci

#

n

Ï Ï ú ú

Ï Ï ú

tan - to

tan - to vi - ci - no Son di

∑

 

Ï

-

ú Î Ï ú ú

-

-

Ï Ï ÏÏÏ w

mi - ne

-

ú.

Ï ú ú

ú.

no

Son di

mia

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ

ÏÏÏÏú -

-

Ï

-

-

-

ú

fa

-

-

-

-

-

-

(continued)

cal of madrigal composition, and he even offers a modal allegory concerning the impossibility of closure. But more than that, he invites us to expect ever more stunning thrills: the next high note, the next extravagant string of passaggi, the next ravishing moment of frisson where two of the voices meet and rub against one another in that top range. Those accustomed to singing the intellectually challenging Petrarch settings

88   |   Gendering Voice E x . 3.2. (continued)

Ï ∑ & b ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï w le. ú ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ# Ï Ï Ï nÏÏ# ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ w Ï &b

32

-

&b w ?b w ta

-

-

-

-

-

-

34

-

-

∑

&bÏ ÏÏ Ï w

-

-

w

-

-

w #

ÏÏ Ï w &b î Î ÏÏ

voi

? b ÏÏ ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï úw î Î JJ ú

Ï

Se

∑

le,

-

Ï Ï Ï #ú Î Ï Ï

le. Se vi - vo tor - no a

úÎÏ Ï Ï ú

î Î Ï ÏJ JÏ Ï ú

Se vi-votor-no a voi

ú ÏÏ

-

Î

î În Ï n Ï Ï Ï # ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ w JJ

vi - votor-no avoi

&b w

-

î

ú

tor - no im-mor - ta - le,

4#

úÎ Ï

tor - no im-mor-ta

-

le,

tor - no im-mor-ta

-

le, Se

úÎ Ï Ï Ï

Ïú 4

∑ #

úÎ Ï

#

by Adrian Willaert might well have scoffed at the easy erotic pleasures afforded by the repertory composed for the Ladies, which is why some of the responses to this music resemble the dismissive comments made by aficionados of alternative rock when faced with what they regard as the virtuosic excesses of Mariah Carey.

Soprano as Fetish   |   89

But if the music of the concerto delle donne no longer takes its cues from the complexities of metaphysical poetry, it has a different agenda. It introduces into the public sphere radically new ways of experiencing the self, a self no longer tethered to the exigencies of discursive language but rather freed to simulate the throbbing of desire or the soaring sensation of ecstasy. The voice ceases to serve as a mere vehicle of speech; instead, it enacts metaphors of the body as it would feel if liberated from the constraints of gravity.22 The example of the Ferrarese Ladies helped to break music out of the intensely introverted polyphony of the Renaissance, with its grounding in Pythagorean mathematics, and to point toward the linear temporality favored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—toward a perception of time that celebrated dynamic change, velocity, and acceleration, that required for its mathematical corollary the invention of the calculus.23 In order to maintain some modicum of grammatical coherence while freeing the three soloists to perform their virtuosic flights of fantasy, Luzzasco notated a version of the piece to be played by an accompanying instrument. As a result, the tenor and bass voices that would ground a typical madrigal do not encroach upon this all-female space: if we ignore the Svengali-like keyboard or lute player who provides the support, we have a pastoral landscape featuring only the Three Graces, to whom texts for and about the Ladies of Ferrara often allude. Luzzasco’s accompaniment doubles the three solo parts (except for the ornamental flourishes) and adds a supporting bass. Although this is not quite the same as the schematic basso continuo that was beginning to appear around this same time, it certainly was one of the available options that led to the development of that crucial practice—though perhaps as a negative model. For compared with basso continuo, this notation is quite cumbersome; it moves in a controlling lockstep with the singers, and it lacks the flexibility that might allow keyboardists and lutenists to realize their own accompaniment according to the idiomatic capacities of their respective instruments. To return to the discussion in chapter 1 concerning the emergence of expansion devices, this solution resembles Caccini’s more closely than Peri’s. A bare bass line—the eventual solution to this technological problem—would leave these parameters open for particular performers to determine. In order to save space as well as time, I have reduced Luzzasco’s intricately notated accompaniment to its bass alone in my examples above, with indications under the score for accidentals not otherwise apparent from the upper parts. His younger contemporaries  

 

 

 

90   |   Gendering Voice

would have done the same thing for precisely the same reasons. Still, the novelty of writing for women’s voices alone contributed to the need for new ways of conceiving of performance, harmonic function, and even temporality. Those flights of fancy required a means of support that did not inhibit their ability to soar. But most important, the concerto delle donne instilled in their listeners an insatiable appetite for high voices—again to the consternation of those whose priorities resided with the manly virtues of complex poetry, examinations of conflicted interiority, rhetorical prowess in the public sphere, and participatory modes of music making. The ensembles made up of court musicians and serious connoisseurs from the nobility quickly gave way to displays by carefully groomed and extravagantly paid divas; talented women moved suddenly from a position of relative cultural marginality to one of exceptional opportunity, privilege, and influence.24 Not surprisingly, a good deal of grumbling attended this change of fortunes. Because professional singers (by definition) marketed their talents, they brought with them the taint of commercialism and even something of the aristocratic mania for collecting freaks and charlatans. Monteverdi complained bitterly that his patrons, the Gonzagas of Mantua, cared more for their dwarves, alchemists, and female singers than for his sublime music. To be sure, he and Luzzasco also received recompense for their contributions; but, as present-day composers can testify, the monetary value of the artist’s creative labor is far harder to gauge than that of the performer, who can charge a simple fee in exchange for immediate services rendered. Monteverdi’s salary was about a tenth that of Adriana Basile, the prima donna installed in the Mantuan court,25 and Luzzasco received only a fraction of the resources budgeted for his concerto delle donne.26  

•

•

•

Within ten years of the development of the concerto delle donne, the principal courts of Northern Italy all boasted not only women’s ensembles but also virtuoso soloists. We know many of them by name, for they received star billing in the entertainments designed to showcase their talents. In 1589 the celebration of the marriage between Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine featured an evening-long festivity, and leading composers competed for the privilege of writing for the voice of the Florentine diva Vittoria Archilei. Archilei’s opening number was attributed in contemporary sources

Soprano as Fetish   |   91

variously to Emilio de’ Cavalieri or to Archilei’s husband, with lyrics by Giovanni de’ Bardi. It was more likely, however, the work of Vittoria herself, who could not be credited at the Medici court as a productive artist. “Dalle più alte sfere” is an elaborate embellishment over a relatively simple series of chord changes—the kind of improvisation that could be expected of any virtuoso at the time.27 The fact that Vittoria descended on a cloud as she sang certainly contributed to the effect of making her appear quite literally as a diva/goddess, in this case as the personification of Harmonia. But without Archilei’s astonishing ornamentation, this is scarcely even a viable piece—let alone the curtainraiser calculated to leave all spectators spellbound.  

 

Dalle più alte sfere

From the highest of the spheres

Di celesti sirene amica scorta

By celestial sirens gently escorted

Son l’harmonia, ch’a voi vengo, ò mortali.

I am Harmony who comes to you, o mortals.

As was the case with Luzzasco’s “Non sa che sia dolore,” the accompaniment for “Dalle più alte sfere” is presented by a four-part instrumental ensemble, written out in full score (reduced here to two staves). The vocal soloist embellishes the top of those lines, allowing us to compare the bare line with Archilei’s fleshed-out realization. Throughout this number Archilei presents the text first in a fairly straightforward manner so that listeners can hear the words. She then offers an extravagantly embellished version in which the words mostly disappear into the spectacle of her voice. For instance, in the final line of the text of “Dalle più alte sfere,” Bardi compares Christine de Lorraine to Minerva and Ferdinando de’ Medici with Hercules (Alcide), claiming that the sun has never seen a more noble pair. Saving the best for last, Archilei gilds this line with flourishes that must have exceeded the expectations even of those familiar with her talents (ex. 3.3). This is the kind of ornamentation Giulio Caccini warned against in the preface to Le Nuove Musiche, in which he set forth his own way of doing things, designed to keep the lyrics intact. But Archilei’s excesses have excellent company: even Monteverdi found himself seduced into this kind of extravaganza (see the discussion of his Magnificat in chapter 6 or his obvious attempt at competing with the divas in “Possente spirto,” from Orfeo); later Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio often worked to foreground the voice per se by means of mutilating their

92   |   Gendering Voice E x . 3.3. Archilei, “Dalle più alte sfere,” conclusion.

ÏÏ. & C î ú Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ïj J Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï î Qual &C w ú ? C ww

voi

ú ú

no

Ï Ï ú

úú

Ï Ï w wú

úú

-

va Mi - ner-ba e for

ú

ú ú ú

úú wú

ú

-

Ï Ï .ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & ÏÏ Ï J ÏÏÏ

36

-

& úú ú ?ú 37

&

-

-

w ú úú

-

te

w w w

Al - ci

ú

Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï #Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ

te Al

& úú ú ?ú

-

-

úú ú ú

-

-

-

ci -

# wÏ ú w w

-

-

de, e

for

ww w w

Ï

Ï

Ï

- de, e

wú w w

-

ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ú

poetry past the point of intelligibility. Caccini makes his recommendations in the interest of rhetoric. But rhetoric comes in many forms. If Caccini had in mind the expressive burden of his lyrics, Archilei and Monteverdi (at least when in virtuoso mode) worked no less to control the unfolding of their music so as to heighten the performative effect.

Soprano as Fetish   |   93

Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ &

39

for

& ww w ?w

-

-

-

-

-

ww w w

t'Al

-

-

-

ww ww

-

-

-

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï jÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï J Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

40

-

& ww w ?w

-

-

-

wú úú

-

-

& # ww w ? w

-

-

-

-

ú ú ú

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏú

41

&

-

-

-

úú ú ú

# ww

-

-

-

-

w w

ú -

w

ci

úw w ú ú w ú w

-

W

de.

W W W

Of course, male virtuoso singers also existed at this time, and they attempted to cash in on the craze for elaborate vocal display as well. Jacopo Peri, the musician credited with writing in 1600 the first genuine opera, also took a star turn in La Pellegrina in a number he both composed and sang, with the backup of two singers serving as echoes—  

94   |   Gendering Voice

thus offering at least sonically (if not visually) a male equivalent of the Ladies’ Three Graces. In “Dunque fra torbide onde,” his representation of Arion’s distress after being cast overboard by his own crew (text: Ottavio Rinuccini), Peri not only exhibited his own vocal talents but also his remarkable gift for monodic expression, a gift that became abundantly clear in the laments he later wrote for Orpheus in his Euridice. Monteverdi’s 1607 version of Orpheus cribbed shamelessly from Peri’s strategies as virtuoso singer and as rhetorician. For a while, anyway, male singers seemed to have made inroads into the market apparently controlled by women. •

•

•

Lavish ornamentation also found its way into the church. As discussed in chapters 5 and 6, the Counter-Reformation increasingly allowed musicians to bring into services the sensual imagery of ecstasy developed in the secular realm. The desire-laden gestures of the concerto delle donne—gestures that departed from speech to trace the ineffable—provided the perfect means for conveying in music the experiences described so vividly by Saint Teresa and other sixteenth-century mystics. Monteverdi’s Marian Vespers of 1610 features a number, “Duo seraphim,” in which two—and later three—male voices impersonate angels soaring around the throne of God while intoning the Sanctus (ex. 3.4). In order to create this image, Monteverdi has his singers simulate the extravagant moves of the Ladies of Ferrara, though transposed down an octave so that they may be performed by mature male singers in the context of worship services. Here as in Luzzasco we hear virtual bodies rubbing up against each other in erotic bliss, free of the constraints of gravity as they circle through the heavens; as in “Dalle più alte sfere” we have superhuman ornamentation and at least the aural image of a descent from the clouds. Alas, the octave transposition seems not to have satisfied audiences; they wanted the high voice—the voices of the Ladies, the voices of Vittoria Archilei or Adriana Basile. A recording by René Jacobs features the seraphim sung in the treble range so that they sound very much like the concerto delle donne.28 And a comparison between this and the many available recordings with the tenors Monteverdi designated reveals the greater agility of the sopranos and of Jacobs himself, who is singing as a countertenor. It may be an injustice of acoustics, but the chains of suspensions can be heard more easily when they are executed in higher frequencies. As will be discussed in the next chapter, very little  

 

 

 

 

Soprano as Fetish   |   95 E x . 3.4. Monteverdi, “Duo seraphim,” beginning.

ú . Ï ú Î Ï Ï . JÏ ú ú ú

Vb c w w Du - o

se - ra - phimcla-ma

∑

V b c w ú #ú ú. Ï w Du

w

-

o se - ra - phim

? c b w w w

11

Vb Vb

w

ú. Ï w

ma - bant

-

bant

al

Ï Ï bÏ ú Vb ÏÏ Ï Vb ú -

w

w

w

17

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

ter

ad

w

cla - ma

-

ú -

-

-

-

bant,

w

w

Ï . JÏ ú

al

-

ÏÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏÏÏ ú -

-

-

al

-

-

-

-

w

w

cla - ma

-

bant,cla-

î Î Ï Ï . JÏ ú ú ú î ÎÏ b w

j ú ú ú Ï .Ï ú

Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏ ú -

bant,

w

w

al - ter ad

bú ú ú ú ú ú

?b w

?b

w

-

î Î Ï Ï . JÏú ú Ï Ï

∑

bÏ Ï Ï Ï -

w

-

-

-

-

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ

w

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï w

-

-

-

Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï -

cla - ma -

-

-

w

-

te - rum:

. Ï #w

te - rum:

w

music was written for performance by tenors or basses during the seventeenth century. The soprano voice ruled. The demand of audiences for sopranos implied—at least for a while— that women held a commercial monopoly, that they and they alone could supply what had become a commodity fetish. And indeed, female singers continued to appear (except in Rome) as stars in opera productions throughout the seventeenth century: their tastes dictated many decisive  

 

96   |   Gendering Voice

changes in style, especially the move away from stripped-down stile recitativo to the ever-greater lyrical expansion of showcase arias.29 •

•

•

The seventeenth-century addiction to high voice also influenced two other major areas of musical activity. I will first deal with the easier of the two, namely the rapid rise of the violin to dominance in the increasingly important domain of instrumental music. Before the concerto delle donne fever seized Italy, string players had favored the viol: its mellow sound allowed for the kind of blending in consort situations that was also valued in polyphonic madrigal performances. It did not, however, offer the brilliance, agility, or dynamism now demanded in the wake of the Ferrarese Ladies.30 Around 1600 composers began to publish what they called sonatas for one, two, or three violins. They modeled these pieces—among the first autonomous genres of instrumental music in European culture—on the strategies developed for the concerto delle donne. Like Luzzasco’s pieces for virtuoso singers, sonatas relegate the lower parts to continuo instruments, which support the high soloists; and, also like Luzzasco, sonata composers feature affective gestures such as sighs and yearning appoggiaturas (which are easy enough to understand without explicit textual support), and they delight in the amorous intertwinings of melodic lines.31 Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sonata XXI con tre violini (1615) begins with a relatively staid point of imitation, alluding to the canzona—an instrumental genre that in turn alluded to the French vocal chanson—with a cluster of characteristic rhythms.32 Although some instrumental music of the time participates in seconda prattica transgressions (see the Fresco­baldi toccatas in chapter 6, for instance), in this sonata Gabrieli adheres strictly to standard rules of dissonance treatment. But what makes this sonata sparkle is the intense interaction among the three violins. They jockey for position, as did the Three Ladies, taking turns introducing and varying motives. Also present in the sonata are the simulations of lovemaking that permeate nearly all music of this time, whether vocal or instrumental, sacred or profane. In example 3.5, for instance, the instrumental lines lead by fifth from V/A to D minor (the modal fifth degree), through G to C. Then doubling out in sensuous thirds, the top two violins veer back toward A and begin trying to cadence. But consummation proves difficult to achieve, or, put differently, they don’t really want this exquisite pleasure to end.  

 

 

 

Soprano as Fetish   |   97 E x . 3.5. Gabrieli, Sonata XXI, mm. 47–62.

Ï. & c Î JÏ Ï # ú ú ú # ú &c &c ?c

#w Ï

∑

∑

w

∑

Ï. Ï #ú ú ú#ú Î ÏJ

∑ Ï .ÏÏ w J

 

∑ w

ú ÏÏÏÏ &î #ú î &

w

?ú

∑

ú ú ú

w

∑

Ï.Ï ÏÏ Î J ÏÏ ú îÎ

∑

j Î Ï .Ï Ï ú ú ú ú

w

w

ú ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ î Ï & #ú î

55

w

∑

w ÎÏÏÏ

Î Ï Ï Ï #ú ú w

∑

w

∑

Ï

î

Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ ú

Ï Ï Ï . ÏJ ÏÏÏ

w

w

#ú ú ú #ú ú ú ú w ∑

w

w

w ∑

î

ú

ú

ú ú

And as in the examples by Luzzasco and from La Pellegrina, Gabrieli sometimes ratchets up the energy level by mutual goading leading up to a final explosion of ornamental frenzy (ex. 3.6). I will not go into the modal details of this fascinating piece, but I would like to point out the ambiguous waffling at the first ending: after generating the expectation of a full cadence on G, Gabrieli suddenly withholds the Fá we had taken for granted, and the arrival on D in the bass serves both as a possible confirmation of D minor (the area on the fifth degree in Mixolydian) and then—but only weakly—as V/G. The cadence itself is tinged with a Bâ  

 

98   |   Gendering Voice E x . 3.6. Gabrieli, Sonata XXI, conclusion.

äÏÏÏ ú

&c ú

äÏÏÏ ú

äÏÏÏ ú

äÏÏÏ

Ï ú &c Î

äÏ ÏÏú

ä ÏÏÏú

äÏÏÏú

& c ä Ï Ï #Ï ú

ä Ï #Ï Ï ú

ä#Ï Ï Ï ú

äÏÏÏú

w

w

w

?c 105

&

ú

w

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï.

Ï #Ï J

Ï

Ï #Ï Ï ú

w

Ïú &äÏÏ

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ

&äÏÏÏú

ú

ä Ï bÏ Ï w

ú

?w

w

w

w

ú.

Ï

w ú

blues tone, coloring it as bittersweet. The second ending makes amends to some extent, though its emphasis on C makes the final sonority sound like V/IV as much as confirmation of the final, the kind of madrigalian ambivalence that invites us to start the lovemaking all over again. Within the next hundred years, violin manufacture in Northern Italy reached its all-time zenith in the workshops of Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri, as they built instruments that approximated the sound of the legendary sopranos. Virtuosity remains the purview of the violin through the concertos of Vivaldi, the wizardry of Paganini, and the

Soprano as Fetish   |   99 109

&î

ú

Ï ÏÏÏÏ w

& ú. ÏÏÏÏú

&Ï

ú

?w

ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ú &

112

ÏÏÏÏú

&

ÏÏÏÏú

ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï.

?w

w

ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï

ú

ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

ú

w

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ w

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï.

&ú

ú

Ï Ï. J

U w

Ï J w

U w

Ï w J

U

w

w

w

U

pieces that still constitute the core of our solo repertory. It took its cue from the vogue set in motion by the Duke of Ferrara. •

•

•

But the cultural and commercial premium placed on high voices also inspired the emergence of the castrato, the male sopranos and altos who could compete in the same range with the women to whom nature would seem to have given the incontestable advantage. The sudden entry of castrati onto the cultural scene always reminds me of the cycle of envy

100   |   Gendering Voice

that drives twentieth-century popular music: African-Americans invent new genres, which are first received with sexual anxiety and charges of commercialism, followed by wholesale imitation and appropriation by white musicians. Except that the price paid by males wishing to cash in on the success of women singers was inordinately dear. We sometimes read that the use of eunuchs for soprano-range singing originated in the papal choirs, but documented Italian castrati begin to appear in Roman ensembles only around the same time as the advent of the concerto delle donne; before that time prepubescent boys and falsettists had easily handled the higher parts composed for liturgical music. Musicologists also sometimes tell us that castrati were needed for performing the roles of female characters in opera because of the general prohibition of women on the stage. But except for in Rome, where women were forbidden from performing publicly after 1588, divas still played most of the female roles—and even some of the male ones as well, en travesti. Strange to say, the public opera houses in cities such as Venice cast the castrati as virile, romantic heroes. We cannot, in other words, write off this practice as a pragmatic solution for acquiring substitute women. Moreover, if the proliferation of castrato singers resulted from the fashion for high voices, it also brought with it new cultural images of ideal masculinity (see chapter 4). We have to imagine that many of the male spectators and artists hearing the Ladies’ ensembles at Ferrara not only responded to that sound as an object of desire but actually coveted the subject position itself; the simulations by Peri and Monteverdi of Luzzasco’s textures and acrobatics by lower voices indicate as much. In his now-liberated higher range, the castrato could move with even greater power and agility, thus putting the “vir” back into “virtuosity.” But it is in the love duets of public opera that the payoff becomes most evident: the movements of intertwining bodies traced by the Ladies’ identical voices now become available for the depiction of heterosexual lovemaking, as, for instance, in the duet that concludes Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. Nerone and Poppea have traced a path of destruction throughout the opera: they have killed off the philosopher Seneca, sent Ottavia (Nero’s wife) into exile, and corrupted the moral fiber of everyone around them. Poppea’s naked ambition has not been hidden from view, and the Emperor Nero’s abominations are too well known to require rehearsing. Yet here at the end they sing one of the most ravishing compositions ever penned, “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo.”33 The outer sections of the duet unfold over a descending-tetrachord  

Soprano as Fetish   |   101

ostinato, a device that sustains a single region indefinitely through a repeating bass figure. It was commonly used to simulate trancelike affective states, whether lament or—as in this case—sustained erotic rapture. While the bass guarantees insulated security (often simulating entrapment in laments), the voices interact in the manner of the concerto delle donne: they intertwine, take turns being on top, rub up against each other in aching dissonances, resolve sweetly together. Note how the dissonance in mm. 11–12 would lose its poignancy if Nerone sang his line down an octave rather than producing the minor second that finally forces Poppea to bend to his will (ex. 3.7). The middle section of the duet turns more active, as the lovers tease each other with a variety of possible key trajectories. Whereas the first section maintained a kind of timeless bliss, here the singers cavort, nipping at each other in the musical equivalent of the love bites featured in so many lyrics of this time or in what Stephen Greenblatt calls “friction to heat” in the rapid repartee in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies.34 But after this episode of mutual arousal, Nerone and Poppea settle back down into their ostinato and its promise of endless pleasure. Many recordings of this duet cast a tenor in the role of Nerone, and much of the erotic quality comes through even with the octave displacement. Indeed, a resolutely heterosexist listener may prefer to hear the woman sound like a woman, the man like a man. But such a performance pries the lovers apart and puts them in separate beds; instead of caressing and licking each other, they swat at each other as if with towels at a distance, and they can never dissolve into a single undifferentiated unit. The ideal mode of lovemaking as represented in music followed the patterns set out by the Three Ladies, even when the participants included men, even when the price of reaching that ideal required extremely extreme makeovers.  

 

 

•

•

•

One more area of influence: if the concerto delle donne had already separated voice from social agency, making of it a commodity, then the trainers for the castrati pushed this tendency even further. When the duke recruited the women to Ferrara they had already reached a mature age and had developed their skills, to a large extent independently of his court musicians.35 Yet despite what all accounts record as their superb musicianship, they turned over their abilities to those who molded them into the highly choreographed spectacle they became. Jacqueline Warwick has pointed out the parallel between their treatment and that

E x . 3.7. Monteverdi (Ferrari?), L’Incoronazione di Poppea, “Pur ti miro.”

3 &2 îîÏ Ï ú úî

î î Ï Ï ÏÏÏú î

î î Ï Ï w.

? 32 w .

w.

w.

3 & 2 ∑ .

î î Ï Ï ú ú î î î Ï Ï ÏÏÏú î

Poppea Pur ti mi - ro,

#w.

Nerone

4

&w

pur ti mi - ro,

Pur ti go -do,

pur ti go

Ï Ï ú ú î

w

ú

w.

pur ti strin

îî

#w.

do,

î î

? w.

-

no

-

no

7

go,

-

-

pur ti strin - go

w.

-

-

-

-

w.

-

-

? w. -

-

-

-

ú

- no, non pe

? w. mo

-

w

w.

go,

&úú ú w & w.

-

#w.

-

ú ú ú ú

no, più non

ú #ú ú ú î î

w.

-

-

w.

ro,

Ï Ï ú ú î -

-

do

w.

#w.

-

-

#w.

-

-

più non

w Ï Ï #w ú w

î ú ú w.

pe

-

î ú ú

più non pe

pur ti strin - go

w.

pur t'an -

do pur ti strin -

& Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú Ï Ï w. &w

9

-

Ï Ï

pur t'an-

Ï Ï

& Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú Ï Ï w. -

-

-

w.

più non pe

w ú w

no, non mo

-

ro;

w.

-

no;

-

-

w

Soprano as Fetish   |   103

of the girl groups of the early 1960s, who similarly were discovered and then shaped by professionals.36 By contrast, most of the boys mutilated for the sake of possible stardom came from impoverished backgrounds, and some had little previous training. Many were placed in specially designed conservatories for a process of assembly-line manufacture: whereas Luzzasco drilled the Ladies of Ferrara in perfect execution, now an entire faculty worked sixteen-hour days to instill into young boys the arts of vocal production, ornamentation, sight singing, stage deportment, and so on.37 Their voices were treated as mere raw resources—the sows’ ears from which others sought to create silk purses, in a division of labor that alienated them from control over their only possession; if they were lucky, their trainers succeeded in transforming their voices into objectified, marketable products. Relatively few ever reached that pinnacle of stardom for which they aimed, but those who did were adored as cultural idols. “La voce” became the ultimate fetish object, hailed with the slogan “Evviva il coltello!” (Long live the knife!) Although we no longer practice surgery to produce the voices we want, our models for music pedagogy evolved from the careful development of passive performers by trainers in the court of Ferrara and from the conservatories developed for the mass production of castrato singers. Luzzasco’s control over every detail of the concerto delle donne may not seem odd to us today because we now take it for granted; this division of labor among composers, studio teachers, and performers became the norm for the transmission of European and North American high culture. With this division, performers could concentrate solely on perfecting their virtuosity, while composers no longer had to worry about whether or not they themselves could execute the notes they put on the page. But the price for this economical solution was the splitting off of actual voice (that of the performer) from virtual voice (that of the composer). One has only to try persuading a conservatory student to improvise—or, for that matter, a composer to sing—to discover how very deeply engrained this cultural habit has become over the course of four centuries. Yet we also owe to this legacy the Queen of the Night’s tirades (as well as her Three Ladies), Lucia di Lammermoor’s mad scene, and a series of sublime divas including Maria Malibran, Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, and many others—the cult surrounding what Wayne Koesten­­baum refers to as “the queen’s throat.”38 The insatiable appetite for the fetishized high voice first aroused by Duke Alfonso continues unabated to our present moment. And who would wish it otherwise?  

 

 

 

Chapter 4

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in the Operas of Cavalli

Until a few years ago, Shakespeare specialists acknowledged the fact that boys had acted the roles of all the Bard’s heroines, but they tended to get cranky if anyone tried to make anything of that fact. Without fail, generations of students have found this morsel of information highly titillating; and, just as inevitably, they have been shamed into accepting it as a mere convention. For their teachers insisted that they learn to see “straight” through this historical aberration to the natural binary oppositions of male and female that Shakespeare doubtless intended to represent, however skewed those intentions may have been by the prudery of a society that refused women access to the stage. But anyone who has kept up on recent literary criticism knows that scholars no longer treat the boy-actor problem in this fashion. Indeed, this and related issues concerning gender representation in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater now sustain virtually a whole publication subindustry by themselves. Several factors have contributed to our fascination with these topics in recent years, among them the problematizing of the categories “male” and “female” by feminist and Foucauldian theorists, who have come to recognize that this stringent binary logic is in part a product of the Enlightenment.1 Another important factor, however, is the increasing malleability of gender in today’s popular culture. Over the last forty years, as artists as diverse as David Bowie, k. d. lang, Prince, RuPaul, Michael Jackson, and various glam metal bands have flaunted androgynous and cross104

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   105

dressed personae on stage, our tolerance for—even expectation of—flagrant gender bending have made us more receptive to similar moments in earlier cultural history.2 And we have come to recognize seventeenthcentury theater as the site most rife with public performances of sexual ambiguity and deliberately perverse gender construction prior to those of our own time. Consequently, the very elements that used to provoke such grave embarrassment in the classroom now attract the rapt attention of scores of academics. Not surprisingly, most of this work takes place in English departments, for the plays of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and (of course) Shakespeare stand as the cornerstone of the English literary canon. Moreover, because scholars have been poring over these plays for four hundred years, they are constantly searching for new directions in research and publication. Thus when queer theory began to emerge twenty years ago, Elizabethan scholars embraced it as a godsend. As a result, a large number of monographs and collections concerning these topics have now appeared.3 As certain similarities among conventions indicate, the musical genre that most closely resembles Elizabethan plays in its penchant for gender bending is Italian opera, especially the commercial opera that developed and flourished in Venice beginning in 1637. This genre has received far less critical and historical attention than Shakespeare’s plays; despite the pathbreaking studies contributed by Nino Pirrotta, Lorenzo Bianconi, Ellen Rosand, Tim Carter, Wendy Heller, and Roger Freitas, we still need to ask rather fundamental questions about opera in Venice.4 And although delightful recordings of a few of these operas now exist, we have very few published scores to which we can easily refer.5 In this chapter I want to consider some of the more glaring elements involving gender representation in mid-seventeenth-century Venetian opera, especially those by Francesco Cavalli, the most prominent composer of these works. Like traditional professors of English, musicologists often have wanted to rush quickly past these curious anomalies to get at what they have regarded as more important issues—the music, the contexts, the institutions. Yet, if anything, Venetian opera raises questions concerning gender even more urgently than do Shakespeare’s plays. I will have few answers—mostly problems and suggestions for further investigation. And although Elizabethan theater differs in many important respects from the later (and unrelated) genre of Venetian opera, I will draw on certain ways of thinking about these issues that have emerged from English scholarship in recent years.6  

 

 

 

106   |   Gendering Voice •

•

•

One convention appears in both genres and functions in roughly the same way in each: plots involving female characters who disguise themselves as males, usually in order to enjoy the sense of agency and free mobility that society granted only to men at the time. Thus like many an Elizabethan heroine, Amastre (the only serious character in Cavalli’s Serse) dresses as a man in order to track down Xerxes and win him back. We are on relatively solid ground making connections between Italy and England with respect to female travesty, for we can trace this plot type back to sources shared by both: to commedia dell’arte plots and stories concerning cross-dressed female sojourners that date back as far as medieval Spain; Ariosto’s celebrated verse epic Orlando Furioso (an important source for Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) features a valiant female warrior, Bradamante. It is worth noting that nearly all instances of this convention in English drama occur in plays purported to take place in Italy: in other words, even in the sixteenth century—long before the advent of commercial opera—the English imagination already strongly identified transvestism with Italian theater and literature.7 Why were such plots popular? As do all historians of culture, we find ourselves trying to understand the pleasures of another time, a project admittedly fraught with difficulty yet necessary as we attempt to make sense of conventions and their fortunes.8 Although some of us may be tempted to read female transvestism unambiguously as a sign of feminist resistance, we have to exercise caution: as various writers have demonstrated in their examination of extant responses from Elizabethan spectators, this convention played into male social and sexual fantasies— factors that undoubtedly account for much of its success and longevity.9 Moreover, as Margaret Reynolds has argued, many disguise roles “offer a familiar model of female self-sacrifice that is not very inspiring,” not to present-day women at any rate.10 Nevertheless, the plot device of disguising a female character as a man at least gestures toward the greater empowerment of women and critiques the social inequities that largely confined women to the home.11 And male impersonation on the dramatic stage also potentially engages with women’s desires. The recent collection En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera contains several essays that focus on female cross-dressing in opera—for purposes of the plot (as in the disguises here under consideration), for “trouser roles” (adolescent boys, such as Mozart’s Cherubino or Strauss’s Octavian, designed from the outset to  

 

 

 

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   107

be performed by women), and for roles intended to be sung by castrati (often performed by women actualizing the absence of that voice type; Gluck’s Orfeo was the principal character of this sort that continued in the standard repertory). As the essays in En Travesti reveal, such performances—whether or not intended as such by the composers and librettists—have long since provided women artists and audience members with a site for same-sex fantasies.12 Yet historians have difficulty documenting the responses of seventeenthcentury women themselves, for the overwhelming majority of the playwrights, performers, audience members, and the critics whose opinions show up in the written record were male. The patron hovering over many of Shakespeare’s productions, however, was the queen, whose favor was sought by most artists and whose tastes may well have shaped many of the plots composed during her reign.13 Suzanne Cusick’s examination of Francesca Caccini’s work under Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria indicates that female patronage may also have influenced Florentine opera plots.14 Finally, Queen Christina’s reign over Roman culture in the 1660s and ’70s seems to have resulted in the emergence of storylines and lyrics that privilege women; Carolyn Gianturco argues that Christina may even have exerted enough influence to allow female singers occasionally onto the Roman stage, where they were otherwise prohibited—or at least allowed them on the stage of her own private theaters.15 Feminist criticism came to musicology only around 1990, but it has already revealed a previously unsuspected cultural world of motivations, interpretations, and pleasures hidden behind the traditional narratives of music history. We still have far less information about mid-seventeenthcentury Italian opera than the genre warrants, but we have long known that popular female divas—artistic descendants of the Ferrarese virtuose discussed in the previous chapter—sometimes acquired sufficient boxoffice clout to affect many Venetian conventions, including the increasing domination of showcase arias over dramatic dialogue; indeed, composeroriented musicologists have often complained of the inordinate power of “mere” singers, which quickly eroded the aesthetic integrity of Venetian opera.16 In other words, our notions of baroque opera have shifted as we have allowed ourselves to focus our attention on the women stars of the time. Is it not possible that the divas’ preferences also influenced the frequency of plots involving female transvestism?17 As musicologists begin to regard female singers not merely as passive conduits for transmitting the works of composers but as cultural agents in their own rights, we are learning to see the canon from very different vantage points.18  

 

 

 

 

108   |   Gendering Voice •

•

•

The opposite situation—males cross-dressed as women—presents a more difficult array of questions, for the social-empowerment argument does not appear to obtain in such cases. The English custom of having boys play the parts of women because of societal restrictions would seem to be relatively easy to accept as a convention of convenience: to some extent, at least, playwrights expected their audiences to ignore the fact of cross-dressing and accept the boys as women as part of the suspension of disbelief already fundamental to the theatrical enterprise. But Shakespeare frequently calls attention to the fact that males were playing the roles of female characters. In the very last scene of Antony and Cleopatra he has his heroine imagine the “saucy lictors” and “quick comedians” who will stage their great love story for the entertainment of distant generations: “Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore” (act 5, scene 2). Thus squeaks the Cleopatra boy. Peter Stallybrass has located an unexpectedly large number of passages in which the script encouraged Elizabethan audiences to contemplate erotically precisely those parts of the actor’s physique that differentiated it from that of the female character he played—thus, for instance, the references to naked, swelling breasts that abound in these plays.19 As a result, this convention often positioned boy actors quite deliberately as objects of homoerotic desire. One of the most obvious pieces of evidence for this covert eroticizing of cross-dressed boy actors as boys occurs in the opening scene of Marlowe’s Edward II (1593). Gaveston, the king’s favorite, seeks to arouse Edward by presenting what he announces as an “Italian” entertainment, in which:  

 

 

. . . a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring. . . .

The late musicologist Nino Pirrotta used to love describing an almost identical moment from the later Roman opera Diana schernita (1629), in which the male singer playing the role of the goddess disrobes to the point just before unambiguous signs of sexual difference would be revealed.20 Gaveston’s male pronouns insist throughout his speech that we remember we are concerned with an alluring boy, and the phallic olive tree in

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   109

the boy’s “sportful hands” scarcely suggests the female genitals of the Goddess of the Hunt as “those parts which men delight to see.” Note that Elizabethan scholars understand Marlowe to be marking Gaveston as a sodomite simply by virtue of his references to Italy, which was sufficient coding at the time for English audiences.21 We have no reason to believe, of course, that Italians indulged in same-sex activities more often than the English, but we must recognize that the English commonly projected this exoticist stereotype onto Italy (and Venetians onto Florentines, scholastics onto humanists). In any case, whatever the realities of actual sexual behaviors at the time, we cannot any longer regard the custom of having males play women’s roles as an uncomplicated “mere” convention in either tradition. •

•

•

But the feature that most obviously distinguishes Venetian from Elizabethan representations of gender—the feature that quite literally separates the men from the boys—is the presence in Italian opera of the castrato. The very fact that castrati existed constituted a sexual scandal (the operation that produced them remained illegal during the entire period of their reign), yet they appeared not intermittently or surreptitiously but as the leading characters in this genre.22 When they played women (as was the custom in Rome),23 we face a predicament similar to the one English scholars encounter with Shakespeare’s boy actors—except that the Italian female impersonators were adult males, which introduces another cluster of implied pleasures and anxieties, thereby raising the stakes immeasurably. The critical work responding to Balzac’s novella Sarrasine addresses many of these issues.24 More often, however, castrati filled the roles of male romantic leads. This element of Italian opera has proved difficult to “fix” in keeping with modern sensibilities; for if we can recast women as the heroines in productions of Shakespeare or Roman opera, we cannot easily substitute our own gender economy for the one sustaining male heroes in Venetian scores. As performers producing recordings of these operas have discovered, it does not truly work either to transpose the music down to “natural” male ranges or to use cross-dressed women for these parts.25 Gradually, modern audiences have accommodated themselves to hearing castrato roles performed by countertenors, male falsettists who may sound somewhat like women (at least to untutored ears), but whose feigned voices often project fragility and vulnerability rather than the power ascribed to the castrati by their ear- and eyewitnesses. And many  

 

 

110   |   Gendering Voice

of us, when presenting these operas in our classes, still strive to scurry past this stumbling block as quickly and efficiently as possible, covering over the strangeness of it all with an appeal, once again, to convention. Yet just as Elizabethan plays often problematize the fact of boy actors’ bodies, so operas implementing castrati as heroes sometimes acknowledge their own artifice by cracking castrato jokes—usually not in direct connection with the lead himself (as occurs in the case of the squeaking Cleopatra boy), but displaced onto characters whose lowerrange voices exempt them personally from such jibes. For instance, in Cavalli and Cicognini’s Giasone (1649), the character Besso (a fully mature bass and captain of the Argonauts) counters the suggestion that he is effeminate by appealing to his “members,” a line to be accompanied, no doubt, with a time-honored lewd gesture. Later in the opera, when Besso attempts to woo Alinda (a lady in Medea’s court), she asks suspiciously what voice part he sings, leading him to insist vehemently that he is not a castrato. Moreover, the other principal role notated in the alto clef besides that of Giasone belongs to Delfa, Medea’s nurse, who hands out advice and sings of her own postmenopausal lust—a role to be sung, of course, by a man in drag, a castrato at the time (and perhaps a hooty countertenor in ours). In all these scenes the castrato becomes a target for hilarity and perhaps an outlet for latent anxieties. Quite evidently, audiences of the time were not expected to forget altogether the inconvenient fact that Giasone—the purportedly oversexed protagonist of this opera—is a castrato, especially since Besso’s boastful reference to his members immediately precedes Giasone’s initial entrance, and Medea tricks Giasone temporarily into thinking it is Delfa (the other castrato, albeit disguised as an old woman) to whom he has been making love in the dark all this time. If the status of castrato superstars and the earnestness of eighteenth-century opera seria eventually minimized the scandal attached to this phenomenon, castrati in 1649 were still invitations for sniggering, even as they performed the roles of romantic leads. Too often modern scholars view the castrato through the lens of Freud’s theories concerned with castration. Because Freud’s constructions of identity depended heavily on the potency of male genitals, he translated all threats to the male subject into fears of metaphorical dismemberment. Up against that framework, the prospect of literal castration—in other words, the flaunted actualization of absence—looms as virtually unthinkable; we imagine that this condition would so shatter the sense of male subjectivity that existence would become meaningless.  

 

 

 

 

 

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   111

This is in part because post-Enlightenment thought increasingly understood the subject as an intensely privatized essence, with sexual apparatus as a fundamental element (indeed, Freud eventually theorized it as the foundation) of identity formation. To be sure, seventeenthcentury men also prized their ability to procreate: recall Duke Alfonso’s desperate attempts at siring a son, discussed in the previous chapter. And we don’t even have to go outside the opera house to learn the importance of this dimension of sexuality, for the libretti themselves abound with boasts about potency. But the seventeenth-century sense of self relied far more on relationships within a social fabric than on the individualized yet physiologically grounded essences of later models of identity. To fulfill the role of “male” demanded many kinds of social performance; masculinity was not reducible to the body as such. (A comparable move in history involves the shift from the concept of “the sodomite,” as one who engages in acts of sodomy, to “the homosexual,” as one who is thus oriented by essence, regardless of actual behavior.) Of course nineteenth-century masculinity did not solely depend on sexual apparatus either. Yet the distrust of social convention that came along with Romanticism displaced notions of identity increasingly onto sexual essence. Bereft of theological certainty or faith in rationality or social contract, nineteenth-century man experienced himself as thrown back on (so to speak) his own devices. It is not a coincidence that in Lord Byron, Goethe, and Beethoven the self must be bound up not just with masculinity but with explicitly phallic assertion. Freud only theorizes that custom after the fact. I do not mean here to minimize the physical, emotional, and social distress attached to the sexual mutilation required for the manufacture of castrati in the seventeenth century. Nor do I wish to offer an argument of cultural relativism condoning this practice, for it was widely regarded as inhumane even in its own day.26 But I do want to separate the actual operation—which allowed at least some individuals access to fame, fortune, and great social influence—from the figurative yet apparently far more traumatic condition of Freudian castration, which implies a general failure of self and social efficacy, even though the body remains intact. To persist in reading the castrato in Freudian terms is to obstruct any possible understanding of this cultural practice that dominated European music for nearly two hundred years. What, then, are we to make of this custom of casting castrati in the roles of romantic leads? To stick with Giasone: as other characters describe him, he is a beautiful youth, one who still lacks facial hair,  

 

112   |   Gendering Voice

who proves irresistible to women. Within this context of ephebic eroticism, his unchanged voice makes perfect sense, especially when we recall that in the 1600s boys matured physically only toward the end of their teens. Yet Giasone’s creators also expected the audience to believe that he spends nearly all his time making love to women and that he is possessed of prodigious sexual potency: we are informed that he has fathered not one but two sets of twins before the curtain even rises. He inhabits, in other words, a moment of development when he can pursue sexual activity while not yet encumbered by the burden of patriarchal responsibility. Giasone’s status as an object of desire resembles that of a whole string of twentieth-century matinee idols, ranging from Rudolph Valentino to the younger Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Timberlake. As Marjorie Garber has argued, gender ambiguity in such cases registers not as a failure of masculinity but quite the contrary: it is a standard characteristic of marketed male sex symbols.27 Although crucial differences remain between the castrato of Venetian opera and the idols of recent pop music and Hollywood film, observing the similarities can help us understand why such unlikely figures might have exerted such erotic appeal. It may also push us to scrutinize more closely our own cultural pleasures. •

•

•

Perhaps a more curious convention of Venetian opera concerns male roles that require unaltered voices. The characters who sing bass or baritone—thereby testifying by means of sound production that their genitals remain intact—almost never have anything to do with sexual or even romantic activity. Historians often discuss the fact that European men around 1800 began to adopt the drab clothing identified with power in the new world of business and to deny themselves the spectacular male garb of previous centuries—a denial known as the Great Masculine Renunciation.28 But the gender economy of Venetian opera demands an even more severe renunciation: whether they serve as fathers, kings, philosophers, or the more prestigious gods, almost all the characters who sing bass have traded in erotic pleasure for social authority: they acquire the phallus if and only if they agree to retire the penis. We have, in other words, a bizarre situation in which only castrati can play sexually active characters, while unaltered males sing the roles of those deemed by their culture as ineligible for sexual encounters. Alas, a taste for the deep-voiced “Love Daddy” persona of 1970s R&B (best exemplified by Barry White) had not yet materialized.29  

 

 

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   113

Pity, therefore, the intact male character in a seventeenth-century opera who finds himself enflamed by desire. More often than not, his untimely lust becomes a target for ribald commentary. A mature emperor possessed of a young wife, as in Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, can expect to fall cuckold to a castrato. Moreover, adult servant characters who fall in love reliably offer episodes of comic relief. Too old not to know better, yet aware that sexual activities count among the few sources of delight for those of their class status, they taunt each other with jokes about size, endurance, and age. But such characters are not calculated to arouse the libidinal fantasies of the audience. These strange paradoxes and inversions involving mature male voices and their sexualities reach a dizzying height with Cavalli and Faustino’s La Calisto (1651). Based on one of Ovid’s fables, this opera situates Giove—Jove, the most prominent of the gods—within a whole range of subject positions, each of which strains credibility more than the one before. At the beginning, Giove bears a strong resemblance to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with his lecherous sidekick Mercury, also (like Don Giovanni’s Leporello) a bass-baritone. Giove’s initial attempt at seducing the nymph Calisto fails, for not only is Calisto devoted to Diana’s virgin cult, but Giove’s voice betrays him as someone altogether inappropriate for courtship. Thus rebuffed, Giove disguises himself (like the boy in Gaveston’s playlet and the castrato in Diana schernita) as Diana; he must surrender, in other words, all evidence of his virility in order to qualify for romantic encounters.30 In Ovid’s version of the story, Giove drops his female disguise as soon as he has isolated Calisto, and he rapes her—quite against her will; the same occurs in Thomas Heywood’s Jacobean version of the story, The Golden Age.31 But in our Venetian sex comedy, Calisto somehow never even notices that her partner in their entirely successful bedding is not Diana. Is this because Giove’s disguise goes all the way down to the physiological level? Or is it because of Calisto’s singular naïveté? Maybe both, but this detail also opens the floodgates for a veritable contagion of gender confusions, as Calisto invites the real (and appalled) Diana to join her in the bushes again and as Endymion (Diana’s male devotee) mistakes Giove for his goddess and attempts to make love to her/him, to Giove’s homophobic horror. Cross-dressing spills over into implied same-sex encounters—same-sex encounters, moreover, that cannot be set straight. For if Endymion’s intentions toward pseudo-Diana and Giove’s intentions toward Calisto both finally confirm oppositesex norms, Calisto only acquiesces to Giove because she thinks he is  

 

 

 

114   |   Gendering Voice

Diana. If the part of Giove-as-Diana is sung by a female singer, we have a woman seducing another woman while playing a man in drag; I’m not sure this normalizes anything. In short, the one consummation in the opera—heterosexual though it technically may be—is accomplished only under the guise of a same-sex liaison. How do we account for such plot devices, in which not only crossdressing but also suggestions of same-sex encounters appear so blatantly? As with all forms of early theater, seventeenth-century Italian opera delighted in playing with the technologies of representation with which it engaged. Thus, when composers discovered the means to produce the illusion of “male” and “female,”32 they simultaneously learned to use those same techniques to devise a whole menagerie of hitherto unsuspected options. Marjorie Garber, in her study of cross-dressing in early theater, concludes that:  

 

“Man” and “woman” are already constructs within drama; within what is often recognized as “great” drama, or “great” theater, the imaginative possibilities of a critique of gender in and through representation are already encoded as a system of signification. . . . Transvestite theater recognizes that all of the figures onstage are impersonators. The notion that there has to be a naturalness to the sign is exactly what great theater puts in question. In other words, there is no ground of Shakespeare that is not already cross-dressed.33

Moreover, the malleability of gender in the theater resonated strongly at the time with the possibility of class mobility. Mikhail Bakhtin has theorized the relationship between class and gender inversions in carnival festivities, of which Venetian opera was perhaps the most elaborate historical manifestation.34 Thus, women characters acquire otherwise unavailable social privileges when dressed as men. And to cast the lofty Giove as a drag queen who falls into humiliating circumstances beyond his control is to play mischievously with class status, in what Pirrotta labels a “mockery of the gods” plot.35 Yet, as many other historians remind us, we cannot reduce crossdressing and flirtations with same-sex encounters to nothing but a fascination with the apparatus of representation or slippage with classrelated issues.36 The ease with which performers shaped and reshaped genders and configurations of desire on the stage had to have been received as provocative by at least some audience members, for to enact such sexual permutations on the stage raises the possibility of such arrangements in real life, even when the dramas appear to play them for laughs. Certainly, the English contingent in the Venetian audience

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   115

would have felt cheated without some innuendoes along these lines: they expected no less of Italy—or, at least, of Italian theater. But we are not quite finished with Giove. Having presented himself first as an aging lecher and then a female impersonator, he suddenly reverts to his natural bass voice in the final act and reestablishes his identity not simply as Giove, but as God-the-Father-of-the-Christian-Trinity. As you may recall from Ovid, Juno—Giove’s endlessly betrayed spouse—avenges herself on Calisto by turning her into a she-bear. In the opera, Giove reappears to bestow his divine clemency on Calisto, who offers her gratitude in a prayer recalling the Magnificat, lowly handmaiden trope and all.  

 

Calisto:

 

Eccomi, ancella tua.

Behold your handmaid.

Disponi a tuo piacere,

Make use as you please,

monarca delle sfere,

Monarch of the Spheres,

di colei che creasti,

of her whom you created,

che con frode felice,

whom, through a happy stratagem,

oh mio gran fato,

O my great Creator,

accorla ti degnasti

you have deigned to welcome

nel tuo seno beato.

To your divine bosom.

Soon thereafter, as Giove foretells Calisto’s ascension (to become the constellation the Big Bear), they sing together a rapturous duet between God and the soul that would be right at home musically in San Marco, where Cavalli had his day job (see chapter 5 for more on this context). Such extreme measures—a flagrant appropriation of sacred iconography—seem required to justify a love duet involving a bass-baritone.  

 

Giove:

Mio foco fatale: son Giove e tormento.

Behold my fatal thunderbolt: I am Giove and I thunder.

Calisto:

Beata mi sento a questa salita.

I feel blessed at this ascension.

G:

Per te, mia tradita.

For you, my betrayed one.

C:

Mercè del mio dio.

The mercy of my God.

G & C:

O dolce Amor mio.

O, my sweet beloved!

Our acceptance of this moment bordering on sacrilege is conditioned by the gorgeousness of the music (ex. 4.1). Here—as in so many of the productions linked to the Accademia degli Incogniti—an extraordinary cynicism reveals itself, as utterly loathsome characters suddenly over 

 

116   |   Gendering Voice

whelm the listener with musical beauty, tempting us to doubt our previous moral judgments.37 We do not have to wait for Bertolt Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect to learn that the medium of music lies and seduces; the Incogniti offered that lesson over and over again.38 Thus, just as we are subjected in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea to Poppea and Nero sweetly singing their final duet after they have committed unspeakable crimes (see again chapter 3), so in Calisto we are lulled into forgiving and forgetting the lechery, the grotesque drag show of Giove’s former manifestations, and even the Blessed Virgin’s unfortunate bearlike muzzle, to which the libretto repeatedly refers. Our critical defenses drop as a beneficent Giove and Mercury (acting here as Holy Spirit) waft her angelic through the skies—over a timeless tetrachord ostinato.39 t A few words about the musical device Cavalli employs here. The tetrachord ostinato counts as one of the most important musical devices of the mid-seventeenth century. Put quite simply, it involves the repetition of the same four-note descending figure over and over (“ostinato” is a cognate with “obstinate”) in the bass. It was used to simulate trancelike psychological states (laments or erotic or religious ecstasy, for example) in which the character no longer experiences time in a linear or progressive fashion.40 Although Giove initiates the duet by singing a countermelody against the ostinato, he spends much of the duet doubling the tetrachord descent of the continuo. His duplication of the bass line identifies him musically as the foundation that controls the entire context. And however ornately she may sing, Calisto’s melody must conform to its (his) dictates, for this line guarantees the coherence and direction of the entire duet. Theorists of the time increasingly conceived of musical syntax in terms of this “fundament,” and they came to regard melodic lines as feminine epiphenomena in relation to the patriarchal security of the bass.41 But the identification of bass voices with harmonic bass lines was something of a liability in the seventeenth century: it prevents lower voices from participating fully in the expressive domain, which is almost always relegated to higher voices in counterpoint with the bass. This is in part a technical problem: it accounts for why we have thousands of violin sonatas from this era and only a few—and necessarily contorted (if wonderful)—examples for, say, bassoon or cello. The apparent power of the lower voice to regulate the direction of the music also makes it awkward for performances of subjective feeling. This technical problem also influenced immeasurably the conventions of the dramatic stage. As we saw in the previous chapter, basso  

 

 

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   117 E x . 4.1. Cavalli, La Calisto, act III, Calisto/Giove duet.

& 32

∑

ú ú. Ï ú ú ú

? 32 î î ú Giove

? 32 w . 5

9

&

∑ .

∑

Mio

fo - co fa - ta - le, son

w.

w.

ú #ú ú ú ú î

Gio-ve e tor-men-to!

? ∑ .

#ú w ú ú ú ú îî

? bw.

w.

que - sta sa - li - ta!

ú & w #w.

#

? bw. w.

O,

w.

#

î î ú

w ú w.

w.

O,

î

w.

bw.

î

dol - ce,

w.

w.

6

w ú ú ú ú ∑

w.

w.

w.

ú ú w ú ú ú ú ú w w ú

ú ú bw.

w.

∑

Mer - cè mer-cè del mio

te, per te, mia tra - di - ta!

î î ú w.

w. ? ∑ . î î ú di - o,

w.

∑ .

∑

Per

Calisto Be - a - ta mi sen - to a

bw.

6

ú #ú. Ï ú ú î

î î ú . ú úú ú ú Ï

w . # ú ú ú w# ú w .

dol-ce, dol-ce, dol -ce A-mor mi - o! Be -

bw. dol

-

w.

ce,

dol- ce A-mor mi - o!

w.

w. w .

(continued)

continuo devices developed in part in the context of the fabled concerto delle donne in the court of Ferrara, the group of virtuosic coloratura voices whose prized commodity status contributed to the opposite of penis envy, leading to the widespread production of castrati.42 Because opera’s cultural work (and that of virtually all music of the baroque)

118   |   Gendering Voice E x . 4.1. (continued)

î î# ú ú ú . Ï ú ú ú

∑ .

14

& ú ú. Ï ú ú î

ú ú. Ï ú ú ú

? ∑ .

ú #ú ú ú ú #ú bw ú ú w î î îú î î î îî

? w.

w.

a - ta mi sen - to,

18

&

w.

be - a - ta mi sen-to a

Son Gio-ve e tor-men-toper te,

bw.

î î ú

w.

w.

w. î î ú

w ú ? ú bú ú

w ú w.

mer - cè,

cè,

w.

ú ú ú w.

w ú & î î ú ú ú ú w. ? o,

?

w.

w.

dol - ce, dol

o,

-

w ú ú ú ú ∑

bw. w.

22

bú ú ú w.

w. w.

dol- ce, dol - ce,

bw.

w.

mer - cè, mer-cè del mio

te, per te, mia tra - di - ta,

? w.

per

w.

w.

ce, dol- ce, dol - ce,

w.

w.

que-sta sa-li-ta, mer-

te,

bw.

per

w.

w

Ï Ï #w.

di

-

î îú

o,

w ú

O,

bw.

o

w.

ú #ú ú w #ú U w. ú ú ú w.

U

w.

U

dol - ce A - mor mi - o!

w.

dol - ce A - mor mi - o!

ú w

w.

focused on the display of the passions, composers of the day preferred to showcase the high voices and instruments that maximized the desired effect. Thus we arrive at the same conclusion from a “purely musical” direction: the patriarchal authority of the bass voice’s tessitura restricts his versatility in roles where emotions matter, which results in his subordination in plots to the freely expressive castrato.43

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   119 •

•

•

I want to return now to the character Giasone, among the most fascinating in Venetian public opera. This was the opera that eighteenthcentury literary critic Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni both praised as the most perfect and also condemned as the one that fatally corrupted the standards of traditional Italian theater.44 Crescimbeni focused his ire on class-related promiscuities when he penned his critique, but the opera also raises questions concerning the proper constructions of masculinity; indeed, as we have seen, transgressive masculinity is repeatedly and urgently thematized within the opera itself. Giasone is, of course, the Jason of Argonaut fame, the hero who seduced and then later abandoned Medea after she had assisted him in stealing the Golden Fleece, leading her to enact her spectacularly bloody revenge.45 In Il Giasone, however (as in so many Venetian operas), the story unfolds not as epic or tragedy, but rather as sex farce. Accompanied by his Argonauts, who are starved for heroic military adventure, Giasone has been drifting lazily around the Aegean, apparently impregnating a queen in every port. As the opera opens, Hercules and Besso stand debating outside the love shack where Giasone and Medea have been ensconced for a full year. It turns out that Giasone still has not actually seen Medea: they have been groping about in the dark all those months, during which time she has given birth to twins. He hasn’t even a clue about the identity of his bed partner; he knows only that he doesn’t want to do much of anything else, least of all pursue the Fleece. Hercules complains bitterly of Giasone’s effeminacy, by which he means the hero’s extreme susceptibility to feminine wiles. It is not, in other words, the fact that a castrato sings the part of Giasone that renders him effeminate in the eyes of the other characters, nor does the word “effeminate” carry any suggestion of same-sex predilections. Quite the contrary: it is Giasone’s single-minded devotion to making love with women—his erotic excess—that earns him this label.46 For while the Argonauts stand by, ever ready to perform their legendary acts of courage, Giasone spends all his time frolicking in bed with Medea. Besso defends Giasone by pointing to his youth and beauty: the boy can’t help it if women find him irresistible. But Hercules wants Giasone to live up to his own standard of manliness, to learn to embody such traits as leadership, responsibility, and—above all—indifference to sexual indulgence with women. The opera will, in fact, trace a plot trajectory during which Giasone  

 

 

 

120   |   Gendering Voice

comes to accept his social duties, even though this means forfeiting Medea, who likewise has to submit to marriage with a former suitor. In other words, the plot yanks the two principal characters from their private world in which they are devoted to lovemaking and inscribes them—quite against their wills—into a patriarchal economy that grants no space for pleasure. The prologue already forecasts this outcome, as the allegorical figure Amor advocates not the blind passion usually associated with him, but instead strictly conjugal love. If, like Monteverdi’s Poppea, the opera enacts the triumph of Love, this Amor more closely resembles Juno’s watchdog fidelity than Venus’s delights of the flesh. With a Cupid like this one floating above them, the affair between Giasone and Medea doesn’t stand a chance. And yet. The pleasures of the opera clearly reside with this pair in their unreconstituted state. It was, after all, for those last thrills of youth that young men from all over Europe flocked to Venice before they went home to shoulder their own adult responsibilities. If, by the end of the opera, duty has prevailed (how could it not, when this opera defines love as duty?), the figure of Giasone presents a model of masculinity rarely seen or heard in music until the forthright androgyny of recent gender-bending rock stars. The debate between Hercules and Besso stops when Giasone himself finally emerges, confirming every fear Hercules had expressed by launching into a prolonged aria. As Pirrotta has argued, the use of fullscale arias still posed problems of realism in the 1640s: serious characters had to be carefully incited to lyricism, and the bursting into song in itself betrayed a dangerous excess of passion (recall how Poppea and Nero build only gradually toward their brief exchange of lyrical outpourings in their first scene together).47 Evidently, Giasone is always already incited, and he stumbles from Medea’s chamber out into the rosy-fingered dawn still swooning in a mist of jouissance. If the fact that he sings an aria at his entrance is a bad sign, even worse from Hercules’ point of view is the burden of the song itself. Lorenzo Bianconi has pointed out that the text Cicognini gives Giasone at this point has rhythmic peculiarities that make it resemble a lullaby,48 and the lullaby genre will continue to mark Giasone’s discourse—especially in his interactions with Medea—throughout the opera. One of the softer hip-hop radio stations in Los Angeles used to have as its motto “The station where it’s always bedtime,” and Giasone could easily adopt such a motto for his own purposes.  

 

 

 

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   121

Giasone:

Delizie, contenti,

Delights, raptures

che l’alma beate,

that ravish my soul,

fermate, fermate:

stop, stop;

su questo mio core

on this heart

deh più non stillate

let not one more drop fall

le gioie d’amore.

of love’s joys.

Delizie mie care,

My beloved delights,

fermatevi qui!

stop here!

Non so più bramare,

I know not how to desire more,

mi basta così.

I have enough.

In grembo agl’amori

In the lap of love

fra dolci catene

in sweet chains

morir mi conviene.

I would like to die.

Dolcezza omicida,

Murderous sweetness

a morte mi guida

lead me to my death

in braccio al mio bene!

in the arms of my beloved.

Delizie mie care (etc.)

My beloved delights (etc.)

The lyrics Giasone sings in his opening aria assert that he is sated with the delights of love and wants no more of desire. But his verbal tropes—chains, ravishment, and “murderous sweetness”—pull rhetorically against what he offers as his principal argument for abstention. And Cavalli’s music too presents these lyrics as if Giasone were fighting a losing battle, for it all too happily wallows in pleasure (ex. 4.2). Giasone produces a passive energy vacuum around himself that provokes the desires of others—something like the effect of Michelangelo’s languorous David.49 Occasionally one of Giasone’s musical lines will gesture toward desire: that is, it will build intensity by sequencing or even modulating from D Dorian up to the dominant, A minor, which requires him to alter his sleepy sixth-degree Bâ up to Bà (in the first verse, compare the first statement of “deh più” on Bâ with the second, in which the pitch has been raised for a cadence on A minor on “gioie d’amore”). But these moments of potential action yield almost immediately to the subdominant tug back to Bâ and his more or less permanent erossaturated state; they serve to make his collapse back into passivity all the more glorious. That (as he claims) he no longer wants to desire  

 

 

úú b úú .. ÏÏ úú ú úú úú ú î î

E x . 4.2. Cavalli, Giasone, “Delizie contenti,” mm. 1–29.  

& 32

∑

∑

& 32 î î ú b ú . Ï ú

ú ú ú ú. Ï ú ú ú î

ú bw

De - li - zie con - ten-ti, che l'al - ma be - a - te,

? 32 w 8

∑

∑

w

ú

ú

ú w

#

w

ú

∑

ú bw

w

∑

ú

úú úú .. ÏÏ úú ú ú ú ú úú úú .. ÏÏ úú ú ú ú úú .. ÏÏ # úú úú ú # ú ú #ú ú ú ú îî îî úî îî & & î î ú w.

w.

fer - ma -

-

? w ú w. #

w.

17

&

î î ú w.

w.

- te,

fer - ma -

w. -

- te,

îîú

#

#

w.

sù

ú ú ú ú îîú úú ú ú úîî îîú úú ú ú #

∑

#

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

& ú. Ï ú ú ú bú w ú nú ú. Ï ú ú Ï Ï ú ú Ï Ï #ú. #Ï ú que-sto mio co- re, deh! più, deh!

?w 24

ú w

∑

&

ú w ú

î î úú

? ú ú ú w #

#

-

ú

w #

-

ú ú w

-

-

re.

î

ú ú ú

∑

-

ú w

úú .. ÏÏ úú ú ú ú w #ú #ú ú .

& #ú ú ú ú #ú Ï Ï w gio - ie d'a - mo

più non stil - lan

-

w

∑

te le

ú ∑

î î ú bú. Ï ú ú ú ú

ú ú ú w

ú bw

De - li - zie mie

ú

w

ca - re, fer

ú

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   123

is clear enough: he can hardly muster the energy to remind us what desire might sound like. But that he wishes erotic pleasure to leave him alone seems very doubtful, given the bliss with which he surrenders time and again in his rondo-shaped aria to its gravitational pull toward the subdominant. What we (and Hercules) expect of a hero of Giasone’s reputation is an expression with greater aggression, a tendency to push forward on a modulatory quest, to extend phrases beyond their anticipated length by virtue of sheer willpower. Such formulations occur frequently enough in Cavalli, even in amorous situations: in L’Ormindo, for instance, the eponymous character’s opening aria manifests these qualities, as do many of Medea’s utterances. Giasone does not sing as he does, in other words, because he is trapped inside a piece of “early music” (see the postlude to this book for a full discussion of this aria’s relationship to emergent tonality). Rather, Cavalli labors in this aria to produce this image of extreme languor—a languor from which Giasone will emerge just barely long enough to seize the Fleece. After his one, almost perfunctory heroic deed, he sinks back into his preferred state of mutual ecstasy with Medea. He would remain there indefinitely were it not for the inopportune appearance of Isifile (a former lover, complete with twin set), a comic series of errors that nearly gets Medea killed, and a hastily arranged dénouement that pairs them both with spouses they don’t particularly like but who offer the stability of socially sanctioned marriage.50  

•

•

•

Later operas rarely present male characters whose principal attribute is hedonistic indulgence. To be sure, Mozart’s Don Giovanni is just as sexobsessed, but he operates within mechanisms of unbridled desire, not passive enjoyment. If Giovanni pursues insatiable lust, Giasone happily flops back and sings something like Prince’s “Do Me, Baby”—a song that shares with Giasone’s “Delizie, contenti” not only the androgynous tessitura and surrender to bliss but also its penchant for lullabylike rocking.51 Yet Giasone’s propensity for sacrificing active agency on the altar of pleasure—although controversial, as the opera itself indicates—is a larger cultural phenomenon of seventeenth-century culture: these are not simply his personal idiosyncrasies. Think, for instance, of all those versions of “O quam tu pulchra es” that flourished in Venice in the first half of the century. Whether set by Alessandro Grandi or Heinrich Schütz, this passage from the Song  

 

 

124   |   Gendering Voice

of Songs alternated between fervent attempts at describing the lover’s beauty and collapses back into a passive state of mind-numbing pleasure with each return of the refrain, “oh, how beautiful you are!” By the end of the Schütz setting the singers can do little but moan, as the harmonies rock (Giasone style) back and forth between subdominant and a tonic of severely weakened integrity.52 Recall also the poetry of Giambattista Marino, which eschews the dynamic power of Renaissance rhetoric and substitutes proliferating, overripe images of static sensuality. Both seventeenth-century and present-day critics have become squeamish in the face of this poetry, especially when it appears to have seduced master composers such as Monteverdi in perverse artistic directions.53 Certainly, the duets of Monteverdi’s Book VII reveal that he had fallen under the sway of this intensely erotic but passive sensibility, that he had set aside the rhetorical impulse that marked his early madrigals or the opera Orfeo. Monteverdi even thematizes the choice in his Book VIII—Songs of Love and War—in his setting of the text: “Let others sing of Love, the tender archer: the sweet caresses, the sighing kisses in which two beings dissolve into one . . . but I will sing of Mars!” Like Giasone, Monteverdi lingers too long over the “delizie” of love to make his renunciation even remotely convincing, especially as he sets these words over a swooning tetrachord descent. For those of us who prefer those luxuriant images, the call to arms (when it finally emerges, replete with military fanfares) spells disappointment—a surrender to duty and tedious saber rattling. It also spells a surrender in music technology to dynamic motion. If their destinies as empire builders snatch Aeneas from Dido’s arms, Theseus from Arianna’s, and Jason from Medea’s, our favorite narrative of music history—in which it is the “destiny” of music to discover teleological tonality—makes some musicologists impatient with these moments in the seicento in which progressive, desire-driven images of subjectivity yield to passive erotic pleasure. And the verbal arguments that riddle Il Giasone reveal that the versions of masculinity performed in Marinist poetry or the Song of Songs were already becoming controversial, even by 1650. By the 1680s, few remnants of this moment of masculine indulgence in sensuality will remain, as dominant-oriented tonal schemata and rigorous binary oppositions come to prevail in opera seria gender representations. But Giasone sings his aria without any anxiety or apology, even though the cultural debate concerning masculinity rages around his utterances. Admittedly, he does not present the most admirable role  

 

 

 

 

Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess   |   125

model, as he participates in a series of affairs without giving thought to the reproductive consequences, and the plot will conspire to reform him from hedonistic playboy to dutiful father. Yet in his resistance to channeling sexuality exclusively toward procreation and his reluctance to forgo pleasure for the sake of patriarchal authority, Giasone stands as a performer of “gender trouble” from a distant era. •

•

•

Students of Elizabethan theater have taught us to question the universality of the binary gender arrangements bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. But we can learn even more by attending to the politics of pleasure in mid-seventeenth-century Venetian opera, which adds to the cross-dressing element beloved of most Renaissance drama both the castrato and those musical performances of desire that run counter to our notions of “how music works.” Twenty years ago skeptics doubted that music had anything at all to do with gender—or even with representation, more broadly understood; music was thought to work according to its own austere premises, untouched by mundane concerns such as the body or sexuality. As our explorations of Giove and Giasone indicate, however, many of the most fundamental conventions of musical procedure took shape in tandem with changing and contested constructions of gender and eroticism. In view of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or Michael Jackson, those bizarre performances by Giasone and Giove no longer seem like befuddled early attempts at operatic characterization; indeed, they may appear to us far more sophisticated than the predictably “masculine” stick figure heroes of the nineteenth-century stage. If gender-related questions cannot provide all the answers we might want to ask about culture, they have forced us to rethink much of what we thought we knew concerning not only the history of music but also the history of subjectivity. The Elizabethans undertook pilgrimages to the Italian stage in order to expand their repertory of possible pleasures, and Venetian opera offers similar opportunities to us postEnlightenment subjects as we begin to crawl out from under a particularly rigid economy of gender organization. No longer dusty museum pieces studied only by musicology graduate students for comprehensive examinations, the seventeenth-century music dramas of composers such as Cavalli can serve once again to incite carnival in the receptive imagination.  

This page intentionally left blank

Part III

Divine Love

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

Libidinous Theology

Decades ago, when I was a graduate student, I supported myself playing the organ for a large Catholic church in the Boston suburbs. Vatican II had occurred shortly before that time, and my principal task was to teach these recalcitrant Catholics—most of them immigrants from Calabria— to perform hymns. Except for the few Marian anthems they had learned as children, they knew nothing of congregational singing. I persisted in trying; they persisted in sitting with buttoned-up mouths, glowering at this Protestant abomination. But except for being saddled with that singularly futile task, I was left more or less to my own devices. I learned on the job how to play the organ, and I played my exuberant postludes to a sanctuary that emptied as soon as the priest uttered the long-awaited “Go in peace.” I never got the slightest indication that anyone even noticed. Until the day I took it upon myself to sing Monteverdi’s solo setting of “Salve Regina” during mass. I had scarcely finished the first page when two priests came stampeding up the back stairs to the organ loft. “Stop this immediately!” cried one. Still playing some semblance of an accompaniment as I spoke, I explained that this piece had been composed for San Marco in Venice. Said the priest, “I don’t care if it was written by the pope himself. You will cease this instant!” Needless to say, this priest had had no training in music semiotics, and he could not have named a seventeenth-century composer if his life had depended upon it. Yet the gestures of this solo motet (aided, no doubt, by somewhat heavy breathing on the part of the singer)  

 

129

130   |   Divine Love

communicated so unambiguously as to cause a minor scandal. A few years later I managed to provoke charges of blasphemy from a nun when I presented at an academic conference a lecture/demonstration of Frescobaldi’s “Maddalena alla Croce.” And a class session on Schütz’s “Anima mea liquefacta est,” in which two male voices simulate lovemaking, produced a memorable episode of homophobic panic on the part of several students. (I discuss both pieces later in this chapter.) Such flare-ups eventually led me to develop a graduate seminar titled “Divine Love in Seventeenth-Century Music.” By then, the publications of historian Michel de Certeau, Jewish theologian Moshe Idel, literary critic Richard Rambuss, and musicologist Robert Kendrick had done a great deal to legitimate work in this area.1 Armed with theological and historical research, I no longer seem to be personally responsible for dragging sex into the study of religious music. At least five of my former students have now written on such topics, two of them by extrapolating what they had learned from baroque manifestations of the sacred erotic to help them understand elements of contemporary jazz, gospel, and popular musics.2 Most of the compositions discussed in the previous chapters emerged from secular venues: the aristocratic courts of Northern Italy and the burgeoning commercial hub of Venice. Within contexts that explicitly nurtured expressions of individual virtuosity and libertinism, the expansionist procedures and erotic imagery we have been tracing make good rhetorical sense. But we usually think of the sacred sphere in very different terms, as a place in which self-effacing devotion and faith in traditional orthodoxies always hold sway. Yet the devices then revolutionizing music at court were at the same moment invading the church. Many of the pieces examined in this book and in its prequel, Modal Subjectivities, may sound to our twenty-first-century ears as if they unfold in an arbitrary fashion. I hope, however, that I have made the logics undergirding most of them relatively clear. For the most part, these compositions do not intend to sound obscure, and within the proper grammatical framework they become entirely intelligible. By contrast, those examined in this chapter strive to bypass normative procedures, for the structures of feeling they seek to capture reside by definition outside the realm of the ordinary. They all depend upon a blend between the spiritual and erotic—a stark violation of our modern frame of reference, which tends to relegate the sacred and the sexual to opposite ends of the experiential spectrum. Anyone familiar with seventeenth-century culture, however, will have witnessed this blend many times before. It manifests itself in the lurid  

Libidinous Theology   |   131

verse of Richard Crashaw, the masochistic holy sonnets of John Donne, and the ecstatic statuary of Bernini.3 We have already seen that the fevered expressive vocabulary introduced by the concerto delle donne in Ferrara made its way into the church (see the discussion of Monteverdi’s “Duo seraphim” in chapter 3), and the erotic dimensions of this vocabulary become even more explicit in the pieces by Frescobaldi and Schütz examined below. It was because of such egregious violations of taste that eighteenthcentury rationalists branded their predecessors with the pejorative term “baroque.” But “baroque” has long since been reified as a technical term: in music history, it commonly not only refers to the early seventeenth century but also embraces the first half of the eighteenth. Indeed, because Handel and J. S. Bach are by far the most familiar “baroque” composers, many musicians assume that the word refers to the 1700s— the period most cultural historians would regard as the Age of Reason. In contrast to this dubious use of “baroque” as a bland, mostly meaningless period label, Fernand Braudel’s magisterial study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II shocks readers into remembering the precise context within which this potentially objectionable strain of art developed: “The Baroque conveniently designates the civilization of the Christian Mediterranean: wherever we find the Baroque we can recognize the mark of Mediterranean culture. The Baroque drew its strength both from the huge spiritual force of the Holy Roman Empire and from the huge temporal force of the Spanish Empire. With the Baroque a new light began to shine; . . . new and more lurid colors now bathed the landscapes of western Europe.”4 Braudel identifies this mode of cultural expression with the defiant reassertion of Catholicism in the face of its would-be reformers and with the militant agendas of the Jesuits; indeed, he suggests replacing “baroque” with the label “Jesuit” to designate such art (831). And far from apologizing for the art’s excesses, he explains its purposes:  

Baroque art, then, often smacks of propaganda. Art was a powerful means of combat and instruction; a means of stating, through the power of the image, the Immaculate Holiness of the Mother of God, the efficacious intervention of the saints, the reality and power of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the eminence of St. Peter, a means of arguing from the visions and ecstasies of the saints. Patiently compiled and transmitted, identical iconographical themes crossed and re-crossed Europe. If the Baroque exaggerates, if it is attracted by death and suffering, by martyrs depicted with unsparing realism, if it seems to have abandoned itself to a pessimistic view, to the Spanish desengaño of the seventeenth century, it is because this is an art which is preoccupied with

132   |   Divine Love

convincing, because it desperately seeks the dramatic detail which will strike and hold the beholder’s attention. It was intended for the use of the faithful, who were to be persuaded and gripped by it, who were to be taught by active demonstration, by an early version of verismo, the truth of certain contested notions, whether of Purgatory or of the Immaculate Conception. It was a theatrical art and one conscious of its theatricality. (832)

Elsewhere Braudel suggests Muslim Sufism as a possible source of such practices (761). But the repertories we are investigating here were most directly influenced by a cluster of sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, especially Saint Teresa of Avila. Quite possibly the descendant of Jews who converted under the threat of the Inquisition, Teresa and her experiences of divine union attracted Counter-Reformation theologians seeking ways of holding onto what still remained of their flock. Luther had criticized the alienating mediation of the priesthood between Christians and God; in response, this new form of Catholicism promised nothing short of fervent one-on-one contact between the faithful and Christ. Moreover, whereas Luther had banished women from his godhead, the Counter-Reformation foregrounded as exemplars of spiritual power the Blessed Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and Saint Teresa. As cults dedicated to such women spread across Catholic Europe, composers produced hundreds of devotional pieces designed to suture performers and/or listeners into these overheated subject positions. A Milanese nun, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, even wrote duos that celebrate grazing on the wounds of Christ, greedily lapping milk from the Virgin’s breasts, the ecstatic union of Mary Magdalene with her beloved.5 Andrew Dell’Antonio’s new book, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy, examines the aesthetic writing of the time for evidence of how people heard and made sense of such music.6 The Counter-Reformation was not alone in exploiting such sensationalism during this period. Lutheran pietists also indulged freely in violent and erotic imagery, couching their meditations in Scripturesanctioned sources, including the Song of Songs and the conjugal terrain made available by the metaphor of the church as the bride of Christ. Traces of the sacred erotic appear still in Bach’s music, not only in the bride and groom duets of his cantatas but also in the simulated lovemaking of the Christ-related duos of the B Minor Mass.7 A strain of ecstatic Judaism at the time similarly explored ways of stimulating spiritual immediacy.8 But of these, only the Counter-Reformation allowed itself to make use of the whole gamut of artistic forms: sculpture, painting, theater, verse, and music. A descendant of Jews forcibly baptized

Libidinous Theology   |   133

F igu r e 5.1. Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (photo by Robert Walser).

in Spain, drawing on sedimented memories inherited from Sufism and elsewhere, incited a revolution in spirituality that transformed religious practices and their associated aesthetic expression across all of Europe. Saint Teresa famously described her experience in these words: There grew so great a love of God within me that I did not know who had planted it there. It was entirely supernatural; I had made no efforts to obtain it. I found myself dying of the desire to see God, and I know no way of seeking that other life except through death. This love came to me in mighty impulses which, although less unbearable and less valuable than those that I have described before, robbed me of all power of action. Nothing gave me satisfaction, and I could not contain myself; I really felt as if my soul were being torn from me. O supreme cunning of the Lord, with what delicate skill did You work on Your miserable slave! You hid Yourself from me, and out of Your love You afflicted me with so delectable a death that my soul desired it never to cease . . . . Beside me, on the left hand, appeared an angel in bodily form. . . . He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire. . . . In his hand I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left

134   |   Divine Love

me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God. This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share. So gentle is this wooing which takes place between God and the soul that if anyone thinks I am lying, I pray God, in His goodness, to grant him some experience of it. Throughout the days that this lasted I went about in a kind of stupor.9  

Teresa’s text became the template for metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw and other poets. And when Bernini came to the task of representing Saint Teresa, he sought to capture the moment of upward convulsion before the implied collapse into postorgasmic satiety (fig 5.1). The music we shall encounter in this chapter simulates precisely the same gestural vocabulary.

Desiring Mary The text of the “Salve Regina” counts as one of four standard Marian antiphons added to the liturgy in the eleventh or twelfth century. Identified with the season between Trinity and the beginning of Advent, it also appears as the final prayer in the recitation of the Rosary. Versions of its text translated into vernacular idioms circulated for use in devotions; indeed, the one hymn I could dependably entice my resistant congregation to sing with gusto was “Hail, Holy Queen,” a hymn based on verses of the original prayer. I must admit, however, that Monteverdi’s music for his “Salve Regina” bears little resemblance either to the medieval monophonic chant grafted into the liturgy or to the Englishlanguage devotional hymn so popular among my former parishioners. Were Monteverdi and I guilty of foisting our own dirty minds onto a pristine, virginal object? As I will demonstrate, Monteverdi did everything he could to raise the heat in his setting. And me? I was just following orders—the orders, that is, presented by the details in the score. But Monteverdi did not just arbitrarily impose his reading on these lyrics, which may have been written by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century theologian who not only brought us the Crusades and the Templars but also concentrated much of his energy writing commentaries on the erotically charged Song of Songs. Through extensive meditations on the lovers in the Canticles, Bernard sought to infuse the spirituality associated with divine union into what he regarded as an excessively rule-bound religion. After Bernard’s moment had passed (though with lasting traces in the  

Libidinous Theology   |   135

secular verse of the troubadours and all that followed from them), the Church returned to more orthodox modes of expression. But the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed another enormous wave of mystics aspiring to direct spiritual and even quasi-physical contact with Jesus or Mary. Thus if Monteverdi’s particular way of reading this already-ancient text might not have been the most obvious for previous generations, his own time had conditioned him and his contemporaries to notice and make full use of erotic potentialities offered by the “Salve Regina.” Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae,

Hail queen, mother of mercy,

Vita dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.

Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.

Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae.

To we cry, poor exiled children of Eve,

Ad te suspiramus gementes et

To you we send up sighs, mourning and

flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle,

weeping in this vale of tears.

Eja ergo advocata nostra, illos tuos

Turn then, our gracious advocate,

misericordes oculos ad nos converte.

your eyes of mercy toward us.

Et Jesum benedictum fructum

And show us Jesus, the blessed fruit

ventris tui nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

of your womb after this, our exile.

O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria.

O clement, o loving, o sweet Virgin Mary.

Monteverdi does a bit of rearranging within this text. Most significantly, he derives the lyrics for a refrain by lining up all the words that name the Virgin (“Regina,” “mater,” “vita,” “spes,” “clemens,” “pia”), leading up inevitably to the cadential tag, “o dulcis Virgo Maria.” Anyone familiar with the original text (which Monteverdi’s congregants most assuredly were) might well have been stunned by this aural pelting with vocatives. The music only intensifies the situation, as each new vocative presents the next step in a rapidly ascending sequence (ex. 5.1). Only a pause halfway through, on a reiteration of “salve” in mm. 6–7, offers relief from this single-minded ratcheting up of desire, but that pause also has the effect of teasing—delaying the continuation we know must occur; indeed, with the word “clemens” the momentum increases to a dancing triple meter. The principal rhetorical interruption occurs just before “dulcis,” where a chromatic jump in the bass delivers a timehonored madrigalian frisson, a third-related sucker punch. The music  

 

E x . 5.1. Monteverdi, “Salve Regina,” mm. 1–22.

j Ïj j Ï ú Î Ïj Ïj j Ïj Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï J  

Vc w ?c w

Sal

6

Vw ?w

sal

w

-

-

ve,

32 W

w

3W 2

? w

Vir -  go Ma - ri

-

bw

17

Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ ú

spes,

W

dul-cis

pi - a,

w

#w

Sal

ú ú

w

ú

cú ÎÏ Ï J J cú #ú

o

w

Ï . ÏJ Ï . Ï b Ï . Ï Ï . Ï J J J

∑

a,

vi- ta, o

w w w

w w w

cle - mens, o

w

w

ú

W

o

V #ú Ï Ï

11

ú

w

ve,

o Re - gi - na, o Ma - ter, o

ú

-

bú

ú

-

-

-

w

V Ï. Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï ?

-

-

-

-

-

-

w

w

-

-

-

-

-

Ï. nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï V #Ï Ï Ï Ï

19

?

-

20

w

-

-

-

-

V Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï. ?

-

w

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

ú w

-

-

-

ú #

-

-

-

w

ve.

w

-

Libidinous Theology   |   137

suddenly recoils from the self-perpetuating mechanism of ascent as if crumpling in abjection or in the combination of pleasure and pain portrayed in Bernini’s statue, and we hear a slow-motion, nearly mournful half cadence on “Maria.” To complete the first section, the vocalist is required to present a show of pyrotechnics, in which the word “salve” is meted out in the most minute of divisions and a sequence of those sobbing glottal stops called at the time trillos. (It must have been at around this point that my performance provoked the ire of my priests.) This refrain returns three more times over the course of the motet, alternating with calm discursive passages, which attempt to reduce the heat a bit by presenting languid meltdowns: see again the whimpering conclusion of the refrain above or the extravagant depiction of the sighs, mourning, and weeping in this vale of tears that is the human condition. Despite its melodic chromaticism, Monteverdi’s “Salve Regina” stays quite chastely within the bounds of classic D Dorian; it does not achieve its effects, in other words, by challenging modal logic. Instead, it makes use of conventional materials to produce gestural patterns of urgently escalating desire and a gradual subsiding into intensely pleasurable languor.

Frescobaldi’s Magdalene If the “Salve Regina” stays within the bounds of conventional procedure to produce its startling effects, Girolamo Frescobaldi’s sonetto spirituale “Maddalena alla Croce” (1630) is the kind of piece that gives music of this period its reputation as incoherent. It begins in what might be A major, sets up camp in G minor halfway through, and climaxes on an unprepared Fá major chord before concluding in . . . A minor (see ex. 5.2 below). In the face of such a chaotic assemblage, we could simply throw up our hands and focus exclusively on the lyrics or on social context. The organist at Saint Peter’s Basilica (designed by Michelangelo, with the portico and altar just then materializing according to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s specifications), Frescobaldi had studied with the Mannerists in Ferrara—a lunatic fringe that included composers such as Gesualdo. Monteverdi’s seconda prattica manifesto advises us to accept unorthodox musical events so long as they seem justified by the lyrics. Given that Frescobaldi’s poetic text involves the lamentation of Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, we might accept that his erratic compositional choices make a certain kind of cultural (if not purely musical) sense. But the fact that this brief monody must be understood within its  

138   |   Divine Love

historical context or as a manifestation of the seconda prattica does not suggest that its formal details cease to matter. No less than Bernini, Frescobaldi had acquired the most solid of constructional skills, as well as the most advanced expressive rhetoric vocabulary of his day. To ignore the material means by which each achieved his ends—Bernini in the altarpiece at Saint Peter’s or in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Frescobaldi in his toccatas or in this representation of the Magdalene—is to consign their work to the category of the merely sensational. As I did with Monteverdi’s “Salve Regina,” I will locate “Maddalena alla Croce” within the fevered world of Counter-Reformation propaganda. Without this context it would be difficult to explain the intensely erotic quality of both lyrics and music. But I will also examine the particular ways Frescobaldi produces his imagery: the acute ascents that break off suddenly just before reaching their implied goals, the downward spiral that takes us from A major to G minor, the bizarre arrival on Fá major, and so on. Such details concern not only the analyst and musicologist but also the performer, who must make sonic and temporal sense of these patterns in order to convey them meaningfully to the listener. These details in turn lead back into a cultural environment that encouraged the simulation of frustrated desire, abjection, and shuddering catharsis in sacred music. And here again the writings of the Spanish mystics—Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, without whose descriptions of divine love the Counter-Reformation might have foundered—necessarily enter into the analytical project. For both Frescobaldi and Bernini drew upon those heated descriptions of spiritual longing, the dark night of the soul, and the ecstasy of quasi-physical union with Christ in calculating the phenomenological dimensions of their artworks. The composer’s task was to convey by way of sound the deeply irrational experiences of religious trance. How precisely did he do it? In addition to the erotically charged details of the music’s momentby-moment unfolding, Frescobaldi also constructs a theological allegory through his formal design, thereby deepening the argument of his poetic text. On this structural level, Frescobaldi reveals the method in his madness, his powerful control over the apparently disparate details of the piece. Those curiosities—the beginning in what seems like A major, the swerve into G minor, the sudden seizure on that Fá major chord, the ending in A minor—all turn out to have crucial logical connections to one another. Just as the poem relates the Magdalene’s arrival at divine understanding, so Frescobaldi plots his chain of events in ways that allow him a breathtaking moment of spiritual and also formal insight,  

 

 

 

 

 

Libidinous Theology   |   139

when all is made plain. We can share more fully in that insight, however, if we have followed the musical details that produce it. I emphasize once again that the listener will hear neither the surface gestures nor the allegory unless the performer conveys them in sound. In my experience listeners have no difficulty grasping the affective gestures of “Maddalena alla Croce” once they have the necessary historical context, provided that the singer knows how to translate the details of the piece in performance. My discussion, which brings together the politics of the Counter-Reformation, the mysticism of Spanish saints, the experiments of seconda prattica composers, and the salient formal details of this idiosyncratic composition, can help us grasp not only some of the priorities of seventeenth-century music but also the reasons why these composers were in no particular hurry to discover tonality. A Piè della gran Croce, in cui languiva

At the foot of the great cross on which languished

Vicino à morte il buon Giesù spirante,

Close to death our good Jesus, expiring,

Scapigliata cosi pianger s’udiva

Disheveled and weeping was thus heard to cry

La sua fedele addolorata Amante;

His faithful, grief-stricken lover;

E dell’humor che da’ begli occhi usciva,

And than the tears that issued from her lovely eyes,

E dell’or della chioma ondosa, errante,

And than the gold of her waving and errant hair,

Non mandò mai, da che la vita è viva,

Never has produced, since life was life,

Perle od oro più bel l’India ò l’Atlante.

India or the Atlantic more beautiful pearls or gold.

“Come far,” dicea, “lassa, ò Signor mio,

“Alas, how,” she said, “O my Lord,

Puoi senza me quest ultima partita?

Can you take without me this final departure?

Come, morendo tu, viver poss’ io?

How, if you are dying, can I live?

Che se morir pur vuoi, l’anima unita

For if you wish to die, my soul is united

Ho teco (il sai, mio Redentor, mio Dio),

With you (you know this, my Redeemer, my God),

Però teco haver deggio e morte, e vita.”

Thus with you I may share both death and life.”

E x . 5.2. Frescobaldi, “Maddalena alla croce.”

j j ä Ï Ï Ï # Ï . JÏ J

&c Î Ï ú ?c 3

w

w

Vi - ci - no ˆ mor - te il buon Gie - sù

ú

glia - ta co - si

ú

Ï #Ï

pian - ger s'u - di - va

ú

j j & Ï . # Ïj # Ï Ï Ï w ra - ta A - man

?ú 9

#ú

in cui lan - gui - va

ú

w

ú

spi - ran - te,

ú

ú

Î # ÏJ JÏ

Sca - pi -

ú

r r Ï ä j j j r Ï # Ï Ï & J R R # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ä # Ï Ï . Ï # Ï . Ï ä JÏ JÏ ÏJ ?

7

del - la gran Cro - ce,

j j r j r j j & ä # Ï Ï . # Ï # Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ïj # ú ?ú

5

A Piè

ä ÏJ Ï . # ÏJ Ï w

ú

-

te;

w

ú

ú

la sua fe - de - le

ú

ú

ad - do - lo -

ä Ï # Ïr # Ïr Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï . ÏJ Ï J J J

ú

E dell' hu - mor, che da' be - gli oc - chi u - sci -

ú

#Ï

ú.

j j ú j jj j r j j & Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ä Ï Ï ÏJ JÏ . ÏR JÏ JÏ Ï.b JÏ

va, E dell' or del-la chioma on -do-sa, er - ran-te Non man-d˜ mai, da che la vi-ta è

?úú

ú

ú

ú ú

w

jä j j r r Ï Ï ä Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú

11

&

vi - va,

? bú

ú

&ú ú

lan - te.

ú ú

16

& #Ï

od o - ro più bel l'In

ú

ú

"Co - me far" (di - ce - a) "las - sa,

ú

ú

ú

bú

ú

ú

& Ï b ú b ÏJ JÏ ú

ú

ú

ú

18

tu, vi - ver poss' i - o?

?ú

ú

20

&ú i

?ú

-

dia,

ú

˜

l'At -

Ï Ï

˜

bú nú

Si - gnor mi - o,

w

j j j Ïj . Ïr Ïj Ïj Ï . j Ï Ï b Ï Ï ä ä Ï Ï Ï #Ï #Ï Ï J J J

Puoi sen - za me quest ul - ti - ma

? ú

-

ä b Ï Ï Ï . # Ïj Ï Ï ä Ï b Ïj Î ú # Ï . Ïr ú ú J J

13

?

Per - le,

j Ï Î Ï . Ïr

par - ti - ta?

ú

ú

Co - me, mo - ren - do

ú

ä Ï Ï ä # Ï Ï . Ï Ï ú b Ï Ïj J J J R J

Co - me, mo - ren - do tu, vi - ver poss'

ú.

Ï

ú

#ú

ú

j j j ä Ïj Ï Ï Ï . Ïr Ï

r ä Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï ä JÏ R J R

ú

w

ú

o?

Che se mo - rir

pur vuoi,

l'a - ni - ma u - ni - ta

ú

Ho

(continued)

142   |   Divine Love E x . 5.2. (continued)

Ï & Ï . JÏ ä J Ï ä ÏJ ÏJ ÏJ Ï . # JÏ # ú

22

?

te - co (il sai,

ú

#ú

mio Re - den - tor, mio

ú

Ï & Ï . JÏ Ï . JÏ Î Ï ú

ú

24

deg - gio e mor - te,

?w

w

e

vi

-

ú

Di - o),

#w

ta;

?ú

ú

ú

w

vi

w

ú

Pe - r˜ te - co ha - ver deg - gio

j ÏÏ & ä Ï JÏ . ÏR ä ÏJ Ï Ï Ï # Ï ú e

ú

Per˜ te - co ha - ver

ä j # Ï Ïj Ïj Ï Ï Ï Ï

ú

26

e mor - te,

ä # Ï Ï n Ï Ïj # Ïj J

-

ú

Ï W ta."

W

The sonnet Frescobaldi sets purports to describe Mary Magdalene at the site of the cross, though it is laden with the metaphorical excesses typical of baroque verse. Thus, in the second quatrain the poet compares Mary’s disheveled tresses to precious metals imported from the Americas, her tears to pearls conveyed from India. Much like the gaudy chapels that line the cathedral built by the Most Catholic Kings in Granada after their ethnic purging of the Iberian peninsula and in celebration of the vast quantities of gold and silver pouring in from their newly acquired colonies, this description of the grieving Mary converts her to an icon advertising as a casual point of reference the luxury commodities brought to seventeenth-century Europe by ships from both east and west. But it is the blatant eroticism of this little piece that scandalizes most present-day listeners when they first hear it: here is Mary Magdalene at the site of Christianity’s most holy site—the crucifixion—enacting a fantasy of simultaneous orgasm with the dying Christ. Even those who do  

 

Libidinous Theology   |   143

not know the Renaissance convention of punning on the “little death” will catch this meaning when Frescobaldi’s setting concludes with a spasmodic shudder. Both the jewel-encrusted poetry and the deliberate blending of the religious and the sexual recall Oscar Wilde’s Salome, except that the sacrilegious stakes are much higher here. Recall that when pop star Madonna staged a similar (if much less audacious) scenario for “Like a Prayer,” Pepsi yanked her ad from circulation within a matter of minutes. In the opening pages of this chapter I circumscribed the cultural universe within which such texts made sense. But granting a composer license to explore erotic imagery in no way determines the choice of particular pitches or gestures. As I mentioned above, Frescobaldi developed his craft with the avant-garde composers at Ferrara, and he adopted and extended their experiments with chromatic harmonies and radical discontinuities in his own music. Like Gesualdo, Frescobaldi churned out pieces that today often seem to us little more than conundrums. In an attempt at dissuading me from taking this music seriously as music, one of my teachers told me, “It didn’t matter to them where they started or ended or where they cadenced. They just worked through their texts and stopped.” The challenge posed by that statement has fueled my work for the last forty years. Frescobaldi’s setting of the sonnet lasts for a mere forty-seven measures, but over the course of that very short duration he passes through at least eleven implied keys. By contrast, the much longer pieces by Bach typically move through only four or five. As in his toccatas (discussed at length in chapter 6), Frescobaldi creates here a febrile quality that leaps nervously with no more warning than a sudden leading tone pointing the way. As often as not, the tonic resolution indicated by that leading tone fails to materialize. Still, the powerful syntactical implication of the leading tone preparing to close on its tonic provides an adequate guidepost, however erratic its treatment in context. Without question, “Maddalena alla Croce” refuses to conform to a preset model of coherence; it disrupts modal expectations as much as it does tonal ones. But it does not make its moves at random. A musician accustomed to tonal semiotics is likely to find perplexing the fact that the piece seems to open in A major and end in A minor. But the key signature, which sports neither flats nor sharps, does not confirm A major. If the continuo begins by striking a minor triad,10 then the ascent of the voice to the signed-in Cá for the word “croce” is startling and even hair-raising: in place of a complacent arrival on an already-

144   |   Divine Love

granted major mediant, the Cá now sounds like a Cà wrenched up forcibly out of its proper position. Within the gestural vocabulary of this piece, in other words, the music of the first quatrain does not truly qualify as major; it presents an intensely spiky terrain (call it, perhaps, a severely wracked Aeolian) in which vocal lines and harmonic patterns strain upward past their normal bounds toward something that remains beyond their grasp. The opening melody, the text of which describes the agony of Christ as he hangs on the cross, climbs over the sustained A in the continuo with increasing tension through to Cá—a leading tone that makes its way to D only after a gasp and an aggressive leap to Fá in the bass. From that precarious configuration the voice presses up to Dá, which ought to resolve to E. Instead, the arching trajectory breaks off with an angular augmented fourth on “languiva.” Similar labored ascents and melodic defeats occur repeatedly over the course of the sonnet, even when only the neutral narrator speaks. What starts out as an image of Christ’s suffering becomes the pattern for Mary’s attempts at reaching up to her Lord—futile attempts that repeatedly result in her falling back into herself. On a kinetic level, Frescobaldi offers the phenomenological experience of heaving forward and collapsing inward, simulating a body in the throes of pain, passion, and (potentially) ecstasy. We can hear, perhaps even feel, the Magdalene’s acute yearning, her desperate stabs at forcing a transcendence that all this striving fails to bring about (see again Bernini’s Saint Teresa, figure 5.1). And although Frescobaldi continues to set the poetic text with careful attention to declamation, he chooses to subsume the second quatrain—with its fetishized description of Mary’s tears and hair—musically into his larger allegory. For instead of stopping off to indulge in its particular images, the music keeps pursuing that same hapless pattern of arching up and falling back, though cycling down through increasingly lower pitch levels, as though losing energy. These iterations become paler and paler facsimiles of the model the Magdalene wishes to emulate. When Mary begins to speak in the first terzet, she is in a dark G minor, far removed from the brilliance of the initial terrain. If the opening phrase pushed upward through all those spiky leading tones to encompass a distended tritone, here the Magdalene finds herself confined to the crabbed interval of a diminished fourth. More to the point for this piece, her speech (and, by extension, her consciousness) is crippled with Bâ and Eâ, whereas a cadence on A—the final, which has stood  

 

 

 

 

Libidinous Theology   |   145

since the beginning as her object of desire—would require Bà and a fulfilled ascent all the way to Eà, the modal fifth degree. None of the efforts exerted during the first sections succeeded in catapulting her into the understanding she sought; now her vision seems permanently obscured. A pessimistic gloom settles, making the A realm once nearly within her grasp now seem thoroughly impossible. She continues her struggle, even echoing in m. 25 the frustrated, broken-off leading tone of the opening gesture and almost arriving at A in her half cadence in m. 28 on “partita.” But, despite these near successes, she only spirals down even further: if the setting began by moving far to the sharp side, it now sinks just as far to the flat side. Eventually the Aâ in m. 30 obstructs her access altogether and locks her in the dark night of the soul for the first presentation of her question, “viver poss’ io?” (am I able to live?). Only with great tenacity does she repeat this phrase, managing to wrench herself back up only as far as G minor and the defeated outlook with which she started her terzet. But a distant light suddenly glimmers at the outset of the final terzet as Mary begins to glimpse the solution. If her own personal efforts gained her nothing, she now recalls that her spiritual unity with Christ already guarantees her salvation. For the first time her bass line in m. 35 takes on a linear directionality, and she ascends by step, her melody reconquering first Aà, then pressing on to Bà for “Ho teco” in m. 37. With this realization she pauses for an intimate parenthetical address to Jesus himself. As her level of mystical insight comes to equal his divine knowledge, she respells the Bâ—the pitch that had previously alienated her from Christ’s key—as Aá, the leading tone to B as an implied tonic, producing a wildly dislocating Fá major triad. (If we were to tune our keyboard as Frescobaldi did his, this chord would actually jangle.) For a strangely timeless moment we hover there with Mary, suspended in rapture. Having attained that key to enlightenment, she can now freely enact an affirmative cadence on A, the realm initially identified with Christ. In m. 42 she achieves the ascent up to E (the withheld goal of the initial melodic vector that had broken off so precipitously), now with no difficulty. As she repeats this line of text she traces without obstruction the entire octave, from the depth of her low E all the way up to high E and thence to the final cadence marked so intensely with pain (note the diminished fourth) and pleasure. She now inhabits the world from which she had seemed hopelessly exiled. Before she saw through a glass darkly; now she clasps her Savior face to face.  

 

 

146   |   Divine Love

I referred to Mary’s nadir of despair in her first terzet as her “dark night of the soul”—the title of the celebrated testimonial by Saint Teresa’s disciple Saint John of the Cross—and I have just described the Fá major disruption as rapture. I now want to return to the Spanish saints who provided the impetus for artists like Frescobaldi. As easy as it might have been for Frescobaldi simply to grab onto the musical vocabulary developed in madrigals and opera for simulations of the erotic, he apparently chose (as did Crashaw and Bernini) to go back to the mystical sources themselves for inspiration. For the phenomenology of divine love, despite all its obvious resemblances, differs significantly from that of carnal love. In her writing, Saint Teresa often apologizes for the clumsiness of language as a medium for communicating her experiences for the benefit of others, especially as she seeks to distinguish among several different varieties of mystical transport. She problematizes her own metaphors, switching from one to another in an attempt at getting closer to the ineffable events she strives so urgently to convey in words. But her verbal constructs, however inadequate their author judged them to be, circulated widely throughout the Catholic world and even as far as England, serving to instruct those who would follow in her footsteps. Frescobaldi’s target audiences in Florence or Rome would have known key passages from Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, and he strove to match these very famous images with musical analogues that grant us the illusion of actually experiencing these ecstasies firsthand. With respect to the radical contrast between the harsh brightness of Frescobaldi’s opening and the darkness into which the Magdalene finds herself at the beginning of her terzet, John of the Cross explains:  

 

When [mystics] believe that the sun of Divine favor is shining most brightly upon them, God turns all this light of theirs into darkness, and shuts against them the door and the source of the sweet spiritual water which they were tasting in God whensoever and for as long as they desired. And thus He leaves them so completely in the dark that they know not whither to go with their sensible imagination and meditation.11

But (he explains), this dark night of the soul is necessary for eventual transcendence: The strait gate is this night of sense, and the soul detaches itself from sense and strips itself thereof that it may enter by this gate, and establishes itself in faith, which is a stranger to all sense, so that afterwards it may journey by the narrow way, which is the other night—that of the spirit—and this the soul afterwards enters in order in journey to God in pure faith, which is the means whereby the soul is united to God.12  

 

Libidinous Theology   |   147

Translating this concept back to Frescobaldi’s setting: without that alienated passage through G minor and even F minor, Mary could not have found the means of merging with Jesus. She has to proceed blindly through darkness in order to find enlightenment. Which returns us to that mysterious Fá major chord. Saint Teresa ex­­ plains with respect to the Prayer of Quiet: This is a supernatural state, and, however hard we try, we cannot reach it for ourselves; for it is a state in which the soul enters into peace, or, rather, in which the Lord gives it peace through His presence. In this state, all the faculties are stilled. The soul, in a way which has nothing to do with the outward senses, realizes that it is now very close to its God, and that, if it were but a little closer, it would become one with Him through union. . . . It is, as it were, in a swoon, both inwardly and outwardly, so that the outward man (let me call it the “body,” and then you will understand me better) does not wish to move, but rests, like one who has almost reached the end of his journey, so that it may the better start again upon its way, with redoubled strength for its task.13

Saint Francis de Sales describes a similar phenomenon in these words: “But when the union of the soul with God is most especially strict and close, it is called by theologians inhesion or adhesion, because by it the soul is caught up, fastened, glued and affixed to the divine majesty, so that she cannot easily loose or draw herself back again.”14 An extraordinary description of the effect of that Fá major chord! With respect to rapture, Teresa writes, “Before you can be warned by a thought or help yourself in any way, it comes as a quick and violent shock; you see and feel this cloud, or this powerful eagle rising and bearing you up on its wings.”15 The modern listener is likely to recognize the concluding cadential patterns as patterns of requited desire without too much difficulty. But Mary’s real breakthrough occurs with that Fá major chord, which suddenly and without warning lifts us from linear time for a moment of suspended animation—what we might call an out-of-body experience, a glimpse of timeless rapture. The syntax of this move would have baffled a conservative seventeenth-century music theorist as much as it does us, yet it is neither arbitrary nor merely a momentary response to an image in the text. Over the course of the entire piece, Frescobaldi has carefully prepared the climactic effect of seeing through to some mystical truth by means of this irrational hinge. Just as John of the Cross offers a causal justification for God’s plunging the believer into the dark night of the soul for the sake of unity, so here the very locus of Mary’s alienated doubt becomes her key to redemption. The Fá major chord functions on  

148   |   Divine Love

one level as what we call a secondary dominant, albeit to a pitch rendered highly significant within the context of this piece. But as it suddenly materializes out of nowhere, it offers (in Braudel’s words) the desperately sought-after dramatic detail that strikes and holds the attention, the active demonstration that persuades and grips the faithful. We are not meant fully to understand what transpires with that Fá major triad: we are to hear it and believe.

Melting Down: Heinrich Schütz’s “Anima mea liquefacta est / Adjuro vos” Heinrich Schütz acquired this overheated brand of sacred music and brought it to his home base in Dresden from the source itself, in the course of not one but two sabbaticals spent in Venice. After his first trip (1609– 13), he produced his multichoir settings of the Psalmen Davids (1619) in a style learned from Giovanni Gabrieli; Gabrieli regarded Schütz as his greatest disciple and even bequeathed his ring to him when he died. A second trip put him in contact with Alessandro Grandi, whose extravagantly erotic effects Schütz mines in his Symphoniae Sacrae I (1629), a collection that includes several settings of texts from the Song of Songs. The other two pieces examined in this chapter, Monteverdi’s “Salve Regina” and Frescobaldi’s “Maddalena alla Croce,” both make extensive use of sudden surges of energy and subsequent deflations. Neither pushes the quality of melting down nearly so exhaustively, however, as Schütz in his setting of “Anima mea liquefacta est” in his Symphoniae Sacrae. The title, of course, alerts us to the topic of liquefaction. But it cannot begin to suggest the myriad ways the composer invents to simulate this quality. In order to account for these, we need to have at hand the Tractatus of Christoph Bernhard, a colleague of Schütz’s in Dresden.16 Monteverdi had promised decades before to produce a theoretical account of what he called the second practice—a new way of treating dissonances—but he never got around to doing so.17 Bernhard’s Tractatus comes as close to fulfilling that promise as anything that survives from the period; a compendium of everything the practicing musician would need to know, it trolls through the classic first practice characteristic of, say, Palestrina, then introduces a number of what he explains as rhetorical tropes, ways of elaborating an orthodox background pattern with carefully manipulated dissonances on the surface. His two-layered music examples resemble conceptually the ones I deployed in chapter 1 of this book;  

 

 

Libidinous Theology   |   149

Bernhard even pursues a kind of musical reduction as he attempts to show composers how they might move confidently from conventional backgrounds to idiosyncratic foregrounds and, conversely, how the performer might identify the fundamental structures lying beneath the ruleflaunting details of the score. We need both background and foreground to unpack the images Schütz offers in such profusion. A millennia-long tradition sutured believers into the subject position of the woman of the Canticles, with the male beloved understood allegorically as God. Most of Schütz’s text comes from Chapter V of the Canticles, though he took lines three and four (altered from second to third person) from Chapter II. Anima mea liquefacta est

My soul dissolved

ut dilectus locutus est,

as my beloved spoke, (5:6)

vox enim eius dulcis

for his voice is sweet

et facies eius decora.

and his face is lovely. (2:13)

Labia eius lilia

His lips are lilies

stillantia myrrha primam.

distilling purest myrrh. (5:13)

Adjuro vos, filiae Jerusalem,

I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem,

si inveneritis dilectum meum,

if you see my beloved,

ut nuntietis ei,

to tell him

quia amore langueo.

that I am languishing with love. (5:8)

Schütz’s rearrangement of the scriptural text accomplishes several things. It adds more images inspired by erotic contemplation of the beloved (lines 3–4), and it eliminates the passages from Chapter V concerning abandonment and persecution that might have detracted from a concentrated expression of adoration.18 Moreover, the revised text allows for the opening image of “liquefaction” (rendered, unfortunately, as “My soul failed me” in many English translations) to anticipate and balance the final image of “languishing.” “Anima mea liquefacta est” is in D Aeolian, and it features the am­­biguity typical of that mode: from his second measure on, Schütz implies that the piece might belong to G Hypodorian. This basic tension between modal types counts as one of his most important strategies, for neither option ever guarantees satisfaction—not even the final cadence, which maintains itself on the cusp.19 Schütz opens with an instrumental sinfonia that introduces his principal set of tensions, intelligible even without lyrics to back them up (ex.  

 

150   |   Divine Love

5.3). A forthright presentation of a D minor triad establishes the mode at the outset, but the dominant in m. 2 resolves to a D major triad, a chord that will constantly serve both as the tonic with picardy third and as a secondary dominant to G. Here, in its first appearance, the Fá inserts a moment of expectation, of rising desire, that takes us to G. Halfway through m. 3, however, we hear two acute melodic dissonances, A and C, grinding against Bâ in the bass. Bernhard would advise us to notice that the bass is ascending by step—usually a hint that the one-to-one relationship between pitches in the modal line and those of harmonic support is being suspended temporarily. The reduction is easily accomplished: the opening and closing melodic pitches of m. 3 are identical, and they resolve down by step in m. 4 as the bass reaches its goal. But providing fodder for analysis is never the point of music. Schütz accomplishes several things with m. 3. The bass offers an image of incrementally rising desire; the upper parts, on the other hand, attempt to resolve too soon, then arch up into that illicit dissonance that is not allowed by the bass, finally collapsing back down to the same position in which it began. Schütz traces an internal contradiction, surges that lead nowhere, resigned descents that leave the lover suffering on her bed. Recall the bodily motions of Frescobaldi’s Magdalene or Bernini’s Saint Teresa. Schütz encapsulates both vectors within a single measure. At least we seem to have arrived firmly on V/G in m. 4. A romanescaharmonized descent from melodic D in m. 5 confirms as much. But the arrival on A in m. 6 is given an Fà, and a subsequent diapente descent as though toward D duplicates the same gesture for the rival mode. At least the odd melodic turn figure that created the sharp dissonance at first hearing appears to have been domesticated when it arrives in mm. 5 and 7, as though Schütz wants us to focus here on modal ambiguity. But the four bars of mounting scales in the bass beginning in m. 9 bring the dissonances back in full force. And even if we seem to be fairly securely back in D, the entire complex of m. 11 echoes m. 3 except for the absence of Fá and the insistence of the line in ascending the ninth from G to A. This simulates extraordinary effort coupled with repeated collapses. At last the melody manages to hoist itself up by step to the octave above the final for the cadence in m. 18. The sinfonia’s cadence is met by the voice now putting words to the contradictory images we have just experienced in the instruments: “liquefacta, liquefacta, liquefacta,” it moans as it melts down to a cadence on G in m. 25. The downward spiral continues with the next phrase, which sets out C minor. As in the Frescobaldi, the second degree (Eà here) required for an  

Libidinous Theology   |   151 E x . 5.3. Schütz, “Anima mea liquefacta est,” Prima Pars, mm. 1–18.  

Sinfonia

& b c ú.

ÏÏ ú ú

? b c ú.

Ï Ï #ú ú

& b c ú.

Ï Ï ú #ú #

6

7

&b Ï Ï Ï Ï w &b Ï Ï Ï Ï #w ?b ú Ï Ï w 6

13

& b ú. Ï ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï ú. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú. Ï

Ï #Ï Ï Ï #ú Î nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú Î Ï Ï ú ú ú ú ú Ï Ï ú Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ ú

# n

ÏÏÏÏ ú

ú

ÏÏ

ÏÏÏÏ ú ÏÏ ú ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ ú

#

ú

ú nú

ú

ú

Ï #Ï nÏ ú Ï

& b # ú . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ Ï ? ú ÏÏ ÏÏÏ Ï Ï ú Ï b ú Ï Ï #

#

#

#

authentic cadence has been tamped down something like the dark night of the soul. Except that the Schütz has nothing in its lyrics that would suggest the impending death that the Magdalene explicitly fears. No, this alienation from the world of reason simulates an erotic swoon, apparently brought about by the mere mention of the beloved. The instruments repeat the gesture, thereby underscoring its significance and preventing an immediate move away from this intensely pleasurable stupor.

152   |   Divine Love

As the lyrics go on to enumerate the qualities of the beloved, however, desire begins to build. The bass proceeds by rising fifth, and the voices seek to outdo each other in levels of enthusiasm. So intense is this inflation that it concludes on the other end of the spectrum, complete with an illicit cadence on A. The Bà needed for this cadence appears with searing suspensions on the word “dulcis” (mm. 47–48). Just how sweet is his voice? Well, sweet enough to make the background structure exceed its boundaries. After this quite indecent moment of self-exposure, the ensemble retreats to patterns that would confirm mostly a G axis. For a while it seems to be working step by step back to some kind of normalcy. But normalcy is never the desired condition for this piece, and the ambiguities continue apace. We have only begun to melt down, however, for it is the secunda pars, “Adjuro vos,” that presents the pièce de résistance. As before, it is the instrumental sinfonia that exposes the materials that will pervade this half (ex. 5.4). Here again we find the gesture of arching up and collapsing back, now compressed into two pitches. In the first measure, the Cá in the bass ought to behave as a leading tone and ascend back to D; instead it falls to Cà, as if unable to sustain the pressure. When the motive moves to the top line in m. 4, its effect is intensified by its superimposition over the bass, which marches stalwartly from D to A, giving no consideration to the languishing lines above it. The clash on the downbeat of 5 is even more excruciating than those that appeared earlier in the piece. The motive with the frustrated leading tone then returns to the bass, where it traces first a cadence (with Bà) on A and then on D. Note that the lines accompanying each iteration of this motive offer the most teleological of patterns: they descend through diapente in search of gratification, but always with the crimped leading tone image inflecting their otherwise straightforward progress. When the voices enter, they bring back the internal contradiction between D and G, and the bass has to twist and turn to accommodate each in turn. Once again Schütz halts the process to take a deep breath, and for a while we hear monodic recitation of the kind pioneered by Peri in 1600 and perfected by Monteverdi in Orfeo. Over a sustained pedal the voice runs through most of the remaining text: “If you find my beloved, then tell him that . . . ” As in those earlier models, Schütz delays the descent of the modal line from 5 to 4 until “ei quia.” But here the oratory falters, only to open onto the word we’ve all been waiting for, “langueo.” Schütz does not disappoint us. I suggested above that the first line,  

Libidinous Theology   |   153 E x . 5.4. Schütz, “Anima mea liquefacta est,” Secunda Pars, mm. 1–18.  

&b c ÎÏ ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï #ú ú

Î Ï #ú

? b c Î Ï #ú

Ï nÏ Ï Ï ú ú

ú

Sinfonia

&b c

∑

6

ÎÏ ú

∑

∑

Ï nú Ï & b nÏ Ï Ï Ï 7

#

V b ÎÏ ú 12

Vb

Ad-ju

∑

#

ú ú

-

ro

ÎÏ ú

#

6

j Ï. Ï ú

vos,

ú ú w

12

6

6

ro vos,

4 2

∑

#

6

Ï w w

Ï Ï ú w # #

6

6 6

∑

w

-

5

9

j Ï Ï Ï. Ï #Ï ú

? b ú ú #ú ú #ú ú ú #ú Ad-ju

Ï Ï Ï Ï #ú Ï Ï ú ú ú ÏÏ

ú

Î ÏÏÏ & b Ï Ï Ï . n JÏ # ú ú 7 ? b #Ï nÏ Ï Ï ú Ï Ï #Ï nÏ Ï Ï 6 6

Ï nÏ Ï Ï ú Ï Ï

î Î ú ú

4 3

Î Ï Ï . Ïj ú

ad-ju-ro vos,

Ï ú ú

ad - ju - ro

#ú ú 6

ú

vos,

ú #

“Anima mea liquefacta est,” was designed to announce this eventuality right from the beginning, and here comes the payoff. In my chapter on Wert and Marenzio in Modal Subjectivities, I explained how the notion of “madrigalism” detracts us from attending to the musical dimensions of the text/music relationship: in reducing our explanation back to word painting, we may neglect to observe how the lyrics serve

154   |   Divine Love

merely as the pretext for the composer to imagine combinations otherwise not available. As if to demonstrate this argument, Schütz presents more than fifty measures that demonstrate how many different ways one might experience languor. He sets the words “amore langueo,” appropriately enough, to an elaborate cadential formula. Its melodic meanings, however, find themselves thwarted by other lines—instrumental and vocal—that duplicate the pattern at other pitch levels. For instance, when the second voice enters, the two grind painfully against each other, each denying the other’s desired resolution (ex. 5.5). After much heaving and panting, the voices agree to cadence on G (not shown in the examples). But an exposed Eâ in the second voice in m. 68 drags the entire complex down to a cadence in C minor, illegally to the flat side of the piece’s axis. In contrast to Frescobaldi’s Magdalene, who discovers the path (however convoluted) to rational closure, Schütz liquidates all markers of principal key identity in his last page. The aquatic images are not accidental. Moshe Idel quotes Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, an early Hasidic master who wrote of divine union:  

 

It is known, however, that everything depends on the arousal from below, the feminine waters, since it is the woman who first longs for the man. We, the Children of Israel, are “woman” in our relationship with God. We arouse ourself [sic] from below to cling to Him; then do we awake in Him, as it were, desire to extend to us His flow of all goodness. Then does the flow come down from above: blessing and compassion, life and peace. We, the Community of Israel, and the Creator, blessed be He, are a single whole when we cleave to Him. Either without the other is, as it were, incomplete. . . . When we begin the arousal by our feminine flow of longing for Him and [our] desire to cleave to Him, we awaken His desire for us as well. When these two desires are brought together, there is one whole being.20

In his setting of “Anima mea liquefacta est,” Schütz works hard to simulate “feminine waters” and the longing for “flow.” From here to the end he plays a kind of shell game with leading tones and secondary dominants, disorienting us in a delicious puddle of unrequited desires (ex. 5.6). First he seems inclined to allow his process to devolve into the infinite regress of ever-flatter keys. The arrival on C in m. 73 might be a secondary dominant to F minor, and although he resists taking us there just yet, he will follow through with that implication in m. 88, a scant four bars from the end. But in this first instance he raises all the mediants, allowing the sun to break through. Note the extraordinarily bright quality of the major-oriented parallel sixths of mm. 75–76 and especially the sear 

E x . 5.5. Schütz, “Anima mea liquefacta est,” Secunda Pars, mm. 55–61.  

j Ï ú

55

& b c Ï. &b c ú

Î

Ï

n

qui

V b c Ï. ?b c ú

qui

55

-

-

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï J -

-

a

w

-

-

a

w

ú

6

& b Ï . Ïj ú 58

?b 58

lan

w

4

-

3

-

#ú

w 3

Ï Ï #Ï Ï

j Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï #ú

w

gue

Ï Ï ú. -

4

4

3

ú

-

-

a - mo - re

w ú

-

lan

Î Ï Ï Ï

Î Ï Ï Ï ú

ú

#Ï Ï ú

a - mo - re

#

& b Î Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï ú 58 ú #Ï nÏ #Ï Ï ú Vb Vb Ï #Ï ú

Ï Ï Ï

w

Î Ï

Ï V b c Ï . n Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ JÏ # ú

55

Î

Ï Ï #Ï Ï w

ú

-

-

Ï

o,

w

- gue - o,

ú #

w

#

Î Ï

E x . 5.6. Schütz, “Anima mea liquefacta est,” Secunda Pars, m. 73–end.  

73

&b c w

î

n

&b c w o,

∑

a - mo-re lan

∑

ÏÏ Ï Ï ú

-

-

Î Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

?b c w 73

ú

ú Î Ï Ï Ï ÏnÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

Vb c ú 73

Vb c

ú

o, a - mo - re,

a- mo - re lan

w

w

78

&b ÏÏú

ú #ú

-

î

w

î

ú

ú

-

ú

-

ú nÏ Ï ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï ú -

w

-

-

-

-

-

V b ú nÏ Ï w ?b ú ú 78

-

-

-

w

4

-

-

-

-

-

3

3

w

-

4

-

w 4

-

3

-

-

ú.

Ï

w

î Î Ï

gue - o,

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï ú

-

-

w

&b ÏÏú ú Ï Ï ú. Ï #ú ú w 78 ú Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï #Ï Ï ú ú #ú w #Ï Vb -

-

Ï Ï Ï Ï ú

ú ú

ú

Ï Ï

-

w 3

4

-

ú #ú w 4

a-

gue -

3

84

&b w

î

&b ú

ú

ú

bú w

- mo - re lan

-

Vb w

î

w

w

?b

84

- o,

4

3

&b ú 89

&b î

-

ÎÏ

-

-

Ï Ï ú

a - mo - re lan

w

b

4

ú

ÏÏÏÏbÏÏÏÏ ú

-

3

-

-

w

-

-

-

b U

ú

w

Ï

U

w

j Uw j Ï Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï Ï Ï ä Ï ÏÏ Ï V Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï 89

Vb

-

-

U

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

gue - o.

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

gue - o.

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï# Ï Ï Ï Ï j # w bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

?b w 89

b

w

w

-

-

w

3

ú.

ú

Ï Ï ÏÏ bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï

-

ú

ú

∑

ú

ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï 4

4

w

ú

-

î

∑

w

V b nÏ Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï ú

84

w

ú

U

w #

-

158   |   Divine Love

ing thirds halfway through m. 77 that hold out over the instrumental dissonances. They hold out in part because they are reorienting the piece away from the flat side and now toward the sharp side: they set up a powerful cadence on A, complete with Bà. That arrival, however, initiates a series of falling fifths: first to D, then G, back to C, and finally to F with Aâ. After this astonishing nadir, the process reverses itself, though only with the implication of a palindromic symmetry. If F minor yields to C minor, then G minor, and finally a D major chord, we can only tell by looking at the score that we have returned to the tonic. If anything, this sounds like V/G minor; nothing in this context indicates that it might be the final. But at this point in the piece, who cares? Schütz’s strategy has been to lose us in a labyrinth of pleasure so intense that closure scarcely matters. To continue the bodily image of arching up and collapsing back that so characterizes all the depictions of desire and pleasure in this chapter, Schütz leaves us not with resolution but in midarch—just as in Bernini’s depiction of Saint Teresa—and performers should strive to make that last sonority sound like an unresolved dominant. God has not yet answered, the beloved is not yet fully present: we can only long indefinitely for the bridegroom’s appearance.  

 

•

•

•

I have gone into extensive detail concerning these pieces not for the sake of obscurantism but because I want to demonstrate the tight control these musicians had over their compositional strategies. The option of producing rational trajectories—the kind of procedure celebrated in eighteenth-century tonality—was available to each of them, as they demonstrate with some frequency. But the tracing of mystical experiences was a much higher aesthetic priority for them, and it posed much greater technical challenges. Without this cultural swerve into esoteric phenomenologies, musicians might have homed in on tonal hierarchies as providing the only game in town much earlier than they did. With the increased growth of secularization in European culture, enterprises such as Schütz’s begin to recede. Yet as long as mysticism commanded center stage, it inspired the cutting edge of musical experimentation, with simulations of linear reason pushed to the side. Chapter 6 will remain within this domain, though it will deal mostly with the ways such techniques and their ideological apparatus informed the development of the keyboard toccata.  

 

Chapter 6

Straining Belief The Toccata

The texted pieces discussed in the previous chapter were able to press their cultural agendas quite explicitly. With their lyrics as anchors, composers could to move far away from standard practices to explore ways of being that were diametrically opposed to principles of linear reason. If musical grammar counts as the socially agreed-upon basis for transparent communication, then it must—by very definition—find itself warped, pushed aside, or violated in the interest of simulating phenomenologies of divine love. In this chapter I want to turn to the genre of the keyboard toccata. Except for the subgenre of toccatas expressly designated for the climax of the mass at the elevation, none of these announces a cultural project verbally. Yet they make themselves intelligible through strategies familiar from modal practice, and they too served the Counter-Reformation agenda through the gestural vocabulary rendered familiar to listeners at the time through compositions like those discussed in chapter 5. No less so for being wordless, the seventeenth-century toccata also traces extravagant patterns of mystical experience. Not coincidentally, some of the earliest toccatas work on the basis of virtually the same premises as those I have already discussed; indeed, they do so even more self-consciously. In the first chapter I demonstrated how a modal diapente descent could expand to control an entire speech or aria. I know from the experience of presenting these arguments in talks, however, that musicologists often regard me as imposing  

 

159

160   |   Divine Love

Schenkerian schemata anachronistically upon an innocent repertory. But in many toccatas labeled and ordered according to tones, the generating background line is nothing other than one of the ancient melodic formulas used to intone the psalms. That generating line, moreover, is often identical in shape and grammatical function to the diapente descent that I have used as my principal syntactical unit throughout the book.

Ringing Changes on Psalm Tone 1 My first two examples take as their point of departure the first tone, which also serves as the intonation for the Magnificat (see the top line of ex. 6.1). In order to accommodate the two-part structure of psalm verses, the first half of the formula maintains the fifth degree as a reciting tone, with a single inflection upward to the lowered sixth degree (5– 6â–5). The second half moves down stepwise through the diapente to the mediant (5–4–3), then descends from 4 to the final (4–3-2–1).1 One of the standard activities required of organists around 1600 (and also much earlier and much later) was participation in psalmody; they often played verses in alternation with a cantor or choir. Faced with the task of presenting formulas such as this, Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew, Giovanni Gabrieli, produced elaborate versions of their reciting tones—either in improvisation or in the form of composed-out toccatas designed to simulate improvisation. Murray Bradshaw has written extensively on these procedures, and I refer the reader to his work for more information concerning performance practices.2 I shall begin with one of these settings, both to underscore the prevalence of such techniques at the time and to prepare for discussions later in this chapter of free-form toccatas that translate the same expansionist impulses to radically different formal strategies. Giovanni Gabrieli’s Toccata primi toni opens with the psalm tone fully exposed as the top voice in the right hand, making clear to the acculturated listener the immediate relevance of this organ piece to the psalm recitation presumably underway (ex. 6.1). Although Gabrieli chooses to present the opening fifth degree in long magisterial rhythmic values (to be arpeggiated freely if played on harpsichord), he sustains that single generative pitch by harmonizing it with three different triads: the tonic (a minor triad on D), the dominant (with raised leading tone), and a return to a triad on D that includes an Fá pointing forward as a secondary dominant to the first move in the psalm formula.3 Thus far, the generative background has remained stationary; yet the harmonic  

 

 

 

 

 

 

E x . 6.1. Gabrieli, Toccata primi toni (with reduction).

&C W

& C ww ..

w #w

úú

? C ww . 4

W

úú

w w

ww # ww

bW

bw. w.

ÏÏÏÏ Ï Ïb Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

Ï bÏ Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ

ÏÏÏÏ

& bW

w Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ & ÏÏ www

? W W W

4

6

W & W 6 Ï ÏÏ Ï W & #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #W W ? úú W

8

8

& W & nW W W

ú

ww

Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï

Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ

ÏÏÏÏ

Ï

W W W W

Ï Ï Ï Ï ? Ï Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï jÏ Ï # Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïj Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï (continued)

E x . 6.1. (continued) 10

&W

W W W W

W &W W

? Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï

10

12

&W

w

12

&W W W

? Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï

14

úúú

ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

& W Ï Ï Ï ÏR Ï # Ï Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï & Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏ

14

? Wú W

ú

w

16

& W W & bW W ?

16

Ï

ÏÏ b Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï î Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï

W W #W W

ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï #Ï Ï

Ï Ï# Ï Ï Ï

Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ

W ÏnÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ W W W

#Ï Ï Ï

ÏÏÏÏ

U

W W W W u

#W W

u

Ï

Straining Belief   |   163

twists help to animate that solitary pitch, first by stabilizing it and then inflecting in ways that infuse it with dynamic tension. With the melodic ascent to Bâ, the dramatic high point of this half of the formula, Gabrieli unleashes the energy built up by the Fá leading tone. Beginning gradually and then accelerating, the left hand descends through the scale on G (the harmony of choice for the lowered sixth degree), then rips back up over two octaves to land on Bâ, once again marked as the immediate goal. As the right hand takes over the figuration, it slows the rate of activity to a more deliberate pace and starts raising tensions by striking A, now an accented dissonance, on the second pulse. Another scale lifts us up beyond the previous ambitus to land on A—the principal reciting tone. Located as it is an octave above the implicit generative pitch, it performs an exuberant gesture of return from the upper auxiliary, Bâ, and the triumphant climax of this half of the psalm tone. Rounding out the formula, Gabrieli confirms the tonic with an elaborate tonic-dominant-tonic cadence. Note, however, that nothing has transpired in the generating line other than A–Bâ–A: the entire first segment, for all its maneuvers and spurting runs, has simply (or, better: not so simply) sustained the fifth degree. Gabrieli chooses to overlap the two halves of the formula, having the point of arrival for the first in m. 7 also serve as the point of departure for the second. The Fá in the harmonization of A in m. 7 qualifies both as a picardy inflection of the tonic and also (we learn in retrospect) as a secondary dominant pushing forward. Only in m. 8 does the generating line begin its descent toward the final, marked emphatically with a G major harmonization. Recall that the operative pitch in m. 3, also harmonized with G in the bass, was Bâ, as is typical of Dorian holding patterns. Now as Gabrieli moves down to G as fourth degree, he marks it with a diatonic harmonization: that is, with Bà. Though it need not have done so, that Bà becomes a leading tone in its own right, toppling forward to C—the other principal harmonizer of the fourth degree, G— which in turn gives way to F. The tonal ear might hear each of these moves as equal advances within a circle of fifths, and this pattern of progressive cadential formulas no doubt also appealed to Gabrieli.4 It is, however, a side product of his main task: the setting of the ancient melodic formula. When the generative line backs up to G again, the composer takes advantage of this bump by reversing his previous strategy, for F now leads to harmonically to C, and C to G. When the melodic F reappears it is now harmonized with the final, D, in the bass. With the reversal, the left-hand  

 

 

 

 

164   |   Divine Love

figuration that allowed the easy drops by fifth in mm. 8 and 9 becomes more dissonant and thus more urgently concerned with pressing forward: m. 10 has a strongly accented D as its lowest pitch, and m. 11 has an A in the corresponding position. A frenzied cadential preparation in m. 13 returns us forcibly to D and the concluding descent from the mediant to the final. If there were no explicit generating line for this piece, I might hesitate between whether to classify the arrival in m. 13 as a descent to the mediant or as a reinstatement of the fifth degree. Indeed, if the composition were to continue without fulfilling the cadential preparation, I would probably prefer calling it a return to 5 (parallel fifths aside). I raise the issue because such moves will be at least temporarily ambiguous in so many free-form compositions.5 In the Toccata primi toni, my decision to label m. 13 as the arrival on the mediant is overdetermined by the fact of the generating psalm tone. But Gabrieli also works quite deliberately to mark this moment rhetorically as 3: he short sheets the measure, calculating its rapid scalar ascent in such a way as to plunge forward to an extremely agitated second degree, harmonized as dominant preparation for the arrival on the final in m. 15. The remainder of the toccata prolongs the final, but with harmonies that recall the alternation between A and Bâ that opened the piece. Over the course of this coda Gabrieli privileges Bâ and A in the right hand, allowing for a smooth transition back for the singers who would need to begin their own statement of the psalm tone on the fifth degree. Like the compositions discussed in chapter 1, Gabrieli’s Toccata primi toni holds to a clear generating line and expands its successive functions in a variety of ways for rhetorical emphasis and effect. He can do this without reference to lyrics because his background progression has such a strongly defined sense of direction. But up against that standard background, he deploys a wide array of expansion techniques that depart considerably from the bare psalm tone that serves as the point of departure for the composition. Gabrieli’s melodic lines range freely throughout the entire keyboard, and he exerts his will in determining the duration of each background pitch—most obviously in the foreshortened arrival on the mediant in m. 13 and in the circle of fifths configuration that emerges to elaborate the areas associated with G, the modal fourth degree. If the psalm tone speaks as the timeless voice of God, Gabrieli imposes upon it his own willful interpretation and virtuosic maneuvers.  

Straining Belief   |   165

And it is precisely this combination of familiarity and rhetorical novelty that heightens what Braudel describes as art for “the use of the faithful, who were to be persuaded and gripped by it.”6 No longer your grandmother’s psalmody, Gabrieli’s toccata grabs his listeners by the lapels and pulls them through increasing dynamic excitement to experience belief viscerally. •

•

•

Perhaps the most extravagant demonstrations of seventeenth-century psalm tone elaborations appear in Monteverdi’s Marian Vespers of 1610. For each of the enormous polychoral compositions in the Vespers, Monteverdi uses a different recitation tone as the pretext for exploring a variety of combinations, textures, and rhetorical strategies. Sometimes the psalm tone appears on the surface as a melodic motive for points of imitation; other times it resides deep in the background behind dazzling displays of instrumental and vocal virtuosity. Monteverdi situates his Magnificat as the last large piece in the Vespers. Like the Gabrieli toccata just discussed, the Magnificat relies upon psalm tone 1, and like the other arrangements of recitation tones in this collection, this multimovement setting deploys its generating line in a great many imaginative ways. The opening verse, for instance, offers an antiphonal presentation of the word “Magnificat” as the first part of the formula, then intones “anima mea Dominum” in a single unadorned voice part, as befits the humility of the young virgin. I want to concentrate here, however, on the final segment of the Magnificat, the setting of the doxology. In toccatalike fashion a solo tenor enters over a sustained pedal in the organ, his vocal roulades cascading first down through the octave, then ascending again. In keeping with the then-popular echo effects, a second tenor reiterates this last gambit, the ascending scale. Only after we have witnessed this breathtaking virtuosity (and its duplication, which magnifies both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the statement) does the austere psalm tone enter. With the second pitch the tenor breaks in, slowing its progress and greatly dilating this moment—especially since the requisite echo delays yet further the forward motion. Throughout his setting of the Magnificat doxology, Monteverdi continually pits the background and foreground against one another, making the tensions between their vectors palpable. Over and over again the solo voice invades the serene unfolding of the psalm tone, dilating moments along the way and straining to bring about some desired  

166   |   Divine Love

change through his own efforts. But every time Monteverdi frustrates the will of the soloist, withholding the psalm tone’s move to the next pitch, which is so intensely yearned for by the soloist and also—by dint of the shocking dissonance between these performing forces—by the listener. This effect reaches its climax at the very end of the doxology. To afford some relief from the pent-up energies generated by the opposing forces, Monteverdi allows the chorus to present the second half of the reciting formula alone, with only stark organ accompaniment. (This is what God’s will used to sound like without the interference of human desire, which somehow always gets in the way.) Monteverdi harmonizes this unexpanded descent as a standard romanesca—the most powerful and self-evident way of presenting this formula.7 Beginning in m. 28 the formula repeats, now with the tenor interventions that elaborate, impede, dilate, and whip up increasingly powerful expectations for resolution (ex. 6.2). When at last the reciting tone reaches its penultimate pitch, A, the tenor performs an extravagant series of cadential patterns—only to find his hard-won tonic, G, hanging there in the breeze while the chorus still holds to its A. A sense of thwarted physical desire is instilled in the listener at this point, a desire to find delayed gratification in the resolution that occurs eventually only with the echo—an offstage, unseen voice that both shadows the tenor and also manages to achieve the steps the principal tenor himself is denied. Ljubica Ilic has examined the relationships between the self and power in such echo pieces, which flourished in the early seventeenth century.8 She argues that these effects, long written off largely as gimmicks, often signal a crisis in early modern subjectivity—much as do the celebrated paintings featuring mirrors. In the last act of Monteverdi’s Orfeo the hero laments, only to have the last syllables of each of his lines thrown back to mock him, and Salamone Rossi even has a choral motet in which the tail ends of the Hebrew lyrics bounce back as puns in Italian.9 Who or what is the echo in this Gloria Patri? Most performers assign the principal part to the better singer, leading us to hear the second tenor as a mere trace of the first. Yet it is always the echoing response that manages to coincide with the timeless psalm tone. Despite the admirable virtuosity of the main soloist, his arms are too short to box with God. In a clash of temporalities, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, as Bach would later attest ( “God’s time is the best time,” Cantata 106). Human efforts, even at their most impressive, cannot match or compete with the eternal verities.  

 

 

 

 

 

E x . 6.2. Monteverdi, Magnificat, Gloria, mm. 28–37.

w &b c Vb c

et

Vb c ?b c

31

&b ú

ú

ú

Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï . n Ï Ï . Ï ÏJ ä Î

Spi -

∑

-

- ri

et

∑

î

w

p

w

ú

w

.nÏ Ï Î . V b Î Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï i

Sa

V b ÏJ JÏ Î ?b w

tu - i

Sa

-

-

-

-

-

î

nÏ Ï Ï Ï b ≈ V -

Vb Ï ?

b ú

-

a

-

w -

-

Sa

-

a

a

-

Ï ä b Ï . Ï ÏJ JÏ Î

-

tu

ú

-

-

Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï . nÏ Ï . Ï ÏJ äÎ

î

-

-

-

-

ä Ï bÏ. Ï

p

w

et

-

-

w

-

w

w -

et Spi - ri -

Ï Î Ï nÏ Ï Ï Î -

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

p

-

Ï Î Ï nÏ Ï

a

-

Î

-

p

a

Ï ≈ # Ï Ï

#Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ä ≈ R Î w

-

et Spi - ri - tu - i

#Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Î ä. R

Ï ≈ Ï n Ï Ï J ä Î

p

-

w

Ï Î Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï.nÏ Î -

p

34

&b w

 

-

a

a

(continued)

168   |   Divine Love E x . 6.2. (continued) 36

&b w

Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b J ä V -

Vb Î

?b w

-

-

-

-

ncto.

ä.

p

î

-

-

-

w

-

ncto.

#Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w R a

-

-

-

-

-

∑

ncto.

w

Or maybe they can, for surely it is the solo tenor’s extraordinary attempt to stop or accelerate time that we remember when we hear this doxology, as when we experience so much seventeenth-century art. Milton’s Lucifer dared to aspire to the status of God, and his sublime refusal to submit to the divine makes him something of a hero, even taking into account his eventual failure. If Monteverdi’s setting of “Duo seraphim” in the Vespers (see chapter 3) depicts the seraphs circling the heavenly throne, in this doxology he encourages us to identify with the Dark Angel, the rebel whose investment in individuality put him at odds with his creator. Or, if you like, we experience here free will versus adherence to traditional authority, a tension we will encounter repeatedly in our tour of baroque culture.

Free-Form Toccatas Even the most casual tourist visiting the Vatican notes with awe the altarpiece and baldachin designed for the basilica by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Of course, the enormity of Saint Peter’s itself and the Pietà, just inside the entrance, are also calculated to instill belief even within the most recalcitrant of hearts. Yet both of these monuments (both the work of Michelangelo) have a quality of centered gravitas. In the case of the Pietà we seem to feel the dead weight of the adult Christ’s body, the incomparably heavy grief of his still-youthful mother; in the case of Saint Peter’s, we bear witness to the asserted permanence of the Counter-Reformation church.

Straining Belief   |   169

By contrast, the baldachin and altarpiece—as well as the same artist’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, located across town in the unprepossessing Santa Maria della Vittoria—seem to swirl up into the air, belying the marble and brass from which they take their material forms (see chapter 5). Not by accident was Bernini also the foremost designer of the theatrical stage machines that granted the vision of gods descending from and ascending into the heavens. Whether Christian or pagan, papal or operatic, the deus ex machina depended on Bernini’s magic. His altarpiece (which is said to contain the remaining fragments of Saint Peter’s own throne) merely transposes into the most sacred of venues the special effects Bernini had long wielded in the most profane. In fact, the entire complex of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa features opera boxes on each side with male spectators peering, pointing at, and discussing the enraptured woman.10 Music historians most often associate the music composed for the Sistine Chapel (the original site for “a cappella” performances) with the Counter-Reformation Vatican. The sixteenth-century Council of Trent had sought to remove the centuries worth of excesses that had accrued to the liturgy and, by extension, its music. Most famously, Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli demonstrated how to write music that adhered strictly to Tridentine guidelines, which demanded clear communication and austere (i.e., unadorned) procedures. One might compare the purity of Palestrina’s efforts with the sublime gravity of Michelangelo’s Pietà. But Bernini, the audacious gravity-defying genius of the CounterReformation Vatican, also had his musical equivalent: Girolamo Fresco­ baldi, the organist at Saint Peter’s.11 A virtuoso instrumentalist and singer who had studied at the court of Ferrara with the extravagant Mannerists of the late cinquecento, Frescobaldi specialized along with Bernini in producing images of swirling ascent. Most explicitly in his elevation toccatas—pieces performed at the moment when the mundane bread and wine presented for communion are changed miraculously into the flesh and blood of Christ—Frescobaldi perfected techniques that simulated in sound such mystical and ineffable experiences as transubstantiation and divine union. I want to begin my discussion of Frescobaldi with a couple of toccatas from his Primo libro delle toccate e delle partite (1615) in order to get some sense of how Frescobaldi operates within this genre. None of the toccatas in this collection takes a psalm tone as its point of departure, though other compositions in the Primo Libro—the partitas or variation sets on the romanesca and simple melodies—demonstrate his  

 

 

 

 

 

170   |   Divine Love

strong commitment to diapente-based procedures. But neither do the toccatas pursue arbitrary idiosyncrasies. If they sometimes appear formless to our ears, it is partly because we have forgotten how sixteenthcentury music works. The toccatas in the Primo Libro take their shapes from the tensions inherent within the modes rather than the psalm tones. As we have seen, the tones are static formulas, even though composers such as Gabrieli and Monteverdi knew how to animate them through extravagant expansionist devices. Modes, on the other hand, had developed over the course of the Renaissance into powerful yet flexible structural grids that could be inhabited in an infinite number of ways. In his first collection of toccatas, Frescobaldi reveals his ability to transfer into a wordless medium the complex musical dramas characteristic of the madrigals of Marenzio, Wert, Monteverdi, and Gesualdo. His Toccata Seconda unfolds in accordance with G Hypodorian, a relatively stable mode that typically has one internal conflict: a tendency to divide the octave between D and D at A rather than at G, the designated final. So long as its activities remain within the diapente between G and D, with the upper boundary circumscribed with Eâ, a Hypodorian composition will pose few structural difficulties. But A, the penultimate pitch before the cadential descent to the final, often becomes marked and reharmonized in such a way as to redirect the syntax down through Eà to the lower D, a rival final. Classic Hypodorian thus makes significant use of both versions of the sixth degree, and strange as it may seem to present-day musicians, the lowered sixth degree is the one that guarantees unambiguous diatonic identity; Eà—the version indicated in the key signature—tends to threatens modal identity by tilting toward secondary regions. Recall briefly Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia bella,” discussed in chapter 1. The opening gambit operates exclusively within the G Hypodorian diapente, and its only task is to complete the stammering descent from D down to G. In the middle section of the piece, however, the tune gets stuck at A. First harmonized as part of a dominant to G, it suddenly dispenses with the Fá that had kept it securely tethered to G. A trapdoor opens up, leading down through the nether regions of the mode to D— a move Caccini explicitly associates here with penetration of the body’s surface into the interior. The remainder of the song struggles to assure us of a safe return to the G diapente, though the memory of that glimpse below the final may continue to haunt us. In his preface Frescobaldi advises readers to perform his toccatas as  

 

 

Straining Belief   |   171

if they were madrigals—now fast, now slow, in keeping with the words. Of course, we have no words here. But we do have the same cluster of dynamic tensions exploited by Caccini in “Amarilli, mia bella” and in so many other vocal pieces of the time; we even have the example of Peter Philips’s conversion of Marenzio’s “Tirsi morir volea” into a virtuoso keyboard piece that still conveys its scenario of longing, frustration, postponed gratification, and simultaneous climax, even without the lyrics.12 Although Frescobaldi’s toccatas have no prior vocal model, they trace just as reliably the kinds of dramatic conflicts made available within each individual mode. Frescobaldi begins his Toccata Seconda with precisely the modal line described above, coincidentally the same gesture as the first half of psalm tone 1: the G Hypodorian diapente with the lowered sixth degree circumscribing its upper boundary (ex. 6.3). He infuses the pattern with rhetorical urgency through a series of suspensions, but the first one and three-quarters measures maintain the opening fifth degree, harmonized by the final in the bass. As m. 2 advances the inner voices become agitated, pushing toward something else. The generating line descends to the mediant at the end of m. 2 and then down to A, the second degree, at the beginning of m. 3. A harmonic suspension delays what we expect to hear as an Fá leading tone. Instead of resolving as expected, however, Frescobaldi delivers an Fà in beat 2 and then a half cadence to D, with Cá in the harmony. Already, in other words, the difficulty of maintaining an unalloyed G Hypodorian has made itself felt. By the end of m. 3 the pitch A has revealed its perfidy in the ease with which it shifts allegiances. This tension will drive the remainder of the toccata. In a quick recovery maneuver, Frescobaldi presents the tardy Fá at the beginning of m. 4, and a hasty half cadence to G materializes to undo the damage of that unfortunate slip into D. The next four measures celebrate the recovery with exuberant scalar passages over a tightly circumscribed G diapente, held secure by frequent appearances of Eâ and Fá. Even the brief flirtations with Bà, which open the possibility of moves to C, prove innocuous so long as they lead to the reinstatement of Eâ. When they do not, however, they herald trouble—as, for instance, at the end of m. 10. It had seemed that Frescobaldi was setting up a particularly elaborate scalar descent toward G, and a very slight reharmonization of the end of m. 10 (if the Eà in the bass moved up through Fá to G and the melodic Bà continued its chromatic descent to Bâ) would give us a most satisfying confirmation of our final. But the bass gets stuck on Eà, paired with Bà,  

 

E x . 6.3. Frescobaldi, Toccata Seconda, mm. 1–29.

b wú ú

w &b c w ww ? c w b

4

wú w ú

9

úú ú

& b ÏÏ

úú ú

Ï.Ï Ï#Ï ú Ï.

úú ú

b úú

úú

úú

Ï .Ï Ï Ï ú

# úÏ

Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïb Ï Ïb Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï úú

úú

b úú

n

ÏÏÏÏÏ

# úúú

Ï . Ï Ï Ï ú Ï úú Ï .Ï Ï ÏÏÏ ú

≈ Ï # Ï Ï Ï . # ú Ï

Î

≈ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . ≈ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . úÏ . ú Ï.

ú ? n úú b 8

úÏÏ Ï úÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï úú

& b ≈ Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï . b ú ú ? # úú b

6

 

b

Ï Ï úú ÏÏÏ Ï Ï

Ï Ï Ï . úúú

Ï

ÏÏÏÏ

≈ Ï Ï Ï ú Ï# Ï Ï # Ï

ÏÏÏÏ & b Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # úÏ Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ïú # Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ úÏ Ï b Ï Ï Ï ? Ï Ï b úÏ b nÏ Ï bÏ Ï Î & b #ú ? b úú

Ï

Ïú b úú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b ÏÏ

ú ú

ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïú Ïú

Ï

Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ

10

&b

Ï

? n Ïú b 11

& b úÏ ? #Ï b

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï

Ï Ï

Ïú ÏÏ

Ï

Ï Ï

ÏÏ

Ï Ï Ï #Ï ú

nÏ

Ï

ÏÏ Ï Ï n Ï n

Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ #Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï

ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # ÏÏ

Î Ï ÏÏ ú

n úú

ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï ú

Ï ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï.Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú b & Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï úÏ # Ï Ï # Ï Ï# Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

12

?

ú b úÏ

ú # úú

nÏ

Ïú

Ï

# Ï Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ

Ïú

Ï Ï Ï Ï # ≈Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï ú & b #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï # úú

13

?

Ïú b ú

Ï

Ï ú

nÏ

& b # ÏÏ . Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï n Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï n Ï

14

Ï. ?b ú

Ï n Ï . Ï Ï ÏÏ

Ï

Ï. Ï Ï

# ÏÏ .

Ï Ï

nÏ #Ï Ï Ï ú

Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

Ïú

j Ï

Ï J

Ï # Ï Ï n ÏÏ . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï (continued)

E x . 6.3. (continued)

Ï & b ÏÏ . Ï Ï Ï Ï úúÏ Ï Ï Î #Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ ? ú b

16

19

& b # ÏÏ . Ï Ï Ï ?

Ï Ï

ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ïúú Ï Ï ÏÏ

Ï

Ï Ï Ï Ïú . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï. Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú

Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

≈ Ï Ï Ï úú ú

Ï b ú

Ï

n úúú

úú ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú & b nÏ Ï Ï ú

20

?

b

ú ú

Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

úú

úÏ &b ú Ï úÏ Ï úÏ Ï Ï Î Ï ? b Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

21

22

& b # úú ?

ú ú

ú w

ú ú nw b ú # ú nw

ú

úú

ú #ú

úú

úú

Ï # ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ # Ï

úÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï

Straining Belief   |   175

Ï . ÏÏ . Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ# Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï . . b Ï n Ï Ï & ú Ï Ï .ÏÏ . Ï Ï Ï Ï ú Ï Ï # Ï Ï .Ï Ï .Ï n Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï n Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú ÏÏÏÏ Ï . Ï . ú ú ?b ú ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

24

Ï &b ú

Ï # ÏÏ ÏnÏÏ Ïn úú . .

Ï &b Ï

ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ

26

ú ? # Ï Ïn Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï ú b î 28

ÏÏ Ï Ï ? # Ïú Ï Ï ÏÏ b

n úÏ Ï Ï . Ïú Ï . Ï Ï . # úúú Ïú Ï . Ï Ï . úÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

# Ïú Ï . Ï Ï . # úÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï n Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ïn Ï# Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï . Ï. ú

Ïúb Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ

ÎÏn Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïú Ïb ú

úú

ú Ï Ï Ï úú # úúú ú ≈ Ï ≈ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï# Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ïn Ï Ï Ï ú Ï Ïú

which initially seems no closer to D than to anywhere else. This enigmatic snarl suddenly resolves itself at the beginning of m. 11 when A appears, harmonized with Cá, and precipitates a powerful descent toward D. As if preening in its triumph, D extends itself, through bunched-up figuration in both hands at the end of m. 11, then an exultant leap up to A, which violates the upper boundary of the Hypodorian species. G tries to recover again, with Fás that return the toccata’s orientation back to the proper final. At the moment when the G cadence ought to occur, however, an Fà in the lower part of the scale sneaks in, and A finds itself accompanied once again by Cá, for a half cadence pointing toward D (m. 13). I realize that my prose in the previous paragraph resembles a blowby-blow account of a soccer match, but I believe that something like this dramatic series of events is what Frescobaldi had in mind when he asked the performer to think of his toccatas in madrigalian terms. His rhythmic notation gives some indication of relative speed, but it cannot convey the sense of “enigmatic snarl,” “preening in its triumph,” or “exul-

176   |   Divine Love

tant leaps” and boundary violations that one might hear—but only if the choices in modal strategy are made audible as such. This arrival at a half cadence in D at the end of m. 13 should feel, I believe, like a sucker punch: the most weighted articulation in the toccata thus far, it comes at the conclusion of a knock-down, drag-out struggle for domination, and it seems to spell defeat for the final. One might even stop and pant for a moment before continuing. In m. 14 Frescobaldi gives the listener a break in the action. In place of the overwhelming sense of overflow and obsessive surveillance of A, he offers a sequence, a sequence of tiny key areas that prance by in succession. None lasts longer than the value of a half note, and some even begin pointing within their briefs spans toward the next key; the jaunty dancelike motive that appears in each segment allows it to sound like a discrete unit. Were it not for the systematic motivic reiterations between units, we would be able to hear quite clearly that Frescobaldi is holding very close to the modal surface, with stepwise motion twice leading up and back through the G diapente. And this cautious strategy seems to work, for in m. 19 the sequence leads into the first relatively straightforward authentic cadence on G—though paired with the major rather than minor mediant. This is potentially one of those places to which Frescobaldi calls our attention in his prefaces: it is a seam in the fabric at which the keyboardist could decide to stop—provided that the arrival on G halfway through m. 19 were extended through an improvised alternation with the subdominant, producing a kind of amen. If we were pursuing a reduction to the modal line, we might regard this moment as the longawaited descent to the final, especially given its picardy harmonization. But the longer Frescobaldi maintains the G major chord the more we should worry. Suddenly, in m. 21, the bass seizes up on Cá, in company with the assertion of A in the modal line. An emphatic, unambiguous descent through the D diapente emerges, and if it did not make its point sufficiently clear initially, the figuration disappears entirely in deference to an unadorned and bizarrely harmonized second descent. Frescobaldi recommends in general that harpsichordists arpeggiate long chords to help sustain the sound. If I were playing this particular toccata, however, I would want to make sure that anything I added did not obscure the dramatic shock of this moment—clearly the most stunning thus far in the piece. Having grabbed control, the D subregion labors to hold onto it. If the diapente descent halts on its second degree, E, the increased fig 

 

 

 

Straining Belief   |   177

uration—especially the jagged reverse dotted rhythms—generates the energy required to transfer that E to the upper octave and another leap beyond the modal boundary (mm. 24–25). The D subregion no longer lurks only in the lower part of the Hypodorian scale; it has now catapulted its own diapente on top to trump its rival. It turns out, however, to have overreached. With no warning whatsoever the second degree of D, E, converts to the fifth degree of a diapente on A. This is precisely the maneuver that has allowed D to undermine G throughout the toccata; what goes around comes around, and D finds itself similarly thwarted. But this usurpation is far more disruptive, inasmuch as it requires the alteration of the signed-in Bâ to a genuine—not a fictive—Bà, and the performer should try to make the Bà in m. 26 sound just as unnatural as possible (notwithstanding the frequent appearance of accidentals, this is the only such event in the whole toccata).13 The crisis lasts only for a moment: with the removal of Gá from the harmony, the orientation returns to D. Although the inner voices trace a descent toward the usual half cadence, the top voice reiterates the fickle A: first as would-be tonic, then as a potential fifth degree in D, and finally as second degree for the G Hypodorian diapente, which had withdrawn completely from the action while D fought its own demons. From this point onward the toccata belongs to G Hypodorian. The specter of a tonicized D raises its head from time to time, but it is easily assimilated back into the mode that governs the piece. The lowered sixth degree, Eâ (the pitch that guarantees diatonic Hypodorian), becomes increasingly prevalent, and the pitch A—despite occasional tendencies to point back toward D—learns to behave as the penultimate pitch leading to G, the final. I will leave it to the reader to trace out the denouement. I wish to make just one more comment before moving on to the next composition. A tonal musician might be tempted to regard Toccata Seconda as merely passing back and forth between cadences on the tonic and dominant, and a strong polarity between the final and fifth degree indeed structures this piece. But, as I hope my discussion has indicated, this is no dominant/tonic alternation but rather something like a fight to the finish over control of the modal octave. A canny performer will be able to convey that struggle in no uncertain terms to the listener.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

•

•

•

Above I characterized Hypodorian as relatively straightforward: located in the middle of the string of modal types, it can move in either direction

178   |   Divine Love

to all the other areas without genuine (as opposed to fictive) chromaticism. It has no difficulty establishing its own central core, and its principal coordinates—the fifth, fourth, and third degrees—easily emerge to serve as subregions. Moreover, its tensions find clear parallels with commonly shared subjective conflicts, making it particularly suitable for Renaissance allegories. The most frequently deployed of the modes, Dorian and Hypodorian will eventually evolve into tonal minor. Indeed, as was argued in chapter 1, we might consider tonal minor the expansion of a single Dorian or Hypodorian diapente descent rather than the extension of Aeolian. But Frescobaldi and most of his contemporaries continued to regard all the sixteenth-century modes as important resources. If his exercises in Hypodorian sometimes lure us into thinking he has converted to tonality, his toccatas in other modes, which appear cheek by jowl with these rather more transparent ones, leave us grasping at analytical straws. In these too we find the expansionist techniques of florid melismas and a powerful sense of willful rhetoric. But the polarities in between final and fifth degree in the Toccata Seconda that seem at least somewhat (if a bit deceptively) familiar fail to materialize in many other pieces—not because the composer is breaking loose from modal logic as he had received it but quite the contrary: because he has determined to mine the particular structuring tensions of those types long since eliminated from our musical world. I want to turn my attention now to one of these compositions, also in the Primo Libro, the Phrygian Toccata Sesta. In contrast with the Dorian modes, Phrygian resides at the far extreme of the modal types. Below it stretch all the others, and it has easy, diatonic access to all of them. It does not, however, contain the normal second degree that would make authentic cadences to its own final available: the Fá necessary for a convincing diapente descent would destroy the very diapente it was striving to shore up. Consequently, Phrygian cannot confirm itself cadentially without betraying its own identity. Yet regardless of the energies it invests in its less restrictive subregions—especially A, which divides the uneasy E octave at the fourth rather than the fifth degree—none of these will serve as points of secure grounding either; they must always eventually surrender, however unpersuasively, to the perpetually unstable E that is the rightful final. Recall that in much Renaissance music, before music theorists Glareanus and Zarlino raised Aeolian and Hypoaeolian to the status of modes in and of themselves, many compositions labeled as Phrygian actually unfolded  

 

 

 

 

Straining Belief   |   179

within what appear to be Aeolian species, as though they were grounded in A, only to revert dutifully to E for the final cadence. Toccata Sesta often behaves like one of those pieces. We might say that there are no “normal” Phrygian pieces, since they are at root so irredeemably uncomfortable. But Toccata Sesta nonetheless qualifies as a quintessentially Phrygian composition—one that resembles madrigals in this mode by Willaert, Marenzio, or Gesualdo. Composers do not stumble upon this mode by accident, but once they choose it, they have to accept along with its potential its limits and drastic affective scenarios. I shall start by scrutinizing the opening four measures of Toccata Sesta. Frescobaldi helps us out by giving us an E minor triad right at the outset. The top voice begins by staking out B, the fifth degree—an indispensable sign of modal identity and one of the few we get in this particular piece—then moving up a half step to C and returning once again to B. Instead of tracing a diapente descent from the securely circumscribed B, however, the top voice leaps to the octave above the final and attempts to move by step from that position. As often happens in modal compositions that introduce their diatessarons into the mix, this strategy opens a can of worms. Immediately that E, the upper limit of the Phrygian octave, gets harmonized in ways that arrogate it to the species grounded on A. Repeatedly throughout the toccata the top voice will toss itself up to that exposed E and try to make an unimpeded descent through the octave to its final. But, time and time again, the melodic descent will stall at Gá, simultaneously the leading tone to A and a bittersweet distortion of the E mediant (ex. 6.4). I have begun my discussion by focusing on the top line because that voice is the toccata’s protagonist; its travails as it seeks to trace a descent to its final will constitute the principal series of dramatic events in the piece. But it is, of course, the erratic harmony that catches our ears and that thwarts the top line’s attempts at self-fulfillment. And the harmony proves treacherous right from the outset. If Frescobaldi grants the opening fifth degree an E minor triad (also a rare event in this toccata), even the slightest melodic shift seems to cause the entire complex to come undone. As the top voice moves to C in m. 1, it creates an excruciating dissonance against the held B in the tenor. When the inner voices relent, as if forced to do so by the imperious C, they move in parallel motion with lower auxiliaries before moving back up when the C likewise returns to B, its opening position. The alto voice, however, introduces a hornet’s nest of accidentals.  

 

 

180   |   Divine Love E x . 6.4. Frescobaldi, Toccata Sesta, mm. 1–8.

ú

 

wú wú w

& c ww w ? c ww

ú

# úw w w

ú w

ú

ú # ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï

úú

& úú úÏ # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï úw Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï n w ú ? # úú ú w

# wú ú

& # úúú

Ï Ï . Ï .Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ#äúÏ Ï. Ï úÏ .ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï

3

5

#ú

? 7

ú Ï Ï

úÏ Ï Ï Ï ú

úú

# úú

ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏú ú w ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏú

úú

Ï Ï.ÏÏ.Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï úÏ ÏÏ # Ïú Ï Ï. ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ # Ï Ï.

úú

Î ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ & Ïú Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ú Ï Ï ú Ï ú Ï Ï ä Ï . ä Ï Ï . Ï úÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïú . Ï Ï ú . # Ï # úú úú ? Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï .Ï Ï Ï ú ú n The Fá—an illicit pitch within Phrygian—would seem initially to confirm E minor. But by the beginning of m. 2 the function of that pitch becomes less clear. Already with the Gá that greets the return to B in the top voice, the orientation of the piece veers toward A, and the Fá of the first measure serves to prepare the Gá, without which we would have (God forbid!) an augmented second. The bass follows suit, presenting a chromatic ascent through the A diatessaron: E–Fà–Fá–Gà–Gá–A. Thus even when the diatonic Fà appears prominently in m. 2, it is construed in such a way as to ally it with A. In m. 3 the Fá, which might have reinstated E as a tonic (if not exactly a final), drops after its cadential effort  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Straining Belief   |   181

to Fà and hence to a more or less straightforward cadence on A at the beginning of m. 5. Very quickly, however, A gives way and allows the top line its desired descent to E. But the Phrygian final is harmonized as part of a dominant to D—scarcely a satisfying arrival. Back up the octave it hops for a second attempt, only to find itself dragged down by harmonic constraints to the B below its final (m. 8). Then back up to the octave E, and so on. For as is characteristic of Phrygian pieces, every possible subregion—A, D, G, C—proves more stable and more convincing than the principal species presumably intended to govern the composition. Fortunately for the listener, Frescobaldi’s figuration underscores this dramatic strategy: note the agitation that so often accompanies the leaps up to E, as if the top line keeps trying to get it right, only to get shunted hither and yon by uncooperative, perverse misharmonizations. About halfway through the toccata, the equivocal Gá that so often halted the descending motion is replaced by Gà, sustained usually with moves to C or G. When the top line halts on Gà, even when functioning within foreign harmonic areas, it sounds like a ray of hope: with the obstacle of Gá out of the way, perhaps a full descent to E may eventually occur. Alas, in the final section of the toccata the Gá reasserts itself. Although the composition concludes with a major triad on E, its context makes it sound more like a half cadence to A than a cadence on E with a picardy alteration; moreover, the mode-bearing voice manages to descend only as far as Gá—in other words, with the same bittersweet ambiguity that emerged already in m. 2, never to reach resolution. One could perform such interpretations of the other toccatas in Frescobaldi’s Primo Libro in such fashion. Although highly dramatic in their sequences of events, these pieces still operate within the frameworks specific to each mode inherited by the composer from his forebears; he regarded his task as that of rendering within a wordless medium the same kinds of internally conflicted structures typical of the madrigal. And, as Frescobaldi advises, the performer should calibrate matters of speed and inflection accordingly.  

 

 

 

Hocus Pocus But Frescobaldi also composed a subgenre of toccatas that quite deliberately thwarted anyone’s sense of logical procedure: the elevation toccata. Such compositions were designed explicitly to accompany the most solemn and miraculous moment in the mass, the moment when

182   |   Divine Love

the priest raises the elements of communion—mere bread and wine— so that they may transubstantiate into the flesh and blood of Christ. As a priest elevates the host he utters in Latin, “Hoc est corpus,” or “This is the body.” Wags long ago corrupted this motto to “hocus pocus”—a phrase like “presto, change-o” that carnival magicians still declaim as they perform their own mysterious transformations. If the toccatas of the Primo Libro still adhere to some form of cultural logic (albeit one that we have forgotten over the course of four centuries), the elevation toccatas necessarily avoid any kind of previously existing formal principles. Just as the human mind cannot grasp the sublimity of transubstantiation, so it should remain stunned by the unpredictable inflections of the music accompanying this ceremony. Like Bernini’s gravity-defying constructions of brass and marble, Frescobaldi’s music for these occasions is designed to strike awe into the hearts of congregants, to animate as multimedia theater the greatest of Christian mysteries. Yet the fact that elevation toccatas were intended to sound ineffable does not mean that we should not ask how Frescobaldi accomplished his tricks. Bernini made use of the most advanced engineering principles (indeed, he developed many of them himself), thus ensuring that his airborne sculptures would not collapse, and Frescobaldi similarly involved himself in material culture when producing his effects. I have preceded this examination of elevation toccatas with discussions of two other toccatas in order to show that Frescobaldi does not always compose in erratic ways. He differentiated between “ordinary” toccatas and those designated for the special occasion of Holy Communion. So how do these latter work? I have chosen the Toccata per l’Elevatione from the Missa degli Apostoli, an organ mass in the collection Fiori musicali (1635). Although Frescobaldi also includes elevation toccatas in his Seconda Libro, he writes somewhat more succinctly, in a more concentrated fashion, in Fiori musicali, a collection that is also better known to today’s organists. A Phrygian composition, the elevation toccata from the Missa degli Apostoli bears the closest resemblance to the Toccata Sesta we just examined. Like the Toccata Sesta, the Phrygian elevation toccata begins with a leap from the fifth degree, B, up to the octave above the final, whence it tries repeatedly to descend; moreover, both end with the top voice equivocally poised on Gá, serving equally as leading tone to A or to a picardy inflection of E. But the strong internal markers of Phrygian— for instance, the emphatic returns to the higher E for retrials—do not  

 

 

 

 

Straining Belief   |   183

appear with such frequency in this elevation toccata; indeed, in this piece Frescobaldi is as likely to begin auspicious descents from D. And in addition to the leading tones that kept shunting the octave descents every which way in the former piece, the Apostoli toccata also features flats, borrowed from a vastly different modal universe. In most of the procedures we have examined thus far, leading tones serve to orient the ear to a pitch center, to secure tonal identity. The very appearance of a leading tone implies a functional second degree in the modal line, right on the verge of cadence. Yoked together, the melodic second and the leading tone arouse expectation—and thus whet desire—for closure on a particular configuration. And when used consistently as a means of prolongation (see again ex. 1.4 and 1.5 in chapter 1), the leading tone utilizes this quality of centeredness to maintain a single unambiguous key area. I suggested at the conclusion of chapter 1 that all the elements and syntactical relationships fundamental to tonal practice had emerged by the first decade of the seventeenth century; Monteverdi and Cesti understood perfectly well how to organize their pitches and temporalities in this manner. What had yet to develop, however, was a concession that this was the only game in town. As frequently occurs when a new technology appears, the composers of the day evidently preferred to explore a whole range of new possibilities rather than to stick to a single option, however powerful and even obvious that particular option might appear to us in retrospect. Thus the very device that works in certain contexts to cement stability operates in others as a wild card, as an invitation to orientational promiscuity: in short, as a misleading tone. I include the chromatically lowered sixth degree here also as a kind of leading tone, for it too appears as a means for abruptly battening down the hatches of what otherwise might seem like a modally open field. Just as directional as the raised seventh degree, an accidental that produces a lowered sixth indicates, however briefly, a powerful sense of tonal center. In other words, those flats that crop up in the Apostoli toccata also function to lead— as well as to mislead. Pulled this way and that by leading tones and by sudden flats that melt down like limp Dalí watches, most listeners can keep track only of the very local events, each of which finds itself rubbed out before implied resolution, replaced by yet another vector that arouses and then resists rational expectations. But if the changes were altogether arbitrary, then they would not serve the liturgical purposes for which they  

 

 

184   |   Divine Love

were designed. Frescobaldi does not want us to experience nonsense but rather divine mystery. Our is not to question why: we should feel as if we are constantly on the brink (thus all the leading tones) of seeing through a mediating series of veils but never quite managing to glimpse clearly what lies beyond. The toccata begins and ends on an E major triad, though our principal marker of Phrygian identity is itself already compromised with the presence of a Gá (ex. 6.5). Between those two outer frames, the activity centers not on the tensions between B and A as potential divisors of the E octave, as in Toccata Sesta, but rather on an alternation between A and D as possible finals. Yet neither of these truly emerges as a center of activity. Instead, the leading and misleading tones of both enter to spark our attention, only to evaporate in favor of yet other options. The seventeenth-century keyboardist would have recognized the opening as operating within Phrygian, given the rarity of compositions in E major and the frequency with which Phrygian compositions begin with the raised mediant. For those not privy to the score, however, the initial triad would quickly lose its status as the unequivocal tonic of a major key when Cà appears in the tenor voice; that Cà, coupled with a rhythmic figure usually associated with cadential preparations in the alto, firmly reinterpret the E major triad as a dominant leading toward A. At the beginning of m. 2, however, an F in the bass denies the expected arrival. In itself this is not such a big deal: deceptive cadences of this sort were relatively common in Renaissance music. But the bass then moves up to Fá, thereby cranking up the level of tension while leaving quite ambiguous its implications. If the bass were to continue up chromatically to A it would duplicate what occurs in m. 3 of Toccata Sesta and lead to a more emphatic confirmation of A; but the sonority over the Fá also emphasizes D in the top line, and the leap between Fá and B in the bass, particularly with the sonority that emerges at the beginning of m. 3, may be heard as pointing to E. Nor should one rule out G as a possible option, with the Cá in m. 3 serving as a secondary dominant marking D as V of G. Measure 4 disappoints that option, however, with the melting Bâ in the alto, a pitch that seems to mark A as a circumscribed fifth degree relating to D even while the Fá in the tenor wants to keep confirming G. And what about the descending lines that allowed us to keep track of the generating logic in the other two Frescobaldi toccatas? These too weave tangled webs. The soprano in the Apostoli elevation toccata opens up the Phrygian diatessaron, thus demanding a descent from E. It makes its way down as far as A before breaking off (as does the alto

Straining Belief   |   185 E x . 6.5. Frescobaldi, Missa degli Apostoli, Elevation Toccata, mm. 1–14.

w & c # úw

ú Ï w Ï ú Ï ú Ï Ï ú Ï # Ï úú Î #

ú ÏÏ ÏÏú ú w ? c w. ú ú # ú úú . 5

8

 

úw Ï Ï w ú w ú. .

Ï b ww

ú ú ú ú ú Ï w W# Ï Ï Ï w #w

. Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï & î ú úÏ Ï # Ï # úú úÏ ú w Î ú ú ? wú # ú wú W

Ù Ù ú . ú Ï . # Ï úw Ï wú Ï Ï. Ï #ú Ï. Ï ú ú ú . ú bú w

ú

#ú Ù Ïú . Ïj

Ù Ï .Ï Ï Ï & úw Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï # ÏÏ Ï úÏ. # Ï Ï # Ï Ïú ú Ï ä Ï w ? ww

# úú

ú nú

ú w

#ú

Ï & ÏÏ # ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ïú n Ï ú

11

?ú

∑

Ï Ï

Ï nú w

Ï ú Ï # Ï úäÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ

ÏÏ ú ú Ï # Ï # úw ÏÏÏ

Ï # Ï # äÏ ÏÏ Ï Ïw# Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï úw. Ï î

ú Ï Ï Ï #Ï

with Bâ in its descent in m. 4). If we were to follow the tenor, we might hear it valiantly attempting to construe a responsible Phrygian: its opening gambit establishes the high E before it moves on to circumscribe with both upper and lower auxiliaries B, the fifth degree; next it catches up with the missed notes—D and C—then makes it as far as the Fá that sounded so puzzling just as a harmonic function. But if Fá has a place of honor within E major or minor, it does not belong to Phrygian.  

 

186   |   Divine Love

From every point of view m. 5 represents a cul-de-sac. As if starting all over, the soprano picks up a new opening gesture; but, unlike the parallel moments in Toccata Sesta, which always reaffirmed E, the Apostoli toccata chooses to begin its oratorical pronouncement on D, seemingly operating within G. Until, that is, the deceptive would-be arrival in m. 6, in which E in the bass and Gá in the soprano reorient the piece toward A—or (why not?) again toward the oddly configured E that can neither establish itself nor surrender to any other key. For the prepared A is not allowed to solidify in m. 7, hindered as it is by a deceptive harmonization and a quick swerve to the flat side, the Bâ that clearly serves here as a lowered auxiliary to the fifth degree in D. And so it goes for the duration of the toccata. Inchoate desires emerge, intensify, deflate, and find themselves replaced by yet other im­­ pulses. Only very occasionally does a configuration suggesting E Phrygian materialize—for instance, in mm. 14–15, the beginning of m. 21, and the bold outline in the bass from m. 30 to the end. Like the Toccata Sesta, the Apostoli toccata concludes with its opening sonority. But the former composition pursued a dramatic process in which repeated attempts at descending from E all culminate equivocally on Gá. The elevation toccata presents no such process. Instead, it is as though the opening sonority itself stands as an enigma: “behold, I tell you a mystery.” Over the course of the piece the gestures of human desire attempt to grasp the incomprehensible fact of transubstantiation, of a Phrygian entity with a signed-in Gá. But the mystery remains intact, still unfathomable at the end, unchanging yet containing within itself miraculously transformative powers. The first three toccatas discussed in this chapter strained belief by elongating each moment of an explicit or implicit credo. Armed with the cultural knowledge contemporaries would have brought to these pieces—the psalm tones they recited endlessly at liturgical services, the dramatic processes contained within each mode—we can hear how Gabrieli and Frescobaldi energized and rendered flamboyant but still intelligible familiar musical practices. By contrast, the elevation toccata from the Missa degli Apostoli strains belief by asserting and then withdrawing—nearly to the point of exhaustion—the mechanisms designed to induce cadential credibility. Yet from the failure of the structures of human rationality comes the confirmation of a different logic, presumably eternal and not decipherable by the human mind. The vessel elevated by the priest at the beginning of the ceremony—like the E major triad that opens the Apostoli  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Straining Belief   |   187

toccata—is the same one lowered after the utterance of the magical phrase “Hoc est corpus.” For the congregants at communion, however, the contents have become radically different substances by processes that demand a leap of faith. Frescobaldi’s toccata offers a vehicle through which to imagine and vicariously participate in the transcendental event.  

Beyond Measure The toccata always puts strain on available notational systems. Although Frescobaldi indicates rhythmic values in detail, he advises the performer to play freely, as if improvising. Beginning with Louis Couperin, an alternative solution appeared as the French unmeasured prelude. Some of these acknowledge their origins in the Italianate toccata by riffing on the opening strains of well-known predecessors.14 But whereas the Italians attempted to capture in precise writing something of the mercurial ebb and flow typical of spontaneous performance, the French preferred to provide a mere scaffold of principal and secondary pitches, leaving it to the player to invent durations and plausible relationships. Most modern performers find the unmeasured prelude considerably more daunting than its Italian counterpart: it seems easier to bring a sense of flexibility to an already assembled composition than to put together a string of unarticulated notes. Facing one of these preludes feels very much like confronting an IQ test that asks you to solve a problem with only a limited set of tools. Yet coming to terms with such a piece—which requires all the performer’s harmonic, melodic, contrapuntal, formal, rhythmic, and (above all) rhetorical skills—can be remarkably satisfying. I have chosen the Prelude to the piece in D Dorian/minor by JeanHenry D’Anglebert as my example. Most recordings identify this set of pieces as operating in D minor, and the dances that follow (some of them discussed in chapter 4) do indeed qualify as pieces in tonal minor. The opening movement, however, maintains its allegiance to modal structuring devices, especially when it moves toward the end to G major—the area on the Dorian fourth degree—rather than G minor. Along the way D’Anglebert’s Prélude explores with great intensity the duality of Dorian’s sixth degree, which shifts continually between Bâ and Bà, depending on context and function. In the very first gesture the right hand moves from the stable fifth degree to a Bà, which is emphasized by its greater length (it and its eventual resolution, A, alone  

 

 

 

188   |   Divine Love

are designated with whole notes) and by a biting mordent (ex. 6.6). The rhapsodic melisma that follows mounts quickly through the leading tone to D, then back to A, but now A finds itself safely circumscribed with a Bâ. The ensuing arpeggiation quickly stakes out the lower part of the scale, including the diatessaron below the final. Over the D pedal held in the bass, the first grouping places its emphasis on chord tones, thus sustaining the tonic, and the second piles up discordant harmonies against the pedal until, note by note, they concede to resolution. Think Bach’s D Minor (Dorian?) Toccata. Like other composers in this genre, D’Anglebert offers the performer cues concerning the broad formal outlines of his piece. What appear to be bar lines in fact delineate the ends of vectoral groupings, the goals of each trajectory, the composition’s background progression. The first two relatively brief ones just discussed unfold over a D pedal, and the third pursues a tetrachord descent from D through a heavily marked Bâ to A, establishing the dominant to D. Only after three strong confirmations within the original key does the weight shift to the dominant of A and then to a cadence on A itself. The next two bar lines respectively articulate the arrival in and then the establishment of F. Immediately, however, we move once again to the dominant of D, which forecasts the return to the final or tonic. No real surprises here: the same sequence of cadential points—tonic, dominant, relative major, tonic—has appeared as the structural outline in thousands of pieces in the minor mode ever since. All (all!) the performer has to do is to parse out how much weight to grant each step toward each goal. I like to luxuriate in the sections devoted to the relative major, presenting an island of relief in the midst of what otherwise is the storm-tossed sea of minor-mode collisions, and I also enjoy the in-your-face quality of the Bâ that defies the eventual arrival at D major, the final cadence with a picardy third. My experience as an organist leads me to think of the isolated melismas in the bass as pedal solos, with the emphatic heaviness the feet can bring to such passages in, say, Buxtehude. Plunge in and make it up any way you like. I will concentrate in detail on only one passage: the one that separates the penultimate bar line, which marks the dominant, from its inevitable resolution to D (ex. 6.7). The music preceding this bar line features a strong approach toward V/D in the bass, while the right hand struggles in vain to resist the gravitational pull. When the smoke clears, the right hand has reached E, the second degree, with a Cá in the harmony announcing imminent closure.  

 

Straining Belief   |   189 E x . 6.6. D’Anglebert, Suite in D Minor, Prélude, opening.

E x . 6.7. D’Anglebert, Suite in D Minor, Prélude, penultimate section.

A sleight of the left hand, however, moves down to G and then to Fá for one of those luminous six-three chords that can make one weep. A simple turnaround in the right hand finally settles on Bà, harmonized with G in the bass. When we had no reason to anticipate anything other than the inexorable confirmation of D, D’Anglebert suddenly bestows this moment of bliss. It ought to take the listener completely unawares, especially if the performer allows this configuration to take shape as if by fortuitous accident. If the downward pointing Bâs of the Prélude have been sufficiently articulated, this Bà should sound magical; indeed, it even seems unrelated to the tension-filled Bàs that set up cadences on A in the middle of the composition. As it hovers so vulnerably as mediant over the barely contrived G in the bass, it presents a breath of fresh air, a taste of hope and beneficence, however brief. As it must, the loveliness of this moment gives way to the return to D minor, but the dissonant harmonies, twisted melodic lines, and snarled counterpoint bear witness to the reluctance with which we bid adieu. Indeed, it may be difficult to follow D’Anglebert’s syntax in the remainder of this phrase. The key to tracing his always-impeccable contrapuntal web is the wavy line in the left hand, which indicates that the bass proceeds from E to F (held tight underneath middle voice changes) to G as the last pitch in example 6.7, resolving finally to A as the first pitch of example 6.8.

190   |   Divine Love E x . 6.8. D’Anglebert, Suite in D Minor, Prélude, conclusion.

Although the bass has hoisted itself up by step from E to A, the inner voices resist that eventuality kicking and scratching. After the arrival on A in the bass, the melodic line twists and turns like a fish on a hook, but it can find no escape, neither through Bâ, which always tilts downward, nor in a last grab at Bà, which now serves only as a passing tone on the way to Cá and thence to D. The bitterness of the Bâ that taunts apparent closure on D major calls up the whole dilemma one more time before all the voices subside to rest on a D major chord. The last pitch we hear, a double-struck A in the right hand, reminds us that we have just heard a prelude, an extended upbeat that prepares us for a suite of dances. But nothing in the series of dances will even attempt to match the dynamic volatility of the introductory toccata. Indeed, they belong to a different conceptual and affective world, one grounded in the body and in social reality.

Part IV

Dancing Bodies

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

The Social History of a Groove Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and the Chaconne

Most of the formal processes discussed in the previous chapters have taken their structural principles from modal practice: in some the bare diapente descent provides background coherence for extensive expansion; in others—including the multisection composites discussed in chapter 2, as well as expressions of divine love (chapter 5) and the toccata (chapter 6)—the complex compositional formal characteristic of madrigals continue to operate, despite the expansionist techniques that frequently dilate moments on the surface. As I have indicated, important aspects of tonality emerge from both. But another practice also contributes significantly to the development of harmonic tonality: the procedures involved in producing music for social dance. Far more prevalent than extant written scores would indicate, dance music is as ubiquitous as humankind itself. Neanderthals danced at least as early as they sang, and both literary and visual sources bear constant witness to this activity.1 For most of that history, the musicians providing the sound did not have scores propped up in front of them; they played tunes and rhythms handed down and developed through oral tradition. Literate composers and music theorists often sneer at the sounds produced by mere pipers and fiddlers, yet no civilization can manage without its dance bands.2 In contrast with the erratic and flamboyant surfaces of the procedures examined in some of the earlier chapters, a dance has to main 

 

193

194   |   Dancing Bodies

tain a dependable groove in its rate of harmonic change: a dance tune that fails to facilitate and simulate actual dance steps is ordinarily judged worthless. But aestheticians who concentrate exclusively upon music have frequently marginalized and even disparaged dance. Roman Ingarden, for instance, writes, “We may doubt whether so-called dance music, when employed only as a means of keeping the dancers in step and arousing in them a specific passion for expression through movement, is music in the strict sense of the word.”3 The eccentric maneuvers of the music designed to simulate mystical experience or willful extravagance share with later aesthetics at least a sense of the resistant artist who defies norms in search of transcendence. By contrast, dance—the focus of this and two of the chapters that follow—can appear to us as simply banal: too grounded in the exigencies of physical movement, too much inclined to the mechanical grinding out of identical units and therefore devoid of musical or cultural interest. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, repetitive procedures in music acquired a singularly bad reputation. Frankfurt School critic Theodor W. Adorno—who based his aesthetic principles concerning the resistance to reiteration in the music of Beethoven and Schoenberg—fulminated against the moral dangers of such procedures, especially as they lured unwary listeners away into apparently mindless dances such as the jitterbug, into Stravinsky’s primitivism, or into the herd mentality encouraged by bourgeois affirmative culture and later exploited by the rise of European fascism.4 The ethical imperative of Schoenberg’s serialism grounded itself in part in this horror of repetition and of the kinds of subjectivities it breeds; decades after everyone had forgotten the original rationale behind prohibitions of musical redundancy, the commandment “Thou shalt not repeat patterns in thy compositions” still held sway over university-trained musicians. Of course, any rule that strident and seemingly arbitrary only invites reaction, and the minimalist musics of the last thirty years have reveled in repetition, in deliberate violation of high modernism’s most cherished taboo.5 The musicians who have participated in this return to repetition paid for their sins by getting excluded for decades from official histories of Western music, which still tend to trace an upward trajectory away from ritualistic reiterations and toward increasingly autonomous, nonredundant formal processes. As a result, most textbooks make it as far as Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt, then lose their narrative thread. Surely Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and John Adams (to say nothing  

 

 

 

The Social History of a Groove   |   195

of James Brown, Parliament, or Missy Elliott) cannot comprise the next step along this carefully plotted path! There must be some mistake. This book concerns not the crises of contemporary culture, but rather the music of a much earlier era, the seventeenth century. Yet I have begun this chapter with a discussion of more recent aesthetic principles because that allergy to repetition has also colored the analytical methods and standards of judgment developed in musicology in the wake of Beethoven. To the extent that Beethoven teaches us implicitly in his music to abhor repetition, he instills in us a principle we apply willy-nilly to all musics. In this chapter I want to examine a single pattern, which was highly redundant within itself and which spawned hundreds of reiterations over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It qualifies, in other words, as a mise en abyme of the concept of “repetition.” Yet if this procedure inspired copycat imitations everywhere it went, each new site imbued it with very particularized sets of meanings, often very different from and even antagonistic to those developed within other institutional contexts, depending upon the ideological priorities of each place and time. It thus affords us a glimpse into several very distinct cultural worlds, united in their interest in inhabiting this simple pattern, even if diametrically opposed in their strategic deployments of it.

The Chacona: Origins and Disseminations Our story begins somewhere in the New World, where sixteenth-century conquistadors encountered a kind of music they liked well enough to include it (or some version of it) in the booty they brought back to Spain. Musicologist Richard Hudson has speculated as to the chacona’s origins: possibly Mexico, a site sometimes mentioned in early sources; perhaps South America, where Andean musicians still play rhythmic and harmonic patterns uncannily like those of the chacona; perhaps even African settlements, for the slave trade had already flourished for some decades by the time the chacona made it back across the Atlantic, and the cross-rhythms characteristic of the chacona also mark many of the impulses of African-Latin musics.6 Like so much of the music born of the cultural collisions brought about by colonization and diaspora, the chacona bears tantalizing but frustrating witness to a distant past recorded (if at all) with gaps, misunderstandings, and distortions. For whatever the chacona sounded like in its original contexts, its transport-

196   |   Dancing Bodies

ers inevitably translated what they heard into patterns congruent with their European conceptual schemata. Nonetheless, the transfer of something from the New World back to the Old took place, and many Spanish sources—including mentions by Cervantes and Lope de Vega—testify to the chacona’s rapid spread in its new environment.7 The chacona sparked a dance craze that inspired a familiar set of reactions: on the one hand, it was celebrated for liberating bodies that had been stifled by the constraints of European civilization; on the other, it was condemned as obscene, as a threat to Christian mores. But all sources concurred that its rhythms—once experienced— were irresistible: its practitioners had only to shout “Vida bona!” (The good life!) to signal the beginning of the music that would pull everyone within earshot into its compelling groove. For example, the lyrics for one extended chacona describe a funeral at which the officiating priest mutters by mistake “vida bona,” the signal for the dance to begin. The clergy, the nuns, the family of the deceased, and even the corpse itself respond by wiggling and leaping with uninhibited glee. When they go to the bishop afterward to beg forgiveness, he asks (strictly as a point of legal information) to hear one refrain and spends the next hour gyrating with his skirts raised; his congregation shakes the house for another six. At the conclusion of this carnivalesque fantasy, the bishop forgives his flock.8 In a sequence of events still paralleled today whenever a type of dance bubbles up from the wrong social group, a backlash against the chacona soon ensued. The chacona—like rhythm and blues at a later historical moment—crossed over cautiously guarded class and racial boundaries. Whatever the chacona signified in its original contexts, in Europe it quickly came to be associated (by friends and foes alike) with forbidden bodily pleasures and potential social havoc. Like syphilis, which also followed the conquistadors back home, the chacona qualified as a venereal contagion, and the association of both with sensual pleasure ensured their unchecked spread throughout Europe. Attempts at insulating upper-class ladies from the dance’s influence appeared, and the church banned the chacona in 1615 on grounds of its “irredeemably infectious lasciviousness.” But the horse had already left the barn, thanks in large part to new technologies of music printing, which made the dissemination of the chacona quick, cheap, and unstoppable. For the introduction of the chacona coincided with a market for self-help manuals—in this case, books that promised to teach you how to play the guitar in the comfort  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Social History of a Groove   |   197

of your own home. Aimed exclusively at amateurs, these publications offered only the bare essentials about tuning and frets, along with a few easily executed patterns. The older virtuosic mode of performance, which required complex plucked finger work (punteado), was replaced by rasgueado, the technique of strumming simple chords. The chacona fit perfectly into this new demand for music playable by three-chord wonders, who employed their quickly acquired rasgueado for rhythmic vitality and could happily play the chacona—like the blues—all night long. Very much like the folk, art-school, or garage musicians of a later era who sometimes learned how to play their requisite three chords the same day as their public premieres in bands, early modern amateurs used these manuals to take musicking into their own hands, to provide the sound track for la vida bona.9 Such self-help publications comprise our principal source of written documentation for the musical details of the early chacona. A few slightly different patterns appeared in print under this name; they all share, however, a very restricted number of chord changes (conforming to the most basic of contemporaneous cadential formulas), a strong rhythmic accent on the offbeats, and the instruction that one simply play the minute pattern (four to eight seconds in duration) over and over again (ex. 7.1a). It was not the harmonic pattern itself that aroused consternation, but rather the offbeat accent, which seemed to provoke the explicitly sexualized motions in the bodies of dancers.10 Moreover, the constant repetition of the pattern became addictive, putting its listeners into the ecstatic trance state sought after by many rituals, from those of whirling dervishes to Cuban Santeria to raves.11 The fact of the chacona’s “barbaric” pedigree simultaneously enhanced its appeal for its devotees and helped to provoke the hysterical denunciations of its opponents. If the chacona had stayed within the realm of amateur guitar manuals and community music making, musicologists probably would pay no more attention to it than to dozens of other practices that similarly left only the barest of outlines for purposes of improvisation. Imagine having to reconstitute the richness of the blues tradition or trying to make sense of all the verbal testimonies to its power if instead of recordings we had only the twelve-bar schema that underwrites it! Fortunately for our story, the chacona soon started to trickle upward from its humble origins to infiltrate the highest levels of cultural production, to enter contexts within which court composers wrote out and thus preserved their inventions in lavish detail for posterity. Some memory of the  

 

a. SPANISH CHACONAS a. SPANISH CHACONAS

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? 43 198   Ï|   Dancing Ï ÏBodies Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? 43 a.Ï SPANISH CHACONAS

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï a Spanish Ïchaconas. a..? SPANISH CHACONAS Ï Ï Ï Ï 3 ? Ï Ï 4Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï ? ? 3 Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ 4 ? Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? ÏÏ ?ÏÏ ÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï ? Ï ? Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï E x . 7.1. Ostinato patterns.

Ï Ï ÏÏ

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

Ï Ï ÏÏ

Ï Ï ÏÏ

Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï

Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï

Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b. ITALIAN CIACCONA Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? CIACCONA b. ITALIAN ú w Ï úÏ w Ï w ? 32 w ú w ú w ? 32 w úú úú w ITALIAN CIACCONA b.b.Italian ciaccona.

? 32 w ú c. PASSACAGLIAS ? 32 w c.c.PASSACAGLIAS w wú ?Passacaglias. w ?w

ú

b. ITALIAN CIACCONA

w

ú w w w

c. PASSACAGLIAS Tetrachord descent

ú w ú w

w w

ú w ú w

w ?w w w w # w n w ? w ? w w ww w ww w ? # w n w Tetrachord w w descent w w ww C h rom at ic pa ssac agl ia. Chromatic passacaglia Tetrachord descent Chromatic passacaglia w ? #w nw w w w w w chacona’s titillating past new environment, but its n w came ? w # weffects witswith w itwto each w wvery different things as mythology and theChromatic of passacaglia repetition meant T e t r ac horTetrachord d de sc e n t.descent

c. PASSACAGLIAS

it jumped from host to host. Chromatic passacaglia

The Italian Ciaccona The chacona first traveled from Spain to Italy along with fashionable guitarists and the international marketing of improvisatory manuals. In its new home, the ciaccona (as Italians called it) soon became the musical background for dancing and a common item in instrumental

The Social History of a Groove   |   199

variations. The renowned organist at Saint Peter’s in Rome, Girolamo Frescobaldi, included ciaccona sections within his keyboard partitas, for instance, and references—labeled as such or not—show up frequently in Italian vocal and instrumental musics of the early 1600s (see ex. 7.1b). By far the most famous of Italian ciaccona settings is Claudio Monteverdi’s accompanied duet for two tenors, “Zefiro torna,” published in the collection Scherzi musicali in 1632 (ex. 7.2). The poetic text hails the return of spring and spins out verse after verse enumerating the season’s delights. For most of the duet the ciaccona proliferates its dance pattern with reckless abandon, each temporary conclusion breeding only the desire for yet another repetition. Toward the end of the text, however, the anguish and alienation of the poet’s inner self suddenly erupt into the text, setting up a stark Petrarchan contrast with the splendor of the natural world. As the lines concerning the poet’s emotional condition appear, the music swerves into a concentrated passage featuring some of the most chromatic, dissonant writing available to the Mannerist avant-garde. The duet ends by pivoting between the overwrought agony that guarantees the “authenticity” of the subject’s interiority and the carefree, seductive ciaccona rhythms of “nature,” of the body. Note that this “body” is no longer the body of color or of the lower classes from which the ciaccona was taken; it now stands for the “universal” (i.e., European) body—albeit a body yoked explicitly in binary opposition with the tortured, deeply feeling soul. It thus articulates a mind/body split, whereby the unbridled pleasures of the flesh compete with the white man’s burden, the alienation nurtured by thought and zealous self-fashioning.12 Monteverdi allows the listener to have it both ways, as he indulges us in course after course of the ciaccona’s contagious impulse, though periodically dunking us into the chilly waters of tormented interiority. Nor did the ciaccona remain strictly within the realm of secular composition in Italy. In his capacity as maestro di cappella at San Marco (a church frequently resistant to Roman authority), Monteverdi happily brought to his sacred music his entire toolkit of devices, which included the ciaccona. For instance, in a solo setting of Psalm 150 (the psalm that recites the inventory of King David’s instrument collection), the ciaccona suddenly enters with the verse “Praise God upon the loud cymbals, praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.” The mere mention of “primitive” percussion instruments derails the music from its rather more gracious deportment, and, as though someone had shouted  

 

 

200   |   Dancing Bodies E x . 7.2. Monteverdi, “Zefiro torna,” mm. 1–18.  

V 31

∑

∑

∑

∑

3 V1

∑

∑

∑

∑

î ú . Ï ú ú .Ï w ∑

∑

Ze-fi-ro, ze-fi - ro,

#

î ú . Ï ú ú .Ï

∑

Ze-fi-ro tor -

?3 1 w. ú w ú w ú w ú w ú w ú w ú w ú w ú w ú w ú w 7

ú .Ï ú ú .Ï w ∑ V î

ú. Ï ú ú .# Ï ú î ∑

∑ î w ú ú . Ï w ∑

∑

∑

ú. î # Ï ú w w ∑ ∑

îw ú w

ú w úw ú w w ú úw ú w

úw ú w úwúw

úw ú w

ze-fi-ro, ze-fi - ro,

V w ∑ ?

∑ î

na

∑

ze-fi-ro, ze - fi - ro,

î ú . Ï ú w w ∑ ze -fi-ro tor - na

ze - fi-ro tor - na

. V îw ú ú Ï ú ú W

W.

V w ∑ ∑

î ú W

W.

?

ú w úw ú w ú w úw wú

13

tor-na ze - fi - ro, ze

na,

úwú w

ze

-

-

tor-na ze- fi - ro,

wú ú w

tor - na, tor -

ú ú ú ú ú ú úúú ú #ú ú

fi- ro tor - na, e di

so - a - vi ac-cen-ti

w ú ú ú . # Ï w ∑ ∑ fi- ro tor - na,

ú w úw

∑

úw ú w

“vida bona,” the ciaccona immerses us in the party rhythms of the New World. Whereas each of the previous verses of the psalm had received a brief setting, the cymbals and their attendant ciaccona run on for nearly a quarter the length of the whole piece. Only the need to proceed to the final verse, “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord,” brings a

The Social History of a Groove   |   201

reluctant halt to the festivities. Even here, the high spirits of the ciaccona seem to have compromised the decorum established earlier in the psalm setting, requiring that the voice go out in a blaze of glory—in a delirium of coloratura ornamentation.13 Although the ciaccona enjoyed a period of considerable popularity in early seventeenth-century Italy, it nearly always functioned as though within quotation marks, as in the two Monteverdi examples just discussed. To be sure, Italian courtiers included dance among their entertainments, and dance-oriented rhythms appear in both vocal and instrumental genres of the time. But elite Italian composition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused most often on the arousal of the passions, on representations of interiority—especially interiority under duress. The Renaissance madrigal developed an extensive arsenal of devices for simulating conflicted inner states, and opera, which emerged around 1600, likewise pursued this highly subjective agenda.14 Dance occupied a decidedly backseat position with respect to cultural prestige. Thus even when the ciaccona intrudes into pieces such as the ones mentioned above, it is marked as pleasurable yet somehow as a distraction; variously aligned with nature, with the dancing body, or with percussion, it resides on a lower level within the aesthetic hierarchy than those components that would lend insight into interiority. The tenors in “Zefiro torna” sing exuberantly about how nice it would be to feel at one with the unproblematic springtime landscape, but the entire ciaccona section—regardless of its length and energy—converts to a subjunctive “as if” as soon as the “reality” of tortured emotions pushes to the surface.15 Psalm 150 includes no anguished imagery to juxtapose to the ciaccona, but Monteverdi still situates his reference to New World rhythms in the position of the primitive. In short, the ciaccona constitutes a guilty pleasure within the Italian cultural lexicon. This is not to suggest that the Italians hesitated to indulge in such delights, for (as we have seen) hedonism ranked high among their values. But we would be missing something important if we failed to notice how Italian composers framed the ciaccona as cheap thrill. Nonetheless, the ostinato patterns under consideration in this chapter also contributed to the seventeenth-century concern with the shaping of temporality. The options we have examined in previous chapters sought to warp the experience of time or to infuse dynamic energies into complex procedures. By contrast, an ostinato allowed for the indefinite  

 

 

 

202   |   Dancing Bodies

prolongation of a key area through the repetition of a single cadential formula. I pointed out in chapter 1 how Monteverdi and Cesti had to struggle to sustain a key, given the tendency of tonal patterns to secure immediate closure and the imperative to move on to the next step in the background. Ostinatos—whether derived from the chacona or the circling tetrachord descent—provided a laboratory or playground free from the formal exigencies of madrigal-based structures. Whatever their particular expressive goals, these procedures made it possible for musicians and listeners to inhabit and become accustomed to vast stretches of static time. As we shall see in the postlude to this book, compositional devices developed in the latter part of the century relied on patterns of this sort to prolong each successive key area within movements based on the ever-expanding diapente descent. In other words, these guilty pleasures left an indelible impression on the history of musical process.  

 

The French Chaconne Sometime around 1650 Cardinal Mazarin brought the Italian virtuoso Francesco Corbetta to the French court to teach Spanish guitar to Louis XIV himself. No three-chord wonder, Corbetta had brought to this lowly instrument the kinds of punteado techniques associated with the higher-class lute, making him the first in a line of guitar gods (as my generation called Eric Clapton and his heavy-metal descendants). Corbetta published some of his compositions based on the ciaccona, and we can follow in his scores some of the strategies a skilled performer of the time could bring to this dance: they begin with the simple rasgueado strumming featured in instruction manuals, then build with ever more difficult figuration finally to encompass the whole range of devices available to fretted instruments. In Corbetta’s hands the ciaccona became a pretext for intellectual exploration. If he retains something of the old second-beat accent, Corbetta’s successive variations pull the ear further and further away from the mere physical impulse and exact repetition the ciaccona had offered in previous incarnations. As the changes unfold the infectious dance rhythms are sacrificed to ornamental filigree and to contrapuntal display, slowing the tempo and making the ciaccona an increasingly abstract Platonic form. When French harpsichordists such as Jean-Henry D’Anglebert started writing chaconnes for solo keyboard, they established an essentially

The Social History of a Groove   |   203

new genre. First, they revised the repetitious quality of the old ciaccona. Instead of proceeding through consecutive iterations of the basic unit, the keyboard chaconne fused with the rondeau format. Although the rondeau refrain still clings to the harmonic patterning of the ciaccona (again a very simple cadential formula; ex. 7.3a), it alternates with episodes that introduce other keys and that explore other musical options. Without question the refrain serves as the focal point of the resulting composition: the listener waits through the imaginative episodes with the sure expectation that the refrain will return intact. But the structural priorities of the keyboard chaconne differ from those of the much simpler ciaccona. More important, the French brought the chaconne back into the realm of actual dance. In contrast to the Italians, who preferred the passionate medium of vocal music, the French shaped their court rituals around dance, which served both to provide recreational distraction and to inscribe courtiers physically into the Neoplatonic ideology prescribed by the Sun King (discussed at length in chapters 8–10). Far from referring to the unbridled exuberance of the primitive body, the French chaconne delineates the most stately of rhythmic impulses—parallel, in fact, with the upwardly mobile ascent of the sarabande, a dance likewise reputed to have originated in orgiastic rituals of the New World but gradually refined at court to represent the height of elegance (even as it managed to hold onto a hint of its previous naughtiness). Both the chaconne and the sarabande maintain an accent on the second beat; but in their much slower tempos, they no longer inspire (nor would they condone) the ill-behaved gestures of the body that had so scandalized the chacona’s early foes. In its new French manifestation the chaconne climbed even farther up the ladder of cultural prestige, until it reached the summit. Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV’s dance and music czar, often positioned a chaconne as the concluding element in his ballets and operas.16 At this point following the plot’s denouement, spectators joined the professional performers in dancing around the body of the king, thereby simulating the orbit of planets around the sun. The repetitious—and thus timeless—quality of the chaconne provided the musical stimulus for this ritual in which the court participated in affirming immutable verities of power and pleasure. For instance, at the end of Lully’s tragédie lyrique Amadis (1684), the legendary hero Amadis of Gaul (intended as a thinly disguised allegorical stand-in for Louis himself) triumphs, leading to a chaconne finale in which nature and humanity join in celebration. The chaconne lasts for  

 

 

 

E x . 7.3. French chaconnes.

D'Anglebert Chaconne a . D’Anglebert, Chaconne. D'Anglebert Chaconne

#### 343 & & 4

úÏúÏ..ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ? # 3 ? # ## 434

ÏúúÏ úúÎ Î

úúúú Ï Ï Ï úúÏ

ÏÏÏÏ ÏúÏú ÏÏ úÏúÏ úú ÏÏ

jj ÏÏ..ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ úú ÏÏ ú ÎÎú

Lully, Chaconne from Amadis b. Lully, Chaconne from Amadis. Lully, Chaconne from Amadis

ÏÏ.. & & & ÏÏ.. & Ï.. Ï B B B ÏÏ.. B ú ?ú ?

& &

ÏÏ

ÏÏJ J ÏÏJ J ÏÏJ J ÏÏJ J

ÏÏ..

& ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ.. & Ï.. Ï Ï B Ï B B ú B ú ? . ? úú.

ÏÏ ÏÏ..

ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï úú ÏÏ

ÏJÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï J

ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ úú.. ÏJÏ ÏÏ J ÏJÏ ÏÏ JÏ Ï Ï Ï JJ úú ÏÏ úú

úÏúÏ..ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏ

jj ÏÏú.. ÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏÏÏú ÏÏ ú ú Ï ú ÏÏÎ ÏúÏú ÏÏ úÏÏ úú ÏÏ Î

Ï ÏÏJ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ.. J ÏÏ úú ÏÏ ÏÏ.. ÏÏ ÏÏ.. ÏJÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ.. J ÏÏ ÏÏ.. Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ.. ÏÏ úú.. úú ÏÏ..

úú úú

ÏÏ ÏÏ

ÏÏ

ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ..

ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ úú..

ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ

ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ

úúúú.... úú.. úú..

ÏÏ

ÏÏ.. ÏÏ.. ÏÏ

úú

ÏÏ

ÏJÏ J j ÏÏj ÏÏ JJ

ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ

ÏÏJ J jj ÏÏ ÏÏJ J j ÏÏj

The Social History of a Groove   |   205

quite a long time—long enough, certainly, to induce that state of bliss that comes of “keeping together in time”17 and through a process identical to that practiced by religions that seek the erasure of self-awareness through musical drones and recitation of mantras (ex. 7.3b). The ideological shift in the meanings of the ciaccona/chaconne that occurred at Versailles relates to fundamental differences in cultural priorities. Spanish, Italian, and French observers recognized the extraordinary effect of this dance type, but as we have seen, in Italy its mesmerizing quality encouraged motions of the body defined as illicit or somehow dissonant with the proper focus on individualistic feelings and reason. In France, where dance served as one of the principal tools for instilling a sense of harmonious community, the chaconne represented a means of eliciting the highest degree of pleasure and, simultaneously, the greatest sense of Neoplatonic order and group identification. Not surprisingly, the French authorities viewed the Italian obsession with interiority with suspicion, and Lully’s operas often punish characters who indulge in ill-behaved Italianate displays (see chapter 10). The ability of the chaconne to minimize consciousness of individual boundaries and to produce in dancers a sense of unity with the cosmos made it an invaluable resource. Recent neurobiologists have found that radical changes in brain function occur in people involved in such rituals, especially those involving music and dance. The parts of the brain responsible for orienting us as individuated selves as we move through space actually shut down their activity, causing subjects to experience as reality that merger with timelessness.18 Mystics often interpret this phenomenon as evidence of divine union, but long before scientific evidence confirmed this set of connections, Louis XIV deployed the chaconne pragmatically to turn “the God trick”: to seduce his courtiers into that neurological condition in which they dissolved into a state of jouissance—not coincidentally with the king himself as center. The chaconne, however, had a doppelgänger—one that sometimes alternated unproblematically with the chaconne itself but that could also carry rather different affective charges. In the Amadis finale, for instance, the major-key chaconne (the same tetrachord descent that undergirds the final duet from L’Incoronazione di Poppea, discussed in chapter 3) gives way to a minor-mode version of the same cadential figure. Nothing ruffles the serenity of the apotheosis; the shift into the minor only produces a welcome contrast for a short while before the major reappears. But the minor-key version of the chaconne, most often  

 

 

206   |   Dancing Bodies

known as the passacaglia, had a somewhat different chain of cultural referents. Even if both procedures appeared in early guitar manuals as pretexts for improvisation, the passacaglia more frequently fused with the signs not of “la vida bona” but rather of lament (see ex. 7.1c).19 The most famous ostinato of this sort is Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa, in which a solo female singer bewails her entrapment and abandonment, all over an unchanging tetrachord descent in the bass. The association of the figure with ritualized mourning became so strong that it could signal grief all by itself in instrumental as well as vocal pieces. Purcell’s celebrated farewell aria for Dido, “When I am laid in earth,” draws brilliantly upon the sedimented history of this formula, elaborated chromatically, and Marin Marais’ Tombeau pour Mr de Saint-Colombe for viol starts off with an allusion to the descendingtetrachord lament as a means of establishing the elegiac tone of his funeral commemoration.20 Musicologists used to love to write articles attempting to draw a decisive line between “chaconne” and “passacaglia”: graduate exams back in the early 1970s typically demanded that students produce a rule of thumb for distinguishing the two. The fact is, however, that most seventeenth-century musicians cared much less about generic boundaries than do historians, and they sometimes used the two terms interchangeably. Yet the music of the time often does treat the two in very different ways; if there exists a gray area of overlap in which one can substitute for the other, there are also contexts in which the more carefree version of the ciaccona/chaconne has nothing to do with its melancholy twin, the lamenting passacaglia. And even the gray area of overlap can present difficulties, not only for musicologists who want each term to have its own separate box, but also for anyone concerned with musical meanings. Consider, for instance, the Passacaille in the final act of Lully’s tragédie lyrique Armide (1686). Armide, a Saracen sorceress, has seduced the great crusader Renaud from his task of ‘“liberating” Jerusalem. She holds him captive in bonds of pleasure so powerful that he lies helpless in her lair. At the beginning of this last act, Armide finds she must leave Renaud for a short while, and she entrusts him to a gaggle of demons, who maintain his paralytic condition by performing a passacaille, a fournote tetrachord descent in minor. To the same gentle dance rhythms as those of the Amadis chaconne, they serenade him for over thirteen minutes with soft strings and woodwinds, with occasional choral entries in praise of “plaisir” and “amour.” The spell shatters only when Renaud’s

The Social History of a Groove   |   207

companions in arms awaken him from his stupor and persuade him to go back to battle with them. (Armide returns, finds that Renaud is gone, delivers a brief tirade, and thus ends the opera; the Passacaille qualifies as the showstopper for the act. See chapter 10 for a fuller discussion of this opera and of its conclusion in particular.) To some extent this passacaille functions identically to the chaconne from Amadis: both serve to induce that state that eradicates the boundary between inside and outside, that pulls theatrical characters and spectators alike into that timeless zone of infinite pleasure. Yet the minor key of the passacaille, its rather more yearning melodic shapes, and its dramatic context make it available for a somewhat different reading, one that resonates with entrapment by a surfeit of sensual pleasure, one that may even connect back to the non-European origins of such musical procedures. Renaud’s French raison is held hostage by this repetitious soundscape, requiring that his comrades forcibly rescue him from the blandishments of his Saracen captor, who knows that her music suffices to keep him blissfully enslaved. This passacaille, I would argue, brings us much closer to warnings against repetitious music implicit in “Zefiro torna” and ecclesiastical bans. Too much depends upon who controls such a powerful resource—the king or diabolical forces of oriental witches—to make the Armide Passacaille an unambiguously innocuous procedure, even in the heavily regulated French court.  

 

J. S. Bach and the Chaconne By far the most famous chaconne in the standard repertory is the final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita no. 2 in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin. It still stands at the pinnacle of violin virtuosity: to say “chaconne” to a developing violinist is tantamount to saying “Everest” to an aspiring mountain climber. Many of us have encountered the chaconne and other baroque genres (French dances, chorale elaborations, Italian concertos, fugal techniques) solely through Bach’s compositions, and we treat Bach a kind of ground zero of music history, the earliest canonic source we think we need. As a result, we miss much of the cultural work Bach achieved in his music. If we thereby honor him as self-contained and beyond history or criticism, we may also fail to engage with his compositions as socially meaningful texts.21 I have argued elsewhere that Bach worked throughout his career to translate everything he had inherited—the dances of the Absolutist court, the relatively static fugues of earlier north German organists, even the  

208   |   Dancing Bodies

Lutheran chorale—into the dynamic, narrative-oriented style elevated to the status of an international lingua franca by Antonio Vivaldi.22 A veritable sponge, Bach acquired and processed all new ideas as soon as they became available, whether through the purchase of publications or trips to sites of musical innovation. He remained, however, in what were then regarded as the backwaters of European culture, always resentful of his lack of worldly recognition yet enabled by that very isolation to conduct musical experiments and to produce any hybrid he could imagine. Bach’s ways of rereading French dance types have gone unnoticed, in large part because we have taken his “French” dances (including the Chaconne) as the standard and have judged those by, say, D’Anglebert as insipid. But if we take D’Anglebert’s compositional aesthetic seriously (see chapters 8 and 9), then we can also begin to see how Bach more or less assaulted the foundations of French cultural values. Given a choice between the timeless physicality of Versailles and the dramatic impulse of the concerto, Bach opted every time for the latter. In his simulations, the elegant hovering of a courante became intolerable stagnation, to be converted forcibly into the progressive, modulatory dynamism of Vivaldi. The tension between the French and Italian models involves far more than mere taste or personal preference; to Bach, faced with mutually exclusive structures of temporality and subjectivity, the differences warranted a lifetime of creative struggle. If he bequeathed to us a predisposition toward the Italianate mode of being (adopted by his German/Austrian successors tout court as “the way music is supposed to go”), he also managed to hide his tracks to the extent that few even realize the stakes of his fundamental choices. The French chaconne, with all its Absolutist trappings and extreme suspension of time, posed a particular challenge to Bach, and in his composition for solo violin we have something of a microcosm of his modus operandi—his obsession with saturating his pieces with farflung, often contradictory references, which must then work their way toward some kind of formal and semiotic détente. We cannot doubt that Bach knew the codes discussed above. The tetrachord descent with its roots in Monteverdi and Purcell underwrites the Crucifixus in the B Minor Mass. Moreover, he seems to have had access to Lully’s frequently anthologized Armide passacaille, which he casts in his own reworking as unambiguously sinister. In the astonishing opening movement of his Cantata 78, Jesu, der du meine Seele, he appropriates Lully’s passacaille as a simulation of entrapment in sin.  

 

The Social History of a Groove   |   209

The repetitious pattern relents only once: on the line of text expressing the hope that Christ will pull us forcibly from the jaws of the devil. But this statement remains provisional, and the movement ends back in the passacaille with the plea that God will stand by us. The lyrics to Armide’s plaisir-drenched lullaby have no place in this musical landscape that resembles those circles in Dante in which sinners—stuck in slime up to their ears—cry out with remorse. Subsequent movements of the cantata, based on the acknowledgment of guilt and the confession of faith, pull us gradually out of the mire and into the teleological temporality that Bach uses to simulate a trajectory toward redemption. The movement for unaccompanied violin, of course, has no lyrics to render specific its meanings. In modern editions it usually sports the title “Chaconne,” though Bach’s manuscript labels it “Ciaccona.” (The same “correcting” of Bach’s labels also occurs when pieces he properly called “Corrente” get published as “Courante,” as though all dances must come from France, as though differences between the types must be negligible.) Moreover, as the piece begins, it quite clearly aligns itself more closely with the minor-mode, lament-oriented passacaglia. I will follow convention and call it “Chaconne,” for any single title assigned to Bach’s hybrid composition proves inadequate. Indeed, the history of the alternate titles and the first four measures of the movement, which announce the passacaglia, suffice to set the conflicted terms for this remarkable movement—the condensation and ultimate transformation of all the traditions we have been tracing, and deservedly the most renowned instance of the genre.23 We first hear something genuinely resembling a dignified French chaconne about two-thirds of the way through the movement when Bach suddenly alters the minor mode to its parallel major (ex. 7.4a). In other words, he presents formally a reverse image of the Amadis Chaconne, which begins and ends in major but includes a minor-key episode in the middle. Here, in this extended passage at least, Bach gives us a taste of timeless bliss, of repetition welcomed and celebrated. The rich harmonies and apparently effortless arpeggios of this extended passage immerse us in a haven of warmth and freedom of physical motion—so long as we remain content with endless refrains in D major. But this island of D major reminiscent of Amadis serves only as a delusion, a refuge of false consciousness, as Bach’s larger compositional strategy indicates. For he frames this placid section within a movement that works desperately to extricate itself from the repetitive coils of the chaconne (or passacaglia). And the fact that the lone violinist must both  

 

 

 

210   |   Dancing Bodies . 7.4. Bach, Partita no. 2 in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin, Chaconne. 7.4a.E xBach, Chaconne, mm. 132-140 7.4a.a .Bach, Chaconne, mm. 132-140 mm. 132 –40.

#### 343 ÏÏ Ï . Ïjj & & 4 ÏÏ Ïúú . Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏú .. Ï ú #### Ï & & ÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏ .ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï. ÏJ Ï J  

Ï ÏÏ Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏú .. ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏú.. Ï ú Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï . Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ .. Ï ÏÏJ ÏÏ Ïúú J

j ÏÏj ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ .. Ï ÏÏJ J j ÏÏj Ï ÏÏÏ

7.4b. Bach, Chaconne, mm. 118-131 b. mm. 118Chaconne, –31. 7.4b. Bach, mm. 118-131

Ï ÏÏ # Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ nn ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ b ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï & # Ï b Ï ÏÏÏ Ï ú Ï & Ï Ï Ï #Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ bb ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ bb ÏÏ Ï & Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & ÏÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ  

& bb & ÏÏ Ï bb ÏÏ & & ÏÏÏ

nÏ #Ï Ï ÏÏ n Ï # Ï Ï

Ï Ï. ÏÏ ## ÏÏ nn ÏÏ ## ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ bb ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏÏ Ïúúúú. Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ## ú ÏÏ ÏÏ #Ï Ï #Ï nÏ Ï Ï bÏ b Ï ÏÏÏ # ÏÏÏÏ n Ï ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ b Ï b ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ## ÏÏú .. Ï ÏÏ Ï # Ï ú Ï Ï nn ÏÏ nn Ï ÏÏ bb ÏÏ Ï #Ï ú

nÏ #Ï Ï ÏÏ n Ï # Ï Ï

ÏÏ ÏÏ j Ï ÏÏ .. ÏÏj ÏÏ ÏÏÏ # ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï # ÏÏ úúú Ï Ï Ï

ÏÏ ÏÏ

furnish the redundant ostinato and also fight tooth and nail against it locates the antagonism inside a single subject (see example 7.4b). Like Monteverdi’s nymph, the violin fights to escape the obsession that holds it down; it is as though we witness Renaud awakening from his drugged state but finding himself incapable—even with the most heroic exertion—of liberating himself from Armide’s spell. A song by Purcell states, “I attempt from Love’s sickness to fly in vain, since I am myself my own fever and pain.” Bach’s piece presents with far greater affective intensity that same struggle to pull oneself out of one’s own skin, to transcend the material conditions of being, to resist the jouissance afforded by repetitious structures so as to fol 

 

j ÏÏj j ÏÏj

The Social History of a Groove   |   211

low a progressive trajectory of Bildung—a German idealist model of subjectivity just beginning to appear on the cultural map. Yet as in the first movement of Jesu, der du meine Seele, the Chaconne’s formal commitments will not allow us into the promised land. We witness instead Laocoön or Samson wrestling valiantly despite all odds, concluding not with triumph but with unbowed determination not to concede defeat or to accept the terms offered by the ciaccona/chaconne/passacaglia. Bach’s Chaconne begins with a tonic triad—simple harmonically but requiring that the performer sweep the bow across three strings of the violin in order to execute what the mere drop of a hand could accomplish on a keyboard; even in this starting position, a sense of unresolvable tension already arises as this melody instrument has to take upon itself the tasks of the harmonic bass in addition to its own singing voice (ex. 7.5). The tension increases exponentially at the downbeat, as the melodic line leaps up a fifth, producing a harsh dissonance against the bass—now articulated as the lowest of four pitches, demanding the sweep over all four strings. For a few beats the melodic (read: subjective) line of the violin seems to prevail, and the passacaglia bass seems to conform to its dictates. The top line gives the appearance of escaping the downward pull of the ostinato. But the escape turns out to be provisional; the energies expended in launching the top line up through its leap and its subsequent ascent to F deplete its resources, and the line then falls parallel to the generating bass until it even closes up the initial triad: in m. 4, the melody collapses to meet the bass on D. A flurry of activity pushes toward a renewed effort, and this time the top line jumps all the way to a high Bâ, from which vantage point it almost seems to bring about the cadence by itself. But, of course, the cadence only initiates another statement of the ostinato, this time with an inner voice leading while the top line makes itself heard only through intermittent gasps. As the variations unfold, the distinctions between voices sometimes dissolve into running ornamental notes and hair-raising passages of arpeggiation for which the performer must saw raucously through chord progressions, concentrating the attention on the almost unbearable strife between the inevitable bass and the resistant melodic line. When the smoke clears, we find ourselves right back at the beginning, for Bach casts his opening strain also as a refrain—a refrain that both first establishes the stakes of the composition and also reappears periodically to consolidate identity, even as it concedes the inability of the persona, despite its superhuman efforts, to progress beyond the conundrum first posed at the very outset.  

 

 

 

E x . 7.5. Bach, Partita no. 2 in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin, Chaconne, mm. 1–37.

j Ï j j j j Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . . . 3 Ï Ï ÏÏ ú & b 4 Ïúú . Ï ÏÏÏ úú ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ïúú . Ï ÏÏÏ úú Ï ú #ú #ú Ï Ï #Ï J jä j jä j ä 6 Ï Ï . Ïj ÏÏ # ÏÏ .. Ï Ï Ï . Ï ÏÏ .. Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï ÏÏ . Ï ÏÏ . Ï Ï . Ï ÏÏ . ÏÏ .. ÏÏ ÏÏ .. ÏÏ Ï & b ÏÏÏ ú Ï Ï . Ï Ï. Ï. Ï Ï #Ï Ï ÏÏ ú Ï Ï. J ä J ä J ä ä. Ï ä J Jr R j ä jä jä 11 jä jä ä . Ï Ïj Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & b Ï .Ï # ÏÏ . Ï Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï .Ï ÏÏÏ .Ï ÏÏ .Ï Ï .Ï ÏÏÏ . Ï Ï . Ï Ï .# ÏÏ Ï . Ï ú# Ï . Ï Ï J ä # JÏ ä J ä JÏ ä ä . RÏ Ï . Ï ú J ä Î ä. R 16 Ï. Ï . . Ïj. Ï Ï . Ï Ï ä . ÏÏ # ÏÏ . n ÏÏ Ï Ï # ÏÏ n ÏÏ . n Ï b ÏÏ . Ï # Ï Ï . ÏÏ ÏÏ .. n ÏÏ # ÏÏ .. ÏÏ ÏÏ .. # ÏÏ b & Ï ä. R R ä. R J  

Ï . Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï .. ÏÏ # ÏÏ . Ïn ÏÏ . Ï Ï . # ÏÏ Ï .n Ï Ï . Ï # Ï Ï . Ï Ï . Ï Ï . # Ï # Ï . Ï ä R nÏ bÏ &b J ä . # RÏ Ï Ï n Ï ä . Ï ä. R Ï R 24 Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï & b ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï J J J Ï J R 28 Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï & b ÏÏ Ï Ï #Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï ÏÏ R

20

Ï Ï Ï n Ï n Ï # Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï j jÏ Ï n Ï # Ï j Ï Ï n Ï Ï n Ï b & #Ï j Ï #Ï n Ï n Ïj bÏ ÏÏ

31

&b

35

Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï nÏ Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï nÏ #Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï

The Social History of a Groove   |   213

It is after this concession that Bach suddenly drops us into the far more serene realm of D major and the tight, consonant harmonies of the courtly chaconne (see again ex. 7.4a). As the violin’s persona becomes accustomed to this new world of plaisir, it expands virtuosically to nearly equal the technical feats of the opening segment. Alas, this whole D major passage functions in the subjunctive mode. Following the confident final arrival on octave Ds, the piece suddenly awakens to find itself back in the context of the minor. With nothing more than a sleight of hand, the illusory vision collapses like a house of cards: “if this, then . . . ” But no. The concluding D minor segment allows another series of variations, each of which expands both the pyrotechnic scope of the violin and the attempts at pushing beyond the dilemma to some kind of narrative development and closure. Yet at the very end the violin simply reiterates the refrain that opened the composition, and the two antagonistic lines—the top one of which repeatedly defied gravity in its determination to escape the inexorable pull of the bass—fall to a unison, a single pitch. My discussions of Italy and France located the meanings of the ciaccona/chaconne squarely within the cultural centers of courts and churches. Bach’s Chaconne is more difficult to situate institutionally, however. He probably wrote it during his tenure at Cöthen around 1720, but it would not have contributed to social dance, especially given its tormented gestures and extreme discontinuities. Like much of Bach’s music, it served as a showpiece for any virtuoso equal to the task, but even more as the exhaustive, comprehensive pedagogical exploration of a specific compositional technique. In short, he intended this as the chaconne to end all chaconnes. If Bach did not write his piece for a particular institution, however, he himself became the cornerstone of the German canon that still dominates our conceptions of music history. We have inherited from Bach many of the musical values we take as self-evident, values that themselves have defined the institutions of concert music and pedagogy for the last two hundred years. Adorno never refers in his Bach essay to the Chaconne,24 but his philosophy of music might have proceeded from this composition alone. For here we have the dramatic enactment of repetition as narcotic, as that which prevents the Self from developing autonomously. Try as it might, the violin in the Chaconne cannot throw off its chains—the connections back to the stasis of French court life (still alive and flourishing in the Potsdam of Frederick the Great at the  

 

 

214   |   Dancing Bodies

end of Bach’s life), the siren song to regress to the warm certainties of social dance; it cannot make the leap from these ideologically saturated procedures to the dynamic drive of Vivaldi, for even when it annexes Vivaldi’s virtuosic figuration, its will to proceed through progressive modulation is blocked by the generically imposed imperative to repeat. Bach turns the pleasurable dance rhythms evoked by Monteverdi, the simulations of cosmological order choreographed by Lully into nightmares, from which only the ability to self-invent can extricate us. Mozart will similarly pit Bildung against pleasurable regression in his mature works,25 and Beethoven will nearly blow up the tonal ground on which he stands in his anxiety to eschew conventional formula—or else he will, as Bach does in his Chaconne, so overdo repetition that it calls attention to itself as imprisonment.26 We need only Freud to explain in words the drives and contradictions associated with this particular brand of subjectivity, already firmly in place in Bach. Adorno will then build his rise-and-fall narrative of Western art music by moving from Bach to Beethoven to Schoenberg. The Bach Chaconne, then, stands as the final manifestation in the history of the repetitive procedure imported from the New World in the late 1500s. It sums up both the sensual delights and the autocratic tendencies already aligned with various branches of the tradition and points away in the direction of other musical structures and devices, ones that would rule classical music for a few hundred years. But those exalted structures and devices proved no match against the next wave of repetitive procedures that emerged from the New World in the form of blues, jazz, rock, rap, and electronic dance music. This time around, it seems, the descendants of the chacona get to win.  

Chapter 8

Dancing about Power, Architecture about Dancing

Dance figured prominently among social activities in the seventeenth century, as in most other periods in human history. But the cultural meanings attached to dance—even to a particular genre of dance—varied considerably from place to place. Some Protestant denominations banned the practice along with the music associated with it (I was raised within one such sect and only started trying to move my body to music after most of my contemporaries had decided they were too old for such nonsense). During this period Catholic communities tended still to revel in dance; recall, however, that the pope tried to outlaw the chacona. In other words, although all known human societies engage in dance, its ability to shape behaviors makes it a site of ideological contention. The discussion of the chaconne in chapter 7 indicates that dance represented something far more serious than fun and games in the French court. In accordance with the Sun King’s priorities, French musicians maintained dance at the center of virtually all their activities. Even the airs composed for the tragédies lyriques moved, more often than not, according to the rhythmic impulses of dance types.1 Why should dance have been the principal idiom in France at this time? One reason, of course, is that Louis XIV was an accomplished dancer who took personal pleasure in performing in ballets and at balls. Explanations that rely too heavily upon pleasure, however, can invite trivializing assessments. Musicologist Paul Henry Lang, for instance, has written (in language dripping with feminizing tropes), “The music  

 

215

216   |   Dancing Bodies

all these [French seventeenth-century] composers cultivated was in the sign of the dance, so congenial to the French, with its neat little forms, pregnant rhythms, great surface attraction, and in tone and structure so much in harmony with the spirit of the age. This music, though slight and short-breathed, was elegant and so different from any other that the whole of Europe became enamored of it.”2 Pleasure per se should not require defending. Yet our aesthetic principles—grounded in the presumably higher values of desire-driven progress (i.e., the Italianate expansion processes discussed early) and the violence-laden sublime of Romantics and the moderns—have long marginalized the “merely” sensual and the beautiful. In a discussion of the ramifications of applying such standards in judging smooth jazz (a genre identified with artists such as Kenny G, whom critics love to vilify), Robert Walser has written:  

 

Of the critical and empathetic stances an analyst might adopt, the [critical] is always easier. But millions of people make love to Kenny G’s music; it reassures, comforts, promotes tenderness. Empathetically read, Kenny G’s music is also a critique: its particular kind of beauty is meaningful for many people because it protests a world of too little tenderness, not enough nuance, too few caresses. If every critique implies an alternative, every affirmation is also a critique; its power depends upon its ability to address and redress pain and lack.3

Consequently, we might want to reexamine the basis of our criteria if they lead us to disparage some of the few comforts afforded by human existence. But pleasure was only part of the reason for the French court’s obsession with dance. As José Antonio Maravall and Lorenzo Bianconi have argued, much early modern art was designed to function as propaganda to further the agendas of the state or church in consolidating power. Robert Isherwood’s Music in the Service of the King traces the extensive networks of political control that governed artistic production at Versailles, and he shows how Louis XIV employed dance and its music to regulate—indeed, to synchronize—the bodies and behaviors of his courtiers.4 Yet this political control only rarely revealed itself as raw power; rather, it was cloaked in appeals to bon goût, pleasure, or Platonic order. Thus the formal balls at which courtiers danced served as moments where the ideals of court society were realized literally, as participants enacted—as though spontaneously and with supreme grace—a world in which everyone appeared to operate with one accord, following a schema seemingly as inevitable as the harmonia of the Pythagorean spheres.5  

 

 

 

Dancing about Power   |   217

Note that within this ideological system the body—far from representing a subversive element—was aligned with mathematics, for Renaissance Neoplatonists held that the properly disciplined body served as a conduit between celestial order and the soul.6 Drawing on such beliefs, codes of official behavior at Versailles arranged for the body to perform and make visible hegemonic structures of mind and political authority, just as the geometrical grid of trees at Versailles seemed to reveal the law of nature itself. A long tradition of Western transcendentalism contends that the spirit is cruelly confined within the corruptible body, but in Discipline and Punish, Foucault instead argues that beginning in this period it is the body that is imprisoned by the soul. In his words, “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”7 He views the court of Louis XIV as inhabiting a transition between a time when punishment was meted out ritually upon the body to one in which authorities practiced surveillance and self-discipline to colonize interiority so as to control behavior from the inside.8 Nor did the king exempt himself from this regimen of ideological control. His body was glorified as the state made flesh, and Peter Burke and Louis Marin have revealed the extent to which Louis appropriated sacramental imagery and ritual to elevate his corporeal being into the realm of divine mystery.9 Accordingly, every aspect of his physical appearance was sculpted and choreographed in order to maximize the desired effect.10 And in his ideal society courtiers followed suit—in dance, in deportment, in behavior, and (at least theoretically) in thought. If this was true in principle, it was not necessarily the way things actually worked. Recent historians have questioned whether or to what extent such structures were accepted by courtiers. Norbert Elias, for instance, argues that courtiers adopted codified rituals not because they were duped but because the conspicuous consumption demanded by peer pressure made them economically dependent on the king and thus vulnerable to his whims. Moreover, as their power as feudal heirs drained away, they increasingly defined their nobility in opposition to other classes: their affiliations with other aristocrats became largely a matter of performance as they participated collectively in a choreography of the ethos distinguishing “good society.”11 Jonathan Dewald reveals that courtiers often bridled under the “gentle” coercion to which they were subjected: in diaries and other personal narratives, the gap between the ideal and the real seethes with resentments, family conflicts, and illicit desires and behaviors.12 Recall, too, that many French writers openly sided with Italian music, thereby resisting official policy.13  

 

 

218   |   Dancing Bodies

And Georgia Cowart has written extensively on the ways in which the nobility maintained a surprisingly high degree of autonomy, articulated, among other ways, through their identification with libertinism.14 In other words, the consensus celebrated in official courtly art may be but a thin veneer. Like all cultural artifacts, not even the most carefully controlled piece of propaganda can rely on the surefire transmission of its intended results, free from gaps, moments of slippage, and promiscuous chains of signifiers. Dance historian Mark Franko, for instance, argues in his book on the ideology of the French baroque body that even the most geometrical dances still had to include motion (the movement of bodies from one pattern to the next) and that this necessary element always threatened to undo the mapping of bodies onto mathematics. And in moments of greater license—especially in the period before Louis XIV came to power—court dances gravitated away from the Pythagorean allegories of the sixteenth-century ballet de cour and into burlesque performances that foregrounded narrative action, verbal play, and the Bakhtinian grotesque body; Louis himself occasionally performed in drag during his youth.15 It was in that same relatively open period that Cardinal Mazarin introduced Venetian opera into France16 and that Louis Couperin was at liberty to develop the unmeasured prelude. When Louis XIV ascended the throne, he didn’t so much put away childish things as he harnessed them to do his bidding. Geometrical dance returned with a vengeance, and courtiers were pressed to submit to its discipline as they performed the ritual of dancing two by two before the king. Now, this was no small requirement, for a typical ballroom choreography lasted two to three minutes, with few repeated patterns, and courtiers had to have about twelve of these elaborate arrangements on call at any given time.17 Saint-Simon recounts how a young nobleman newly arrived at court destroyed his career when he tried to dance without knowing the proper moves: as he turned continually in the wrong direction and pranced out of the designated orbit, he betrayed his status as an outsider and provoked gales of malicious laughter from the assembly. He was driven from court in disgrace, his social and economic future reduced to rubble, because of the privileged place of dance within the intricate web of social knowledge that defined court society.18 Thus whether or not the official imagery succeeded in disciplining not only the body but also the mind, it is crucial for those concerned with the history of such images to observe how they were engineered to accomplish those purposes.  

 

Dancing about Power   |   219 •

•

•

Although examining the place of dance within various social networks tells us a great deal about early modern values, I am not turning my back on musical procedure to concentrate exclusively upon context. As in previous chapters, I will here attend both to the contexts for which the music was designed and also to the ways in which composers exercised their creativity and imagination within the pragmatic demands of those contexts. As we saw in chapter 7, the ostinato-based chacona and its various transformations played several very important roles over the course of the baroque era. Yet it by no means represented the mainstream of dance music in the seventeenth century, most of which descended from much earlier and always-evolving traditions. When sectionalized dances begin to appear in notated sources in the late Middle Ages, they already resembled structurally the allemandes and minuets composed much later by Bach or Mozart: usually comprising two or three repeating sections, they sustain relatively stable harmonic regions, marking their discrete segments off from one another with open and closed endings. Such formal divisions within dances served to indicate to those dancing when they should perform certain gestures—move in the opposite direction, exchange courtesies with partners, and so on. The scholarly contributions on court dances by Meredith Little, Wendy Hilton, Patricia Ranum, and Betty Bang Mather emphasize the necessity of knowing something about the steps and choreographic moves assumed by contemporaries when we play, say, a courante at the keyboard.19 Because dance music had to accommodate the patterns of interaction sedimented by centuries of social practice, it was somewhat less susceptible to the extravagant expansionist projects that so powerfully transformed most other genres early in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, binary form—the conventional framework for dance composition— became one of the most important sites for stylistic innovation over the course of the seventeenth century, not only in France but in every musical culture in Europe. This chapter will trace how composers invested this very simple mechanism with ever-increasing musical complexity, making of it a separate but crucial tributary to what eventually emerged as eighteenth-century tonality and its dominant forms. I will turn to the dances written for the French court later in this chapter. But the centrality of dance to everyday life, whether in villages or in aristocratic courts, demanded that virtually all musicians devote  

 

 

220   |   Dancing Bodies

a considerable amount of their time and energy to producing music for this purpose: in other words, the very same composers who operated at the cutting edge of experimental practices, some of whom we have already visited, also wrote scads of dances, thereby displaying their cosmopolitanism, their ability to operate equally well in all available genres. Yet they also clearly welcomed the challenge of filling the old bottles of binary-form dances with new wine—with the harmonic vocabulary they were developing within the context of other genres.  

•

•

•

Girolamo Frescobaldi—a major figure in my discussions of divine love and keyboard extravaganzas—divided his collections between toccatas, variation sets on romanescas and other diapente-based patterns, and dances. If we compare the formal procedures in different parts of his collections, we can see quite clearly that in his correntes Frescobaldi makes use of harmonic configurations relatively familiar to presentday listeners—not because he had suddenly turned a new leaf and had become tonal overnight but because these configurations were already characteristic of dance music. A good professional, he simply shifted gears in keeping with generic expectations. A glance at the dances in Frescobaldi’s Primo Libro reveals that his opening strains invariably sustain the fifth degree, with the end of the first part punctuated with cadences on the tonic, dominant, or mediant. Our investment in binary structures is deep, for these not only underlie the dances collected into suites by later composers but also—in enormously expanded versions—the sonata-form movements of later string quartets and symphonies. Although Frescobaldi’s short, modest dances belie the glorious future of such procedures (he obviously viewed his toccatas as his principal claim to fame), they offer an excellent place from which to begin an examination of binary form in the seventeenth century. Not too surprisingly, given the ubiquity of these patterns, the strains of these little dances ground their activities in diapente descents. By means of an unlimited number of compositional strategies (e.g., contrapuntal manipulations, varying degrees of circumscription, secondary dominants that flirt with or even tonicize temporarily a range of alternative pitches), each strain presents its own profile. We are not dealing here, in other words, with a preset formula so much as a fairly restricted framework within which the composer’s imagination can work dialectically within shared expectations.20 It is the coincidence of relative free 

 

 

 

 

Dancing about Power   |   221

dom for invention and clear structural conventions that makes binary form the procedure of choice for subsequent generations. For now, let us say that the task of the first strain in a dance is to maintain the modal fifth degree while also making it interesting to the ear. In the opening chapter we saw how pieces usually unfold from that position, with harmonies either continuing to sustain 5, sometimes pointing to the upper auxiliary, 6, or down to 4 as if toward the final, but always eventually arriving back to confirm the tonic for the conclusion. Such will be the case also with dances—not only the very brief examples by Frescobaldi but also the much longer, more complex binary-form pieces of the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century. The pieces examined in the next few pages—like those that appeared in chapter 1 and the settings of psalm tones in chapter 6—will often resemble little Schenker graphs right on their surfaces. Although I do not consider myself an orthodox disciple of Schenker, my arguments suggest that he discerned quite accurately the germinating forces that underlie tonal procedures. He did so, moreover, without the benefit of knowing the historical lineages of the background descents he traced in much latter repertories. My first example opens a set of four short correntes in Frescobaldi’s Primo Libro (ex. 8.1). As is the case also with the second in the set (not shown), Corrente 1 ends its first strain on the tonic, leaving its more adventurous moves for the second half. It wastes no time in establishing the principal key area: the tune presented in mm. 1–2 romps straight down the D Dorian diapente, supported by consistent cadential harmonies. The following two measures, however, open up the field with contrary motion between a swiftly rising melody and a tetrachord descent in the bass. Are we still in D? Are we modulating? Deliberately ambiguous, these measures could go in any number of directions, but with the strongly accented Bâs in mm. 5 and 6 and the wedges they form with attendant Eàs we seem to have switched allegiances to F, which indeed receives a half cadence in m. 7. Yet I would prefer to hear this passage as a rise to the upper auxiliary, a return to 5 (now harmonized with F in the bass), and a weighted arrival to 4 in m. 7; for beginning in m. 8, the harmonies take us right back to D and complete the diapente descent to the final. Except for those two wildcard measures, what we have here is a scarcely expanded—though vigorously energized—romanesca pattern. To be sure, the passing glance through what we would later label as  

 

 

 

 

 

E x . 8.1. Frescobaldi dances (opening strains). a . Corrente 1.

Corrente Corrente11 Corrente 33 Î Î1

&& 44 Î Î ÏÏ & 43 Î Î Ï ? ∑∑ ? 4343 ? 43 ∑ && bbúÏú Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï & b úÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ? ? ÏÏ ? úú ú Ï

b.Corrente Corrente 4.4

Corrente 4 Corrente b .. . Î Î 4ÏÏ

&& b . Î Î & b .. Î Î Ï ? ? b .. . ∑∑ ? b ... ∑ b Ï Ï && bb ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ &b ú Ï úú ? ? b ÏúúÏ ÏÏ Ï ? bb úÏ Ï Ï Ï Balletta Balletta c. Balletta. Balletta .

ÏÏ. . Ï. ÎÎ Î

j ÏÏjjÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏÏ Ï Ï ÏÏÏ Ï

ÏÏ. . ÏÏjj# ÏÏÏ j #Ï ##úúÏú. Ï # ÏÏ ú # úú ÏÏ Ï

Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏÏÏÏ úúú ÏÏÏ úú ÏÏ úúú ÏÏÏÏ bbúúúú ÏÏÏ úú ÏÏ b úúú ú Ï

úúú.. . ÏúÏ. ÏÏ ÏÏ # úú Ï ú.. ú. Ï ú. . ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ##ÏÏÏÏ # ú úú . Ï Ï Ï Ï # ÏÏ Ï #Îúú úúú. . Ï ÏÏ úÏ ÏÏÏ Î ÏÏ úÎ Ï b ÏÏ ú úú úúú ÏÏÏÏ bÏÏ úúú Ï ú ÏÏ Ï Ï ú ú Ï ú bÏ ú Ï j ÏúÏ. . ÏÏjjÏ Ï . Ïjj ú ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ.. ..ÏÏÏÏjjÏÏÏ úúú n ÏÏÏ bbúúúú ÏÏÏ Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ïúú. ÏjÏÏÏ ÏÏ.. ÏÏj##ÏÏ úú ÏÏ ÏÏ .. JÏÏJ ÏÏ úúú n ÏÏ b úú ÏÏ #Ï ÏÏÏ úúúú ÏÏ nnúúúúú ÏÏÏÏ úúúú J ÏÏ Ï îî Ï úú Ï n úúú ÏÏÏ úúú ÏÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ úúúú ÏÏ ú ÏÏ úú Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ÏÏÏ î ú Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï . ##úúúú ÏÏ ÏÏ. JÏJÏÏ úú ÏÏ ##ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏ#Ï#ÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï ú Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï# ÏÏ # úú J Ï j j ÏúÏ. . ÏÏjÏ ú ÏÏÏ ÏÏ. . ÏÏjÏ úúú Ï ú ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï j j # ú ú ú ú ú Ï Ï Ï Ï úÏú. Ï ÏÏÏ úú ÏÏÏ #Ïú. Ï Ï úúú ÏÏ úú ÏÏÏÏ ú Ï ú ú ú ú Ï ú ÏÏ # ú Ï ú ÏÏ ú Ï

ÏÏ##ÏÏÏÏ##ÏÏÏÏÏÏ##ÏÏ. .Ï Ï Ï . ÏjjÏ Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏ. . ÏÏ Î Ï c . && c .. Î Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï # Ï . JÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï . Ïj Ï Ï ÏÏ . JJ #Ï ÏJ Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ & c .. Î Ï úúúú.. . # ÏÏÏú úúú J ÏÏ# ÏÏÏ ú ú ? # . ? cc . .. úúú.... #ÏÏÏÏÏú. . Ï #úúú ÏÏÏ #ÏÏ úÏ ÏúÏ Ï Ï ÏúúÏÏ ? c .. úú .. # ÏÏ úÏ . JJÏ # úú Ï # Ï ÎúÎ Ï úÏ Ï Ï ÏúÏ Ï Ï Ï ú Î Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï J

úú ú úú úúú ú

.. . . .. .. . . ..

úúú ÏÏ ú úú Ï úÏú ÏÏÏ . úÏÏ .JÏJÏbbÏÏÏÏÏ . Ï bÏ J

ú ##úúúúúú # úú úú úúú ú

ÏÏ##ÏÏÏÏ ú . Ï# Ï ÏÏÏúúÏÏ.#.#JÏÏ úú . Ï Ï.# ÏJ ú . úÏú Ï Ï Ï J úú. . Ï úÏÏ ÏÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ úúú. . Ï ú.

.. . . .. .. . . ..

ÎÎ .. .. Î .. ÎÎ Î .. .. ..

Dancing about Power   |   223

the relative major matters, both affectively and formally. As we shall see, other dances even conclude their first halves in that key, though Frescobaldi chooses to withdraw that option in this particular corrente, a choice that likewise matters affectively and formally. The fact that this strain ends on the final does not, however, represent a throwback: it is simply one of several possible ways of maintaining the fifth degree, which is finally what counted at this time. As points of comparison, I would like to discuss the opening strains of two other minor-mode dances by Frescobaldi. One of them, from the fourth corrente in the set, ends its first half on the minor dominant; the other, a balletta (the piece that immediately follows Corrente 4), ends on the mediant. Corrente 4—a hybrid that incorporates wisps of imitative counterpoint—begins as the first did, with a direct diapente descent, this time in G Dorian. But its harmonization is more ambivalent, for in m. 3 an inner voice (split between the hands) presents the fifth degree with an upper auxiliary that is not flatted, as is customary in Dorian configurations. A seventeenth-century keyboardist might have thrown in the Eâ automatically, and although this would produce a tritone with the tune, the Eà, too, produces a linear tritone with the Bâ that precedes it. If we choose to go with the Eà, then it creates an impulse already in the third bar to move somewhere other than its opening position, as does the Bà that greets the melodic arrival on the final. With an abrupt jump cut Frescobaldi responds to this beginning with a restatement of the tune, now up a third and harmonized initially as though in D minor. But this bid for D minor is short-lived, for both melody and harmony conspire to shunt the line down to C, the fourth degree of the G diapente, thence with a leading tone to C with Eâ (the lowered sixth degree thus far lacking), and back to 5 and a solid confirmation of G. Despite the gestures in other possible directions, the modal line has returned in m. 8 to its starting position. Nonetheless, the energies generated by the thwarted attempt at moving to the minor dominant continue to make themselves felt. Starting in m. 8 the bass presents the tune, now operating ambiguously between available readings: is this a diapente descent to C or the harmonization of the sustained G Dorian region? As the top line imitates the bass it removes the Eâ that would have confirmed either of these options, and the Eà of m. 10, harmonized with Cá, reasserts the D minor that seemed to have been defeated earlier. Not only do Cá and Eà prevail for the remainder of the strain, but the top line leaps up to present the tune as  

 

224   |   Dancing Bodies

a triumphant diapente descent toward D. This D, of course, is the same pitch staked out as the G Dorian fifth degree right at the beginning. Yet it has emerged as tonic at the end of the strain as the result of a great increase in tension—an increase even more apparent when we return for the repeat. My third dance, the balletta, actually operates within E minor, with a consistent Fá that sidesteps entirely the Phrygian problematic characteristic of Frescobaldi’s E-based toccatas; moreover, its opening strain cadences in G major. The melody starts on the fifth degree but skips up immediately to explore the melodic realm above 8. When the cadential second degree appears, it is an octave higher than the one required for closure. As if premature and excessively flamboyant in its opening gesture, the melody drops to the proper range in m. 2. Note that we are still within a sustained E minor: spurts of energy aside, we have not actually moved yet. When the melody approaches the fifth degree again in m. 2, it is harmonized as mediant of G major, the relative major that will unambiguously control the rest of the strain. Now rivaling the dance’s final, the mediant (G) too skips up into the upper tessitura, but with a greater sense of stability: the melody moves first to E (the sixth degree of the new key) and then launches itself all the way up to G before returning to cadence on the lower G. Although clearly marked as operating within G major, this second key area continues to mark as significant the pitches of the E minor triad: E, G, and B. Even if we hear it as affectively more congenial, the relative major is still the conjoined twin of the original minor sonority. The second strains of these dances have the task of reopening the field and then coming to closure. As is the case with the three first strains we have examined, these sustain various moments in the background, sometimes modulating briefly, other times extending themselves by means of sequences or through melodic vectors that produce octave displacements. We encounter no real surprises in the secondary regions visited along the way—III or v as reinforcements of 5, iv or VII as markers of the descent to 4—followed by the inevitable return to the tonic and the melodic descent of 3, 2, 1. But dancers don’t want surprises.21 More than anything else, they demand a vivid kinetic pulse that allows them to keep together in their steps, as well as advanced warning of upcoming caesuras so that they can prepare a graceful exchange of courtesies with their partners. If this all seems terribly mundane and utilitarian, it also accounts for why this particular set of patterns persisted for centuries. I have argued else 

 

 

Dancing about Power   |   225

where that the convention of eighteenth-century tonality in its outline is nearly as simple as that of the twelve-bar blues.22 And far from being a handicap, that adherence to convention is precisely its virtue. Yet social function does not preclude musical imagination, as Frescobaldi’s tiny dances reveal. •

•

•

Although Italian composers could and did write dances, they concentrated their attention elsewhere. The late Irene Alm has traced the frequency with which dances show up in Italian opera, though often only as indications that a dance—at the discretion of those in charge of a particular production—should be inserted.23 Dances continued to flourish in oral practice, and there seemed to have been little incentive for anyone to write them down. Indeed, freezing them in notated form only threatened to sap of them of the spontaneous vitality that they sought to provide. Although I am grateful that Frescobaldi included these dances in his collections, I would prefer to have heard him improvise them. Not so the French. For reasons discussed earlier in this chapter as well as the next, the French court prized social dance more than any other secular genre, and music to accompany the dance (or to simulate it in chamber settings) attracted the most prestigious French composers. We are accustomed to dismissing these pieces as woefully tied to convention and accomplishing nothing more than satisfying a demand for decorative background fluff. But that attitude only betrays the profound effect of later German aesthetic categories on our thinking. If French composers had not continued to invest their energies and imaginations in binary-form dances, the German sonata would not have had a readymade crucible for its cultural agenda. Nor would we have all these wonderful pieces. I will start with everyone’s favorite halfway house, Johann Jacob Froberger, a composer who studied directly with all the available sources at the time: with Frescobaldi (from whom he learned how to write toccatas), as well as with the dance musicians in the Parisian court. One of the most self-consciously eclectic artists of the seventeenth century, Froberger greatly influenced J. S. Bach, who similarly produced collections in all national genres, often (like his predecessor) in clusters of six. Unlike Bach, however, who tended to produce Italianate hybrids wherever he turned,24 Froberger tried to home in on the particular essence of each genre. In fact, he succeeded so well at distilling French dances that his manner of presenting them in cycles—allemande, courante, sara 

 

 

226   |   Dancing Bodies

bande, gigue—became the international standard, in France as well as elsewhere. I will concentrate here on a courant from Froberger’s Suite in A Minor (Libro Seconda, 1649). Just as Frescobaldi composed his toccatas within the modal frameworks of the sixteenth century and dances within the circumscribed practices we call tonality, so Froberger deployed Aeolian and other traditional modes when he wrote toccatas but moved to the other set of procedures for his dances. Even at mid­century prominent artists remained committed to both formal models, each of which counted as cutting edge, each for its own purpose. In other words, no one was junking modes in favor of the rather more restrictive options offered by the major/minor schema. But what marked the Aeolian paradigm in his toccatas—the prohibition against a genuine Fá that would allow for moves to its dominant—does not appear as a problem in this or any of Froberger’s other A minor dances. So long as we are operating within a procedure that demands only cadential circumscription of background units, we do not have to worry about whether or not the mode allows us an Fá. Again, we are concerned here with very tiny pieces, scaled to match the exigencies of contemporaneous social dance: in his courant, for instance, Froberger has to achieve his goals within a mere twelve bars. And those goals are already generically determined to a large extent: he needs to cadence in a key that sustains the fifth degree to punctuate the first half (six measures) and return to the tonic by the end (an additional six measures). In this case, he chooses the minor dominant for his midway articulation, but in other dances from the same collection he opts for the relative major—indeed, he flirts with that possibility in this courant as well. Although they signify differently with respect to affect, the minor dominant and relative major are equally available and more or less interchangeable with respect to the grammar of the background. The composer’s task is to make this process interesting to the ear, despite the fact that its shape is a foregone conclusion. One of Froberger’s principal strategies involves intricate play with rhythmic patterning—a trick he learned from lutenists at the Parisian court. With respect to genre, the French courant differs markedly from the Italian corrente in its physical impulse: the meter of the corrente rolls forward impetuously, true to its name—“running” dance—and the Italianate love of unbridled action; by contrast, the French courante deliberately brakes any such motion through its cross-accents and divisions of the bar into groups of two or three main pulses, depend 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dancing about Power   |   227

ing upon the harmonic rhythm. The various kinds of groupings corresponded to very different dance steps and hand gestures, making the courante the most complex of court dances, though much of this fascination with cross-rhythms also manifests itself in other dance types. As with several of Frescobaldi’s dances, Froberger opens his courante with a direct diapente descent; together with the cadential harmonies supporting the piece up through the beginning of m. 3, he has established A minor unequivocally (ex. 8.2). Of greater interest, however, are the inner parts that move about, producing constant activity and shifting nodes of rhythmic tension. Already within the first beat the voice just below the soprano jumps the gun for an off-kilter accent on B—the principal sore pitch in this piece. That anticipated pitch appears to pull all the other voices along in its wake, though they all reconcile themselves with the sustained A in the bass halfway through the measure. As it turns out, however, this measure does not divide down the middle, even if it may initially seem to do so. Indeed, this implication is so strong that Froberger has to throw in a powerful agogic accent to reveal he has faked us out—a strategy the performer should attempt to project in sound. For an inner voice that has been milling around in the diatessaron below the final moves suddenly to Fá to greet the soprano’s arrival on B in m. 1, as the bass finally breaks free from its pedal to begin its cadential preparation. The confluence of all these events serves to mark the third half note as the rhythmic dividing point within the measure, and it also weights the melodic second degree (already marked by the earlier anticipation) as an important agent. The second measure releases these tensions onto a dominant, with Gá rather than B highlighted in the melody, though the B sneaks in again as an off-putting anticipation right after the downbeat. By midmeasure we have returned to tonic, and the same question arises as before: is this the rhythmic divisor? Well, no, for once again Froberger shoves us forward to the measure’s third half note with a knot of dissonances featuring B in both soprano and bass. These will resolve back to tonic in the downbeat of m. 3. Meanwhile, we might note the feathery cascades of sixteenth notes that occur three times in m. 2. For the moment these almost take on motivic significance, and slowed-down versions of this contour also oc­­ cur in mm. 4, 5, and 9. No more than most French dances, however, does this courant concern itself with motivic development, though Froberger displays such skill in spades in his fantasias and ricercars. But for purposes of this dance, those suggestions of imitative patterning vari 

 

228   |   Dancing Bodies E x . 8.2. Froberger, Suite in A Minor, Courant.

3 .. Ï úúÏ . Ïj ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï . Ïj . ä Ïj Ï ÏÏÏÏ &2 # Ï Ï # Ïú #ú ú Ï Ï Ï Ï äÏú Ï J ? 3 .. ú Ï ú Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ úÏ Ï # Ï # Ï # Ï ú 2 Î ú. Ï 3

Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ïj & Ïä ÏÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï ú ?ú ú

Ï Ï ú Ï

úú . äÏj# Ï . Ï Ï Ï úú .. Îú Îú

ú.

Ï ú äÏjÏ Ï# Ï úú ä JÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï . # Ï ú . J #ú ú. Ï ú ÏÏ Ï #ú ú Îú ú

j & .. Ï # úúú . # ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ïú . # Ï úÎ Ï ÏÏ Ï ä Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ . Ï Ï ú äJ ú Î Ï #Ï ú Ï ? .. Î ú ú . ú

7

.. ..

Ïú .. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏúÏ Ï ÏÏ Î Ï #Ï ú

ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ#. ÏÏ ÏÏÏ . Ï ú . úú .. &Ï ú # Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . ú Ï # ú Ï Ï úú J ú ÏÏú . # úú ? ÏÏäÏÏÏ . Ï ú. Ï Î ú ú ú

10

ously tickle the listener’s ear or (as in m. 2) animate what otherwise would be a bare resolution from V to i. If Bach strives to maintain motivic consistency throughout his dances, the French (and Froberger counts as French when he writes dances) prefer to make each individual measure construct itself afresh in order to keep the dancers focused in the particular moment, with no thought of the future (I will return to this issue in the next chapter).

Dancing about Power   |   229

So here we are, in the third of six measures, still just sustaining the tonic. Yet a great many events have already occurred in terms of rhythmic, melodic, and contrapuntal friction between interlocking voices, and we must attend to that level of detail when performing, listening, or dancing to such pieces. Otherwise they appear to have absolutely zero content—which is precisely how many non-French observers view them. At last, halfway through m. 3, the harmonies shift toward C major, the relative major. The soprano keeps both E, the fifth degree, and C in play, even insisting on C throughout the precadential chords generated by D. Froberger might at this point elect to toy with C and conclude the first half of the courant in that key. But despite the emphatic quality of the arrival on C at the beginning of m. 4, he pulls the rug out from under us by pushing back with a Gá to A. The cruelest blow of all, however, involves the rhythm: after Froberger has lulled us into expecting the metrical division on the third half note he sucker punches us with the harsh Gá right in the middle of the measure, thus splitting the measure at the level of the dotted half. The dancers would have to respond to this eventuality with an entirely different set of physical moves: their bodies would register and amplify the shock of this shift. This metric division remains constant throughout the rest of the strain. But we do not end the strain back in the tonic, even though the B and Gá in m. 5 appear to be headed in that direction. At the last possible moment the harmonies shift underneath the melodic B—the top line’s second degree poised to resolve to A but also the pitch so carefully highlighted through the first two measures. As it turns out, this courant structures itself melodically in a typically plagal fashion, complete with a trapdoor that reinterprets B as the upper boundary of the diapente on E, and we close quite unexpectedly on the minor dominant in m. 6. Taking the repeat pulls us back up out of the nether regions and reasserts the proud declamatory quality of the beginning, though the reiteration of the full six bars brings back the abjection of that moment of closure on the lower octave. I will not continue with this blow-by-blow account, though a glance forward reveals that Froberger spends much of the second strain in the lower part of the scale. Only with tremendous effort does he manage to launch the melody back to into the A diapente, just in time for cadence. If the fifth degree continues to dominate the second half, it is the E an octave below the final that persists rather than the more active upper boundary of the diapente. Before leaving this courant, I want to make some general comments  

 

230   |   Dancing Bodies

concerning strategy. First, Froberger is sufficiently aware of the various options available that he plays with them as if in a shell game. Okay, which shell will get the cadence? The relative major? Oops, maybe a return to tonic? No! It’s the minor dominant! Ta-da! (Note how painful the illicit Fá sounds at the cadence: this particular shell would not even have been in play in Aeolian.) In much more prolonged binaryform structures, in which each key area gets its own thematic identity, this background plan will blow itself to proportions that have been labeled as three-key expositions. It’s already alive and well in Froberger, however. Second, despite the fact that Froberger operates throughout his courant within tonal harmonic strictures, he also clearly wants us to perceive differences between authentic and plagal scalar structures. Octave equivalence does not obtain here (if indeed it ever truly does in tonal music). If we neglect to observe the plagal trapdoor or the affective qualities of those measures that dwell (as John Dowland would say) “in darknesse,” then we will fail to grasp most of the content of this dance. •

•

•

About ten years ago I decided I could not stand myself anymore if I continued to have no idea how French seventeenth-century dance music worked. Every year I would teach a survey of baroque music, and every year I was stumped by the Froberger examples in the anthology I used. For a while I tried to explain this music away by placing it in an Absolutist court with royal patents that so controlled all cultural production that a kind of blandness resulted. But although this argument continues to appear in scholarly publications, I could no longer accept it in good conscience. Consequently, I assigned myself the task of playing nothing but French dances for an entire summer—or until I was able to look at a new one and recognize what was special about it. No longer satisfied with “it goes to the dominant and comes back,” I wanted to be able to discern what makes this courante different from all other courantes. Over the course of that summer I fell in love with the music of D’Anglebert and gave a talk on his Tombeau that eventually appeared in the online journal ECHO; I include a version of that essay in chapter 9. For present purposes I will discuss rather more analytically the second of two courantes in his Suite in D Minor: analytically, but also with an ear toward aesthetic achievement, for this is one of the drop-dead gorgeous pieces of all time.  

Dancing about Power   |   231

In a way that seems quite perfunctory, D’Anglebert dispenses with his diapente descent in the opening measure, a measure—with nary a chord change—that divides unambiguously down the middle (ex. 8.3). But a passing tone in the bass (ornamented so as to call our attention to it) escapes the regimen established by this too-abrupt lunge for selfcontainment. Given the ubiquity of tetrachord descents in bass lines, we might expect that C will yield to Bâ, which indeed it does. No one could anticipate, however, that the Bâ triad would blossom and extend itself for a full measure. The businesslike opening bar suddenly gives way to a dream world, as time stands still for a luxuriant arpeggio on the lowered sixth degree. To make sure that no rhythmic impulses disturb this moment of suspended animation, D’Anglebert ties the pitches together, thereby instructing the harpsichordist to produce a most unidiomatic blur. In the nineteenth century composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, and Mahler frequently exploited the flat-six region as the ideological alternative to the too-rational dominant; it offered a world of fantasy or illusion, the locus of hopes denied by the harsh glare of Industrial age reality.25 So identified is this move with Romanticism that it may well seem startling to find it presented so flagrantly in a seventeenth-century French courante. Yet here it is, drawing on precisely the same kinds of pitch relationships—the tentative quality of the lowered sixth degree coupled with the common-tone tonic—that produce the same sense of longing and unreality that it presents so dependably in later music. D’Anglebert does this nowhere else in his keyboard music: this does not qualify, in other words, as part of his basic modus operandi. But its uniqueness here only underscores its significance within the context of this particular dance. He speaks here in the subjunctive: ¡Ojalá! (if only, or may Allah will it), as the Spanish say. The third measure returns us to what might be D minor. But the arpeggiation of m. 2 has at least had the effect of transporting the melodic line into the upper octave with the mediant at the top, at which point a heavily weighted descent leads by step toward the relative major, F. The fifth degree with which the piece opened appears again at the beginning of m. 4, now harmonized with F, and an ostentatiously ornamented G in the melody now shifts the metric pattern to a division of three and pulls the background line down to the fourth degree. (Note how the embellishments designated by D’Anglebert serve to point up the crucial moves: these do not merely clutter the surface with decorative luxury but mark significant structural and metric events, heighten the  

 

 

 

j jÏ Ï Ï bÏ bú Ï. Ï) Ï Ï ( Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ .. Ïú Ï Ï ÏÏÏ ... Ï m * Î Î Ï Ï b ÏÏÏ .. Ï b Ï Ï ? 32 Î ú ú Ï bú. Ï .. m Î ú Ï ú ( ( 3 ( Ï . ) Ï mÏ Ï Ï mÏ . b Ï m bmÏ Ï Ï m) j Ï Ï . Ï úú ). J & # ÏÏ b( úúÏ . Ï J Ï . JÏ . J Î Ï ÏÏ Ïú ú Ï w ú b úÏ n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? Î Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï úÎ Ï m (m ( (m 6 Ï .) Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ïm. Ï Ï Ï . Ï J & ( ÏÏ .. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï J J(Ï # Ï . Ï m m) ú ? ú Ï úÎ . Ï Ï # úú . Îú Ï Ïú . Ï Ï # Ïú . ú ÏÏ ú Î Ï Î ú

E x . 8.3. D’Anglebert, Suite in D Minor, Courante 2.

j & 32 ä Ï ÏÏÏ ...

! & Ï # úúú ú * ? Ïú . Ï ú 9

úú úú

ú) ú

Ï Ï ÏÏÏ .. .

1re. fois

Î Ï Ï ú. ú m

j Ï (Ï

.. Ï

* .. úÏ .

úú! # úú

Ï ú

Ï ) Ï b Ï gÏ .

ÏÏ .. Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ .. m ú. ) ú.

2e. fois

( m j Ï Ïj Ï . Ïj Ï . Ï. m)

& Ï . Ïj # Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï úú!.. ú. m) m ) m ) Reprise j Ï Ï ÏÏ úú ?ú . Ï Ï ) Ï b Ïú Ï ÏÏ ú Ï Ï b Ï ú ú ú. Ï Î Î Ï m Î Ï 12

Dancing about Power   |   233

15

& úú .. ú.

) Ï Ï ) Ï Ï Ï Ï )Ï Ï Ï Ï mÏ . Ï #mú . J úú ..

j Î ? Ï .) Ï Ï ú . Ï b ÏÏ Î Ï m 18 m ) (m ÏÏ & (ÏÏ .. JÏ Ï . J . ÏJ Î Ï ú Î ? ú . Ï Ï ÏÏ úú

bú ú.

Ï ú ú Ï bú.

úúú . Ï)

Ï

Ï

Ï )Ï Ï n Ï Ï

ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ïú

Î b ÏÏ Ï ) Ï b Ï Ï Ï b Ï Ï b Ï Ï Ï Ï . j Ï Ï m) Ï Î Ï ÏÏ úú. Î ú Ï Ïú . Ï Ï Ï ú.

(m « Ï Ï # Ï Ï . # Ï Ï # úúú! ÏÏÏ ... Ï Ï Ï .. & Ï. J ú Ï. m m * 1re. fois * Ïú Ï # Ï ú . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? Ïú .. # Ï Ï b úú úú Ïú .Ï ú úú . ) wÏ . 24 ( m Ï Ï . ) Ï ( Ï Ï Ï Ï mÏ Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï mÏ . # Ï Ï Ï(mÏ . Ï Ï Ï« úú! úú .. & J # úú úú .. au commencement * 2e. fois .S. j Ï ú Ïú Ï ? Ï #äú Ï Ï Ï b úú Ï úú . ú ) w ú úw. Ï . ú 21

m m m Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ). Ï # Ï Ï ú J J

level of dissonance, and even define the melodic contour through otherwise unnotated appoggiaturas. Thus, the performer needs to understand the purpose of each agrément and weight it in such a way as to allow it to project its function in sound. A rapid trill-like alternation of the two designated pitches will not do.) D’Anglebert could have chosen to extend F major and ended his first strain in that key. Instead, he turns away from the well-established fourth degree (G), glancing back to Bâ and hence to A. The sixth measure

234   |   Dancing Bodies

presents exactly the same figuration as the opening: 5 in the melody, harmonized with D in the bass, and the measure divided once more into two halves, with only the cross-rhythmic accents of the resistant right hand reminding us of the metric alternative. When the melody reaches the precadential second degree, however, another octave displacement jumps again into the upper range touched upon earlier. This time the top line, with its carefully placed ornaments, traces a diapente descent from E for a strong cadence on A minor, thereby ending the first strain. Comparing D’Anglebert’s dance with those of his predecessors, we can see that he maintains the same overall schema: the first strain moves to one of several possible ways of maintaining the fifth degree—the relative major, the minor dominant, the half cadence to the tonic. But within that framework D’Anglebert develops a number of additional ideas. First he opens up the higher register and makes important formal use of the octave above the final and its mediant. Indeed, he will end the courante in this upper range rather than on the final itself—a decision that causes the conclusion to sound somewhat forced, as if closure requires an enormous increase rather than a slacking off in energy (note particularly the coda, which insists that this is in fact the register in which the piece must stop). Nonetheless, most of the activity takes placed within the diapente, which remains unrequited at the end. This double-leveled action allows for a complex set of strategies as D’Anglebert weaves his melodic motion between the two trajectories. As Schenker might say, it permits him to increase content within a preestablished schema. Composers will become increasingly adept at adding contrapuntal lines and balancing them off each other for longer and longer movements, though the principle stays more or less unchanged for the next two hundred years. Second, D’Anglebert marks that pause on the lowered sixth degree in m. 2 as an extraordinary affective event, not just as a step in a standard tetrachord descent. I hope I have already demonstrated how Frescobaldi and Froberger also imbued their dances with fascinating details: none of these composers was following a rote formula. Still, D’Anglebert’s considerably longer dances bring ever-greater density to the genre. With D’Anglebert’s pieces it is not difficult to grasp why binary dance form appeared so rife with possibilities for composers in the later eighteenth century. In particular, this courante shows how a schema as apparently rigid as this could lend itself to narrative-oriented projects. Finally, in this dance D’Anglebert manipulates all available parameters—melody, harmony, register, ornaments—in order to produce the  

 

 

 

Dancing about Power   |   235

exquisitely varied cross-rhythmic effects so valued by French connoisseurs. An expert dancer would have responded to those details not only through large-scale changes in foot patterns but also in nuanced hand gestures and facial expression. (We shall examine in chapter 9 the ideologies that fostered this kind of attention to fluctuating metrical accent.) For now, I only wish the reader to observe the superb craft that allows D’Anglebert to develop dimensions of musical composition rarely noticed in analysis. As expected, the second strain of the courante returns us eventually to the tonic. This is important, of course: few dances end up elsewhere. But it also tells us very little about anything other than the most basic level of convention to which the piece adheres. How does the composer make the inevitable meaningful? The second strain takes us back to the lower range, to the diapente abandoned in the first part. Although m. 12 clearly sustains E, the second degree, throughout, the many ornamental licks D’Anglebert requests produces a low, seductive burbling before E yields in the following bar to F and a harmonic return to D minor. The contradictory metric impulses between the melodic line and the bass also contribute a slightly dizzying effect, set “right” by the reestablishment of a measure divided unambiguously down the middle. In its own way, m. 12 casts a spell nearly as magical as the move to flat 6 in m. 2, owing to rhythmic and ornamental detail, plus the extraordinarily sensuous sound of the harpsichord in that particular register. The 6/4 metric division also injects enough stability to allow for the advance to a straightforward cadential arrival on F major, an event forestalled in the opening strain. An accented passing tone in the left hand, however, leads back to D and the presentation in the bass of the tetrachord descent, similarly forestalled at the beginning. The melody elevates itself through an octave displacement back to the upper range abandoned after mm. 7– 8 to initiate a passively falling melodic sequence, thereby underscoring the gravitational pull of the tetrachord descent. Note that in m. 17 (as in mm. 7 and 12) D’Anglebert has brought us to within spitting distance of the goal. Nothing would be easier than resolving the dominant to tonic and having done with it all. But the melodic arrival on D in m. 17 is met with Fá in the bass. This deceptive maneuver opens the door for yet more expansion, this time by means of a bid toward binding together the two melodic levels D’Anglebert has juggled throughout the piece. The pitch C has received strong emphasis twice before, once in m. 3 as a preparation for a move  

236   |   Dancing Bodies

to F, the other in m. 8 as the mediant of the dominant key area, A. In mm. 18–19 C becomes its own secondary tonic, even as it pulls the consistently prolonged fifth degree in the background decisively down to 4. The arrival on C, however, quickly reveals itself as but a step in a strongly weighted scalar descent to the second degree in the lower register—once again poised to achieve closure. An octave displacement, however, returns to the upper register for a conclusion not in the stable lower diapente but rather on the rhetorically insistent 8; a coda reinforces this decision, reiterating the high-energy finish. Are we meant to hear this conclusion as linked with the initial approach to the upper register, the one harmonized by flat six in m. 2? I realize that to ask such a question is to raise the specter of narrative in the context of an innocent twenty-five-measure dance. If we allow ourselves to consider such a possibility, however, we have a piece in which an unanticipated moment of imagined bliss early on in the piece forecasts and eventually makes that upper realm a concrete reality. But whether or not we wish to extend that far, D’Anglebert undeniably offers us a demonstration of how tonal expansion can occur by means of multiple contrapuntal lines.  

 

•

•

•

I will close this chapter with an example familiar to most keyboardists—the courante from Bach’s French Suite in D Minor—just to offer a clear point of comparison (ex. 8.4). In contrast with the D’Anglebert courante just discussed, Bach grants us a sense of continuity and metric predictability. A product of the German Enlightenment, it features none of the unexpected pauses or sudden flurries of motion that so delighted the French. The first quality that strikes one, of course, is Bach’s much greater investment in imitative counterpoint. The subject introduced in the right hand in m. 1 moves to the left in the following bar and then proceeds to drive the rhythmic and melodic activity of the whole courante. One of the pleasures of the piece is hearing how Bach can both maintain tight motivic unity and yet also play with crosscurrents by situating elements of the principal unit on different parts of the measure or by treating the initial leap of the minor sixth—D to Bâ—as a wild card that can shoot off at other intervals (see, for instance, its conversion to an octave leap in the left hand of m. 7). But Bach’s commitments to imitative counterpoint and motivic unity also restrict his ability to engage with the kind of rhythmic ambiguity  

 

 

 

Dancing about Power   |   237

M j j . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ä Ï . Ï # Ï úú..Ï Ï ú

E x . 8.4. Bach, French Suite in D Minor, Courante, opening strain.

j & b 32 Ï Ï .

Î ? b 32 ä w . Ï 3

6

ú

M Ïú Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ .. Ïj & b # ÏÏú nÏÏ Ï Ï # Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï#Ï Ï Ï ? b ú. &b ?b

9

Ï

Ïú .

Ï

j Ïj ÏÏ # Ï Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïú . Ï ÏÏ. Ïj Ï J Ï #Ï nÏÏÏ ÏÏ # Ï # Ï . Ï MÏ . n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï J J úú . .

g# ÏÏÏ g

j M j Ï b Ï . Ïú . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú .Ï ú g ÏÏ Ïn ÏÏÏ.Ï Ï ÏÏ . J äJ äJ j ä j Ï . Ï . w Ï ú .Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú b Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

M j b & ÏÏ . Ï # ÏÏ Ïú Ï Ï Ï Ïú . g ä ? ú. Ï Ï Ï ú b

ú ú

nÏ

Ï #Ï Ï Ï úú M j Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. J ÏÏÏ

M j j ÏÏ. Ï Ï ÏÏ. Ï Ï ÏÏ. Ïj Ï ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ #ÏnÏ Ï

j Ï Ïú Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú nÏ #Ï úú . .

úú

ää .. ä .. ä

characteristic of Froberger and D’Anglebert. His subject and its components consistently divide the measure into three half notes, and he positions his few metric shifts—so deftly deployed by the French—only at cadential arrivals, where they serve to brake the moto perpetuo of the surrounding context. The cross-rhythmic impulses of French courantes rarely materialize. What Bach offers instead is an exciting play of aroused expectations and delayed gratification. Notice, for instance, how the would-be arrival  

 

238   |   Dancing Bodies

in m. 2 overlaps with the statement of the subject in the left hand or the way the right hand in m. 3 catapults the melody up and over before descending in m. 4 to the second scale degree—a potential resting point canceled out by a resistant bass line that pushes on as toward G minor. Although Bach entices us into hoping for a respite at every downbeat, he invariably denies the promise of consonance with an imitative entry, lingering dissonance, or rhythmic displacement. Bach’s restless maneuvers hint at modulations; he suggests possible moves into G minor, F major, and Bâ major, each option shored up by leading tones and strongly articulated melodic descents toward posited tonics. I will spare the reader a discussion of how Bach’s middle levels operate, for this piece fits squarely in the center of the Schenkerian universe. But if the composer refuses the particular physicality of the courante, he does manage to dance around the fifth scale degree without ever really budging. When the smoke finally clears at the double bar, we find ourselves back on the dominant to D minor, on the same melodic pitch with which the courante started—a point made very clear when the repeat commences. The heavy-breathing quality noted in Cesti’s “Pose in fronte” (see chapter 1) becomes standard practice in Bach’s music, even when he pretends to be “French.” Like Cesti he instills the desire for a particular configuration and then sets up obstacles until finally he decides finally to relent. In his drive for gratification (albeit continually postponed), he overrides the cross-rhythms and the sorts of weighted patterns that would allow for actual dance. In short, he infuses his dances with Vivaldian energies. Thus, for all the superficial similarities between the dances of these composers (binary form, 3∕2 meter, etc.), they diverge radically in their notions of temporality. If D’Anglebert keeps our attention keyed to ever-changing details of the moment, Bach operates here and elsewhere according to the desire machine he had acquired from Italian models. Once he gets the pattern of running eighth notes cranked up, Bach offers the listener and performer no place to breathe until he finally reaches the repeat sign. We rarely notice this dimension of Bach’s work; we simply take it for granted. But we do discern the absence of such energies when we approach the dances composed for the French court. The next chapter deals in detail with the ideological context within which composers such as D’Anglebert cultivated their very different ways of structuring time.  

 

Part V

La Mode Française

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 9

Temporality and Ideology Qualities of Motion in   Seventeenth-Century French Music

In a classic essay from 1973 art historian Michael Fried focused on a quality he had discerned in French eighteenth-century painting, a quality he called “absorption.”1 The paintings he examines in the course of the article depict individuals so immersed in meditation that they seem withdrawn from the world. Those artists who excelled in this genre rarely chose heroic figures as their subjects; Jean-Baptiste Greuze, for instance, often preferred to present pretty children quietly pondering their dead canaries or gazing in distraction away from their books. Today these paintings may strike viewers as precious and sentimental— certainly not the stuff to which one would turn in reconstructing sociopolitical history. Indeed, such paintings, much loved during their own moment, have long been dismissed by many critics as kitsch. Yet by interrogating this quality of absorption rather than the manifest content of the canvases, Fried identifies an elusive but persistent element for the period under consideration—the kind of element Raymond Williams referred to as a “structure of feeling”:  

 

For what we are defining is a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period. The relations between this quality and the other specifying historical marks of changing institutions, formations, and beliefs, and beyond these the changing social and economic relations between and within classes, are again an open question: that is to say, a set of specific historical questions. . . . We are talking about characteristic elements

241

242   |   La Mode Française

of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.2

I first encountered Fried’s article when I was seeking to understand a peculiar quality in French music of the ancien régime, a quality that seems designed to induce something like absorption in the listener, a quality of stillness in which consciousness hovers suspended outside linear time. As it turns out, Fried’s absorption is but one of a very large cluster of privileged images and metaphors prevalent in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that converge around the ideal of timelessness: I would include here the Neoplatonic geometry that undergirds everything from landscape design to ballroom dance at Versailles, the obsession with Arcadian themes that pervades court life and its art, the warnings against thinking about the future in Jansenist theology, the Quietist definition of ecstasy as a state of utter desirelessness. To the consternation of historians who like to keep their categories separate, these images come from a wide variety of cultural domains, some of them (for instance, the Absolutist court and the Jansenist philosophers of Port Royal) mutually antagonistic. Moreover, they appear throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a very long span of time during which many radical ideological and cultural changes occurred.3 I will return later in this chapter for a more detailed discussion of these problems, but first I wish to consider briefly the music that first motivated this line of inquiry. In my experience as a coach of early music performance, the seventeenth-century French repertory presents more acute challenges to most present-day musicians than any other. Heinrich Schütz’s complex modal allegories or Girolamo Frescobaldi’s erratic toccatas may present them with temporary obstacles, but these gradually become accessible through the rhetorical sensibilities performers bring with them from later music. The French baroque, however, often stops them dead in their tracks; François Couperin taunts them from across the centuries when he boasts in L’Art de toucher le clavecin (1716) that “foreigners play our music less well than we do theirs.”4 Yet most performers, before they will accept Couperin’s chauvinistic diagnosis for their puzzlement, prefer to reverse the blame, to dismiss the music itself as incompetent.

Temporality and Ideology   |   243

Oddly enough, this assessment underlies a good many of our official musicological accounts of this music. Of those who have written on seventeenth-century French music, only David Fuller seems to me to have grappled sympathetically with how this music works, how it produces its effects.5 But most other scholars—even those who create elaborate catalogues, exhaustive archival documentation, and detailed histories—go on summarily to dismiss the materials in question as unworthy of serious musical attention. For instance, James R. Anthony, in his French Baroque Music (long the definitive book on this repertory), damns with the faintest of praise one of its most characteristic genres: “In summary, French lute music of the seventeenth century is mannered, precious, even decadent; its melodies are surcharged with ornaments, its rhythms fussy, its harmony often aimless, and its texture without unity. Yet at the same time, it is never pretentious, it never demands more from the instrument than the instrument can give. In its own fragile way, it is honest to itself.”6 We must keep in mind, however, that the Absolutist rulers who commissioned and listened to this music had access to the very best artistic talents money could buy. It is not likely that Louis XIV simply tolerated mediocrity in his compositional staff; indeed, we know that he intervened at every level of cultural production and even participated personally in auditions for new orchestral musicians. If this music now falls on figuratively deaf ears, it seems to have satisfied precisely what its highly discriminating makers and patrons required of it. As the quotation above indicates, today’s musicians encountering French seventeenth-century music often experience it chiefly in terms of lack: they listen in vain for teleological tonal progressions (“its harmony often aimless”), patterns of motivic reiteration (“its texture without unity”), or imitative counterpoint—the very ingredients we have learned through our theoretical training to value. Instead, this music arrests the attention with an agrément here (“surcharged with ornaments”), a sudden flurry and cessation of activity there (“fussy rhythms”). In short, such music makes it difficult or impossible to play the serious games of speculation and anticipation we usually bring to music of this and subsequent periods; it settles instead for the “precious,” “mannered,” or “decadent.” Confronted by what we take as manifestations of absence, we may hear this music as relatively arbitrary, as a series of events connected (if at all) only on a moment-by-moment basis. In phenomenological terms it sounds static rather than dynamic. Yet most courtiers and artists dur 

 

 

244   |   La Mode Française

ing the ancien régime clearly preferred this music to its alternatives. Consequently, historians of seventeenth-century French culture face the difficult task of converting all those negatives and pejoratives into positive attributes. What kinds of rewards did this music offer its devotees? What structures of feeling did it reinforce? We might, of course, turn directly to the polemics of the time, in which Francophile connoisseurs sought to justify their predilections. In their attempts at pinpointing the essence of French music, they buttressed their documents with words such as bon goût, plaisir, and raison (good taste, pleasure, reason), words obviously freighted with a great deal of cultural prestige. But those words speak meaningfully only to insiders who already count themselves aficionados; the rest of us must ask: whose taste? which pleasures? what version of reason? •

•

•

I have selected as my example Jean-Henry D’Anglebert’s Tombeau de M.r de Chambonnières, from his print of 1689 (ex. 9.1).7 I acknowledge the danger of single examples: I too can produce lists of pieces that behave otherwise—most obviously, the unmeasured preludes that flourished during this period in the hands of Louis Couperin, ElisabethClaude Jacquet de la Guerre, and D’Anglebert himself, as well as the hybrids produced by composers such as Marc-Antoine Charpentier or François Couperin who self-consciously trafficked in Italianate styles. I know, moreover, that the genre of the tombeau virtually demands an elegiac, introspective quality. Yet D’Anglebert exemplifies in his tombeau (and in most of his pieces) so many of the points I wish to make, and he does so with what seems to me such beauty and skill, that I hope to avoid the charge that the music itself is inept, even if it works according to premises far removed from the ones within which we usually operate. Let me begin with the usual series of negatives. First, D’Anglebert’s tombeau displays no imitative counterpoint of the sort we like to celebrate in Bach. (Note, however, that if we were to turn the page in the print we would find a set of five magnificent organ fugues on a single subject. D’Anglebert was, in other words, fully capable of contrapuntal complexity, even if he does not showcase it in most of his dances.) Second, this tombeau does not employ melodic motives to pull the various parts of the piece together; instead, the rhythmic groupings of the surface constantly shift. To be sure, as a gaillarde,8 it offers the regularity of dance steps: the piece guarantees at least the rational structure  

E x . 9.1. D’Anglebert, Tombeau de M.r de Chambonnières.

j m j j Ï . Ï úÏ Ï Ï Ïú . Ï (Ïú . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï gú

# 3 ! j & # 2 ä Ï Ï ) Ï g Ïúú . Ï wú gú m ? # # 32

fort lentement

ú ú

Î ú Ï Ï ( úúú

.S.

ú n úú

ú n ww

ú)

úÏ Ï ú

m j j nÏÏnÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï n Ï Ï . Ï ú! j Ï Ï (úÏ Ï Ï ú Ï ÏÏ & n( Ïú . Ï Ïú Ï Ïú . Ï ( ÏÏ. Ï Ï Ï Ï ( Ï Ï Ï( Ï m m úú ú ÏÏ Ï ú Ïú Ï Ï mÏ Ï ? # # Î úún Ï úú Ï Ï ú Ï w ú ÏÏ ú Ï 3

##

# & # ( úú Î Ï 6

m j úÏ ) Ï )gúÏ . Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï! Ï Ï Ï) ÏgÏúú!. Ï .. ú gú m ÏÏÏ * 1re fois .S. Ïú Ï!) ú . ú ú ú ú ) úú . Ï Î äÏÏú J j ÏÏ Ï . Ï Ïm. Ï Ï Ï ) Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï . úÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ( ú . Ï gú ) m Reprise úú ú úw . # ú n ú úú úú ú ! ú

w Ï. Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï m ? # # Ï . Ï Ï ÏmÏ . Ï Ï Ï Ï ú

# & # .. Ï . Ï ÏÏ! úú m ÏÏ úú * 2e. fois ? # # .. ú ú) ä JÏ Ï ú 12 # m & # Ï . Ïj( Ï). Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï m 9

ú Ï ? # # úw . Ïw

ú

m úú .. ú.

! ≈ Ï Ï)Ï ÏÏÏ ... Ï.

Ï . Ï mÏ n Ï J

j ÏÏj Ï ú !J gú

j Ï n Ï . ä Ï Ï) Ï (úú !

Î Ï ú ú) n wÎ Ï ú ú

ú Ï Ï

(continued)

E x . 9.1. (continued)

# # m. & úú .

m n (Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï ( Ï . ) Ï Ï Ï . # Ïj ( ú ) Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïm Ïj w ú ú ú. m Ï ú ! m Ï ú ú ? # # úÏ . Ïj Ïú Ï mÏ n ÏÏ úú . n úú Ï úÏ Ï úÎ . Ï úú Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï úÏ n Ï (m 18 j ! ## j Ï Ï n Ïú . Ïj mw! ( Ïú Ï n Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ..Ï Ï ( úúÏ . Ï úúú ) ww & ( Ïú . Ï n(Ï Ï g ! ! 15

ú ? # # úÏ Ï # Ï Ï úú ú Ï Ï Ï Ï úÏ . Ï Ï )Ï Ï Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï) Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï ú J nÏ 21 ## j jm ! ≈ w Ï ( Ï ) Ï g Ïú . Ï & Ï . Ï ÏÏ úÏ Ï Ï ( ÏÏ . Ï ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ( úú . ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ! ! Ï Ï m. J J .S. jÏ Ï Ïú Ï ) ú ? ## Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï úÏ Ï wÏ Ï ) úÏÏ Ï úÏ . Ï ú Jm 24 (m # m & # Ïw Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ . Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï! ä Ï) Ï Ïú . Ïj .. g Ï m m . ÏÏ .S. * 1re fois ú) ? ## Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï .. ú ú) w ú w # j m & # .. Ï . Ï Ï! ä Ï Ï ) Ï (Ïú . Ï ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ! ! * 2e. fois ? # # .. ú Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ïj Ï ú) m w m Ï 26

! ( úú Ï Ï

.S.

Ï Ï

Temporality and Ideology   |   247

of a slow triple meter with stresses on beats 3 and 1, and it thus choreographs the body in accordance with a Neoplatonic matrix. But the listener cannot predict when a metric unit will contain a surfeit of ornamental notes (e.g., the middle beat of m. 3) or when it will hover with virtually no activity. Finally, the piece never really modulates. As we saw in chapter 8, binary dance forms tend to adhere closely to conservative harmonic conventions, but this example does not even establish its dominant as a secondary key at the end of the first half. Twice D’Anglebert implies the possibility of moving to the subdominant (both mm. 2–4 and 17–19 gesture toward G major), but neither passage concludes with a cadence. The key of A minor becomes a viable destination in mm. 14–15, but the would-be cadence on A never materializes. In the final analysis, the tombeau remains in D major from start to finish. Yet this series of negatives seems to me less an indictment of D’Anglebert’s skill as a composer than of our analytical habits, which were designed for illuminating particular repertories but then applied willynilly as universal standards to all music. I do find it noteworthy that D’Anglebert does not utilize imitative counterpoint, unifying motives, or a progressive modulatory schema in this tombeau. But his refusal of these devices—all of which he employs in other pieces—leads me to ask what these devices usually accomplish. If we turn to the dance suites of Bach or the dance types (allemandes, gigues) in which the French also typically made use of imitative counterpoint, we find that this device produces relatively long rhythmic groupings, the reiteration of which invites listeners to project into the future.9 As soon as the second voice enters to repeat what we have just heard in the first, we can leap forward in our imaginations to anticipate what will happen next. To be sure, the specific engagement between voices may offer us delight. Yet as soon as the imitation begins, we know from past experience with such techniques to jump ahead in time and start speculating. Something similar occurs with motivic play: when a composer indicates that a two-beat-long motive will saturate the texture of a piece, the listener quickly assumes a particular way of parsing out time.10 Of course, motives produce a sense of identity, organic relatedness, and much else as well, but they also greatly influence our perception of temporality. As does the rhetorical version of modulation that pervades contemporaneous Italian music, which works on the basis of instilled, heightened, and fulfilled desire. Developed as a means of expanding the simple  

 

 

 

 

248   |   La Mode Française

linear formulas of modal practice, this set of procedures sustains each pillar of the background structure by deferring arrivals, barely granting each implied cadence before rushing off toward the next. As we saw in the early chapters, within this process each moment serves principally to whet the appetite for its successor, maximizing a headlong race into the future—the immediate future of the next modulatory arrival, the final destination of the return to tonic. It is this element of multilevel goal orientation, I would argue, that listeners unaccustomed to French seventeenth-century music miss the most: to the extent that progressive tonality counts as “how music is supposed to work,” its absence spells pure and simple incompetence— or, even worse, guilty pleasures (“precious,” “mannered,” “decadent”). Yet if we take seriously the choices made by D’Anglebert and his colleagues, we can glean insights into a society quite alien from the one that gave our own dominant tradition not only its compositional techniques, but also its sense of being. For D’Anglebert worked within a culture that for a wide variety of reasons wished to promote sensibilities of timelessness. But how, precisely, does a composer go about producing such effects? Music by its very nature unfolds through time; of all media it would seem the most resistant to the project of conveying immobility. Put briefly, D’Anglebert’s task is to produce an experience of time in which the listener is absorbed by each present instant. He is obliged to satisfy the rules of orderly succession (the much vaunted raison) as he moves from moment to moment: the transgression of fundamental propriety would undermine the idyllic security of this prolonged stasis. He may even group together a couple of measures in a quasi-causal conspiracy, as in the case of the implied modulations, although none of these actually comes to fruition. Yet, in contrast with superficially similar strategies in Italian music of the time, those missed cadences do not spark the rhetorical effects of disappointment or frustration; rather, the relatively low level of anticipation involved produces merely a bittersweet inconclusiveness. Gradually we learn from this music not to bother at all with future-oriented thought, but to embrace the serene beauty of each new configuration as it arises. D’Anglebert thus needs to make every moment sufficiently full that we need not ever experience desire, so that the attention moves on to the next instance of plenitude only with reluctance. And this he accomplishes in large part through his highly refined negotiations between two different conceptions of rhythmic activity: what the French referred to  

 

Temporality and Ideology   |   249

as mesure and mouvement. Couperin wrote that if “Mesure defines the number and equality of the beats,” “Cadence or Mouvement is properly the spirit and soul that it is necessary to add.” Bénigne de Bacilly further explains these important qualities thus: Mouvement is . . . a certain quality that gives soul to the song, and that it is called Mouvement because it stirs up, I may say it excites, the listeners’ attention, in the same way as do those who are the most rebellious in harmony . . . it inspires in hearts such passion as the singer wishes to create, principally that of tenderness. . . . I don’t doubt at all that the variety of Mesure, whether quick or slow, contributes a great deal to the expression of the song. But there is certainly another quality, more refined and more spiritual, that always holds the listener attentive and ensures that the song is less tedious. It is the Mouvement that makes the most of a mediocre voice, making it better than a very beautiful voice without expression.11

We might say that listeners can follow quite easily the raison of the tombeau’s mesure, its metric structure, but would be hard pressed to anticipate the bon goût of its mouvement, its particular way of inhabiting each successive beat. Couperin and Bacilly write primarily for performers, and they point to something beyond simple metrical accuracy for which players or singers must take responsibility. To the extent that a score such as D’Anglebert’s represents a kind of recorded improvisation, we may discern at least some of the ways in which he composes in the effects so treasured by his contemporaries—the effects conducive to absorption. One of D’Anglebert’s principal strategies for playing mouvement against mesure is his lavish deployment of ever-changing ornaments. Un­­like Italian ornaments, which almost always lead forward impulsively to the next event, French agréments serve to ground any rhythmic excess that may have accumulated by securing the weight onto the strong beats, the markers of mesure; the tension/release mechanisms that animate the music occur on the very local level of the half note. But even as the arrival on the beat reliably anchors the dance step, the agréments draw the ear down into the intricacies of those slight delays that flirt with the self-evident main pitch, thus sustaining a crucial quality of hovering and allowing for the constantly replenished novelty of mouvement. D’Anglebert also ensures that we will expect something beyond the luxury of the instant at hand through judiciously arranged harmonic dissonances. He does so by saturating the surface of his tombeau with lengthy suspensions and anticipations. These operate much like a series  

250   |   La Mode Française

of locks on a canal: they break down what could otherwise be an abrupt shift into tiny increments that release the pressure only gradually. Thus the opening trajectory—a descent from the tonic (D) down to the mediant (Fá) in the bass—is both urged along by a tenor line that applies the pressure of 2–3 suspensions at irregular intervals and also delayed by the bass’s seeming reluctance to part with each of its pitches (note, for instance, the port de voix that creates a pull on its move to Cá in m. 1). No sooner is the basic trajectory of the progression clear to the ear (with the descent to Cà in m. 1 and dissonance added at the beginning of the next bar) than D’Anglebert begins playing with rates of motion: observe the way he sustains that dissonance for two full beats in m. 2, enhancing the poignancy of the moment through the feathery mordent of the middle voice marking the second pulse. But as the bass descends to B (such a big deal for such an obvious move!), the tenor quickens its pace and coaxes the ear into the even richer sonority of m. 3, which is suspended in turn with a wistful melisma in the soprano. Even the arrival on Fá, destined for the downbeat of m. 4, lingers so that the soprano reaches its melodic goal alone and in tension against the bass. Finally, the bass slips down to produce the desired pitch, though on the offbeat as a mere afterthought, and the right hand supplies its downward arpeggiation of the first-inversion tonic sonority—the affirmation of a quasi-caesura—over a rhythmic void in the bass. I don’t want to bore you with an inchworm’s-eye view of this piece. Yet D’Anglebert focuses our attention at precisely this level—on the fact of that exquisite mordent in m. 2, on the sudden awakening and repositioning that follows, on the swirl of circular activity in m. 3, on the nonsimultaneity of arrivals in m. 4. Consequently, one shouldn’t even think about playing a piece like this unless one is willing to savor to the utmost every detail in turn. Harpsichordist Lisa Crawford used to smile with delight at her hands when they played these pieces, as though they were adorable pets who were frolicking of their own accord. Compare the method behind my description of D’Anglebert’s opening passage with Denis Diderot’s celebrated review of Greuze’s painting “Young Girl Mourning Her Dead Bird”:  

 

 

 

 

 

The pretty elegy! The charming poem! . . . Delicious painting! . . . Oh, the pretty hand! The pretty hand! The beautiful arm! Notice the truthful details of these fingers; and these dimples, and this softness, and this blushing tint with which the pressure of the head has colored the tips of these delicate fingers, and the charm of all this. . . . One would move closer to this hand in order to kiss it, if one didn’t respect this child and her pain. . . . This kerchief

Temporality and Ideology   |   251

is thrown on the neck in such a fashion! So supple and light! When one sees this detail one says, Delicious! If one stops to look at it, or returns to it, one exclaims: Delicious! delicious!12

Or compare it with this eyewitness account of Chambonnières’s performances of his music: “Every time he played a piece he incorporated new beauties with ports-de-voix, passages, and different agréments, with doubles cadences. In a word, he so varied them with all these different beauties that he continually revealed new charms.”13 Or read Charles Rosen’s exquisite analysis of how one of D’Anglebert’s contemporaries—the poet and fabulist Jean de La Fontaine—manipulated minute shadings in French vowel sounds to produce his unparalleled effects of aural patterning.14 To focus on—indeed, to fetishize—each moment of a piece goes quite contrary to our training as analysts and as musicians; philosophically North American musicologists descend from an anti-French tradition of German Kultur that insisted on the moral virtue of structural essence in counterdistinction to the sensual surfaces of French civilisation, and we are taught systematically how to brush away such details in order to get at a composition’s formal truth.15 Accordingly, D’Anglebert’s processes may well breed impatience to get on with things and not to dither about where exactly to locate the downward arpeggio demanded in the beat that serves as a pickup to the first full measure. We might be tempted to mutter in exasperation, “It’s a tonic triad—get over it!” But that beat (by far the most difficult to execute in the entire piece) sets the atmosphere for everything that follows: the appoggiatura (itself elaborately embellished) that delays the arrival on A before the arpeggio can commence already puts a nostalgic tug against the necessity of moving forward through time, and the eloquent repetition of A just before m. 1 produces a gesture of stoic resolve following the collapse performed by the arpeggio. Delicious! delicious! A telling feature of this music, once it has seduced one into its phenomenological web, is that the performer may actually want to play the repeats and even to accept the invitation at the end of each dance to recommence from the beginning (recall that in a social setting the same dance would be repeated for each pair of courtiers). The longing to sustain this out-of-time state becomes almost a physical necessity, and one dives back in to revisit each exquisite moment as soon as one reaches the double bar. After a summer of playing only this music and noticing in myself this odd compulsion to take repeats, I assumed I would bring  

 

 

 

 

252   |   La Mode Française

this newfound reflex back with me when I played Bach. But no: even the most Francophile of Bach’s dances pushes inexorably forward through its series of destinations. Taking the repeats in Bach is, to be sure, always instructive, for we cannot truly grasp how he got from one place to another in a single hearing. Still, to go back and do it all over again feels a bit like turning back the clock, like a betrayal of the narrative impulse that propels Bach’s music onward.16 When this Italianate impulse infiltrates François Couperin’s music, he often marks it programmatically as a special effect. See, for instance, the opening movement (an allemande) of his Second Order, titled “La Laborieuse” (The Laborious), in which a two-beat-long motive works hard to achieve every twist and turn along the course of the piece. Or, more famously, “Les Baricades Mistérieuses” (The Mysterious Barricades, from the Sixth Order), a rondeau movement that enacts in its third couplet, however gently, the sense of striving to overcome invisible obstacles typical of the Italo-German version of tonality. It is as though the premises of such techniques—the very basis of what pass in Bach as “purely musical”—demand some extramusical explanation within the French context. Interestingly, the one movement Couperin named after himself, “La Couperin,” in the Twenty-first Order, identifies through its procedures with the Italian style.  

 

•

•

•

The reader has no doubt noticed that I am once again committing the crime I think of as “effing the ineffable,” that is, translating into words the kinds of experiences that music can render so effortlessly and that speech does so clumsily and ineffectively (recall that Saint Teresa of Avila complained of the same gap between phenomena and language). I have three reasons for doing so, however, two of which I have indicated throughout my discussion: first, that performers often require extensive reorientation of this sort before they can make any sense of this music; second, that coming to terms with the French repertory can lead us to reexamine the cultural premises of the most basic units of our analytical methods and to take seriously elements such as this elusive quality. But for the rest of this chapter I want to concentrate on my third reason—namely, history. Historian Hayden White has implored musicologists to give back to the discipline of history the kinds of information to which musicians have special access.17 Too often we restrict ourselves to the modes of evidence available to other historians while neglecting those issues to which they look to us, usually in vain. Yet scholars who  

Temporality and Ideology   |   253

cannot read a note of music can produce inventories of archives, comparisons among verbal documents, or accounts of various moments of critical reception. They cannot, however, address how music itself participates as a cultural medium to articulate structures of feeling. Let me begin with some of the common explanations for why much French seventeenth-century music works in the ways I have described. Some simply assume the mediocrity of the music, considering it the product of talentless composers. And many assign the blame for this abysmal dearth of talent at the French court to Jean-Baptiste Lully, who exercised a ruthless monopoly over composition, driving wouldbe competitors to seek employment outside France and leaving behind only those who posed no challenge to his hegemony. But many political and cultural historians (Robert Isherwood, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Kathryn Hoffmann, Georgia Cowart) have pointed to the ideological centrality of Neoplatonic ideals for the perpetuation of the Absolutist state.18 Such critics understand seventeenth-century French cultural forms not as inept but as exceptionally powerful; they concentrate on how these media created the illusion of an eternal now so surfeited with pleasures and images of perfect order that thoughts of or desire for change never even had the chance to arise. In theory at least, Louis XIV arranged the daily lives of the nobility so as to distract them from fomenting rebellions such as the Fronde, to suspend them in an Arcadia of endless delights, in a condition of busy immobility. Hoffmann opens her book with “The society of pleasures . . . was a reverie of power where the logic of pleasure always contained the trap of violent oppression, where desire and force, pleasure and knowledge, the caress and the chains of subservience always informed each other in strange couplings”; and Isherwood concludes his study with “Louis XIV made music the handmaiden of the politics of absolutism.”19 Thus we could explain the music as the pragmatic means to an autocratic end: the deliberate anaesthetizing of a potentially restless group of subjects. The geometrical gardens at Versailles, the carefully executed divertissements, the highly regulated dance maneuvers, the complex etiquette of courtly manners, and many aspects of the music were deliberately designed to produce these political effects, to lull aristocrats into habits of activity-filled oblivion; in the words of a cynical contemporary critic, “Let the people slumber away in their festivities, in their spectacles.”20 I always marvel at accounts of French baroque music that somehow neglect to mention any of these issues; we should never minimize

254   |   La Mode Française

the efforts at social engineering that served to support such cultural practices. Yet I hate to fall back on a monolithic Adornoesque explanation that appeals solely to false consciousness. For if political establishments and their intentions must form part—even a large part—of the picture, they cannot account for the allure of the imagery, the material complexity of the practices, the ideals embodied and enacted through these processes. Moreover, a state, however powerful, cannot bring into being a viable structure of feeling purely by fiat.21 At best it can privilege some qualities that seem consonant with its priorities and try to suppress others— which is, of course, precisely what happened under Louis XIV. But this mode of being must have had broad-based support, must have made sense and genuinely counted as appealing for it to work, even at the political level. As it happens, this sense of timelessness was valued not only by the centers of power in France but also by many of those disenfranchised by Absolutism. In his classic study The Hidden God, Lucien Goldmann argues that the Port Royal philosophers advocated withdrawal from the world in part as a way of coping with an eroded sense of political agency; he shows how they aspired to an ideal of attentive motionlessness while discouraging future-oriented thought and beliefs in progress.22 Martin de Barcos (1600–1678), for instance, wrote, “Thoughts of the future are a dangerous and clever temptation of the Evil One, contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, and capable of ruining everything if not resisted; they must be rejected without even a first glance, since God’s word tells us not only to take no thought for the morrow in things temporal but also in things spiritual, and it is these which hang much more on His will.”23 Far from anticipating the advent of Enlightenment habits of thought, this philosophy recalls the sublime passivity advocated in the parable of the lilies in Matthew 6: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Barcos’s more famous colleague Blaise Pascal likewise wrestled with skepticism concerning agency in a world bounded by Absolutist rule: “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only misery and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and are incapable of either certainty or happiness. We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to make us feel from where we have fallen.”24 An entirely different religious domain, that of the Quietist mystics,  

 

 

 

Temporality and Ideology   |   255

diverged in many important ways from the theology of Port Royal, yet they too advocated withdrawal from time. Saint Francis de Sales (1567– 1622), for instance, wrote concerning “The Prayer of Quiet”:  

The soul, then, being thus inwardly recollected in God or before God, now and then becomes so sweetly attentive to the goodness of her well-beloved, that her attention seems not to her to be attention, so purely and delicately is it exercised; as it happens to certain rivers, which glide so calmly and smoothly that beholders and such as float upon them, seem neither to see nor feel any motion, because the waters are not seen to ripple or flow at all. Now this repose sometimes goes so deep in its tranquility, that the whole soul and all its powers fall as it were asleep, and make no movement nor action whatever except the will alone, and even this does no more than receive the delight and satisfaction which the presence of the well-beloved affords. . . . It is better to sleep upon this sacred breast than to watch elsewhere, wherever it be.25

Sales refers to the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila for corroboration of this experience of quiet, but it is very significant that Teresa regards quiet as the least ecstatic of the states she describes in her vivid prose. Her desire-driven descriptions of divine union, which inspired so much poetry, music, and visual art of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, found little resonance in her French counterparts; the Quietist mystic Mme. Guyon, for instance, exalted most a condition in which the soul is “without action, without desire, without inclination, without choice, without impatience, seeing things only as God sees them, and judging them only with God’s judgment.”26 Note that although the Absolutist court worked to suppress both Jansenism and Quietism they all share similar phenomenological ideals. In other words, musical imagery need not correspond in a one-to-one relationship with the antagonisms or allegiances in the world of politics; the cultural meanings of music are always much vaguer than we might wish. At the same time, music also offers experiential knowledge of a sort that makes far more palpable the qualities aspired to during former periods. Philosophers and theologians of the late seventeenth century could write all they wanted about qualities of being in time, but they could never attain the immediacy offered by immersion in, say, D’Anglebert’s tombeau, in which we hover for the duration of about four minutes in an eternal present of plaisir, slightly tinged with a melancholy reminiscent of Watteau.27 Perhaps the most important cultural insight offered by this music, however, involves what polemicists referred to as raison, that sense of

256   |   La Mode Française

reason apparently guaranteed by French manners and found to be sorely lacking in the rambunctious music from Italy. We often conflate the raison of French style with the brand of Reason elevated by the dawning Enlightenment. But they are not the same: indeed, they turn out to be diametrically opposed qualities. As Norbert Elias has explained, the raison of court culture might better be translated as “regulation”: it involves submission to tradition and etiquette.28 Such acquiescence gained one entry into a Neoplatonic realm that embodied timeless truths; it allowed one to luxuriate in an idyllic cocoon, a paradise on earth. By contrast, the premises of contemporaneous Italian music enacted ideals of progressive thought: the consistent sacrifice within the music of past and present for the sake of ongoing movement into the future. It is the Italian version of tonality that best approximates the restless habits of questioning, discarding, and projecting forward on the quest for distant goals that we identify with Enlightenment Reason. To the extent that images of extroverted public rhetoric, progressive action, and investment in the future circulated within Italian repertories, that music needed to be quarantined: French authorities feared that a bite of the forbidden sonata would suffice to destroy the illusion of their carefully cultivated Eden, to bring about another fall from grace. We can still experience in the musical practices of this time the radical incompatibility of these two worlds. To those courtiers who had managed to live suspended in music such as D’Anglebert’s, the head-on collision with the sweeping events of the later eighteenth century involved more than loss of status and wealth; it brought with it the violent collapse of a way of being. The hermetically sealed jar broke and history rushed in. This helps explain the vehemence with which so many in France denounced Italian music. In his account of the hysteria over music generated during the Guerre des bouffons, D’Alembert presented a satirical version of the argument against foreign styles: All liberties are interrelated and are equally dangerous. Freedom in music entails freedom to feel, freedom to feel means freedom to act, and freedom to act means the ruin of states. So let us keep French opera as it is if we wish to preserve the kingdom and let us put a brake on singing if we do not want to have liberty in speaking to follow soon afterwards.29

Note D’Alembert’s use of breathless phrasing and his deployment of logic that, once unleashed, runs rampant from music to insurrection. The irony is, of course, that if Italian music itself did not bring about

Temporality and Ideology   |   257

the French Revolution, it did embody quite palpably the qualities of motion and habits of thought that eventually overthrew the court tradition. In the words of José Maravall, “Static guidance controlling by presence had to give way before a dynamic guidance controlling by activity.”30 And given French ideals such as Neoplatonic order, spiritual Quiet, Absolutist authority, and Arcadian timelessness, the awakening could not have been ruder.31 Of course, seventeenth-century France also produced Descartes, who advocated the individual subject’s questioning and rejection of traditional authority in his famous slogan “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). But that was an earlier time. Louis XIV effectively monopolized the terms of Descartes’ egocentricity with his “L’état, c’est moi!” (I am the State), according to which he became the supreme and only Subject. As Hoffmann puts it, the French nobility “were invited to desire their infinite subservience to the Other. It was a perfect dream of power . . . where the disciple is always desiring the body of the master and is turned to stare, in the posture of admiration, at the place where the renunciation of his own will is performed. Reverie of another’s cogito.”32 I have no intention of trying to lure anyone back to take up permanent habitation in the always-vulnerable, spellbound utopia of seventeenth-century France. But as historians of music, we need to be able to understand the goût, the plaisir, the raison that sustained this repertory, not only for the sake of performers, who must learn how to suspend their expectation of future-oriented procedures if they are to make sense of this music, but also for the sake of historians of culture, to whom we can offer invaluable pieces of a larger puzzle. Versailles has long since become a theme park safe for bourgeois tourists. Perhaps we can afford the occasional surrender to absorption in D’Anglebert without losing our investment in upward mobility.

Chapter 10

The Dragon Cart The Femme Fatale in   Seventeenth-Century French Opera

In the previous two chapters I dealt at length with issues of energy control in music of the French court. In contrast with the desire-driven trajectories of Italianate procedures, most French music of this period strives to produce a condition of timelessness—or at least a phenomenological state governed by moderation and reason. Literary sources abound with stories of individuals who did not manage to keep themselves bridled, and operas often present characters who must be chastised for their failure to keep their emotions in check. In Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Persée, for instance, the character Mérope persists in expressing her desire for Perseus, even though he is promised elsewhere. After repeated warnings that she should curb her passion, she falls into an ill-fated plot and is finally arrested. Even without the conspiracy, however, Mérope seems to demand punishment through her inappropriate modes of singing; she is given to Italianate outbursts in an otherwise well-regulated French society. She is also by far the most riveting character in this opera, for she alone is torn by inner conflicts. But as we have seen, court culture required that these all-too-human feelings be bottled up, kept out of the view of other courtiers. The consequences for failing to do so were dire. Thus it comes as a particular shock to find two very prominent and publicly displayed exceptions to this otherwise dependable rule: Lully’s Armide and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Médée.  

258

The Dragon Cart   |   259 •

•

•

The Frick Collection in New York devotes an entire room to a single project by François Boucher, The Arts and Sciences. In this series of paintings Boucher presents paired allegories of adult activities: “Singing and Dancing,” “Painting and Sculpture,” “Fishing and Hunting,” “Astronomy and Hydraulics,” “Poetry and Music,” “Architecture and Chemistry.” But his agents are impossibly cute children, whose chemistry sets explode and who peer through the wrong end of the telescope. All maintain an aura of cuddly innocuousness except one. For the tragic component of “Comedy and Tragedy” Boucher still features his typical Kewpie doll subject, but this one has mounted a flying dragon cart and brandishes a dagger with a look of horrific rage distorting her tiny face. Although she most resembles a hissing kitten, we are meant to recognize her as a miniature Medea, depicted just after she has tossed the mutilated bodies of her children at Jason, their father. This scarcely seems proper stuff for the nursery! What is this doing here? Boucher captures in this little spoof the climactic moment not only of various seventeenth-century French dramatizations of Medea but also of Armida, the seductive sorceress from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Time and time again, the playwrights and librettists of the ancien régime turned for inspiration to these stories of the femme fatale, often producing enduring masterpieces in so doing. We might, of course, say the same of nineteenth-century opera. Yet these seventeenth-century temptresses differ in at least one important respect from their latter-day sisters. The penalty for feminine transgression in Romantic opera—in, for example, Carmen or Salome—is sure and violent death. By contrast, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Médée end their respective operas by leaping unrepentant onto their dragon carts and flying off into the rafters of the theater, the moment most often preserved in drawings commemorating such productions. Within the context of opera they do so accompanied by an overwhelming musical upbeat that defies resolution as they surge out beyond the temporal boundaries of the composition. Some years ago I published a chapter titled “Excess and Frame” in which I examined a convention that normally demands that madwomen (or simply forces categorized as “feminine”) be eliminated for purposes of narrative and musical closure.1 The same principle prevails in the movies: think, for instance, how fervently we need to see Glenn Close  

 

260   |   La Mode Française

really and truly dead at the end of Fatal Attraction. Or, as the exception that proves the rule, the end of Basic Instinct, in which Sharon Stone provocatively toys with an ice pick concealed underneath the bed. This may be as close to the dragon cart as Hollywood gets. For recall the last frame of Thelma and Louise, in which defiant (though entirely sympathetic) women similarly take to the sky over the Grand Canyon in their chariot—but with the sure implication that gravity will cause them to crash and burn as a result of that airborne trajectory. If the director spares us the inevitable downbeat, we know it must follow, despite the exhilaration we experience with that frozen moment of glory. No such downbeat awaits Médée or Armide, however. They fly away scot-free, ready to wreak havoc on the next unsuspecting hero. I have no intention of retracting my previous theoretical model in the face of these French seventeenth-century discrepancies, for I never claimed that the convention was an absolute; indeed, I offer counterexamples of my own in Feminine Endings. But that model helps us not only to identify moments that bear out its claims but also to take notice of exceptions—rather the way our definitions of musical consonance allow us to recognize and then seek explanations for dissonance. And these ladies who fly in the face of my lovely theory and get to sing the last word at the top of their lungs—especially in this most rule-bound of contexts—clearly demand some explanation. The most obvious explanatory strategy turns to the stories upon which the authors of these operas relied. Medea has her dragon cart awaiting her in the classic setting by Euripides; even Pierre Corneille’s version of Médée (1635), though it concludes with a monologue by Jason, allows his Médée her glorious dragon-borne exit. This splendid coup de théâtre, along with the requisite incantation scene, accounts in part for the popularity of Medea-based plays since Hellenic times. The much later story of Armida and her seductive power over the hapless crusader Rinaldo clearly borrows important elements from the model of Medea: the incantations to infernal powers, the threat of feminine seduction, the rage of the woman scorned that leads her to destroy her enchanted palace and to fly off into the air on her chariot. But not all seventeenth-century revivals of classic stories adhere faithfully to their literary sources, especially when it comes to powerful women. Venetian operas, for instance, often end very differently from their models, even though they repeatedly deal with femmes fatales. In Cavalli’s Giasone, for instance, Medea becomes a figure of ridicule, as she is tossed by mistake into the Aegean Sea and then married off pre 

 

 

 

The Dragon Cart   |   261

cipitously in the last moments of the opera to Aegeus, the largely irrelevant king of Athens, while an arbitrarily contrite Jason returns to his previous paramour, Isifile (see chapter 4). Cavalli gives the last word not to Medea or Jason but to a stuttering hunchback, the Marty Feldman of the Venetian stage. In his Didone, Cavalli does not even grant Dido her cathartic suicide: she too is married off—and to a character who has been portrayed as a lunatic throughout most of the opera. Wendy Heller rightly classifies this portion of the opera as comedy, despite Dido’s heart-rending lament immediately preceding the abrupt denouement.2 Powerful female characters may have been box-office draws in Venice, but the alignment of the commercial opera season with Carnival seems to have demanded happy endings, with threatening women safely domesticated by the final curtain. As Heller puts it, “Opera, like carnival, nearly always concludes with the confirmation of existing power relationships: marriage is usually favored over adultery, matriarchy concedes to patriarchy, and class and gender discrepancies are corrected. But, also like carnival, opera provided a space, albeit briefly, in which the rules were overturned, and in which a topsy-turvy universe was not only seen but also heard.”3 In the interest of reform, the next generation of Italians eliminated the topsy-turvy elements so loved by the Venetians. Opera seria—the dominant Italian genre from the late seventeenth century through Rossini—demanded the resolution of all tensions through the intervention of a benevolent patriarch; in Mozart’s Idomeneo, Electra is sent packing while the community rejoices in its monarch. Don’t look for girls on dragon carts there! I do not mean to dismiss or trivialize Italian opera. This is my first love, and I will always find myself far more drawn to its music than to that of its French counterparts, which I still struggle to appreciate quite so fully (see chapter 9). And Venetian opera often appears more progressive with respect to its willingness to stage explicit eroticism, impassioned expressivity, flirtation with same-sex encounters, and libertine behaviors of all varieties. Yet the fact remains that at least some French patrons tolerated plays and operas that feature these unrepentant women, whereas the Italians tended to clip their wings. I also do not intend to minimize the power of these women on the Italian stage, for they express their anguish with extraordinary eloquence. The fact that they ultimately get silenced does not make them any the less the emotional centers of their respective stories. The very abruptness of the closures to which they are subjected only makes their plaints resonate all the more; we clearly are not to take those reconcilia 

 

 

262   |   La Mode Française

tions and forced marriages as anything other than self-consciously artificial tactics. We get to experience that transgressive power and yet leave the theater with the tenets of social order still intact. I might mention as well that all these operas, whether French or Italian, feature oddly ineffectual male characters. Even the heroes of antiquity and Renaissance epic—Aeneas, Jason, Rinaldo, Roland—lie limp as putty in the hands of their respective seductresses. Recall that none of these operas or the films I mentioned earlier was contrived by a feminist: these are male parables of male powerlessness, composed by male artists, and aimed at predominantly male audiences. Yet the women get to act as the agents who move the plots, and they—not the ostensible heroes—execute the musical gestures associated at the time with virility, often even militancy. In fact, the French operatic rendition of Armide actually eliminates the safety mechanisms and softening elements Tasso had built into his epic poem. As we read in canto VII, verse 34 of Gerusalemme liberata, the original Armida travels by means of a cart conveyed not by dragons but by virginal unicorns worthy of any prepubescent girl’s fantasies:  

 

 

 

The chariot is like that which brings the day, shining with pyrope and jacinth; and the skilled driver manages with adorned yoke four unicorns harnessed, two by two. A hundred girls and a hundred pages in array, their shoulders slung with bows, complete the sight, spurring the backs of their white steeds apace, war stallions quick to turn, and light to race.

Moreover, after vacillating between love and vengeance for several cantos, Tasso’s Armida ends up by capitulating to her crusader. On the penultimate page she utters abjectly, “I am your handmaid. What you think best, do, and let my law be but a sign from you.” The seventeenth century scarcely counts as a moment of women’s liberation, of course. In addition to garden-variety patriarchal oppression, this was the great era of witch hunts. Médée and Armide attain their power by means of black magic, and the centerpieces of their respective operas allow us to witness them conjuring up the forces of Hell, performing precisely the kinds of lurid fantasies that fueled the Inquisition. Recall that the literary sources, though they acknowledge these characters as sorceresses, do not focus unduly on incantation rituals, nor do they declare time-out for divertissements that feature demons prancing about on the stage, as do both these operas. But the operatic Armide

The Dragon Cart   |   263

and Médée qualify unequivocally as monsters, just like the ones now burning at an auto-da-fé near you. Still and all, they manage to escape their rightful punishments by means of their magic dragons. We usually assume that the entertainments produced for Louis XIV will betray their origins in the heavily regulated environment of his court. As we saw in chapters 8 and 9, no pastime—and certainly nothing that required the capital investment of the tragédie lyrique—occurred without the intense scrutiny of several state agencies. Moreover, Armide was a collaboration between Louis’s longtime culture czar, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Philippe Quinault, and it remained in production as the most critically acclaimed of their works. The dragon cart didn’t sneak in while no one was paying attention, in other words. Indeed, Lully and Quinault imposed it on a literary model that boasted a far less threatening heroine. Still, the French court itself, however stringently policed, had a much greater claim to gender equality than most other European centers of cultural production at the time or, indeed, even today. Aristocratic women participated in and sometimes even dominated certain activities: they operated as patrons, commissioning works from artists and thereby influencing subject matter and treatment. Lully, for instance, first entered into court circles through the Duchesse de Montpensier, the so-called Grande Mademoiselle. And it was Mademoiselle de Guise, of the powerful house of Orléans, who sponsored Charpentier, helping him to forge crucial connections relatively independent of Louis himself. Patricia Ranum has suggested that some of the adverse criticism Charpentier received may have stemmed in part from the centuries-old rivalry between the Bourbon and Orléans families.4 Many such women ran salons, some of them ranking among the most important intellectual contexts of their time. Madeleine de Scudéry and others figured among the first serious proponents of Descartes and Newton, and the philosophers themselves often valued their insights and responded to their critiques.5 Though sometimes referred to as les précieuses because of their penchant for elaborate metaphorical expression, they influenced the literary and philosophical stars of their day and even dared publish their own works; the French novel—largely a genre by and for women—developed within these salons, and some of the sharpest political criticism of the time was penned by noble ladies, including la Grande Mademoiselle. Needless to say, these efforts did not receive universal acclaim: la Grande Mademoiselle had to spend time in exile at her estate for her  

 

 

 

264   |   La Mode Française

efforts, though she continued on unabated with her writing. Later, Molière wrote several scathing parodies in which women put on intellectual airs, pretend to write poetry, and neglect their duties as wives and mothers—or even refuse marriage and procreation altogether—in favor of the life of the mind. Some of the satirical lines in, say, Les Précieuses ridicules or Les Femmes savantes might have been penned quite recently by Lynne Cheney. And Boileau’s Contre les femmes (1696) attacks women specifically for their love of opera.6 Such put-downs as well as the newly established Académie française, which excluded women, took their toll. By the turn of the century female intellectuals had lost some of their former eminence. Yet the firebrands Armide and Médée surely recalled some of these powerful women at court, and they similarly inspired both admiration and anxiety. Lully in particular maintained very close ties with women at court, especially in the later years of his career, when knowledge of his pederasty began to strain his formerly tight personal and working relationship with the king, now under the influence of his Jansenist mistress, Madame de Maintenon.7 The tragédie lyrique always begged to be interpreted in terms of the king himself. From an early age and even after his coronation, Louis starred in ballets designed to exhibit his personal and symbolic prowess; when age began to undermine his ability to perform his own perfection, the opera became the principal genre dedicated to the Sun King.8 Allegorical prologues invariably addressed him and celebrated explicitly his most recent military triumphs: la Gloire reigns supreme in these introductory extravaganzas. But the court also witnessed on a daily basis the spectacle of the king’s dalliances and his shifting hierarchy of mistresses. The dramatic plots of the tragédies lyriques nearly always pivot around the conflict between love (read: sexual pleasure) and glory (or effective leadership), both immediate concerns for the nobility that staked its future on Louis’s continuing success, as well as for the king himself. That he approved and sometimes went so far as to propose themes in which great heroes lie helpless in the thrall of beautiful temptresses indicates significant self-awareness on his part. As Dowling Thomas argues in his Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, if Louis appeared as an explicit model of masculine prowess in the prologues, he also tolerated and even welcomed the topics treated in operas themselves, complete with their impotent leading males and ravishing Amazons.9  

 

The Dragon Cart   |   265

Marriage scarcely seems a viable outcome for such stories: these tempestuous women are mistresses or (in the case of Médée) powerful wives. Thus the usual loophole of docile domesticity offered by Italian opera does not work in these contexts. Moreover, few would dare actually killing these women off at the end—not with all their obvious models sitting in the audience ready to pounce. The artifice of the stage machine conveying Armide or Médée away at least breaks the powerful emotional spell they cast over the courses of their respective operas. Feminine rage converts to special effect, social anxiety to technological marvel. To put it in a slightly different way, the end of her opera would have been far more terrifying if Médée had simply hurled the body parts of her children at Jason and stalked off the stage without taking to her dragon cart. The contraption itself helps to produce necessary distance, allowing us to perceive it as a fiction after all. Boucher’s Kewpie doll Médée recalls the paradox that the dragons to some extent defang the image.  

•

•

•

But enough of contextual explanation for now. What do these moments actually sound like? The Médée of Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Thomas Corneille premiered in December 1693 at the Académie royale de musique. In a bid to win the favor of the king (or perhaps only because it was de rigueur for the period), the collaborators raise the curtain with the words “Louis est triumphant,” and the allegorical figures of Glory and Victory descend in a palace from the clouds to participate in a prolonged celebration of the repose made possible by the king’s military prowess. But after the completion of the sycophantic prologue, the musical markers of militancy will mostly belong to Médée. And she possesses them right from the outset. In her opening lines she claims control over repose and glory, thereby usurping precisely the attributes ascribed to the king in the prologue. But prescient as she is, she fears that her husband, Jason, has transferred his affections to Crëuse, the princess of Corinth, despite the fact that he owes his achievements to Médée’s sacrifices and powerful interventions. As Nérine, her confidante, seeks to reassure her, Médée gives us a glimpse of her potential rage: her eyes have tamed wild bulls, and the mere thought that Jason might prove faithless threatens to awaken her inner dragon. The violins begin to swirl, and urgent, repeated pitches in her accompaniment simulate the pent-up energy only barely contained.

266   |   La Mode Française

Qu’il le cherche, mais qu’il me craigne.

Let him seek, but let him fear me.

Un dragon assoupy, de fiers taureaux domptez,

A dragon subdued, fierce bulls tamed,

Ont à ses yeux suivy mes volontez.

His eyes have seen them obey my commands.

S’il me vole son coeur, si la Princesse y regne,

If his heart is stolen, if the Princess rules,

De plus grands efforts feront voir,

Greater efforts will reveal

Ce qu’est Médée et son pouvoir.

Who Medea is and what are her powers.

Nérine, who has witnessed that force unleashed in the past, hastens to calm her, and the two sing a gorgeous duet: this is the sound of Médée the loving wife and mother, Médée as she wishes to be. But if Nérine strives to reduce Médée’s level of fury temporarily, she and Médée also express an ulterior motive: vengeance is better achieved when rage is concealed. Immediately, Jason enters and unwittingly confirms all of Médée’s worst suspicions. Guess what?! Crëuse wants to take care of our children while you go alone into exile, and (by the way) she really likes your dress du soleil. Can I give it to her? For the remainder of this tragédie, Médée struggles valiantly to keep her rage in check while her husband, his mistress, and the king of Corinth push her beyond the capacity of even her superhuman tolerance. We listen in on sappy, adulterous love scenes between Jason and Crëuse, and we are subjected to King Créon’s self-serving political maneuvers to rid his kingdom of this inconvenient sorceress. Only when she has tried every means of negotiation and finds herself backed into a corner does Médée finally fight back. Calling on her infernal deputies, she casts a spell of madness on the king, poisons the dress that burns Crëuse to death, butchers Jason’s sons, and takes to the air with the same swirling violins and in the same key that she prophesied in her first aria. Given the stoic suppression of her violent temper since that opening scene, this blaze of glory at the end grants us a longawaited catharsis. Médée receives Jason’s hypocritical objections with contempt, presented in a triumphant major key. As hideous as her act of infanticide is, the music accompanying the collapse of Corinth and her ascent in the dragon cart sweeps us along with her. Charpentier sutures us, in effect, into her subject position and thus delivers what we are to experience as an exhilarating (if not exactly happy) ending.

The Dragon Cart   |   267

•

Adieu Jason, j’ay rempli ma vengeance.

Farewell, Jason, I have taken my vengeance,

Voyant Corinthe en feu, ces palais embrassés,

Seeing Corinth in flames, these palaces ablaze,

Pleure à jamais les maux que ta flamme a causés.

Mourn forever the evils your passion caused.

•

•

Lully’s Armide received its first performance six years earlier than Médée, in February 1686. Although earlier in his career Lully had staunchly denied the possibility of opera in the French language and had long blocked its development, under his own monopoly he made it not only a viable genre but one that could rival its Italian counterparts. Armide was the last tragédie lyrique he completed before his death a year later; it was celebrated as the gold standard of French opera for the next several decades, and it served as the stick with which eighteenthcentury Lullistes could flog their opéra comique challengers. The librettist, Philippe Quinault, drew his characters and plot from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Within the context of the epic, Armida is a kind of Saracen Mata Hari, a secret agent sent into the crusaders’ camp to disable the Christian knights before they even have a chance to go into battle. Although she has magical powers, she manages by means of her beauty alone to seduce everyone except for Godfrey, the pious leader of the company, and Rinaldo, the most valiant of the crusading heroes. Rinaldo’s imperviousness to her physical charms so infuriates Armida that she resorts to her sorcery in order to conquer him. But when her pet demons have brought him unconscious and helpless to her lair, she hesitates before striking him dead. The unthinkable has occurred: the formidable Armida has fallen in love with someone whose charms exceed her own. And even though she can keep him as her paramour as long as he lies under her enchanted spell, she knows only too well that he does not love her of his own volition. Consequently, when his comrades find him and bring him to his senses, he abandons Armida without a second thought. She delivers a blistering tirade, turns her magic powers against herself as she destroys the illusory palace in which she had held Rinaldo captive, and then flies off in her . . . unicorn chariot. In the final scene of Gerusalemme liberata Tasso brings back his Armida, defeated militarily by her former lover and vowing devotion and begging for conversion to Christianity. Quinault, however, ends with her tirade and her dragons.

268   |   La Mode Française

In Tasso, Rinaldo figures as a full-fledged hero. We see him engaged in battle and in strategic planning with the other officers. But Quinault’s Renaud serves as little more than a passive object of desire, a plot device for igniting Armide’s contradictory passions: violence, tenderness, shame, remorse, vengeance. Time after time, beginning with the scene in which she hovers over the sleeping Renaud with her dagger, she finds her will to slay him stymied by her desire. Even when she realizes that he responds to her only by virtue of the hypnotic trance in which she holds him, she cannot muster the strength to kill him. She summons up La Haine—the infernal power of Hate—but just as they are cementing a pact to destroy Renaud, Armide weakens in her resolve and withdraws from the agreement, to the disgust of Hate, who forecasts her doom. The battle takes place entirely within her own breast, and Lully had the task of dramatizing that inner conflict in music. Not everyone has thought he succeeded: Jean-Jacques Rousseau took special delight in lampooning the very scenes Lully’s followers so admired. Where they heard exquisite nuance, Rousseau perceived stagnant, tuneless waffling.10 He faulted these scenes for lacking the extended dynamic trajectories and vivid emotional range characteristic of Italian opera. Until quite recently, most musicologists fell in line with Rousseau’s dismissal of Lully’s operas, which seemed in retrospect to have greater historical than aesthetic significance. But new recordings by conductors such as William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe manage to capture the sensuality and theatricality of these scores, causing many of us to alter our previous assessments. The fact that Lully owed his career in part to political machinations and his acquisition of a royal monopoly does not mean that he could not also write music. Take, for instance, the famed passacaille in act 5. Armide has to go off on business (the Crusades are still going on, after all), and she leaves Renaud slumbering in the safekeeping of her demons, disguised here as Plaisirs. The passacaille proceeds over a repeating harmonic pattern; a sense of timelessness emerges as each moment of would-be closure simply opens out into the next iteration, each more lavishly orchestrated than the last.11 Lully manages to keep this trance state going for more than thirteen minutes. Renaud struggles in vain to pull himself from the amorous web spun by the pleasure demons, and he succeeds at last only because his fellow warriors arrive to break the spell and return him to the battlefield.12 But in the pleasure palace of Versailles, passacailles in which courtiers danced around their Sun King could—and did—last for hours. And in contrast to Renaud, no one came to wake them up.13  

 

 

 

The Dragon Cart   |   269

In Armide, however, the call to arms and glory interrupts the reverie. Armide returns to find her lover preparing to leave, and although she pulls out all the stops—threatens to pursue him from beyond the grave, appeals to his pity, falls down in a deathlike swoon—he departs. The final scene finds her alone, bereft of her paramour and humiliated by her inability to keep him the old-fashioned way: through love alone. The tensions that have driven the plot throughout remain unresolved, for Armide still hovers indecisively between her thirst for vengeance and her unquenchable desire for Renaud. At first she laments, in the time-honored fashion of all abandoned women. But even the signature line of her lament—“Le perfide Renaud me fuit, tout perfide qu’il est mon lâche coeur le suit”—contains her central contradiction. If it begins with an assaultive accusation, it nevertheless concludes with the abject acknowledgment of her compulsion to concede to him. She encapsulates her dilemma within the scope of this two-measure unit, which opens and closes her lament (ex. 10.1).  

 

 

 

Le perfide Renaud me fuit;

The perfidious Renaud leaves me;

Tout perfide qu’il est, mon lâche coeur le suit.

Perfidious as he is, my feeble heart follows.

Il me laisse mourante, il veut que je périsse.

He leaves me dying, he wants me to perish.

A regret je revois la clarté qui me luit;

With regret I see the light beckoning me.

L’horreur de l’éternelle nuit

The horror of eternal night

Cède a l’horreur de mon supplice.

Yields to the horror of my torment.

Le perfide Renaud me fuit;

The perfidious Renaud leaves me;

Tout perfide qu’il est, mon lâche coeur le suit.

Perfidious as he is, my feeble heart follows.

Between statements of this refrain Armide indulges in self-pity, rendered unstable by the metrical irregularities invented by Lully to simulate the declamatory modes of actors in the Comédie-Française. In contrast to typical Italian recitative, which builds intensity through metrical consistency and melodic lines that drive inexorably toward the rhetorical argument’s bottom line, Lully constantly shifts the floor, thereby thwarting the very development of expectations. His music locates us in Armide’s indecisive subject position, for each possible solution withers even as she speaks it, with no bottom-line solution in sight. Thus the antecedent phrase “Il me laisse mourante” ends quickly

270   |   La Mode Française

with a pair of eight notes before plunging on to the consequent “il veut que je périsse,” which drags out its conclusion to quarter notes over a harmony that suddenly falls stagnant. An Italianate composer would have done just the opposite, thereby telescoping durations and propelling the energy forward. But even at this very local level, Lully simulates Armide’s ambivalences in her alternations between reckless thrusts and self-canceling hesitations. Next she gazes with regret at her dismal future and gives herself over in m. 24 to a Phrygian cadence. As if to pull herself out of this uncharacteristic passivity, she recalls the horrors of hell and willfully truncates her meter to a measure in three. But as she realizes that horror now resides in her own suffering, she struggles harmonically and metrically to avoid the inevitable: three gives way to four, then to two for what sounds like premature return of the refrain. Just before she returns to the inevitability of that refrain, however, she caresses the word “supplice” with a lovely Eâ major chord: this torment is the only souvenir her lover Renaud has left for her. Rousseau ridiculed Armide’s earlier scene for simply circling around E minor without going anywhere. Alas, this is the musical equivalent of Armide’s state of mind: she can twist and turn, but she cannot throw off her obsession. This scene, too, circles ineffectually around a single key, G minor. A subsequent speech allows her to recall with regret her rejection of help from La Haine, Renaud’s courage, and her futile efforts at holding him. But in a musical deus ex machina, the harmonization of her cadence suddenly turns effortlessly from G minor to G major. Armide unleashes her rage, and an instrumental ritornelle, replete with the rhythms of military tattoos and swirling melodic lines, starts to push forward and upward. When she enters again, it is in full revenge mode; she seeks to immolate Renaud in her fury. Yet even here, in the midst of her triumph, she breaks down one last time as she remembers her hapless state. Then onward to the dragon cart: she calls on Vengeance and converts her Plaisirs back into demons so that they can wreak havoc on her palace and bury her love in its ruins. As if fearful that she will once again lose her resolve, she gallops for the end, spitting out invectives with furious speed and sounding less like the love-stricken Armide than like the hissing reptiles that draw her carriage. An instrumental tag with an endlessly rising bass line propels her and her dragon cart into the rafters for a breathtaking conclusion. She’ll be back! But not in this particular opera, for which she manages to have the last word— and then some.  

E x . 10.1. Lully, Armide, act 5, scene 5, beginning.

2 &b 2 î &b ? b

3

3

5

7

7

2 ú 2 2 2 ú

Le per

Î

Ï

ú

-

fi - de Re - naud me fuit,

cÏ

Ï

Ï

6

#6

3

cÏ

Ï

fi - de quÕil est mon l‰ - che coeur le

Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # n6

Ñ 6

b

#6

6

j j bÏ. & b Ï Ï ä JÏ J ä Ïj Ï

ran - te,

& b bÏ ? b bú

&b Ï

gret

& b Ï. ? b #ú n5

suit.

il

Ï Ïj Ï J

je

j Ï Ï . Ï.

re - voy

veut

3

Ñ

Ï Ï Ï R J J

que je

Ï

Ï

#

Ï Ï J J

Ï. Ï ú

Ï Ï

ú

w Ï ÏJ Ï J

Ï

la clar - tŽ

j Ï Ï nÏ bú J 7

qui me luit;

Ï Ï #Ï.

6

Ï J

Ï Ï

Ï

6

Ï j Ï.Ï R

Il me lais - se mou-

pŽ - ris - se,

Ï Ï

ú b

#

Ï

Ï J

Tout per -

Ï

Ï

Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï. Ï Ï

&b Ï b

Ï

x Ï Ï b JÏ JÏ Ï b Ï Ïj . Ï Ïj ä Ï Ï b Ï J J R R J J R

& b n ÏJ ?

5

#Ï Ï Ï Ïj c ÏJ ÏR ÏR J J J

Î

ú

#

ú

6

b5

Î

Î

Ï Ï J J

A re -

Ï Ï

ä JÏ

LÕhor -

3 4

j 43 Ï 43

(continued)

E x . 10.1. (continued) 9

9

b Ï Ïx . Ï Ï Ï 3 j r j j j Ïr c b Ï Ï J & 4 #Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï J R R J R J reur de lÕŽ - ter - nel - le

3 & b 4 ú. ? b 43 ú . #4

2 &b 2 ú

11

pli

2 &b 2 ú

11

? b 22 ú 13

& b n ÏJ

13

6

-

Ï

ce.

Ï.

&b Ï

Le per

Ï Ï b JÏ R R Ï

Ñ 6

Ï

6

4

6 5

-

Ï J

b

Ï

Ï

Ï

cÏ

n64

Ï

Ï

#6

3

Ï Ï Ï

x

Ï Ï Ï

Ï

6

#6

3

#

suit.

2 Ï 2 ú

Ï Ï Ï #Ï.

Ï

Ñ

Ï J

Ï J

Ï

Ï

6

Ï

2 2

Tout per -

#

j Ï . Ï 22 ú R le

3

Ï

Ï J Ï bÏ J J

l‰ - che coeur

2 ÏÏ 2

Ï.

x

fi - de Re-naud me fuit,

j Ï cÏ

bú

n6

Ï Ï Ï

#Ï Ï Ïj c ÏJ ÏR ÏR J J

? b Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï b

c

c Ï Ï bÏ

fi - de quÕil est mon

x

nuit cŽ-de ˆ lÕhor-reur de mon sup -

2 2

22 ú

Ï î

Î ÏÏ ú

Traître, attends, je le tiens,

Traitor, wait, I hold him,

je tiens son coeur perfide.

I hold his treacherous heart.

Ah! Je l’immole à ma fureur  . . .

Ah, I sacrifice him to my fury . . .

Que dis-je! Où suis-je, hélas! Infortunée Armide!

What am I saying? Where am I? Poor Armide!

Où t’emporte une aveugle erreur?

Where does this blind error lead you?

The Dragon Cart   |   273

L’espoir de la vengeance est le seul qui me reste.

The hope of vengeance is all that is left me.

Fuyez, Plaisirs, fuyez, perdez tous vos attraits.

Begone, pleasures, renounce all your charms.

Démons, détruisez ce palais.

Demons, destroy this palace!

Partons, et s’il se peut, que mon amour funeste

Away! And if it can be, may my cursed love

Demeure enseveli dans ces lieux pour jamais!

Remain buried in this place forever!

Where is the frame to seal off all this excess? At the conclusion of both these operas, noise prevails: ideologically with the victorious and destructive agency of sorceresses, musically with upbeats of extraordinary energy and a quality of abruptness that verges on the violent. We can read some of the moral lessons in these operas fairly easily: such fables urge Louis to throw off the blandishments of pleasure and to turn his attention to the next battle; they caution against powerful women and their potential for rage. But they also play on the cultural associations of men with order and women with the excess that comes of being fully human. The women get all the good music in these operas; even as they stand as figures of fear and anxiety, they also inspire envy through their license to a much greater range of self-expression. If such operas struggle to control the feminine, they also locate “the feminine” within the Self more broadly understood as the repository of emotion, desire, pleasure, and sexuality; thus, the eroticized self qualifies automatically as effeminate. As Stephen Orgel shows in his brilliant essay “What Knights Really Want,” Spenser’s The Faerie Queene shares this erotic fantasy of the hero lying asleep while predatory women and/or boys perform sexual acts on his slumbering body.14 Seventeenth-century men apparently wished to avoid taking responsibility for their sexual activity, preferring to lie like Sleeping Beauty at the mercy of a dominatrix. On the other hand, both Médée and Armide possess cultural attributes of “the masculine” in their success as warriors and military leaders; their downfalls— no less than Jason’s and Renaud’s—result from their inadvertent surrender to their feminine sides. In effect, they revert to their Amazonian predispositions for their final blastoffs. I, for one, have learned from reviews of my earlier work that one does not disrespect male authority with impunity, and I am reluctant to applaud these bad girls unequivocally. But Marc-Antoine Charpentier  

 

274   |   La Mode Française

and Jean-Baptiste Lully (both boys last time I checked) created these glorious monsters. So let me conclude by expressing my deep admiration for these particular dead white males and their daring young maids in their flying machines. If our inherited tradition had offered us only such models and if we all had dragon carts, we might not have needed a feminist revolution.

Postlude Toward Consolidation

Over the course of this volume I have traced various ways in which seventeenth-century composers expanded, compressed, and otherwise manipulated the grammatical units and expressive conventions they had inherited from their sixteenth-century forebears. For at least the first half of the 1600s, most of them would have regarded their tasks and options along the lines here presented. None of these strategies presents insurmountable challenges to analysis—the kind of analysis necessary for performance and cultural interpretation—provided that we understand modal background maneuvers on the one hand and expansion devices on the other. In the dances discussed in chapter 8 and in the occasional self-contained aria, the modulatory schemata familiar to us from eighteenthcentury music begin to come to the fore. To the extent that the background pursues a particular linear progression—from tonic to dominant (or relative major), another key or two, and a return to tonic—with each point along the way sustained through cadentially based harmonies, we may consider the piece as tonal in the narrow, common-practice sense of the word. This increasingly becomes a default arrangement. Not all composers moved in this direction, however. As we shall see in this final section, Giacomo Carissimi often exhibited a penchant for Aeolian and Mixolydian structures, with moves to the subdominant more common than those oriented toward the dominant. Much later in the century, Buxtehude still maintained distinctive approaches for  

 

 

 

275

276   |   Postlude

different modal types. And J. S. Bach held onto modal ways of thinking more often than we usually recognize. To acknowledge these tendencies by no means implies defectiveness— unless, of course, we imagine that their ultimate goal was to arrive at and embrace tonality as the only game in town. But the tonal arrangement, whatever its doubtless charms and particular advantages for later musicians and theorists, counted as only one of many then available, appropriate for certain expressive purposes and not at all so for others. If some composers chose to streamline their practice by adopting what would become the typical succession of modulations, many preferred to keep operating within a full range of structural frameworks. By around 1675, however, tonal procedure had begun to emerge as the standard arrangement; by the turn of the century musicians would nearly take it for granted. Yet I resist accepting tonality’s triumph as in any way inevitable, even at this critical juncture. Indeed, if we discard the usual teleological explanation, we may find that “why tonality and why at this moment?” become crucial questions for music historians. Here are few tentative answers. First, tonality counts as one of several moves toward the formal standardization that enables the greater transparency of communication valued so highly in the 1700s. Ellen Rosand has shown how the pressures of quickly providing music for commercial opera in Venice in the 1640 (much like the writers of film music, the composers came in at the last minute to set full-length plays) encouraged the widespread adoption of preset conventions such as tonal procedure.1 If Monteverdi had luxuriated in the creation of complex allegories within his musical settings, the genre tended to follow more closely the model of Francesco Cavalli, who figured out how to streamline his process by means of formulas like the ones we have examined. Later, as publishers started to extend their markets to target a burgeoning merchant class, the intelligibility of sonatas such as those of Arcangelo Corelli (see below), which likewise stick to these formulaic backgrounds, proved unexpectedly profitable. In other words, the expanded diapente became the procedure of choice in part owing to commercial pressures and marketability. Second, the secularization of urban cultures that followed in the wake of religious wars had the effect of marginalizing the mysticism that had been so prominent in nearly all European religions earlier in the seventeenth century.2 Although we may regard those mystical movements as socially reactionary, they inspired much of the avant-garde music of the time, including that of Monteverdi, Girolamo Frescobaldi,  

Toward Consolidation   |   277

Alessandro Grandi, Heinrich Schütz, and many others. In the interest of producing experiences associated with divine union, composers sought to warp time and to simulate out-of-body sensations; indeed, they preferred nearly anything to the regulated temporalities of tonality, even though those were fully available to them. In chapter 5, for example, we examined the sometimes-shocking sacred monodies that make explicit use of sexual imagery to portray religious bliss. Chapter 6 turned to Frescobaldi’s elevation toccatas, in which leading tones point erratically in ever-shifting directions, thereby dramatizing the moment during communion of the transubstantiation of wine into blood; significantly, the device we usually align with human reason here produces vectors of disorientation to simulate the ineffability of divine truth. But with the decline of these sentiments within important cultural centers, the motivation for pursuing such musical strategies also drained away. Nonetheless, one can still find traces of mystical pietism and its musical analogues in the music of J. S. Bach—a composer who became an ardent convert to the tonality of Vivaldi but who still reverted more often than is commonly recognized to the ecstasies of his predecessors. The B Minor Mass resorts to Bride-and-Groom duets whenever Jesus enters the picture, and vestiges of Frescobaldi’s explorations of irrationality continued to show up in toccatas and preludes throughout Bach’s career— and even in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s proto-Romantic fantasias. Third, the influence of French classical aesthetics on late seventeenthcentury courts throughout Europe involved, among other things, the cleaning up of willful and irrational (read: Italian) musical strategies (see again chapters 7–10). Even in Italy, the sex farces of the Venetian stage got pushed aside by the far more dignified—and intensely codified— genre of opera seria, particularly in the Naples of the Spanish viceroys.3 And the quirky fits and starts of midcentury violin sonatas (see chapter 2) give way to more dignified, predictable principles of organization. Did the widespread acceptance of aesthetic values such as “moderation” and “raison” revered in seventeenth-century France qualify entirely as progress? As a reminder of what underlay those values, see Robert Isherwood’s Music in the Service of the King or Norbert Elias’s The Court Culture or Michel Foucault’s “Docile Bodies” or Kathryn Hoffmann’s Society of Pleasures.4 The formal standardization of opera seria and of tonal process might even count as aristocratic reaction formations, reining in the idiosyncratic extravagances of seventeenth-century musical expression. Finally, tonality fits perfectly within the ideological framework of the  

 

 

 

 

278   |   Postlude

Enlightenment, with its emphasis on ideals such as reason, social regulation, and the possibility of self-fashioning without reference to contingency. It is because of such features that tonal music submits so well to later manifestations of music theory, which sought to celebrate and render explicit the principles that allowed for simulations of pure logic.5 Yet the emergence of tonality cannot appear in advance as an obvious development, even if—especially if—later theorists worked to erase its historical tracks and to posit it as somehow natural. It may be easy to accept tonality as inevitable if we know of no viable alternatives for making musical sense. But such alternatives existed in abundance before the Enlightenment, and knowing some of them can help us understand not only the music of the seventeenth century but also the reasons why the eighteenth so preferred tonal strategies that it effectively expunged the memory of any other ways of being. In this final chapter I want to sketch out two clusters of later seventeenth-century formal strategies. The first section returns to a topic mentioned in earlier chapters, the development of standardized middlelevel devices designed for the incremental expansion of stable key areas. In the analysis of eighteenth-century tonal music, we typically pay much closer attention to these than to the ever-retreating background, which we can more or less take for granted until the next major shift of hierarchies.6 The second section examines pieces that deploy expansion techniques but in the service of backgrounds other than the ones that eventually prevailed, pieces that bear clear vestiges of modal conventions. In other words, the book concludes with what I characterize as the persistence of mode.  

 

Stabilizing Expansion As we have seen, much Italian music from the first half of the seventeenth century produces a breathless quality: the process no sooner establishes a cadence on one point in the background than it cranks up to rush on to the next. Recall, for instance, Antonio Cesti’s “Pose in fronte” (discussed in chapter 2), which simulates the masochistic sentiment articulated in its lyrics by this kind of desire machine. Yet even if such compositions meet the criteria I have suggested for tonality, their sense of duration and pacing differs radically from the comfortable stability that characterizes music of the more familiar eighteenth century. As I have argued repeatedly over the course of this book, most changes in musical style have principally to do with temporality, with pitches

Toward Consolidation   |   279

serving as the raw substance shaped in order to convey one structure of feeling or another. Paying exclusive attention to harmonic dimensions of music rarely achieves adequate answers. My discussion in this section owes a great deal to Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style, an extremely important book that catalogues a number of short patterns that served as the basis for music pedagogy in eighteenth-century Naples.7 As Gjerdingen demonstrates, these patterns also constituted the primary blocks from which composers from around 1730 through Mozart and beyond built their pieces. Within the terms of this book, I would claim that their purpose is to produce content while in essence not moving with respect to the background progression. Many of these formulas already began to appear in the seventeenth century and, indeed, I propose that they allowed for the next stage of expansion. Recall, for instance, “Delizie contenti” from Cavalli’s Giasone, discussed briefly in chapter 4 (see ex. 4.2). In the course of analyzing this character’s commitment to wallowing in passive pleasure, together with the charges of effeminacy hurled at him by his compatriots, I mentioned the aria’s simulation of lullaby. In contrast to his partner, Medea, whose aggressive trajectories of desire resemble those in Cesti’s cantata, Giasone’s aria operates almost entirely within complacent, selfcontained cadential patterns, giving it a sleepy, sensuous quality. Cavalli writes “Delizie contenti” in this way because he wants to de­­ fine the idiosyncrasies of a particular character. But such procedures— the expansion of single key areas through repeated cadential patterns, with text fragments and their attendant motives also presented multiple times—become increasingly prevalent, producing longer and longer autonomous movements. Many of Cavalli’s characters (for example, Ercole) remain loyal to the old value of rhetorical speech, and they openly scorn the self-indulgent “purely musical” proclivities of Giasone. But their manly recitatives will be soon shunted to the sidelines in favor of precisely the kinds of tunes and procedures their disgraced leader delivers. This is why the literary critic Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni (echoing Ercole) condemned Cavalli’s Giasone as having led opera down the slippery slope that finally would allow music to prevail over lyrics.8 For, despite criticism, such musical expansion continued unabated. Indeed, it only became worse from the viewpoint of writers such as Crescimbeni. Think of the da capo arias in Handel’s operas, some of which spend a good fifteen minutes on four lines of text! For an example of the next great phase of the expansion principle, I  

 

280   |   Postlude

turn first to an aria from Alessandro Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista, an oratorio composed in Rome in 1675. This oratorio has many claims to historical significance: it specified concerto grosso / concertino orchestration for the first time (along with other pieces written for the 1675 jubilee year), and it included one still-unknown Arcangelo Corelli in its string section. Corelli knew this music intimately, and much of the standardized style later identified with his sonatas and concertos attests to his early experiences with Stradella’s production. In other words, we might consider some of Stradella’s new ways of embodying time as fundamental to eighteenth-century musical procedures. Yet, oddly enough, I came to my project concerning syntactical change in the seventeenth century by way of Stradella. I became in­­ trigued by his music in a seminar directed by the late Nino Pirrotta around 1970, and I planned to write my dissertation on Stradella’s oratorios. Having acquired facsimiles of his La Susanna and San Giovanni Battista, I began trying to make sense of his style, which I found increasingly puzzling, however “tonal” it may have appeared on the surface. I decided that I should drop back a generation to put his music in some perspective—only to encounter even greater difficulties. I finally put Stradella on the back burner and focused my dissertation exclusively on Monteverdi. Since then I have engaged with Stradella a couple of other times: La Susanna served as the basis of my postmodernist theater piece, Susanna Does the Elders, and an aria from that work appeared as an example in my Conventional Wisdom.9 But although I became very familiar with these compositions, I had not really discovered a way to address what I had perceived as strange for so many years. Robert Gjerdingen’s book has led me back to my starting point. The aria “Vaghe ninfe del Giordano” opens the second half of San Giovanni Battista. Sung by the character identified here and in the scriptures as the daughter of Herodiade but better known to us as Salome, this guileless dance number brings the vainglorious but explicitly impotent Herod to the point where he promises his stepdaughter anything she desires. Later in the oratorio, when Herod gets cold feet and tries— in the face of her grisly demand—to renege on his agreement, la Figlia pulls out all the stops with entreaties, threats, and histrionic lamentation. He eventually succumbs, granting her the head of John the Baptist: the French dragon ladies of chapter 10 have nothing on her! But first she plays nice, performing her seduction in innocent pastoral mode— in Ionian and with the rhythms of the siciliano, both of which had long been identified with this topic.  

 

 

 

Toward Consolidation   |   281

Setting out the format that characterizes the shape of both the concert aria and the concerto grosso, Stradella uses his instrumental ritornelli to punctuate key arrivals, highlighting and extending each segment of the background. The voice (the equivalent of the soloists in his and Corelli’s instrumental concertos) assumes the responsibility of modulating from key to key, a division of labor that dramatizes the singer’s agency, that is, her (or his) ability to call the shots. Each successful maneuver incites the approbation of the group, responding to the soloist’s beck and call with its instrumental response. This particular arrangement of forces in articulating a tonal schema remains in force for centuries to come. But in contrast with the da capo aria that will become the standard format for the next generation, Stradella’s arias (like Cesti’s) are usually formally progressive. By this I mean that he begins his arias with one ritornello and thematic presentation from the singer, then proceeds to another for the second thematic idea; moreover, the closing ritornello corresponds not with the opening gambit but rather with the second. Stradella typically plays with the listener’s expectations with respect to formal unfolding, especially toward the end of the second pass through the second segment of the lyrics, when all surprises would seem to have been exhausted. A recent book by Karol Berger concerning temporality in eighteenthcentury music bears the title Bach’s Cycle and Mozart’s Arrow.10 I have argued elsewhere that Bach displayed a keen sense of linear progression, sometimes more deliberately than Mozart, with whom Berger compares him.11 I would claim, however, that Stradella’s projectiles—and those of his seicento contemporaries—get warped into something more closely resembling a cycle by the more stringent structural conventions of the Enlightenment. The da capo aria buttresses its dynamic processes multiply, with the same ritornello appearing at the beginning and end of the A section and then again after the B section when all of A is repeated. To be sure, the soloist is supposed to embellish the second iteration of A, such that the drama continues despite the otherwise exact repetition. Yet the guarantee of certainty—tonal, formal, and affective—takes pride of place. Although the zany, unpredictable energies of Castello’s sonatas, Frescobaldi’s toccatas, and (yes) Stradella’s arias generated exciting new ways of unfolding over time, later generations believed they had to harness and package these in ways that made them safe for eighteenthcentury consumption. Seventeenth-century fortspinnung is consequently  

 

 

 

282   |   Postlude

treated like nuclear fission: tremendously powerful yet potentially dangerous, it appears to require special handling and storage in lead containers. To the extent that Bach operates within the da capo format and other such procedures that resemble cycles, he does so not as a holdover from a medieval world but rather as a modern denizen of the Enlightenment, which sought to clean up the “baroque” excesses of the previous century. And to his credit, Bach very frequently backslides from the reason-dominated ideals of his time to flaunt the unruly exhibitionism of his predecessors: the harpsichord cadenza in Brandenburg No. 5, for instance, defies the return of the ritornello, allowing it to enter only after its authority has been quite thoroughly shredded.12 Salome eventually destroys the patriarchs and prophets who get in her way, but she does not defy authority so overtly at this point in the oratorio; for now, she is intent on seducing, boasting that all of nature seeks to imitate her joy. Consequently, the ritornelli echo her statements faithfully back to her, magnifying but never restricting her utterances. At first glance or hearing, “Vaghe ninfe” seems strophic: it returns to the tonic, then begins again with the same materials as the opening for the second verse. But Salome deviates from her previous course in the second strain, repeating the first lines of text again on the dominant and also visiting another key (F) before returning to ground them in the tonic. Rit 1: C Vaghe ninfe del Giordano

Lovely nymphs of the Jordan

che movete il ballo al piè.

who move your feet in dance.

Deh, deh, mi dite se gioite

Ah, tell me if you rejoice

dentro l’alma al par di me.

as much within your souls as I.

Anco in ciel le stelle tremule

Even in heaven the shimmering stars

vezzosetti ogn’hora danzano.

beautifully and continually dance,

Mà per questo non avanzano

yet they do not for this reason outshine

il mio cor di cui son emule.

my heart which in fact they emulate.

C+Rit 1: C

G+Rit 2: G; C+Rit 2: C

C+Rit 1: C; G+Rit 1: G

C > F+Rit 2: F; C+Rit 2: C

Toward Consolidation   |   283

In other words, a rather obvious process is willfully manipulated, apparently at the whim of the soloist, and the background progression itself continues to operate as part of the signifying apparatus. If Herod is expecting a second verse, same as the first, he is treated instead to something like a fan dance, as Salome reveals dimensions not even hinted at in the previous strophe. She keeps him—and us—guessing. Yes, of course, she returns eventually to the foreordained tonic, just as a strip artist can finally only display a torso more or less like any other; but the art of stripping resides not in displaying a naked body but in the teasing of expectations. Strauss called his equivalent scene the Dance of the Seven Veils. Stradella’s Salome has fewer veils, all of them diatonic, but she knows how to wield them to exemplary effect. I wish to turn my attention away from the background and toward surface strategies. Note that Stradella still follows the same exigencies as his predecessors: a strong rhythmic arrival on a full cadence still requires departure toward the next key. But in contrast to the breathlessness of earlier procedures, he develops ways of maintaining single key areas in a relatively relaxed manner by means of those short, stable formulas Gjerdingen discusses. The aria begins with the pattern Gjerdingen calls the galant Romanesca (not to be confused with the sixteenth-century improvisatory figure discussed in earlier chapters). What begins in m. 3 as a repetition in the bass feigns an approach to G, the dominant, before pulling back to a cadence on C. When Salome enters she expands on the materials laid out for her: she presents the “Romanesca” pattern twice, luxuriating in a sense of presence not offered by the ritornello, before moving on to the feigned move through Fá and its return to Fà. (This “now you see it, now you don’t” flirtation with leading tones becomes even more acute in the last part of her aria.) Following her cadence on C, the ritornello enters to reiterate the closing pattern. What Stradella has done here is to take two two-measure units (one of them a mere cadence pattern) and manipulate them in such a way as to produce twelve measures of music, all contentedly occupying a single key, with no apparent rush to move on (ex. 11.1).13 The second pair of lines in the lyrics brings in a couple of new formulas (mm. 13–22). The first, called a “modulating Prinner” by Gjerdingen, traces a tetrachord descent in parallel tenths. Once again, the pacing is leisurely and sure of itself. The Prinner first arrives at a half cadence in C, then repeats with a willful extension that arrives at a half cadence  

 

 

E x . 11.1. Stradella, San Giovanni Battista, “Vaghe ninfe,” mm. 1–38.

j Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # ÏJ ÏJ . n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï . 3 Ï Ï Ï RJ J RJ J & 8 J Ï J RJ J Ï ÏÏ j j ? 38 Ï Ï ÏJ Ï Ïj Ï J j j r Ï ÏÏ J Ï Ï . Ï Ï. 5 Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ . ÏR Ï & ÏJ Ï Ï ÏJ . R J J J R J J ÏJ J R J J J Va - ghe nin - fe del Gior - da - no, va - ghe nin - fe del Gior - da - no, Ï Ï Ï Ï ? J Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï . J Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï ÏJ J J  

9

Ï Ï Ï # ÏJ JÏ . n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . RJ &J JJ &

che mo - ve - te il

?Ï

∑

bal - lo al piè.

Ï JÏ . Ï Ïj j J R Ï Ï

∑

Ï.

∑

Ï Ï Ï # ÏJ ÏJ . n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï . RJ J J R j r j Ï . Ï Ïj Ï Ï Ïj Ïj . Ïr Ï.

r j Ï. Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï & J J J Ï Deh, deh, deh, mi di - te, deh, deh, Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? j Ï ä ä ä ä Ï J 17 j Ï Ïj Ïj Ï Ï Ïj Ï . Ïr j j Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï j Ï &J J Ï Ï Ï J Ï Ï J 13

?

Ï.

Ï.

j j ÏÏ Ï Ï

se gio - i - te den - tro

Ï

∑

j Ïj . Ï Ï Ï Ï RJ

l'al - ma al par di

Ï ÏÏÏ Ï J J Ï

deh, mi

Ï J

di - te

Ï JÏ Ïj Ïj J

j Ï JÏ Ï . # RÏ Ï . J

j Ï ÏÏ j Ïj J # JÏ ÏJ J J Ï Ï Ï me, al par,

al par di me,

j Ï Ïj ÏjÏ Ï Ïj Ï Ïj r &ÏÏ J .Ï Ï.

21

&

? 26

&

den-tro

Ï

l'al-ma

∑

al par di mè.

∑

∑

Ï ä Ï ä ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï J J Ï Ï Ï Ï j j Ïj . Ï Ï Ïj Ï j Ï J ÏjÏ Ï RJ J Ï Ï. ä ä J Ï. Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï. ∑ J J J R JÏ ∑

Ï Ï. Ï Ï. & J J R

∑

Deh, deh,

∑

deh, mi

? j r Ï äÏ ä Ï Ï Ïj . Ï Ï . 31 Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï j Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï & J Ï J J J RJ

∑

di - te,

deh, deh,

∑

Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ïj jÏ J J Ï j j Ï ÏÏ Ï

Ï ÏÏÏ Ï Ï J J J

deh, mi

j Ï Ïj Ï ä Ï ä Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ï . # Ï J R J J R J J J

∑

di - te

j Ï Ï ÏJ Ï.

? Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ïj Ï Ï JÏ Ï Ï j Ïj ÏJ ÏJ Ï Ïj Ï j Ï Ï J J Ï JJ J J J R JJ J JÏ 35 Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏJ JÏ Ï . Ï Ï . ∑ ∑ & ÏJ Ï J J J R den - tro l'al - ma al par di mè. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï ä ä ∑ ∑ J J J RJ & se gio - i - te den - tro

l'al - ma

al par di mè, al par,

? Ï Ï Ïj Ï Ï ÏJ Ï Ï j Ï . J JÏ J J J J

al par di mè,

Ï äÏ ä Ï

j Ï Ï

j Ï

286   |   Postlude

on G, the dominant. The second formula takes up the pitches that had pointed toward a cadence on G (3–4-5 in the bass) and expands it, again in parallel tenths in the voice. A very brief touchdown on G occurs halfway through m. 19, but Salome pulls away immediately as though to D. The brief arrival on D, however, quickly gives way to a final iteration of the second formula, this time pulling back to the G major key she had promised. When the ritornello enters to punctuate, it offers the two twomeasure units unadorned, without Salome’s shenanigans. As he typically does, Stradella repeats this entire complex, reoriented now toward the tonic (mm. 27–31). But if the aria turns back toward the security of the initial key area, it offers yet other special effects. What had first sounded low, throaty, and suggestive suddenly appears in the high register, assertive and exhibitionistic. We cannot anticipate, in other words, how familiar lines of text will be deployed within the vocal range, each part of which brings its own rhetorical implications. By the conclusion of the first verse Stradella has produced forty-four measures of music from the manipulation of four two-measure units, all of them based on the most mundane of cadential formulas. A remarkable achievement! The second verse nearly doubles that duration while still restricting itself to those same four patterns. The first strain more or less repeats what had occurred in the opening strophe. We are not expecting, however, that instead of moving on to the next pair of lines and formulas Salome chooses to repeat the first pair but now moved to the dominant. She also sings this repetition very low in her range, the huskier part of her voice pulling the listener into a more intimate realm than the exhibitionistic register revealed in the first verse. When she does proceed to the concluding lines of text, she states them first in chest voice, as if stating in a matter-of-fact manner what will be a startlingly arrogant utterance: the stars themselves seek to emulate her as they shimmer. But that modesty of range quickly falls away. Leaping up the interval of an eleventh and to a key, F, not hinted at in the first strophe, she engages again with the high register, challenging the stars in their own terrain. The formulaic character of the surface materials remains constant, however. What makes the last unit of the aria especially delicious is the audacious cross relation on the words “il mio cor” (ex. 11.2). As before, she both offers and withdraws her delights, winking at Herod by means of that peekaboo clash between Bâ and Bà before surrendering to the cadence. The entire second half then repeats in C major, with the cross  

 

Ï Ïj Ï Ï j Ï j j r j JÏ Ï Ï ÏJ Ï . Ï ÏJ 3 Ï Ï Ï &8 J J . RJ Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï J R mˆ per que - sto non a - van - za - no, mˆ per que - sto b Ï j j Ï Ï JÏ ? 38 Ï j Ï Ï Ï JÏ Ï b Ï J Ï E x . 11.2. Stradella, San Giovanni Battista, “Vaghe ninfe,” m. 56–end.  

Ï j & b ÏJ Ï ÏJ Ï . ÏR ÏJ

Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï. J J

59

non a - van - za - no

? Ï 63

il mio

Ï bÏ j Ï ÏJ . ÏR J

∑

&

∑

Ï Ï Ï n Ï Ï . Ï b Ï Ïj j . r Ï Ï Ï. J JJ R J

Ï Ï. bÏ J cor,

il mio

6#

Ï Ï. Ï Ï JJ R J Ï Ï J

cor di cui son e - mu - le.

6

#

Ï.

Ï ÏÏ Ï J Ï J J . ÏR JÏ

∑

jj r ∑ & ÏJ Ï Ï n ÏJ Ï ä ÏJ Ï Ï n ÏJ ÏJ . ÏR b ÏJ Ï Ï . Ï Ï . j r j jj r ? Ï Ï Ïj Ï Ï ä Ï Ï Ï Ï . . bÏ J bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï J J 67 Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï . Ï ÏJ JÏ Ï Ï # Ï Ï . ÏJ Ï Ï # Ï JÏ . Ï n Ï Ï Ï . Ï Ï . J J R J J J R &J JJ R j Ïj . Ï Ï Ï Ï R J

non a - van - za - no

?Ï

71

&

Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï

? Ï

Ï Ï J

il mio

ä ä

ÏÏ J ä Ï cor

6#

il mio

Mˆ per

Ï j J JÏ . RÏ ÏJ Ï Ï #

cor di cui son e - mu - le.

Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï. Ï nÏ Ï

que - sto

6

Ï Ï. Ï Ï J J R J

Ï Ï . Ï UÏ .

U j Ï Ïj . Ïr Ï.

Ï.

288   |   Postlude

relation now between Fà and Fá and beginning on that longed-for high A that marked the dramatic highpoint of the first strophe. It seems to me quite apparent that Stradella consciously constructs his aria through these soon-to-be-standardized formulas. He sets out his background, then builds his materials by sticking these units together, altering their ends slightly depending upon whether they are to stay in one place or to move to another key. This leaves his imagination free to concentrate on effects such as tessitura manipulation—when to scale the heights, when to murmur bewitchingly in chest voice—or the insinuating cross relation of the final strain. But this new sense of pacing also accomplishes something else of the utmost consequence. The simulation of raw desire created by mid-seventeenth-century strategies for extending key areas has relaxed considerably, affording a quality of unhurried pleasure in conjunction with the desire-oriented trajectories of the background. To the very great extent that these patterns are derived from cadential configurations, they parse the music out into bite-sized but easily followed units. They become the building blocks from which composers would construct music that gives the impression of rationality and transparency. The background structure recedes further from away the surface, still providing each movement with its general logic yet available for dramatization, as when Stradella will suddenly pull a new key area out of the bag. The listener, however, is increasingly encouraged to focus almost exclusively on the thematic materials, the repeating motives that constitute the aria’s manifest content. Still and all, it was the relationship between surfaces and backgrounds in Stradella’s music that first puzzled me as a graduate student. However closely his procedures may resemble those of later composers, they differ sufficiently to have launched my musicological odyssey forty years ago. If I’ve had to battle sirens and cyclops along the way, I feel as if this book brings me somewhat closer to Ithaca.  

 

•

•

•

I mentioned Corelli in my introductory comments concerning Stradella. A far more familiar figure in our compositional pantheon, Corelli played in Stradella’s orchestra in 1675 and picked up concerto grosso orchestration from the older musician. When he published his immeasurably influential collections, he also put into wide circulation the procedures Stradella and other late seventeenth-century composers had developed: a linear background progression expanded pillar by pillar by cadentially derived patterns.

Toward Consolidation   |   289

As we saw in chapter 2, sonatas from earlier in the century operated as composites, comprising open-ended sections that flowed one into another with interdependent tonal relations. By the time Corelli came to write his contributions to the genre, the sections had achieved a considerable degree of autonomy: each tracing and completing its own tonal trajectory, each with a single quality of motion (thus the Italian tempo indications specifying the kind of physical “movement” expected to govern the section), each with a particular affect, produced by motivic concentration. The principal vestige of the old procedure may be found in the slow movements, which present a closely related modal terrain; such movements often make explicit their reliance on the larger context through a transitional passage appended to the end, a passage that unravels the apparent closure just attained to demonstrate allegiance with the sonata’s main key. I will focus here on the Adagio of Corelli’s Op. 5, no. 1 in D Major (1700). In contrast with the other segments of the sonata, all of which confirm the tonic, this movement grounds itself in B minor and expresses the kind of affect we might expect in an aria with sorrowful lyrics. It follows a typical series of keys: B minor, D major, and Fá minor all sustain the fifth degree of B, a move to E minor takes the line down to the modal fourth degree, after which the piece returns to B minor. In other words, we have here the standard diapente descent informing the background. But what matters, of course, is how Corelli fleshes out the formula in ways that can hold our musical interest (ex. 11.3). As in so many of the compositions we have examined, this movement sustains its key areas through a mosaic of cadence patterns, pieced together end to end. For instance, the first key, B minor, announces itself through a direct melodic diapente descent, completed by the beginning of m. 3; this too-abrupt arrival is elaborated, then, by a tetrachord descent in the bass (to m. 5). A Dá in the bass (m. 6) opens the possibility of modulation, though it ends up serving as a secondary dominant to E in a progression (4–5-6–5 in the bass) that takes us right back to V of B minor (m. 9). Yet although these strategies allow us to track the rational progress (or, perhaps, stasis) of the Adagio, they are probably not at the center of our attention. We care about Corelli’s music not because he fulfills conventional requirements but rather because he can present so many exquisite configurations at the same time that (by the way) he sticks to the script. Thus the first phrase features the melodic leap of a minor sixth, an interval already associated with lament in the sixteenth‑century  

 

E x . 11.3. Corelli, Sonata in D Major, Op. 5, no. 1, Adagio.

Adagio

ú ú. Ï ú ú ú

# 3 & # 2 î ú ú ú

? # # 32 w

6

## î ú ú &

w

ú

w

? ## # w 11

&

## w

ú

? ## î ú ú

ú #w

w

w

ú

ú. Ï Ï Ï #w w

ú

ú ú Ï w. .

ú

ú

ú

ú w

w

ú ú

ú

ú

ú ú ú

# ú & # ú ú

21

? ## î ú ú

ú î

ú w #ú

ú

ú

w ú

ú ú ú

ú

Ï ú ú Ï

ú

ú

ú

## ú ú Ï Ï ú ú Ï Ï ú . Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w & ú î

w

î ú ú

16

? ## ú

ú ú

î ú ú

ú ú

ú

ú ú ú

ú

ú

î

ú ú

#ú ú w

î

ú î

ú ú ú ú

ú î î

ú

Ï Ï #w

ú

ú

w

26

&

##

ú

ú Ï ÏÏÏ ÏÏw

w

ú ú #ú ú ú ? ## ú

ú ú

# ú ÏÏú î ÏÏú & # ú ú ú #ú #ú ú ? ##

ú ú ú

# ú ú ú & #

ú ú ú

ú

ú #ú ú

36

# & # #w

41

? ## w

ú ú

ÏÏw ú

ú

ú

î ÏÏú

31

? ## w

Toward Consolidation   |   291

ú ÏÏÏÏ

ú

ú ú ú

ú ú

î ú Ï Ï #ú ú ú ú

w

ú w

ú w

ú

w

w ú

ú w

w

w

ú nú

ú

ú w ú w

w

ú

ú ú ú w

ú w. w.

madrigal. A more obvious solution to harmonizing m. 2 would have the bass follow the contour of the violin in tenths; instead, Corelli has the bass buckle as if under the weight of the violin’s grief, and it drops an anguished tritone down to Aá. The second phrase has the violin expounding on its previous leap upward. Now it stakes out the melodic B (8) at the top—a move that will require the rest of the movement to soothe away. At first it appears that the phrase starting in m. 9 will keep B minor intact, as both bass and violin leap again from Fá to B. In m. 10 the  

292   |   Postlude

bass does move down to Aà, but in context it seems simply to be initiating a tetrachord descent, holding B firmly in place as tonic. Notice that although the next phrase on one level only sustains the modal fifth degree, the violin twice reaches up to keep the high B activated; if the violin descended to Aá in m. 11, we would hear this explicitly as yet another holding pattern. Instead, it presents Aà and proceeds on to G in a linear descent to E, harmonized through a slightly modified galant Romanesca. That gravitational pull brings us in m. 13 to the dominant of D, though the promised cadence on D is delayed a full seven bars. Corelli’s signal that an arrival on D is virtually inevitable allows him to play with that expectation, first through a rising sequence from D to A, and then through a cadential descent rendered all the more luxurious through its hemiola. Following the D major cadence in m. 20, the violin returns stubbornly to B minor. It is as if the relative major were mere illusion, swept away by the melodic B; indeed, the melody goes on to attempt a definitive descent through the B minor diapente. A Gá in the bass in m. 22, however, acts like a foot in a door on the verge of closing. It forcibly reinterprets the violin’s Fá, which then descends stepwise past B all the way down the Fá minor octave. Along the way it acknowledges with a painful Eá its co-optation by Fá minor. (The operative pitch in the violin in m. 24 is Cá, suspended over B; Corelli increases the drama with octave displacements in both voices and with the parenthetical plunge down a tortured diminished seventh within a held sonority.) But another octave displacement and the bass’s insertion of Dá takes us very quickly to a cadence on E minor—followed as if in a mere sequence by a return to D. To summarize, the background progression has come to the fore and takes over. These three keys—Fá minor, E minor, and D major—appear in short order, articulating powerfully the move from 5 to 4 to 3 in the B minor diapente that governs this movement. Background progressions do not usually appear so baldly as this, with a circumscribed key for each of the three successive scale degrees, but Corelli apparently wishes to comply as quickly as possible with that particular obligation. Recall Orfeo’s “Ecco pur,” discussed in chapter 1, which similarly moved with businesslike efficiency in its middle section through 5 and 4 to return to 3 for the return of the tonic. Corelli’s expansions here scarcely exceed in length those offered by Monteverdi nearly a hundred years earlier. But that is because Corelli wants to focus on his framing keys: B minor and D major in the first half, and the return to B minor in the sec 

 

 

Toward Consolidation   |   293

ond. The return to D in m. 31 sounds relatively perfunctory, owing to its having been treated merely as a unit in a sequence. Now a new sequence is grafted on, one that reinterprets the melodic Fá of m. 31 as the fifth degree of the B minor diapente, which exerts its own gravitational force toward closure. The sequence that begins in m. 31 lists downward to B minor without resistance until the leap down to Aá in m. 35 averts an immediate cadence. The interruption only sets up a more decisive descent from Fá to B in m. 39, repeated for confirmation in m. 43. A comparison between these two iterations demonstrates some of Corelli’s devices for maintaining absolute transparency while adding spice, especially with the diminished seventh to Aá in m. 41. The last three bars undo the certainty of the B minor arrival, as a tetrachord descent leads to a half cadence. The violin’s Fá is soon to be understood as the mediant of D, the key of the next movement and of the sonata as a whole. Indeed, the entire movement then converts to a prolongation of the D major mediant, harmonized with B rather than D, which is what the three-bar coda intends to underscore. It stands as a brief vestige linking Corelli’s conceptions of structure back to those of his modal predecessors.14

The Persistence of Mode Full-length dramatic works figured among the first genres to operate according to standardized procedures, in large part because of the time constraints composers faced in the daunting task of setting entire plays to music. The intricate allegorical connections between part and whole in, for instance, Monteverdi’s Orfeo fell to the wayside as a result of pragmatic pressures.15 This is not to say that Francesco Cavalli—the most prolific composer of commercial opera in Venice—cared nothing about the relationships between dramatic situations and the associations between affect and mode; it is surely no coincidence that Medea’s incantation in the first act of Giasone exploits the sinister resonances of Phrygian, and scenes that feature especially fraught emotions, such as those of the martyred Isifile, often take place within Phrygian / E minor as well. With all due respect, however, it seems to me that Cavalli’s genius lay in his ability to register successive events on the surface, whether in realistic declamation in rapid-fire dialogue between characters or in the relatively autonomous arias he pioneered. But dramatic works produced in other conditions still sometimes bear witness to the power of tight modal allegories. Giacomo Carissimi,  

 

294   |   Postlude

for instance, came to the composition of his settings of Bible stories for performance in the Oratorio as a specialist in secular cantatas. In chapter 2 we examined the composite structures of sonatas and cantatas, for which the various sections depended upon one another for musical sense: their “movements” for the most part lacked closure but instead contributed to a larger economy. Carissimi—like Monteverdi—brought the exigencies of modal construction along with him when he turned his hand to dramatic composition. Carissimi’s most famous oratorio, Jephte, at first glance may seem to be in G major: its framing sections and appropriate interior sections— most notably the triumphal sequence with which Jephte’s daughter comes out to greet her father—have G as their final. But although these sections make their way through a succession of short key areas, they favor moves to C, F, and A; moreover, the dominant, D, rarely occurs, and it is D minor rather than D major when it does appear. All these apparent oddities are crucial characteristics of classic Mixolydian: the tendency to sink by fifth, the struggle to cement a stable sense of the modal center, G. Why this mode? Consider the opening sequence, in which the Historicus (the narrator) introduces Jephte, a man of infamously weak will. The Historicus dials through cadential confirmations of G, C, F, and even Bâ before cranking back up to C for Jephte’s first speech. Jephte begins on F, but as he makes his fateful vow he moves up chromatically against the force of gravity to reach his foreordained final, G, with the word “holocaustum.” This is not a rational attainment of closure; rather, Jephte has to talk himself into a solution, sealing his doom with what he imagines is a way of securing his identity. Tonality would not have given Carissimi these tools, but his target effect operates perfectly within this Mixolydian framework. The most influential part of Jephte is, of course, the exchange between Jephte and his daughter that follows his homecoming. He has returned victorious from a defeat of the Ammonites, but he has promised to sacrifice on the altar the first entity he meets when he gets home: “Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering” (Judges 11:31). His only child, a daughter—referred to repeatedly as his “only begotten” (unigenita), thus resonating with the status of Christ—emerges joyfully to greet him with her companions: “And behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child”  

 

 

 

 

 

Toward Consolidation   |   295

(Judges 11:34).16 The Scriptures deal with this moment of the story in that short verse; within the oratorio, however, the listener, fully aware of the inevitable consequences, must sit through the horror of her extended jubilation, which in deploying the expansion devices discussed earlier in this chapter demonstrates Carissimi’s grasp of such techniques. But the bright G Mixolydian quality of the daughter’s scena suddenly gives way to A Aeolian, precisely the same juxtaposition as in act 2 of Orfeo, in which the messenger’s wail, “Ahi, caso acerbo!” slams into Orfeo’s overconfident strophic song “Vi ricordi, o boschi ombrosi.” Whereas Orfeo does not know what awaits him, Jephte realizes all too well (if a bit too late) what his arrogance has wrought. Echoing Monteverdi’s messenger pitch for pitch in his opening gambit, he starts his lament with the painful diminished fourth that will stamp its dissonance throughout his speech: “Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me” (Judges 11:35). Note that Jephte reacts to this intolerable situation by casting all blame upon his victim: she has deceived and disturbed him. Carissimi captures in his setting of this biblical text a great many psychological nuances. Yes, he howls in pain, then repeats his expression of agony more acutely, up a fourth to D. But then he crumples: D comes to represent a dominant preparation for G minor, and he moves gradually through that diapente to a cadence on G. If he caresses the words “filia unigenita” with his lamenting descent through Bâ, he also seems to go into denial and self-pity on “decepisti me.” In m. 7 of his speech, the G major chord appears as the reiteration of his point of cadential arrival. A brief glimmer of hope; it could continue the trajectory by fifth on to C or perhaps undo the damage Jephte did when he seized onto G at the conclusion of his vow. “Et tu pariter” (and you equally), he sings. But the horror is too great: a grinding cross relation brings him from his brief refuge back to reality with a wrenching E major chord leading back to “heu” and D minor. Then repeating his abject projection of guilt, he comes back to A as he whines “decepisti me” (ex. 11.4). Jephte’s daughter proves far more rational than her distraught father. Twice she presents him with questioning half cadences, insisting that he fill in the blank that resides on the other side of her leading dominants. She will not allow him to wiggle out, and at last he confesses. Picking up on her unresolved dominant, he explains what he has promised. The issue he has tried to avoid through all his falling fifths can be concealed no longer. On “holocaustum” he moves painfully through an illicit Fá to cadence on E. Recall that the Israelites abhorred the neighboring

E x . 11.4. Carissimi, Jephte, Jephte’s lament.

Vc ?c 4

4

V

Heu, heu mi - hi!

ú

7

ú

#79

Ï Ï Ï Ï. . J R R J b ÏR b ÏJ RÏ Ï

me,

#

7

j r V Î ÏJ ÏJ # Ï . Ï Ï

et tu pa - ri - ter,

ú

#

j Ï V JÏ ÏR ÏR Ï . # Ï w

10

es,

?ú

10

de - cep - ta

es.

6

w

Ï Ï

ú &Î Ï

14

?w

14

#

10 8

fi - li - a u - ni - ge - ni - ta,

?w

?ú

ú

et cur

43

ú b

Î ú

Ï

Î

fi - li - a me - a,

w

8

7

j j #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

Ï. Ï Ï Ï J

Jephte

ú

ä # Ï Ï Ï . ÏR R R J

heu

b

de - ce - pis - ti

ú

#97

Î b JÏ Ïj Ï .

j Ï ú

de - ce - pis - ti me,

ú

ú b

4

ú

3

Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. #Ï J R Rï Rï JJ J

heu fi - li - a

ú

b

&

ú

#97

Filia

Cur

me - a de - cep - ta

Ï bú

Ï

8

4 3

Ï Ï ÏJ Ï Ïj # Ïj Ï Ï J e - go te

w

pa - ter de - ce - pi,

ú 7

6

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï JÏ JÏ ÏJ Ï ÏJ . Ï Ï JÏ Ï . Ï w J RJ J J J J RR ú

ú #

e - go fi - li - a tu - a u - ni - ge - ni - ta de - cep - ta sum?

w #8

7

ú

7 6

w #

V

Toward Consolidation   |   297

Jephte

18

VÎ

?w

18

#Ï

j r j j Ï . Ï Ï Ï #Ï

A - pe - ru - i

os

me - um

w

#

#

V ÏJ JÏ ÏJ ÏJ ÏJ ÏR RÏ JÏ ÏJ

20

ut qui - cum - que pri - mus de do - mo

?ú

20

j j j r Ï #Ï Ï . Ï Ï

#ú

ad

Do - mi - num,

Ï ÏÏ J R R JÏ RÏ RÏ Ï Ï ú

me - a oc - cur - re - rit mi - hi

#ú

jj j Ï Ï j r j V ÏJ ÏR RÏ J J Ï . Ï Ï JÏ Ï Ï Ï # Ïj ú

Ï Ï Ï ä J Ï

22

?

22

of - fe - ram il - lum Do - mi - no in ho - lo - cau - stum. Heu mi - hi!

w

ú

ú 4

3

ú

#

ú

pagans in part because they practiced human sacrifice. Jephte has promised something held as anathema by his own people, and thus the stress on a forbidden pitch in even pronouncing the word. Flinching from the atrocity of what he has just uttered, Jephte careens back to an exact repetition of his initial lament. When his daughter replies, she does so by retracing his path of interlocking fifths. But when she comes to the crux of the matter, her fate as a human sacrifice, she steels herself and embraces this eventually as heroically as Brünhilde riding Grane into the flames at the end of Götterdämmerung. In contrast with the sniveling admission forced out of Jephte in the lowest part of his range, the daughter moves aggressively up by half step and recites “offer me in holocaustum victoriae tuae” (offer me as a burnt offering for your victory) on a high Fá leading to that same illicit cadence on E. Then retreating into maidenly submission, she turns back for a quiet confirmation of her vow in D (ex. 11.5). I will not go through the rest of the oratorio at this time, though the

298   |   Postlude E x . 11.5. Carissimi, Jephte, daughter’s reply.

#Ï Ï jj & c Î # ÏJ JÏ ú Î J J ú Î Ï Ï ÏJ JÏ ÏJ ÏJ ÏJ . ÏR Ïä ÏJ JÏ JÏ Filia

?c 5

5

9

9

&

Pa - ter mi,

w #

w

pa - ter mi,

#

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï Ï JÏ ÏJ . Ï Ï Î Ï # Ï J J R J J J RR J JJ

vic - tor ab hos - ti - bus,

ú

4 3

w #

Ï Ï Ïj Ï j .Ï ú J

?ú

w

si vo-vi-sti vo-tum Do-mi-no re-ver-sus

ec - ce

e- go, fi - li -a tu - a u - ni - ge - ni - ta,

ú

w

#ú

#Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï ú J J JJ & J JJJ ? #ú

nú

6

#Ï nÏ 7

ú

5 4 3

6

w

#6

ú Î #Ï

me in ho-lo-cau-stum vic - to - ri - ae tu - ae,

hoc

w #

of - fer

#

Ï Ï Î # JÏ ÏJ

so - lum pa - ter

#w

j jjr r jjj j j r & ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï Ï . Ï Ï Ï ÏJ Ïj Ï . Ïj w

13

mi praes-ta fi - li - ae

? #w

13

6

b5

tu-ae u - ni -ge - ni - tae an - te quam mo- ri - ar.

#ú 5

6

ú

ú

#

ú

w

daughter’s monologue that follows features all the complex juxtapositions of the most spectacular modal composition; it also features the locus classicus of the Neapolitan sixth configuration, forever after associated with grieving. When la Figlia wishes—as in her jubilation—to present images of certainty and confidence, she relies upon tonal expansion. But Carissimi seems to have regarded the extraordinary emotional  

 

Toward Consolidation   |   299

turmoil that follows as requiring a much broader palette of strategies, all of which still lay close at hand. In other words, this eruption of modal complexity is not to be heard as a retreat into archaic devices. •

•

•

By the turn of the century, most composers had climbed onto the tonal bandwagon: that is, their surface harmonies operated to prolong particular stages of a standard linear background. But occasionally a composer would exploit strategies available within modal conceptions of structure. These may be difficult for us to notice, since for the most part we have not attributed sophistication to those alternatives and therefore do not know how to recognize them when they occur. We do not have to look hard to find evidence of modal residues in Bach. A seventeenth-century musician by training until he encountered the newly published works of Vivaldi, he spent much of his career creating hybrids and translations between old and new procedures; chapter 8 dealt with his translation of French dance into Italian procedure. In his chorales, Bach worked to harmonize a vast repertory of modal tunes by means of those surface harmonies designed for expansion purposes. And although his solutions for incorrigibly modal melodies are often ingenious, the negotiations between the old chorales and modern chordal schemata scarcely qualify as textbook examples of tonality— which makes it all the more bizarre that generations of musicians were trained in harmony and figured bass with these eccentric experiments. Similarly, Bach’s fugues qualify as experiments in translating seventeenth-century polyphonic genres into terms compatible with Vivaldian structural procedures, as Theodor Adorno explained some decades ago.17 If we were not so eager to regard Bach as always already tonal all the time, we might come to have even greater respect for his cultural and musical agendas. I mentioned earlier Bach’s Cá Minor Fugue from the first volume of the WTC —a fugue that displays its antiquarian investment in several ways, including its alla breve time signature and cantus firmus–like opening subject. But the Cá Minor Fugue also displays a consistently Aeolian predisposition, which gives rise to its internal tensions and even afflicts the appeal to closure at the end. The crabbed subject of the beginning, with its tortured diminished fourth, recalls the fantasias and ricercars of Sweelinck, Frescobaldi, and Froberger a century earlier, in which a distinctive, often chromatically twisted motive becomes the pretext for multiple manipulations (see subjects, ex. 11.6). A puzzle presents itself at the outset of Bach’s shout-out  

 

 

300   |   Postlude

to his forebears: does this subject have four or five pitches? That is, does the subject end on its second degree or proceed onward to end back on its final? As we shall see, much depends upon one’s answer. (Full disclosure: I belong to the five-note school.) The exposition starts conventionally enough, given the unusual subject: the second voice enters with a statement on Gá minor, the dominant, and the third takes us back to Cá. So far it behaves like a good tonal fugue. But when the fourth voice enters, things begin to go wrong. Although the second soprano opens with Gá, it moves unexpectedly to Eá and completes its statement by confirming Fá minor—the subdominant. This may seem an aberration: an entry in the tenor in m. 19 gives us the requisite dominant again. But the tenor has no sooner arrived on Gá than it offers a parallel entry on Fá. We will not hear from Gá minor again except for an entry that ends with an occluded cadence in m. 41; the fugue belongs now to the tension between Cá minor and Fá minor. This is, of course, a fugue with three subjects. The second—a string of sequencing eighth notes—appears first in m. 36. In contrast with the initial subject, this one seems to lend a quality of forward drive to the piece: it counterposes at least Vivaldi’s arrow to the introverted cycle of the first idea. And it is in this context that the first subject manages for the last time to gesture toward the more dynamic dominant key area. In m. 49, however, a third subject enters to join the other two. Although it counts as little more than a cadential figure, it possesses by that same token a condensed teleology: it announces “here is the tonic.” It will point to a great many possible tonics over the rest of the fugue, and it will enter into direct combat with the opening motive for the right to determine where we are and where we are going. Significantly, it enters first on Fá minor. Only once, in m. 69, does it attempt an entry on the dominant (Gá minor), and it loses its leading tone that time before it can arrive at its goal. In m. 73 the first subject enters in the bass with a powerful return to Cá minor, followed by similar entries in the soprano and tenor. For a while all three subjects seem focused on keeping the tonic front and center, but then Fá minor creeps in again in m. 86. By m. 94 the second subject has fallen out altogether, leaving the other two to struggle like titans, twisting this way and that. A heroic presentation of the first subject enters in m. 107, leading to what we must hear as closure in m. 112. This is, in any case, where the Schenkerian line descends to its destination. What greets us at the hard-won embrace of the final, however, is a  

 

 

E x . 11.6. Bach, WTC I, Cá Minor Fugue, subjects and mm. 105–15.  

&

####

1

C

Ï #ú ú w 2 #### Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï & w

#### Î Ï Ï Ï & 3

&

####

Ï #Ï Ï ú

Conclusion

w # ú Ï Ï Ï úú

? #### Ï Ï w

Ï Ï

# úÏ Ï Ï # úÏ Ï ú ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w

#### # ú ú úú & ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ # ÏÏ # ÏÏ # ú ? #### Ï w Ï

Ï Ï

#### ú # ú wú . Ï Ï # Ïwú ú & ú. ? #### w w

ú. w

# Ïúú Ï

ú Ü Ïw Ï # Ï

Ï

Ï J

w ÏÏ ÏÏ

ÏÏ ÏÏ

# úú ú

úú ú

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï w

ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ wÏ

w w w # Ïú Ï úÏ Ï wú # Ï Ï # ww

ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏ Ï w w

w w

302   |   Postlude

head-on collision between Cá and Fá minor. To be sure, minor-mode pieces often end with a picardy third, which accounts at least temporarily for the Eá. But if the soprano and bass voices hold firm to the Cá they have determined as tonic, the inner voices keep moving. Both second soprano and alto present the two wrangling subjects, now reverted to Fá minor. And here is where it matters how many pitches the opening subject has. If we have heard both this and the third subjects as circling back to their tonics, then the concluding sonority of the piece will sound overwhelmingly like an interrupted dominant to Fá minor: the subjects ought to go on to converge on Fá. I might add that this double meaning will not occur if the performer slows down and eliminates the accumulated energy over the course of the last four bars. I do not believe Bach would have worked so hard to produce this stunning ambiguity, however, if he had not wanted it to be palpable. The conclusion of this fugue should sound hair-raising (ex. 11.6). The other latter-day saint of modal construction is Beethoven, who draws upon this fugue as a template for his Cá Minor Quartet, op. 131. As in Bach’s fugue, Beethoven balances his vast composition as a struggle between Cá and Fá. When the opening fugue fails to solve the dilemma, he moves on to a series of movements and fragments designed to sidestep the problem. But the final movement returns and takes on the Aeolian issue head-on, and, as in Bach’s fugue, he determines that the problem cannot be solved: in the end, he embraces the double meaning of Cá major as V/Fá and picardy third. In his A Minor Quartet, op. 132, Beethoven explores a much rarer mode: namely, Lydian. Genuinely Lydian pieces almost never occurred in medieval and Renaissance music; before the category of Ionian came into being in the sixteenth century, pieces in F with signed-in Bâ were called Lydian because ancient theory offered a place for modes with F as the final. One of the remarkable features of Beethoven’s “Heiliger Dankgesang” is that it invents ab ovo the structural dilemmas that follow from Lydian configurations. By this I mean that he does not rely on melodic motives with a raised fourth degree. Other composers have moved in that direction. Edvard Grieg, for instance, made increasing use of such melodies as he attempted to transfer the sonorities of the Hardanger fiddle to the piano.18 Debussy occasionally plays with Lydian-sounding fragments in his whole-tone experiments. And Fauré famously punned on that raised fourth degree in his lovely song “Lydia.” But none of these took the

Toward Consolidation   |   303

implications of Lydian to the structural level that became the principal concern for Beethoven in Op. 132. What Beethoven, a first-rate modal theorist, realized was that harmonic Lydian will not allow for the convincing establishment of its tonic, for it lacks the pitch, Bâ, that would serve as the seventh crucial for a preparatory dominant. Consequently, the “Heiliger Dankgesang” always sound poised to revert to C. No matter how fervent the attempts at grounding F, that tonic constantly points elsewhere, perhaps to what is posited within this modal complex as a higher force. The human subject here acknowledges in archaic prayer its inability to stand alone (which was surely the promise of the Enlightenment and tonal procedure) and its humble reliance upon something else more stable if unattainable through reason. Together F Lydian and the gravitational force of C constitute a single universe. These two late quartets firmly reject the certainty and autonomous sufficiency of the linear processes we traced in chapter 1, and they return self-consciously to the strategies native to Renaissance polyphony. For Beethoven understood the expressive burden as well as the limitations of eighteenth-century tonality. He knew how to harness those dynamic, desire-driven energies, but he also knew how to recognize when what he wanted to simulate would not fit into those patterns. Through his study of Bach and Palestrina he found sufficient guidance to allow him to reconstruct other ways of being in music. •

•

•

Here I have come full circle back to the story I started out telling: how music based on modal principles gave way under historical circumstances to a particular transformation we call tonality, but also how modality continued to flourish—both as the backbone that holds conventional tonal movements together and as a repository of alternative expressive strategies. We do not need to choose sides, arguing either that tonality was predestined to emerge or that the representation of complex subjectivities was abandoned with the move into Enlightenment procedures, for both positions show up as crucial aspects of the historical record. I would insist, however, that we impoverish our understanding of seventeenth-century music if we cling to the idea that it was on its way to becoming tonal. It achieved so much more than that!  

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Pr elude 1.  “The Transition from Modal to Tonal Organization in the Works of Monteverdi,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976. 2.  Petrarch’s disclaimer, “quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono,” appears in the collection’s opening sonnet, “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse.” 3.  Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 110–13. 4.  See “Feminine Endings in Retrospect,” foreword to the second edition of my Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). The trope of forbidden doors informs that book’s opening chapter, “A Material Girl in Bluebeard’s Castle.” 5.  See Carl Dahlhaus, Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1968); later translated by Robert O. Gjerdingen as Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 6.  See Harold S. Powers, “Mode,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), and his “Tonal Types and Modal Categories,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 (1981): 428–70. 7.  Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 8.  Eric Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992). For a comparison of our approaches, see my review of his book in Music Theory Spectrum 16, no. 2 (January 1994): 261–66. 9.  For exemplary work in the history of theory of this period, see particularly Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with  

 

 

305

306   |   Notes

the Eyes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 10.  Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). He addresses my work directly on 233–34. 11.  Tim Carter and John Butt, eds., The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xviii. 12.  I relied heavily upon theories of historical linguists when I was writing my dissertation, for this seemed the available enterprise closest to the one I was pursuing. Although I later turned to cultural studies models, I was first encouraged to consider syntax as a socially malleable construct by my exposure to linguistics. 13.  Musical simulations of desire occur much earlier as well. See, for example, Hildegard von Bingen’s “O tu suavissima virga,” in which God’s desire for Mary produces an astonishing melisma on the word “voluit.” 14.  McClary, Modal Subjectivities, chapter 3. 15.  We can reconstruct some of these practices by examining arrangements of vocal music for the lute, the notational conventions for which designate precisely the fret proper for each note. 16.  See Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). 17.  I allude here to Stanley Cavell’s classic essay, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 18.  For more on Artusi and Monteverdi, see chapter 8 of my Modal Subjectivities; for more on French Absolutism, see chapters 7–9 below. 19.  For an attempt at addressing early eighteenth-century repertories, see my “What Was Tonality?” the third chapter of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See also Robert O. Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Bella Brover-Lubovsky, Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and the postlude of this book. 20.  In addition to Modal Subjectivities and Conventional Wisdom, see also my “Due Rose, Due Volte: A Study of Early Modern Subjectivities,” in Musical Meaning and Human Values, ed. Lawrence Kramer and Keith Chapin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 10–31; “Narratives of Bourgeois Subjectivity in Mozart’s ‘Prague’ Symphony,” in Understanding Narrative, ed. Peter Rabinowitz and James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 65–98; and “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas (New York: Routledge Press, 1994), 205–33. 21.  For more extensive justifications for this approach to music, see my “Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities, Music,” Festschrift for Derek Scott, ed. Stan Hawkins (London: Ashgate, 2011); and Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 22.  For an interdisciplinary collection concerning changes in questions of  

 

 

 

 

Notes   |   307

affect, see McClary, ed., Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 23.  José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 24.  For more on the libertine movements and their potential for political subversion in France, see Georgia J. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

1. T h e E x pa nsion Pr incipl e 1.  I develop this way of dealing with style and style change at length in my Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 2.  See my Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) for an extended treatment of sixteenth-century practice. 3.  Although Caccini writes out the repeated portion in its entirety, I have notated it with repeat signs to save space. 4.  For an extensive account of this squabble, see Howard Mayer Brown, “How Opera Began: An Introduction to Jacopo Peri’s Euridice,” in The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525–1630, ed. Eric Cochrane (London: Macmillan, 1970), 401–43. 5.  Suzanne Cusick has explored Francesca Caccini’s extraordinary career and her music in detail. See her Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 6.  See, for instance, the Tratado de glosas of Diego Ortiz (Rome, 1553). Jordi Savall has recorded several of the sample improvisations in Ortiz to dazzling effect. Some of these appear on the album Ostinato, Hespèrion XXI, Jordi Savall, director (Alia Vox AV 9820, 2001). 7.  See, however, Monteverdi’s madrigal “Io mi son giovinetta” (Book IV), which foregrounds parallel fifths and octaves—first as a sign of the apparent naïveté of the shepherdess and then as evidence of the slippery slope her seduction precipitates. 8.  In his brilliant Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Robert O. Gjerdingen chooses to label the first of his eighteenthcentury formulas “Romanesca.” It superficially resembles the Renaissance pattern in that it proceeds by falling fourths (I–V–vi–I6). It operates within the major mode, however, and serves to support its tonic unequivocally. It has more in common with the harmonic progression of the ciaccona (see chapter 7) than with what sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musicians called the romanesca. The reader should be careful not to confuse these two very important figures. 9.  See the analyses in Modal Subjectivities of Claudio Monteverdi’s “Anima mia, perdona” and Giaches de Wert’s “Tirsi morir volea.” 10.  For a recent study of the Medici wedding, see Nina Treadwell, Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for “La Pellegrina” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).  

 

 

 

 

 

308   |   Notes

11.  Brown, “How Opera Began.” 12.  For more on Monteverdi’s swerve into opera, see Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). See also Gordon Haramaki, “Monteverdi and the Poetics of Genre,” Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2008, for an extended consideration of the composer’s life-long agenda in fashioning combinations between his older modus operandi and a wide range of new procedures. 13.  Compare this with the tactic opening Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast /  Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, / Sing, heavenly Muse!” Milton summarizes the entire trajectory from Adam’s fall to our own redemption within his apostrophe, delaying his downbeat until “Sing.” 14.  See “Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” in my Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), chapter 2. See also the discussion in Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 15.  Cusick, Francesca Caccini, and Treadwell, Music and Wonder. Female artists such as Francesca Caccini or Vittoria Archilei suffered particularly from this nervousness concerning attribution. Many scholars now believe that Archilei herself was largely responsible for “Dalle più alte sfere,” the spectacular number that opened the Pellegrina intermedi. 16.  See chapter 6, where explicit expansions of psalm tones return us to this issue. Whatever my differences from Schenker, I find it astonishing that he managed to reconstruct this phylogeny by examining only later music. Much of what I present in this book is compatible with Schenker’s accounts of repertories from Bach through Brahms, though he would not have regarded most of the music I discuss as working properly. 17.  My colleague Michael Cherlin similarly prefers to approach the music of Arnold Schoenberg as the work of a composer steeped in the premises of tonality who pushes for ever-greater attenuation, rather than projecting the methods and assumptions of serial analysis back on his earlier repertory. See his Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 18.  A hemiola groups two measures of ¾ meter into one megameasure of 3∕2 as a way of putting the brakes on what would otherwise threaten to produce a runaway series of rolling triple meter. This device continues to appear throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is still prevalent in J. S. Bach and Handel. 19.  This problem of closure becomes palpable again in Beethoven’s middle period, which is why he resorts to overemphatic repetitions of the final cadence. A mere cadence cannot absorb the energies accumulated over the course of a movement. 20.  See my discussion of Vivaldi in “What Was Tonality?” in Conventional Wisdom, chapter 3, or the analysis of a movement by Corelli in the postlude to this book.

Notes   |   309

2. Composi t es, or t h e St ill-Di v ided Subjec t 1.  See, for instance, Cipriano de Rore’s “Mia benigna fortuna,” discussed in chapter 5 of my Modal Subjectivities: Self Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 2.  See particularly the chapters devoted to Rore, Gesualdo, and Monteverdi in Modal Subjectivities. 3.  See again the discussion in the prelude to this book, in which I compare my approach to those of other scholars, such as Carl Dahlhaus and Harold S. Powers. I take modes to have provided sophisticated ways of articulating musical structures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dahlhaus and Powers doubted the viability of mode for these repertories and thereby, I would claim, eliminated at the outset the very concepts that would have allowed them to make sense of this music. In other words, they threw away the paddle. See Dahlhaus, Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality, trans. Robert O. Gjerdingen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Powers, “Mode,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980). 4.  Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 179–96. Alfred Einstein takes much the same position as Tomlinson in his magisterial The Italian Madrigal, 3 vols., trans. Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949). 5.  For a brilliant account of the relationships between Marsilio Ficino and Monteverdi, see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 6.  Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance, 192–94. 7.  Ibid., 198. 8.  Seventeenth-century composers were loath to relinquish the intertwining of voices so important to the polyphonic madrigal, even after the advent of monody. The trio texture in “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” and countless other pieces that imply a single speaker, manages to preserve at least some of those earlier contrapuntally produced images while exploiting the greater communicative power of monody. The offending pitches in m. 8—D, B, and Fá—are easily reduced out: Monteverdi is “simply” moving the C and A that begin m. 8 down to B and Gá. But, of course, the offending pitches are precisely the point. For a contemporaneous theorist explaining Mannerist violations in this way, see Christoph Bernhard, “The Tractatus,” trans. Walter Hilse, in Music Forum 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). 9.  See my Modal Subjectivities, chapter 4. See also the discussion of the Gabrieli toccata in chapter 6 for instances of this maneuver explicitly generated in the ways I am proposing here. 10.  The passage is not in C major, even though the absence of accidentals might suggest as much to musicians today. The seventh degree in C—then as now—lies a half step below the final, but that does not mean that it always  

 

 

 

 

 

310   |   Notes

functions as a leading tone. The harmonic progressions in example 2.2 do not behave in such a way as to circumscribe C as a tonal pitch center; they are modally generated. 11.  We will see something of this escape into pleasurable fantasy in the discussion of French culture in chapters 7-9. 12.  See chapter 3 for a discussion of the emergence of the violin and its solo repertories, as well as its relationship to the virtuosic vocal music coming to the fore at the same time. 13.  Phantasticus: 17th-century Violin Music (Harmonia Mundi 907211, 1998). See Andrew Dell’Antonio, Syntax, Form, and Genre in Sonatas and Canzonas, 1621–1635 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1997) for the most thorough account to date of this neglected repertory. 14.  See the discussion of “Ah, dolente partita” in chapter 1 of my Modal Subjectivities. 15.  This particular problematic will persist in a string of famous pieces in Cá minor: the fugue in this key in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier I, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, and his Op. 131 string quartet. See the postlude for a discussion of the Bach. 16.  For more on the alien qualities of this period, see Susan McClary, ed., Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).  

3. Sopr a no as Fet ish 1.  For more on this context, see Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–1597, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 2.  See my Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 3.  See Howard Brown, Embellishing 16th-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 4.  Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 5.  As translated in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, eds., Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), 71–72. 6.  Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1961). 7.  For excerpts from John of Salisbury and Pope John XXII, see Weiss and Taruskin, eds., Music in the Western World, 64 and 71. 8.  See Linda Austern, “ ‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 420–48; and “ ‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,” Music and Letters (1993): 349–51. Alas, such warnings do not disappear in later times: Anthony Sheppard documents the attempts by twentieth-century modernists to return to the purity of all-male performance, with such models as Greek tragedy, medieval mystery plays, and Japanese Noh cited for justification. Anthony W. Sheppard, Reveal 

 

 

 

 

Notes   |   311

ing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 9.  Anthony Newcomb, “Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). See also The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 10.  In fact, two of the original band of the Ladies of Ferrara fell from grace quite dramatically: Tarquinia Molza was discovered to be having an affair with court composer Giaches de Wert and was dismissed from Ferrara in 1589, and Anna Guarini (daughter of the author of Il Pastor Fido) was murdered by her husband in 1598 on suspicion of adultery. 11.  See my Modal Subjectivities for detailed analyses of how these operate. 12.  This custom has not disappeared. Many contemporary popular male musicians—Philip Bailey (of Earth, Wind & Fire), Steven Tyler (of Aero­ smith), Prince, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and Rob Halford (of Judas Priest)—regularly sing or sang in the soprano range. All-male groups such as Boyz II Men and ’N Sync approximate the division of labor that characterizes the Renaissance madrigal ensemble, and they likewise combine to produce the illusion of a single [male] subjectivity. See chapter 4 for more on the issue of what I call soprano masculinities. 13.  Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 24. 14.  Vincenzo Giustiniani, Il Discorso sopra la musica (1628), trans. Carol MacClintock (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1962). Although the Discorso was published years later, Giustiniani was born in 1564 and qualifies as one of our most valuable eyewitnesses to the musical changes that occurred during this period. 15.  Luzzasco Luzzaschi’s Madrigali per cantare e sonare a uno, due e tre soprani, for instance, appeared in 1601. A single copy of the print survives. 16.  Until quite recently modern musicians regarded these scores as unperformable. But the early music movement that started in the 1960s with wobbly renditions for use in musicology seminars has long since produced virtuosos capable of executing the feats demanded by such repertories. A suitably breathtaking recording of “Non sa che sia dolore” appears on the album Concerto delle donne, The Consort of Musicke, Harmonia Mundi 77154–2-RC (1988): Emma Kirkby, Evelyn Tubb, Deborah Roberts, sopranos; Anthony Rooley, lute. 17.  I deal with “Ah, dolente partita” at length in the opening chapter of Modal Subjectivities. 18.  G. B. Guarini, from “Partita dolorosa,” Rime (Venice, 1598), madrigal no. 41. So popular was this text that J. S. Bach set a version in BWV 209. 19.  Newcomb, The Madrigal in Ferrara. 20.  Some polyphonic madrigals also moved in this direction, especially those of Giaches de Wert, not coincidentally a composer closely tied to the Ladies. Even the polyphonic madrigal began at this point to be a spectator-based genre. See “Coney Island of the Madrigal” in my Modal Subjectivities. 21.  I hasten to add that even though audiences did not participate along  

 

 

 

312   |   Notes

with the performers in the production of sound, they also did important cultural work. For more on the changes in listening habits during this period and their significance, see Andrew Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 22.  For more on the ideological persistence of this image, see my “The Bodies of Angels,” in Desvelando el Cuerpo: Perspectivas desde las Ciencias Humanas, ed. Josep Martí et al. (Barcelona: CSIC, 2010), 137–44. 23.  For an account of attempts at understanding fluctuating emotions through mathematical models developed for measuring acceleration, see Daniel Garber, “Disciplining Feeling: The Seventeenth-Century Idea of a Mathematical Theory of the Emotions,” in McClary, ed., Structures of Feeling in SeventeenthCentury Expressive Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 24.  See Nina Treadwell, “The Performance of Gender in Cavalieri/Guidiccioni’s Ballo ‘O che nuovo miracolo’ (1589),” Women & Music 1 (1997): 55– 70; and Suzanne G. Cusick, “ ‘Thinking from Women’s Lives’: Francesca Caccini after 1627,” in Rediscovering the Muses: Women’s Musical Traditions, ed. Kimberly Marshall (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993). 25.  Claudio Monteverdi, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, trans. Denis Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 56 and 187. 26.  Professional female musicians continued to be condemned for the fact that they were rewarded with cold, hard cash, even though this form of payment was necessitated by the fact that they could not receive chapel appointments. See Sergio Durante, “The Opera Singer,” in Opera Production and Its Resources, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, trans Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 360. 27.  See Nina Treadwell, Music, Wonder, and the “Mystery of State”: Medicean Theater and the Interludes for “La Pellegrina” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). This kind of marginalization of female creativity does not go away: the girl groups of the 1960s often had their inventions credited to others, and the remarkable improvisatory work of Cathy Berberian is usually ascribed to her husband, composer Luciano Berio. 28.  Un concert spirituel, Concerto Vocale, René Jacobs, dir., Harmonia Mundi 1901032: Judith Nelson and Birgit Grenat, sopranos; René Jacobs, countertenor. 29.  See the section on the prima donna in Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 227–37. 30.  Not everyone in Europe succumbed to the brilliance of the violin. See the astonishingly violent attack on “Sultan Violin” by Abbé Hubert Le Blanc, Défense de la basse de viole contre les entreprises du violon et le prétensions du violoncelle, trans. Barbara Garvey Jackson, Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America 10: 24–27. 31.  The solo sonata by Dario Castello discussed in the previous chapter has close ties with the strategies of soloists such as Vittoria Archilei, and it too relies on the soprano fetish for its rhetorical and affective strategies. 32.  The opening motive of this particular sonata, as well as Gabrieli’s choice of G Mixolydian, recalls Monteverdi’s most infamous madrigal, “Cruda Amarilli,” which opens his Book V (1605).  

 

 

 

Notes   |   313

33.  The text of this duet had appeared in 1641 in Il pastor regio by composer Benedetto Ferrari, and its music bears a striking resemblance to the many other ostinato-based pieces by Ferrari. Like most multisection pieces of this time, L’Incoronazione di Poppea changed for the purposes of different productions. Whoever wrote it, this duet stands out as one of the most beautiful and— given the circumstances of the plot—most lethal in the repertory. 34.  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 35.  Sebastian Klotz, “Androgynous, and Musically Gifted—The Construction of Tarquinia Molza in Francesco Patrizi’s L’amoros filosofia—I (1577),” unpublished paper, 1993. I wish to thank Dr. Klotz for sharing this paper with me. 36.  Jacqueline Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (New York: Routledge, 2007). 37.  Robert Gjerdingen culled many of the patterns he analyzes from the pedagogical materials used in the conservatories in Naples. See Robert O. Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) for more on the teaching methods developed in these influential institutions. 38.  Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993).  

 

 

 

4. Ge nder A mbigui t ies a nd Erot ic E xcess in t h e Oper as of C ava lli 1.  See, for instance, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 2.  See, for instance, Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); Walser, “Prince as Queer Poststructuralist,” Popular Music and Society 18, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 87–98; John Gill, Queer Noises (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Stan Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy (London: Ashgate, 2009). 3.  See especially Stephen Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect: or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 1 (1989): 7–29; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992); Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Susan Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 1992); Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath’: Speculating on the Boy Actor,” in Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics, 64–83; Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University  

 

 

314   |   Notes

Press, 1992); Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 4.  Nino Pirrotta, Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), chapters 15–22; Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also my “Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” in my Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 35–52, and my review of Rosand in Historical Performance 4, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 109–17. 5.  Italian libraries have recently started to make digitized facsimiles available on the Internet. See, for instance, www.internetculturale.it. My thanks to Louise Stein for introducing me to this site, which has become indispensable to me. A critical edition of the most successful opera of the century, Cavalli’s Giasone, is only now going to press. Cavalli, Giasone, ed. Ellen Rosand (Kassel: Bärenreiter, forthcoming). 6.  The situations in France and Spain differ from each other and from those in England and Italy. The French found most Italianate practices of the time— especially those involving castrati—nothing less than repugnant (Gluck had to rewrite his Italian operas for the French stage, thereby purging them of these unnatural creatures). Gender-related issues in Spanish theater of this time have only recently been addressed. See Pilar Ramos López, “Mujeres, música y teatro en el Siglo de Oro,” in Música y Mujeres: género y poder, ed. Marisa Manchado Torres (Madrid: horas y HORAS, 1998), 39–62, and especially Louise K. Stein, Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in SeventeenthCentury Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 7.  On Italy and English transvestism, see Bruce R. Smith, “Making a Difference: Male/Male ‘Desire’ in Tragedy, Comedy, and Tragi-Comedy,” in Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics, 132, 138, 142. 8.  For more on the problems of dealing with the history of cultural pleasure, see Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 9–11. Concerning the cultural formations of conventions, see my Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 9.  For more on the range of fantasies invoked by female transvestism, see the essays in Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics, especially Stephen Orgel, “The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl,” 12–26; Lisa Jardine, “Twins and Travesties: Gender, Dependency and Sexual Availability in Twelfth Night,” 27–38; Valerie Traub, “The (In)significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” 150–69; and Jean E. Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl,” 170–90.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   |   315

10.  Margaret Reynolds, “Ruggiero’s Deceptions, Cherubino’s Distractions,” in En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corrine E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 135. 11.  See Nina Treadwell, “Female Operatic Cross-Dressing: Bernardo Saddumene’s Libretto for Leonardo Vinci’s Li zite’n galera (1722),” Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 2 (July 1998): 131–56. 12.  Blackmer and Smith, eds., En Travesti. 13.  On the differences in plots between Elizabethan and Jacobean Shakespeare, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986). 14.  Suzanne Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For a study that focuses on slightly earlier genres of music drama, see Nina Treadwell, “Sirene at Court: Musical and Balletic Performance at Ferrara under Lucrezia d’Este and Margherita Gonzaga (1580–97),” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2000. 15.  For a study of Roman musical culture under Christina, see Carolyn Gianturco, Alessandro Stradella, 1639–1682 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 16.  For more on the increasing clout of divas in seventeenth-century opera, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 227–37. 17.  The most important work on gender in seventeenth-century opera is being carried out by Wendy Heller. See her Emblems of Eloquence. See also her “Daphne’s Dilemma: Desire as Metamorphosis in Early Modern Opera,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 18.  See, for instance, Susan Leonardi and Rebecca Pope, eds., The Diva’s Mouth (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Mary Ann Smart, “The Lost Voice of Rosine Stoltz,” in En Travesti, 169–89. 19.  Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath’: Speculating on the Boy Actor,” in Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics, 64–83. 20.  Libretto by Giacomo Francesco Parisani, music by Giacinto Cornacchioli. 21.  For the English convention of associating Italy with sodomy, see Goldberg, Sodometries, 105–6, and Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance, 49 and 60. 22.  For more on castrati, see the sources listed in note 4 of this chapter. See also Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975); John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Michel Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Joke Dame, “Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 139–53. See especially the recent study by Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato, which examines in detail the documents concerning an eighteenthcentury castrato. The most sympathetic fictional engagement with castrati—sensationalis 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

316   |   Notes

tic though it may be—remains Anne Rice’s novel Cry to Heaven (New York: Knopf, 1982). Rice makes a compelling case for the erotic fascination of the castrato, and she even explains why audiences would have sat spellbound throughout one lengthy da capo aria after another. See also Dominique Fernandez, Poporino, or The Secrets of Naples, trans. Eileen Finletter (New York: Morrow, 1976) for another sympathetic castrato novel—this one focusing on the impending downfall of the castrati in the eighteenth century, along with the aristocracy that had sustained them. 23.  See William Christie’s production of Stefano Landi’s Sant’ Alessio (1631), which features no fewer than eight countertenors playing the male and female roles originally intended for castrati. This remarkable production is now available on DVD. 24.  See especially the classic study by Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). See also David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: Plume, 1989). 25.  See again the discussion of “Pur ti miro” in chapter 3. For a more extended discussion of this problem, see Joke Dame, “Unveiled Voices,” 148–51. Dame carefully distinguishes between the moment of the castrati and our own time. She argues that in the recasting of women in castrato roles, “the homoerotics of the castrati have been displaced by lesbian erotics. Those who are deaf to this can stay deaf. Though male voyeurism has rarely objected to lesbianism in art, for my part I consider this lesbian representation in modern revivals of baroque operas a present from history, a history that has rendered the authentic casting of castrati impossible, probably for the good.” (151) Still, in their seventeenth-century contexts, these roles represented heroic males—not women—and this is the economy I seek to understand here. For the purposes of this chapter, then, I am resisting the now-frequent argument that reads baroque castrati as women for purposes of lesbian eroticism. To be sure, women sometimes played these roles—particularly in France and Spain, which found castrati despicable, and also in the years following the disappearance of castrati. Gluck’s Orfeo was the only castrato opera to survive the change in taste, and this is the opera that usually inspires discussions of female/female eroticism (see, for example, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark). By the late eighteenth century this custom had led to the creation of trouser roles: male parts designed for female singers, usually with the invitation to imagine samesex encounters between women (Cherubino and “his” women, Strauss’s Octavian and “his”). See the essays by Terry Castle, Margaret Reynolds, Hélène Cixous, and Wendy Bashant in En Travesti. Among the most successful performances involving a woman playing one of these roles is Sarah Connolly as Handel’s Julius Caesar in a 2006 Glyndebourne production of Giulio Cesare (available on DVD). 26.  Martha Feldman concentrated on the castrato in her Bloch Lectures in 2007. Her two books on this subject—The Castrato in Nature and The Castrato’s Tale (both forthcoming from University of California Press)—will greatly expand our understanding of this phenomenon. 27.  Garber, Vested Interests, chapter 13. 28.  The concept of the Great Masculine Renunciation was introduced and  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   |   317

explained in J. C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 113. 29.  For more on the erotic appeal of Barry White, see Mitchell Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). 30.  In the brilliant production of Calisto directed by René Jacobs, the male actor playing Giove sings most of the opera in a campy falsetto, though Jacobs acknowledges that Giove-as-Diana was probably performed in Venice by the woman singing the role of Diana. See the invaluable preface by Jennifer Williams Brown to her edition of La Calisto, in which she details what we know of the original (and ill-fated) production. Francesco Cavalli, La Calisto, ed. Jennifer Williams Brown (Madison, WI: AR Editions, 2007), xv. 31.  See the discussion of this play in Traub, “The (In)significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” 159–63. For more on the significance of Ovid for early modern Italian opera, see Heller, “Daphne’s Dilemma.” 32.  For an examination of this project, see my “Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music.” 33.  Garber, Vested Interests, 39. 34.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 35.  Pirrotta, “Monteverdi and the Problems of Opera,” in his Music and Culture in Italy, 248. 36.  See, for instance, Goldberg in his introduction to Queering the Renaissance: “These essays do not know in advance where sexuality is or how it will manifest itself (indeed, there is pressure in several of these essays on the very crucial question of whether there is any such thing as sexuality in itself beyond its variegated historical manifestations), but they know that the failure to raise questions of sexuality in these texts has often meant nothing less than the tacit assumption that the only sexuality that ever obtains is a transhistorical heterosexuality” (p. 6). See also Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 37.  For more on the Accademia degli Incogniti, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice; Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century; Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller, The Song of the Soul: Understanding “Poppea” (London: Royal Musical Association Monographs, 1992); and especially Wendy Heller, “Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 39–96. 38.  Strangely enough, Miller and Fenlon conclude from their interrogation of the Incogniti and Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea that music cannot lie. See my review in Music and Letters 74, no. 2 (May 1993): 278–81. 39.  The final scene of the opera continues the extravagant mixture of Christian imagery, erotic love, and references to she-bears. 40.  The same device also characterizes much North African, Arabic, and flamenco music, which may have been among the original sources for this procedure, and it underlies a good deal of contemporary popular music, including metal, blues, and West Coast hip-hop. See, for example, my “Wuthering Depths,” a review of PJ Harvey’s album To Bring You My Love in The Village Voice (March 14, 1995).  

 

 

318   |   Notes

41.  See David Lewin, “Women’s Voices and the Fundamental Bass,” Journal of Musicology 10, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 464–82. 42.  See again chapter 3. For more on the concerto delle donne, see Anthony Newcomb, “Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 90–115. 43.  I resist understanding any practice as “purely musical,” even though theorists often attempt to protect music from ideological critique by appealing to this blanket excuse. See my Conventional Wisdom. 44.  Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni, La bellezza della volgar poesia (Rome: Buagni, 1700), 106–7. Quoted in Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 275. 45.  For a treatment of the Medea story as tragedy, see chapter 10. 46.  For more on the problem of erotic excess in Elizabethan drama, see Catherine Belsey, “Desire’s Excess and the English Renaissance Theatre: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello,” in Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics, 84–102. 47.  Pirrotta, “Monteverdi and the Problems of Opera,” 252–53. 48.  Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 206. 49.  For more on the issue of passive/active masculinities in Italy, see Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. Hames Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10–30. See also Stephen Orgel, “What Knights Really Want,” in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 188–207. 50.  This opera—which has mostly celebrated the sensuality of Giasone’s and Medea’s relationship—suddenly appeals to motherhood in a way that shocks at least as much as the earlier erotic excesses: Isifile begs Giasone to kill her if he no longer wants her, asking only that he spare her breasts, so that her dead body may continue to suckle their infants with its mixture of milk and blood. Giasone capitulates immediately in the face of this over-the-top maternal guilt trip. The act ends abruptly with everyone singing the praises of the new couple, and the curtain falls before this bizarre semblance of closure can come undone. Incidentally, the blood-and-milk trope also circulated in sacred music of the time: compare this with Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’s O Quam Bonus Es, a dialogue in which devotees—respectively, of Christ’s blood and Mary’s milk—exchange hyperbolic erotic claims. 51.  Prince, “Do Me, Baby,” Controversy (Warner Brothers, 1981). Prince derives his falsetto delivery in part from a long line of African-American highvoice virtuosos in both gospel and soul music (e.g., Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones, Smokey Robinson, Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire), none of whom have gender bending in mind. But he developed his style in the 1970s, when gender confusion became rampant in popular culture, and his lyrics and outrageous performing style make clear that he wishes to confound gender (the opening lines of “I Would Die 4 U” are “I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   |   319

something that you’ll never understand”). His decision to discard his name in exchange for a symbol composed of male and female signs indicates how seriously he took this project. Prince’s work also draws heavily on sacred-erotic imagery. While not suggesting any direct link between Prince’s late twentieth-century work and the seventeenth century, I do want to underscore the fact that those earlier practices, which sometimes seem so alien, have analogues in today’s popular culture. 52.  The setting by Schütz is in Symphoniae Sacrae I (1629). His “Anima mea liquefacta est,” from the same collection, is discussed at length in chapter 5. 53.  For other views see Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, trans. Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949); and Pirrotta, “Monteverdi’s Poetic Choices,” 271– 316. See chapter 2 of this volume for a discussion of Monteverdi’s responses to Marino.  

5. Libidinous T h eology 1.  Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, eds., Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue (New York: Continuum, 1996); Idel, Kabbalah & Eros (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Robert Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Modena (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 2.  See the UCLA Ph.D. dissertations of Kate Bartel, Grace Tam, and Ljubica Ilic. David Ake draws on this tradition in his chapter on jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in his Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and Loren Kajikawa makes use of it in an essay concerning D’Angelo. See also my “Wuthering Depths,” a review of PJ Harvey’s album To Bring You My Love, in The Village Voice (March 14, 1995), and “Living to Tell: Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshly,” in my Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 3.  For more on this phenomenon, see Certeau, The Mystic Fable; Rambuss, Closet Devotions; Deborah Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 4.  Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), 827. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text in parentheses. 5.  See Kendrick, Celestial Sirens. See also Kate Bartel, “Portal of the Skies: Music as Devotional Act in Early Modern Europe,” Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2006. 6.  Andrew Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

320   |   Notes

7.  For a discussion of Cantata 140, see my “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13–63. In the B Minor Mass, see “Christe eleison,” “Domine Deus,” and “Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum.” 8.  See Idel and McGinn, eds, Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 9.  Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 208–10. 10.  A less bizarre solution is to present merely an open fifth and octave in the continuo at the beginning. So long as the singer performs the Cá as a chromatic inflection, the effect will still occur. I once had the privilege of singing “Maddalena alla Croce” with Nina Treadwell accompanying me on theorbo, and we worked together to optimize the drastic quality of this opening in our performance. 11.  Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Pears (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1990), 62. 12.  Ibid., 75. 13.  Saint Teresa of Avila, The Way to Perfection, trans. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1964), chapter 31. 14.  Saint Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, trans. Henry Benedict Mackey (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 291. 15.  Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, 136. 16.  Christoph Bernhard, The Treatises of Christoph Bernhard, trans. Walter Hilse, Music Forum III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). Although diagrams such as Bernhard’s may remind us of those associated with Heinrich Schenker, they already circulated among music theorists in the seventeenth century. 17.  Claudio Monteverdi, preface to his Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605). An expanded gloss of this statement, penned by his brother, Giulio Cesare, appeared in Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali (1607). See the translation in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950). See also chapter 8 of my Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 18.  Between the moment in verse 6, when the beloved speaks, and the charge in verse 8 to the daughters of Jerusalem is a horrifically violent episode in which the female speaker not only finds herself abandoned but also stripped and beaten by the city’s watchmen. Song of Songs 5:6–8: “I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer. The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me. I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.” 19.  See the discussion of the Castello sonata in chapter 2 for a similar deployment of Aeolian resources. 20.  Quoted in Idel, Kabbalah & Eros, 209.  

 

 

Notes   |   321

6. St r a ining Belief 1.  Although this particular psalm tone resembles the units of modal grammar I have been tracing, modes and psalm tones are not the same—not even in the context of plainsong. Psalm tones are set formulas, whereas modes are flexible frameworks of fifths and octaves through which pieces unfold. 2.  See, for instance, Murray Bradshaw, The Origin of the Toccata (Dallas, TX: American Institute of Musicology, 1972). 3.  I am using tonal vocabulary (tonic, dominant, secondary dominant) to describe parts of this passage because these particular harmonies function in cadentially oriented ways. But Gabrieli could just as easily have alternated the triad on the final with the minor triad on the fifth degree, as Monteverdi does in example 1.3. Gabrieli’s decision to deploy leading tones in this opening section matters rhetorically, but it does not indicate his greater preference for “tonal” harmonies. 4.  Such passages moving by fifth occur in the examples discussed in chapter 2, especially Monteverdi’s “Non vedrò mai le stelle” and the Castello sonata. I explained such maneuvers in those chapters in ways that are consistent with those of Gabrieli, who works from an explicit linear background. 5.  See the discussions of this issue in the pieces analyzed in chapter 1, in which I posited a double level. 6.  Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), 832. 7.  See chapter 1. 8.  See Ljubica Ilic, Music and the Modern Condition: Investigating the Boundaries (London: Ashgate, 2010), and especially her In Pursuit of Echo: Sound, Space and the History of the Self (in progress). 9.  See Don Harrán, Salamone Rossi: Jewish Musician in Late Renaissance Mantua (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10.  Compare this framing device with that of Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa, in which male ensembles mediate between the nymph’s effusive utterances and the listener. See my account in “Excess and Frame,” in my Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 11.  See chapter 5 for a discussion of Frescobaldi as a composer of vocal music. Alexander Silbiger has written extensively on Frescobaldi; see the collections he edited: Frescobaldi Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); and Keyboard Music Before 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2003). Because my aim in this volume is to set forth an internally consistent account of seventeenthcentury music, I am not engaging directly with his work here. 12.  See the discussion of both the Marenzio and the Philips in my Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Peter Philips’s version appears in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. 13.  A quick rule of thumb: the species of fourth (or diatessaron) may be tweaked chromatically without disturbing the mode’s identity, and even the  

322   |   Notes

pitches of the principal diapente may be converted leading tones (i.e., secondary dominants) for subregions. One cannot, however, alter a pitch to produce a “real” pitch, such as a second degree. That is why the Bà in m. 26 is so transgressive, whereas those that function as picardy thirds in G, as sixth degrees in D, or leading tones to C qualify merely as musica ficta. 14.  See, for instance, Louis Couperin’s toccata in imitation of Froberger.

7. T h e Soci a l History of a Groov e 1.  See Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For the ubiquity of musical practices, see also John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); and William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 2.  See Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998); Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Wald’s book demonstrates how the disparaging of dance entered into and came to dominate aesthetic evaluations of jazz and other genres of popular music. 3.  Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, trans. Adam Czerniawski (London: Macmillan, 1986), 46. 4.  See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), especially the sections on Stravinsky; and his “Perennial Fashion: Jazz,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980). 5.  See my “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late TwentiethCentury Culture,” The Norman and Jane Geske Lecture, 1998 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); and “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Composition,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 57–81. 6.  Richard Hudson, Passacaglia and Ciaccona: From Guitar Music to Italian Keyboard Variations in the 17th Century (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981). 7.  See the entry for “Chaconne” by Alex Silbiger in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2000). 8.  The lyrics appear in translation in Hudson, Passacaglia and Ciaccona, 4. 9.  We owe the concept of “musicking” to Christopher Small, whose insistence on shifting from the noun “music” to the verb to emphasize action and participation has had a radical effect on musicology. See his Musicking. 10.  We know very little about the actual choreography of the chacona. Gordon Haramaki, who specializes in the dance music of this era, has reminded me that the elaborate garb of noblewomen would have restricted movements of the torso. Yet the dance did reach the courts by way of the lower classes, who would not have had to contend with such corseting. My thanks to Gordon for his insights. 11.  See Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations  

Notes   |   323

between Music and Possession, trans. Brunhilde Biebuyck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). 12.  For more on this phenomenon, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also my Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13.  Monteverdi, “Laudate dominum,” in Selva morale e spirituale (1640). 14.  See my Modal Subjectivities. 15.  I owe the concept of the “subjunctive” in musical structure to my graduate student Stuart de Ocampo, who has found it operating in repertories as distant from each other as Chopin ballades and Alessandro Grandi’s early seventeenth-century setting of the Song of Songs. 16.  See Geoffrey Burgess, “The Chaconne and the Representation of Sovereign Power in Lully’s Amadis (1684) and Charpentier’s Médée (1693),” in Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Sarah McCleave (London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, King’s College London, 1998), 81–104. Venetian operas sometimes include indications for ciacconas as well, but they did not qualify as central events. 17.  See McNeill, Keeping Together in Time. 18.  See Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001). 19.  For a useful overview of this figure, see Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” Musical Quarterly 55 (1979): 346–59. 20.  For a discussion of the Marais tombeau, see my “Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances: Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music,” in From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Sara Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 21.  See my “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13–62; and Adorno, “Bach Defended against his Devotees,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 133–46. 22.  See my Conventional Wisdom, chapter 3, and “Adorno Plays the WTC: On Political Theory and Performance,” Indiana Theory Review 27, no. 2 (Fall 2009). 23.  Bach also composed the piece most often thought of as the Passacaglia: a virtuoso piece in C minor for organ. Bach’s Passacaglia unfolds over a mostly unbending ostinato pattern of eight bars, and he follows it with a fugal treatment of the ground. The organ composition parallels the violin chaconne in its sense of profound disquiet, articulated by syncopated figures that attempt in vain to escape the law of the repeating pattern. It does not, however, share the Chaconne’s accented second beat, which recalls—however faintly—the dance patterns of its predecessors.  

 

 

 

 

 

324   |   Notes

24.  Adorno, “Bach Defended.” 25.  See my “Narratives of Bourgeois Subjectivity in Mozart’s ‘Prague’ Symphony,” in Understanding Narrative, ed. Peter Rabinowitz and James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 65–98. 26.  See the discussion in Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition,” in Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).  

8. Da ncing a bou t Pow er , A rchi t ec t u r e a bou t Da ncing 1.  See my “Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances: Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music,” in From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Sara Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 85–112. 2.  Paul Henry Lang, introduction to Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1. See my extended discussion of such tropes in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 3.  Robert Walser, “Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances,” in The Analysis of Popular Music, ed. Allan Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37. 4.  José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Robert Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). See also Rudolf zur Lippe, Geometrisierung des Menschen und Repräsentation des Privaten im französichsen Absolutism (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat Reprise, 1979). 5.  See particularly Kathryn Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures: Interdisciplinary Readings in Pleasure and Power during the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); and Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 6.  See Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), especially chapter 3. Although bodily affects were viewed as potentially discordant, music of the proper sort could have the effect of aligning the soul with the cosmos, thus bringing together (as the Greeks had not) the categories of musica mundana and musica humana. See also Kate van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Penelope Gouk, “Clockwork or Musical Instrument? Some English Theories of Mind-Body Interaction Before and After Descartes,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 7.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.  

Notes   |   325

Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 30. For an exploration of the more traditional view, see Michael A. Williams, “Divine Image—Prison of Flesh: Perceptions of the Body in Ancient Gnosticism,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Urzone, 1989), 128–47. 8.  The seventeenth century, however, had not yet abolished some of the most egregious forms of officially sanctioned violence. See Sarah Covington, “Cutting, Branding, Whipping, Burning: The Performance of Judicial Wounding in Early Modern England,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture. 9.  Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 10.  Thus the crisis of state authority that attended Louis’s inevitable loss of physical prowess. When he could no longer perform his own perfection he turned to Lully for the development of other media; it was within this context that the tragédie lyrique took shape. The film Le roi danse (Gérard Corbiau, director, starring Benoît Magimel as Louis, Boris Terral as Lully; 2000) dramatizes very well both Louis’s extraordinary balletic talents and the moment when they began to fail him. 11.  Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 12.  Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 13.  See, for instance, the excerpts from François Raguenet, Parallèle des Italiens et des Français, and Le Cerf de La Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française, in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 273–307. 14.  Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure. 15.  Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also Franko’s essay in From the Royal to the Republican Body; and Peter Maxwell Cryle, Geometry in the Bedroom: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). For Spinoza’s attempt to extend Cartesian geometry to the understanding of affect, see Daniel Garber, “Disciplining Feeling: The Seventeenth-Century Idea of a Mathematical Theory of the Emotions,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture. 16.  See Neal Zaslaw, “The First Opera in Paris: A Study in the Politics of Art,” in Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque, 7–23. 17.  Wendy Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater: The French Noble Style 1690–1725 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 11–12. 18.  M. le duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency, trans. Bayle St. John (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), 19–20; quoted in Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater, 15. 19.  See Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater; Meredith Little, “Recent Research in European Dance, 1400–1800,” Early Music 14, no. 1 (1986): 4–14; Patricia Ranum, “Audible Rhetoric and Mute Rhetoric: The Seventeenth-Century French Sarabande,” Early Music 14, no. 1 (1986): 22–39; and Betty Bang  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

326   |   Notes

Mather, assisted by Dean M. Karns, Dance Rhythms of the French Baroque: A Handbook for Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 20.  For more on the importance of such frameworks, see my Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 21.  Elijah Wald makes a similar argument with respect to jazz and popular music, thereby explaining the greater success of Paul Whiteman compared to more experimental improvisers. See his How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 22.  See my Conventional Wisdom, chapters 2 (on the blues) and 3 (on eighteenth-century tonality). 23.  Irene Alm, “Winged Feet and Mute Eloquence: Dance in SeventeenthCentury Venetian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 15, no. 3 (2003): 216–80. 24.  See chapter 6 and the discussion later in this chapter. See also my “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); my “What Was Tonality?” in Conventional Wisdom; and my “Adorno Plays the WTC: On Political Theory and Performance,” Indiana Theory Review 27, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 97–112. 25.  See my “Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation,” Enclitic 7, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 76–86, reprinted in my Reading Music (London: Ashgate, 2007).  

 

 

9. T empor a li t y a nd Ideology 1.  Michael Fried, “Absorption: a Master Theme in Eighteenth-Century French Painting and Criticism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 9, no. 2 (Winter 1975–76): 139–77. See also his Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Fried observes that “there had been a tradition of absorptive painting, one whose almost universal efflorescence in the seventeenth century was everywhere followed by its relative decline” (Absorption and Theatricality, 43; emphasis in the original). 2.  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131–32. See also my Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 3.  Gordon Pocock justifies a similar account of the longue durée in his book Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980):  

 

 

[Neoclassicism is] a doctrine which flourished in such different social and intellectual contexts, beginning in France in the years when Richelieu was coming to power, consolidating itself in the 1630s, and enduring through the Frondes, the absolutism of Louis XIV, into the Regency, and well into the second half of the eighteenth century. These are years of profound social and intellectual change: of civil wars; of the establishment and partial failure of absolutism; of recession followed by eighteenth-century prosperity; of the Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment. It

Notes   |   327 surely requires some explanation that the same critical themes and doctrines should occupy such diverse minds as Chapelain, Boileau and Voltaire. (14)

4.  François Couperin, L’Art de toucher le clavecin (1716), the paragraph just before the heading “Examinons donc d’où vient cette contrarieté!” 5.  See, for instance, David Fuller’s entry on Chambonnières in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980); “French Harpsichord Playing in the 17th Century—after Le Gallois,” Early Music 4 (1976): 22–26; and “ ‘Sous les doits de Chambonniere,’ ” Early Music 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 191–202. I wish to thank Professor Fuller for sharing with me some of his unpublished materials on this repertory. 6.  James R. Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 243. 7.  Jean Henry D’Anglebert, Pièces de Clavecin (Paris, 1689; facsimile edition, New York: Broude Brothers, 1965), 109–10. 8.  Two other compositions labeled “gaillarde” appear in D’Anglebert’s print, one virtually a transposition of the Tombeau de M.r de Chambonnières into the minor mode (see pp. 81–82; the other gaillarde is on p. 50). It is not the same dance as the more familiar galliard, a lively dance usually paired with a pavane. Jacques Champion de Chambonnières also includes one gaillarde of this sort in his collection, composed much earlier but printed in 1670 (facsimile edition New York: Broude Brothers, 1967), book II, 7–8. 9.  See, for instance, my discussion of the Allemande from Bach’s French Suite in D Minor in chapter 8 or the Courante from his Partita in D Major in my Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), chapter 3. 10.  For more on the very sophisticated ways listeners orient themselves with respect to music, see Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11.  The quotations of both Couperin and Bacilly are taken from the translations in Beverly Scheibert, Jean-Henry D’Anglebert and the SeventeenthCentury Clavecin School (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 40–41. 12.  Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1765,” in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1959), 533; quoted in Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 35–37. Diderot writes, of course, at a very different moment in French history. Yet Michael Fried argues persuasively throughout Absorption and Theatricality that Diderot attempts in his art criticism to teach viewers how to interact appropriately to paintings that play not to the taste for theatricality prevalent at his time, but rather to the contemplative states of mind associated with absorption, a value far more frequently appealed to in art of the seventeenth century. 13.  Jean Le Gallois, Lettre de Mr Le Gallois a Mademoiselle Regnault de Solier touchant la musique (Paris: Michallet, 1680), 68–86; quoted in Fuller, “ ‘Sous les doits de Chambonniere,’ ” 196. 14.  Charles Rosen, “The Fabulous La Fontaine,” New York Review of Books, December 18, 1997, 38–46. 15.  For the theoretical and historical discussion of Kultur versus civilisation,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

328   |   Notes

see Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978), chapter 1. See also chapter 7 of this book. 16.  See my discussion in Conventional Wisdom, chapter 3. 17.  Hayden White, “Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse,” Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 18.  Robert Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Kathryn Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures: Interdisciplinary Readings in Pleasure and Power during the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 19.  Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures, 1; Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 352. See also Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure. 20.  “Laisser le peuple s’endormir dans les fêtes, dans les spectacles.” J. La Bruyère, Les Caractères, 1688; quoted in Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 6. In Society of Pleasures, Hoffmann traces in texts of this time the many recurrent images associated with slumber: dreams, reverie, trance, somnambulism, and so on. 21.  For critiques of the explanation of this culture as simply imposed from above, see again Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures, and also Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 22.  Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). For a more recent political interrogation of Racine and his relation to power, see Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures, chapter 2. 23.  Quoted in Goldmann, The Hidden God, 34. 24.  As quoted in Sara Melzer, Discourses of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s Pensées (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 86. (“Nous souhaitons la vérité et ne trouvons en nous qu’incertitude. Nous recherchons le bonheur et ne trouvons que misère et mort. Nous sommes incapables de ne pas souhaiter la vérité et le bonheur et sommes incapable ni de certitude ni de bonheur. Ce désir nous est laissé pour nous punir que pour nous faire sentir d’où nous sommes tombés.”) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976), fragment 20. 25.  Saint Francis de Sales, as quoted in Paul de Jaegher, An Anthology of Christian Mysticism (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1977), 124–27. 26.  Mme. de Guyon, Torrens spirituels, part II, chapter 4, paragraph 12, as quoted in Ted Campbell, The Religion of the Heart (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2000), 34. Campbell’s book is a comparative study of subjective religious movements of the seventeenth century. See chapter 5 of this volume for more on the phenomenology of divine love. 27.  For detailed readings of Watteau stressing the qualities contributing to  

 

Notes   |   329

reverie, see Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chapter 3. See especially Georgia Cowart, “Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera and the Subversive Utopia of the Opera-Ballet,” Art Bulletin 83 (September 2001): 460–78. 28.  Elias, The Court Society, especially the section on court rationality, 110– 16. See also Pocock, Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism, 12–13. 29.  J. le Rond D’Alembert, La Liberté de la musique (1759), in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, vol. 1 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 520; my translation. 30.  José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1986), 68. 31.  Of course, this is not the only moment in history to have experienced such a collision. Americanists such as David Noble have identified a similar confrontation at the turn of the last century between Quietist isolationism (which many wanted to protect from the onslaught of modern urbanization) and the Progressive political movements that eventually won the day. See his The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 32.  Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures, 34.  

 

 

 

10. T h e Dr agon C a rt 1.  McClary, “Excess and Frame: The Musical Representation of Madwomen,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 80–111. 2.  Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 133–35. 3.  Ibid., 9. 4.  Patricia Ranum, “Lully Plays Deaf: Rereading the Evidence on His Privilege,” in Lully Studies, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15–31. 5.  See Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 6.  Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Satire X (Contre les femmes), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Hachette, 1864), 95-96. For more on the extensive association of women with opera, see Georgia Cowart, “Of Women, Sex and Folly: Opera under the Old Regime,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6, no. 3 (November 1994): 205–20. 7.  See Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chapter 4. In fact, we have no evidence that Louis supported Armide either financially or through his presence at a performance, and the opera was instead underwritten by the Dauphin and by a group of libertines led by the Duc de Vendôme. I wish to thank Professor Cowart for allowing me to read a draft of her book before it appeared in print.  

 

 

 

330   |   Notes

8.  After around 1685 Louis also withdrew from public spectacles such as opera, and in the eighteenth century he was even represented in terms that reversed his earlier Sun King image. See Georgia Cowart, “Carnival in Venice or Protest in Paris? Louis XIV and the Politics of Subversion at the Paris Opéra,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 265–302. 9.  Dowling Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647– 1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Patricia Howard, “Quinault, Lully, and the Précieuses: Images of Women in SeventeenthCentury France,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 70–89; and “The Influence of the Précieuses on Content and Structure in Quinault’s and Lully’s Tragédies Lyriques,” Acta musicologica 63 (1991): 57–72. 10.  See Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 110–11. 11.  For more on the passacaille in general and this one in particular, see chapter 7. 12.  Georgia Cowart too argues that Renaud fails to uphold the earlier image of the hero, turning the spectator’s attention instead to pleasure and the emotional vitality of Armide herself. See her The Triumph of Pleasure, chapter 4. 13.  See Kathryn A. Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures: Interdisciplinary Readings in Pleasure and Power during the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 14.  Orgel, “What Knights Really Want,” in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 188–207.  

 

 

 

 

 

Postlude 1.  Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chapter 10. 2.  For a thorough history of this historical transformation, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 3.  For more on the relationships between this genre and monarchy, see Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in EighteenthCentury Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For more on the influence of the Spanish viceroys’ tastes on opera seria, see Louise K. Stein, “A Viceroy Behind the Scenes: Opera, Production, Politics, and Financing in 1680s Naples,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 4.  Robert Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Michel Foucault, “Docile Bodies,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). See also Kathryn Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures: Interdisciplinary Readings in Pleasure and Power During the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 5.  An earlier version of chapter 1 of this volume appeared in Towards Tonality: Aspects of Baroque Music Theory, Collected Writings of the Orpheus Insti-

Notes   |   331

tute 6 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007). The collection also includes important articles by Thomas Christensen, Joel Lester, and others. 6.  For a theoretical discussion of nested conventions, see “Turtles All the Way Down,” the opening chapter of my Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 7.  Robert O. Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I had the privilege of studying with Professor Gjerdingen at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music in the summer of 2009. 8.  Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, La bellezza della volgar poesia (Rome: Buagni, 1700), 106–7. Quoted in Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 275. 9.  McClary, Susanna Does the Elders: Confessions of a Tanna-Leaf Smoker, which was produced at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis in 1987, with funding from the Minnesota Composers Forum. See chapter 1 of my Conventional Wisdom for a discussion of Stradella’s “Quanto invidio” from La Susanna. 10.  Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle and Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 11.  McClary, “Adorno Plays the WTC,” Indiana Theory Review 27, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 97–112. See also the discussions concerning Bach’s temporality in chapters 7–9 of this book. 12.  For a discussion of this piece, see my “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13–63. 13.  The original has a four-part concerto grosso instrumentation for the ritornelli. To save space, I have reduced these to just the violin and continuo lines. 14.  Robert Winter theorized such endings from a somewhat different point of view in “The Bifocal Close and the Evolution of the Viennese Classical Style,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 42 (1989): 275–337. 15.  See my Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) for an overview of the modal allegory structuring Orfeo. 16.  For an account of why this unlikely Bible story emerged as a favorite in the seventeenth century, see Debora Kuller Shuger, “Iphigenia in Israel,” in her The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 128–66. 17.  See my “Adorno Plays the WTC.” 18.  See my “Playing the Identity Card: Of Grieg, Indians, and Women,” 19th-Century Music 31, no. 3 (2008): 217–27.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Accademia degli Incogniti, 13, 115, 317n37 Adams, John, 194 Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 66, 194, 213, 254, 299, 322n4, 323n21, 323n22, 324n24, 324n26, 326n24, 331n11, 331n17 Ake, David, 319n2 Alm, Irene, 225, 326n23 Anderson, Laurie, 194 Anthony, James R., 243, 324n2, 327n6 Arcadelt, Jacques, 6; “Ahime, dov’ è ’l bel viso,” 6; “O felic’ occhi miei,” 6 Archilei, Antonio, 91 Archilei, Vittoria, 90–96, 308n15, 312n31; “Dalle più alte sfere,” 91–96, 92–93, 308n15 aria form, 42, 281–88 Ariosto, Ludovico, 28; Orlando Furioso, 28, 106 Artusi, Giovanni Maria, 9, 11, 306n18 Augustine (Saint), 80–81, 310n6 Austern, Linda, 310n8 Babbitt, Milton, 194 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 59, 277 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 2, 16, 17, 44, 131, 132, 143, 166, 188, 207–14, 219, 225, 228, 236- 38, 244, 247, 252, 276, 277, 281, 282, 299–302, 303, 308n16, 308n18, 310n15, 311n18, 320n7, 323n21, 323n22, 323n23, 324n24, 326n24, 327n9, 331n10, 331n11, 331n12; B Minor Mass, 132, 208, 277,

320n7; Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, 282; Cantata 78, 208- 89, 211; Cantata 106, 166; Cantata 140, 320n7; “Chaconne,” 16, 207–14, 210, 212, 323n23; French Suite, Courante, 236– 38, 237, 327n9; Harpsichord Partita in D Major, Courante, 327n9; Passacaglia, 323n23; Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, 188; WTC I, C# Minor Fugue, 299–302, 301, 310n15 Bacilly, Bénigne de, 249, 327n11 Bailey, Philip, 311n12, 318n51 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 114, 218, 317n34 Balzac, Honoré de, 109, 316n24; Sarrasine, 109, 316n24 Barcos, Martin de, 254, 328n23 Bardi, Giovanni de’, 91 Bartel, Kate, 319n2, 319n5 Barthes, Roland, 316n24 Bashant, Wendy, 316n25 Basile, Adriana, 90, 94 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 2, 11, 17, 25, 47, 59, 66, 111, 194, 195, 214, 231, 308n19, 310n15, 324n26; Quartet, Op. 131, 66, 302, 310n15; Quartet, Op. 132, 302–03; Sonata, Op. 27 (“Moonlight”), 310n15; Symphony No. 3, 47; Symphony No. 9, 25 Bellini, Vincenzo, 2 Belsey, Catherine, 318n46 Berberian, Cathy, 312n27 Berger, Karol, 281, 331n10

333

334   |   Index Berio, Luciano, 91, 312n27 Bernard of Clairvaux, 134–35 Bernhard, Christoph, 148–9, 150, 309n8, 320n16 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 131, 133–34, 137, 138, 144, 146, 150, 158, 168–69, 182; Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 133–34, 133, 137, 138, 144, 150, 158, 169; Saint Peter’s Basilica, 137, 138, 168–69 Bianconi, Lorenzo, 105, 120, 216, 312n26, 314n4, 317n37, 318n48, 324n4 Bildung, 210–11, 214 Bizet, Georges, Carmen, 259 Blacking, John, 322n1 Blackmer, Corrine E., 315n10, 315n12 bodies, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13–14, 27, 80, 81, 83, 89, 94, 100, 110, 111, 125, 134, 144, 147, 150, 158, 168, 170, 182, 190, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203, 205, 215, 216–18, 229, 247, 257, 273, 277, 283, 312n22, 313n1, 313n3, 315n19, 318n50, 319n3, 322n1, 323n20, 324n1, 324- 25nn6–7, 325n15, 327n12, 330n4 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 264, 326– 27n3, 329n28, 329n6 Boleyn, Anne, 29 Boucher, François, 259, 265 Boulez, Pierre, 91, 194 Bowie, David, 104 Boyz II Men, 311n12 Bradshaw, Murray, 160, 321n2 Brahms, Johannes, 308n16 Brando, Marlon, 27 Braudel, Fernand, 131–32, 148, 165, 319n4, 321n6 Bray, Alan, 315n21 Brecht, Bertolt, 116 Brooks, Peter, 327n12 Brover-Lubovsky, Bella, 306n19 Brown, Howard Mayer, 32, 307n4, 308n11, 310n3 Brown, James, 195 Brown, Jennifer Williams, 317n30 Bruckner, Anton, 37 Bryson, Norman, 328–29n27 Burgess, Geoffrey, 323n16 Burke, Peter, 217, 325n9, 328n20 Butler, Judith, 313n1 Butt, John, 5, 306n11 Buxtehude, Dietrich, 17, 188, 275 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 111 Caccini, Francesca, 28, 107, 307n5, 308n15, 312n24, 315n14

Caccini, Giulio, 11, 22–28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 46, 89, 91, 92, 170–71, 307n3; “Amarilli, mia bella,” 22–28, 23–24, 29, 31, 33, 46, 170–71, 307n3; Euridice, 28, 31–32; Le Nuove Musiche, 22, 28, 91 Callas, Maria, 103 Campbell, Ted, 328n26 Carey, Mariah, 88 Carissimi, Giacomo, 17, 275, 293–99; Jephte, 294–99, 296–98 Carter, Tim, 4–5, 105, 306n11, 308n12, 314n4 Castello, Dario, 49, 55–66, 67, 74, 281; Sonata No. 1, 55–66, 67, 58, 60–62, 65–65, 312n31, 320n19, 321n4 Castiglione, Baldassare, 26 Castle, Terry, 316n25 Castrati, 15, 99–101, 107, 109–18, 119, 314n6, 315n22, 316n23–26 Cather, Willa, 316n25 Cavalieri, Emilio de’, 91 Cavalli, Francesco, 13, 15, 104–25, 260– 61, 276, 279, 293, 313, 314n5, 317n30; Calisto, 113- 18, 117–18, 125, 260–1, 317n30; 317n39; Didone, 261; Giasone, 13, 110–12, 119–25, 122, 260– 16, 279, 293, 314n5, 318n50; Ormindo, 113, 123; Serse, 106 Cavell, Stanley, 306n17 Certeau, Michel de, 130, 319n1, 319n3 Cervantes, Miguel de, 196 Cesti, Antonio, 39–43, 66–74, 183, 202, 238, 278, 279, 281; “Pose in fronte,” 39–43, 40–41, 66–74, 69, 72–73, 238, 278 chacona, 16, 193, 195–98, 198, 203, 215, 219, 322n10 chaconne, 16, 198, 202–14, 204, 210, 212, 215, 322n7, 323n16, 323n23 Chafe, Eric, 4, 305n8 Chambonnières, Jacques Champion de, 244, 251, 327n5, 327n8, 327n13 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, 244, 258, 259, 263–67, 273–74; Médée, 258, 259, 260, 262–67, 273–74, 318n45, 323n16 Cheney, Lynne, 264 Cherlin, Michael, 308n17 Chopin, Frédéric, 323n15 Christensen, Thomas, 306n9, 330–31n5 Christie, William, 268, 316n23 Christina, Queen, 107, 315n15 Christine of Lorraine, 90, 91 Chua, Daniel, 308n14 ciaccona, 16, 193, 198–202, 198, 203, 205,

Index   |   335 206, 209, 211, 213, 307n8, 322n6, 322n8, 323n16 Cicognini, Giacinto Andrea, 110, 120; Giasone, 110, 120 circle of fifths, 51, 57, 59, 163, 164 Clapton, Eric, 202 Close, Glenn, 259–60 Coltrane, John, 11 colonial expansion, 16, 142, 195–96, 199– 201, 203, 207, 214 Columbus, Christopher, 2 concerto delle donne, 80–90, 94, 96, 100, 101, 103, 107, 117, 131, 311n10, 311n16, 311n20, 318n42 Connolly, Sarah, 316n25 Conversos, 132–33 Corbetta, Francesco, 202 Corbiau, Gérard, 325n10; Le roi danse, 325n10 Corelli, Arcangelo, 16, 46–47, 276, 280, 281, 288–93, 308n20; Op. 5, No. 1, 289–93, 290–1 Cornacchioli, Giacinto, 108, 113, 315n20; Diana schernita, 108, 113, 315n20 Corneille, Pierre, Médée, 260 Corneille, Thomas, 265 Council of Trent, 81, 169 Counter-Reformation, 9, 13, 15, 81, 94, 131–32, 138, 139, 159, 168–69, 255, 326n3 Couperin, François, 11, 242, 244, 249, 252, 327n4, 327n10 Couperin, Louis, 187, 218, 244, 322n14 courtesans, 81, 311n9, 318n42 Covington, Sarah, 325n8 Cowart, Georgia, 218, 253, 307n24, 324n5, 325n14, 328nn18–19, 329n27, 329nn6–7, 330n8, 330n12 Cox, Melissa Black, 3 Cozzolani, Chiara Margarita, 132, 318n50 Crashaw, Richard, 131, 134, 146 Crawford, Lisa Goode, 3, 250 Crescimbeni, Giovanni Maria, 119, 279, 318n44, 331n8 Cryle, Peter Maxwell, 325n15 Cusick, Suzanne, 35, 107, 307n5, 308n15, 312n24, 315n14 Dahlhaus, Carl, 4, 305n5, 309n3 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 256–57, 329n29 Dalí, Salvador, 183 Dame, Joke, 315n22, 316n25 D’Anglebert, Jean-Henry, 16, 187–90, 202–03, 208, 230–36, 237, 238, 244–

52, 255, 256, 257, 327nn7–8, 327n11; Chaconne, 203–04, 204; Suite in D Minor, Courante, 230–36, 238, 232–3; Prélude, 187–90, 189–90; Tombeau de M r de Chambonnières, 244–52, 245– 46, 255, 327nn7–8 Dante (Alighieri), 209 D’Aquili, Eugene, 323n18 D’Arco, Livia, 79 Debussy, Claude, 11, 302 Dell’Antonio, Andrew, 132, 310n13, 311– 12n21, 319n6 De Ocampo, Stuart, 323n15 Descartes, René, 14, 257, 263, 324n6, 325n15, 329n5 Dewald, Jonathan, 217, 325n12, 328n21 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 112 Diderot, Denis, 250–51, 326n1, 327n12 Divine Love, 5, 7, 12, 15–16, 94, 116, 130– 58, 159, 169, 193, 220, 242, 328n26 Donizetti, Gaetano, Lucia di Lammermoor, 103 Donne, John, 131, 319n3 Dowland, John, 230 Durante, Sergio, 312n26 Einstein, Alfred, 309n4, 319n53 Elias, Norbert, 217, 253, 256, 277, 325n11, 327–28n15, 328n18, 329n28, 330n4 Elliot, Missy, 11, 195 Enlightenment, 2, 17, 104, 111, 125, 131, 236, 254, 256, 277–78, 281–82, 303, 326–67n3 Este, Alfonso d’, 79–80, 81, 82, 83, 99, 101, 103, 111 Este, Lucrezia d’, 315n14 Euripides, Medea, 260 Fauré, Gabriel, 302 Faustino, Giovanni, Calisto, 113 Feldman, Martha, 311n9, 316n26, 330n3 Feldman, Marty, 261 Fenlon, Iain, 317nn37–38 Ferdinand (King), 142 Fernandez, Dominique, 316n22 Ferrari, Benedetto, 100–02, 313n33; Il pastor regio, 313n33; L’Incoronazione di Poppea, 100–02, 102, 313n33 Ficino, Marsilio, 48, 309n5 Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, 22, 321n12 Flugel, J. C., 112, 316–17n28 Fontaine, Frank, 2 Foucault, Michel, 3, 104, 217, 253, 277, 313n1, 324–25n7, 328n18, 330n4

336   |   Index Francis de Sales (Saint), 147, 255, 320n14, 328n25 Franko, Mark, 218, 325n15 Frederick the Great, 213–14 Freitas, Roger, 105, 314n4, 315n22 French Absolutism, 9, 13, 16, 203, 207, 208, 216–18, 230, 242, 243, 253–54, 255, 257, 306n18, 324n4, 326–27n3 Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 3, 96, 130, 131, 137–48, 150, 151, 169–87, 199, 220– 25, 226, 227, 234, 237, 242, 276–77, 281, 299, 321n11; dances, 220–25, 222, 227, 234; Fiori musicali, 182; “Maddalena alla Croce,” 130, 137– 48, 140–42, 150, 151, 154, 320n10; Primo libro delle toccata e delle partite, 169–81, 182; Toccata Seconda, 170–77, 172–75, 178; Toccata Sesta, 178–81, 180, 182, 184, 186; Toccata per l’Elevatione (Missa degli Apostoli), 182- 87, 185, 277; toccatas, 96, 138, 143, 226, 242, 281 Freud, Sigmund, 110–11, 214, 313n1 Frick Collection, 259 Fried, Michael, 241–42, 326n1, 327n12 Froberger, Johann Jacob, 11, 225–30, 234, 237, 299, 322n14; Suite in A Minor, Courante, 226–30, 228 Fuller, David, 243, 327n5, 327n13 Gabrieli, Andrea, 160 Gabrieli, Giovanni, 96–99, 148, 160–65, 170, 186, 309n9, 312n32, 321nn3–4; Sonata XXI con tre violini, 96–99, 97–99, 312n32; Toccata primi toni, 160–5, 161–62, 186, 309n9, 321nn3–4 Garber, Daniel, 312n23, 325n15 Garber, Marjorie, 112, 114, 313n3, 316n27, 317n33 Gesualdo, Carlo, 137, 143, 170, 179, 309n2 Gianturco, Carolyn, 107, 315n15 Gill, John, 313n2 Giustiniani, Vincenzo, 311n14 Gjerdingen, Robert O., 279, 280, 283, 305n5, 306n19, 307n8, 309n3, 313n37, 331n7 Glareanus, Heinrich, 178 Glass, Philip, 194 Gleason, Jackie, 2 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 107, 314n6, 316n25; Orfeo, 107, 316n25 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 111 Goldberg, Jonathan, 313–14n3, 315n21, 317n36

Goldmann, Lucien, 254, 328n22–23 Gonzaga, Guglielmo, 82, 90 Gonzaga, Margherita, 79, 83, 315n14 Gordon, Bonnie, 311n9 Gouk, Penelope, 324n6 Grandi, Alessando, 123–24, 148, 277, 323n15 Great Masculine Renunciation, 112, 316–17n28 Greenblatt, Stephen, 101, 313n34, 314n8, 323n12 “Greensleeves,” 29–31, 30, 32, 33, 35 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 241, 250–51 Grieg, Edvard, 302, 331n18 Guarini, Anna, 79, 311n10 Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 47, 83, 310n10, 311n18; Rime, 311n18 Guise, Marie de Lorraine, Mlle de, 263 Guyon, Jeanne, 255, 328n16 Halford, Rob, 311n12 Handel, George Frideric, 131, 279, 308n18, 316n25; Giulio Cesare, 316n25 Haramaki, Gordon, 308n12, 322n10 Harrán, Don, 321n9 Harth, Erica, 329n5 Harvey, PJ, 317n40, 319n2 Hawkins, Stan, 313n2, 306n21 heavy metal, 7, 59, 104, 202, 306n16, 313n2, 317n40 Heller, Wendy, 105, 261, 314n4, 315n17, 317n 31, 317n37, 329nn2–3 Henry VIII, 29 Heriot, Angus, 315n22 Herreweghe, Philppe, 268 Heyer, John Hajdu, 324n2, 329n4 Heywood, Thomas, The Golden Age, 113 Hildegard von Bingen, 80, 306n13 Hilton, Wendy, 219, 325nn17–19 historiography, 1–17, 21–22, 74–75, 252– 53, 275–78, 306n10, 309n5, 324n6 Hoffmann, Kathryn, 253, 257, 277, 324n5, 328nn18–22, 329n32, 330n13, 330n4 Homer, 81 Howard, Jean E., 314n9 Howard, Patricia, 330n9 Hudson, Richard, M. Butterfly, 195, 322n6, 322n8 Hwang, David Henry, 316n24 Idel, Moshe, 130, 154, 319n1, 320n8, 320n20 Ilic, Ljubica, 166, 319n2, 321n8

Index   |   337 Ingarden, Roman, 194, 322n3, 320n8 Isabella (Queen), 142 Isherwood, Robert, 216, 253, 277, 324n4, 328nn18–19, 330n4 Islam, 132, 133, 319n1; Sufism, 132, 133 Jackson, Michael, 104, 125, 311n12 Jacobs, René, 94, 312n28, 317n30 Jacquet de la Guerre, Elizabeth Claude, 244 Jardine, Lisa, 314n9 Jeter, Claude, 318n51 John of the Cross (Saint), 138, 146–7, 320nn11–12 John of Salisbury, 81, 310n7 John XXII (Pope), 81, 310n7 Jonson, Ben, 105 Judaism, 132, 154, 309n1, 320n8 Judd, Cristle Collins, 305–06n9 Kajikawa, Loren, 319n2 Karns, Dean M., 325–26n19 Kendrick, Robert, 130, 319n1, 319n5 Kenny G (Gorelick), 216 Klotz, Sebastian, 313n35 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 103, 313n38 Kramer, Lawrence, 306nn20–21 Ladies of Ferrara, see concerto delle donne La Bruyère, J., 328n20 La Fontaine, Jean de, 251, 327n14 Landi, Stefano, Sant’ Alessio, 316n23 lang, k. d., 104 Lang, Paul Henry, 215–6, 324n2 Laqueur, Thomas, 313n1 Le Blanc, Hubert, 312n30 Le Brun, Charles, 59 Le Cerf de La Viéville, Jean-Laurent, 325n13 Le Gallois, Jean, 327n5, 327n13 Leonardi, Susan, 315n18 Lester, Joel, 331n5 Lewin, David, 318n41 Ligeti, György, 11 Lippe, Rudolf zur, 324n4 Little, Meredith, 219, 325n19 Little Richard (Penniman), “Tutti Frutti,” 10 Lope de Vega y Carpio, Félix Arturo, 196 Lorde, Audre, 3, 305n3 Louis XIV, 202, 203–05, 215–18, 243, 253–54, 257, 263, 264, 265, 268, 273, 307n24, 324nn4–5, 325nn9–10,

325n18, 326n9, 328nn18–20, 329n7, 330n8, 330n13, 330n4 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 203–07, 208, 214, 253, 258, 269, 259, 263, 264, 267–74, 324n2, 325n10, 325n16, 329n4, 330n9; Amadis, 203–05, 204, 209, 323n16; Armide, 206–07, 208, 210, 258, 259, 260, 262–65, 267–74, 271–72, 330n12; Persée, 258 Luther, Martin, 132 Luzzaschi, Luzzasco, 83–90, 91, 94, 96, 100, 103, 311n15; “Non sa che sia dolore,” 83–90, 85, 87–88, 91, 96, 311n16 Madonna (Ciccone), 143, 319n2; “Like a Prayer,”madonna 143 madrigal, 2, 3, 6, 8, 14, 15, 17, 28, 32, 44, 45, 48, 54, 63, 66, 68, 80, 82, 83, 84, 87, 89, 96, 98, 124, 135, 146, 153–54, 170, 171, 175, 179, 181, 193, 201, 202, 289, 291, 305n7, 307n2, 307n7, 309n1, 309n4, 309n8, 310n1, 310n2, 311n12, 320n17, 320n12, 323n12, 331n15 Magimel, Benoît, 325n10 Mahler, Gustav, 2, 231 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de, 264 Malibran, Maria, 103 Marais, Marin, 206, 323n20; Tombeau pour M r de Saint-Colombe, 206, 323n20 Maravall, José Antonio, 12–13, 216, 257, 307n23, 324n4, 329n30 Marenzio, Luca, 153, 170, 171, 179, 321n12; “Tirsi morir volea,” 171 Maria Maddalena of Austria, 107 Marin, Louis, 217, 325n9 Marino, Giambattista, 6, 13, 47, 48, 124, 319n53 Marlowe, Christopher, 105, 108–09; Edward II, 108–09 Mary Magdalene, 132, 137, 138–48, 150, 151, 154 Mather, Betty Bang, 219, 325–6n19 Mazarin, Jules (Cardinal), 202, 218 McCleave, Sarah, 323n16 McGinn, Bernard, 319n1, 320n8 McNeill, William H., 322n1, 323n17 Medici, Ferdinando de’, 90, 91 Melani, Atto, 314n4 Melzer, Sara, 323n20, 324n1, 328n24 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, 154 Michelangelo, 8, 14, 121, 137, 168, 169;

338   |   Index Michelangelo (continued) David, 121; Pietà, 168, 169; Saint Peter’s Basilica, 137, 168 Miller, Peter, 317nn37–38 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 168, 308n13 Mithen, Steven, 322n1 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 264 Molza, Tarquinia, 79, 311n10, 313n35 Monteverdi, Claudio, 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 31–39, 43, 47–55, 56, 74, 83, 84, 90, 91, 92, 94–96, 100, 116, 120, 124, 131, 134–37, 138, 148, 152, 165–68, 170, 183, 199–202, 206, 208, 210, 214, 276, 280, 292, 293, 294, 295, 305n1, 305n8, 306n18, 307n7, 307n9, 308n12, 308n14, 309n2, 309nn4– 6, 309n8, 312n25, 312n32, 314n4, 317n32, 317n35, 317nn37- 38, 318n47, 319n53, 320n17, 321nn3–5, 323n13; “Ah, dolente partita,” 56, 83, 310n14; “Anima mia, perdona,” 307n9; “Duo Seraphim,” 48–49, 94–96, 95, 131, 168; Book IV, 47- 48, 307n7, 307n9; Book V, 47, 320n17; Book VII, 13, 47, 124; Book VIII, 124; “Cruda Amarilli,” 312n2; L’Incoronazione di Poppea, 12, 13, 100–01, 102, 116, 120, 205, 316n25; “Io mi son giovinetta,” 307n7; “Lamento della ninfa,” 206, 208, 210, 321n10; “Laudate dominum,” 199– 201, 323n13; Magnificat, 91, 165–68, 167–8, 170; Marian Vespers, 48–49, 91, 94–96, 165–68; “Non vedrò mai le stelle,” 47–55, 50, 52–53, 56, 57, 59, 309n8, 321n4; Orfeo, 31–39, 34, 36, 43, 49, 91, 94, 124, 152, 166, 292, 293, 294, 295, 321n3, 331n15; “Salve Regina,” 129, 134–37, 136, 138, 148; Scherzi musicali, 148, 199, 320n17; “Svogava con le stelle,” 48, 49; “Zefiro torna,” 199–200, 200, 201, 214 Montpensier, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse of, 263–64 Morris, Mitchell, 317n29 movements, 46–47, 63, 66, 202, 220, 234, 279, 289, 294, 303 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 2, 8, 103, 106–07, 113, 123, 214, 219, 261, 279, 281, 306n20, 324n25, 331n10; Don Giovanni, 113, 123; Idomeneo, 261; Le Nozze di Figaro, 106–07, 316n25; Symphony No. 38 (“Prague”), 214, 306n20, 324n25; Die Zauberflöte, 103

music and commerce, 12, 13, 28, 80–81, 90, 95–96, 99, 100, 105, 106, 130, 261, 276, 293 mysticism, 12, 15–16, 94, 132–33, 135, 138–58, 159, 169, 194, 205, 254–55, 276–77, 319nn1–3, 320n8, 328n25 Neoplatonism, 48, 202, 203, 205, 216–18, 242, 247, 253, 256, 257, 277 neurobiology, 205, 323n18 Newberg, Andrew, 323n18 Newcomb, Anthony, 86, 310n1, 311n9, 311n13, 311n19, 318n42 Newton, Isaac, 263 Noble, David, 329n31 Norberg, Kathryn, 323n20, 324n1 ’N Sync, 311n12 Orden, Kate van, 324n6 Orgel, Stephen, 273, 313n3, 314n9, 318n49, 330n14 Ortiz, Diego, 307n6 Ovid, 113, 115, 317n31 Paganini, Niccolò, 98 Page, Christopher, 310n4 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi, 148, 169, 303; Missa Papae Marcelli, 169 Parisani, Giacomo Francesco, 315n20 Parliament, 195 Pascal, Blaise, 254, 328n22, 328n24 passacaglia, 198, 205–13, 322n6, 322n8, 323n23 Paul (Saint), 81 Peri, Jacopo, 2, 28, 31–32, 89, 93–94, 100, 152, 307n4; “Dunque fra torbide onde,” 31, 93–94, 100; Euridice, 28, 31–32, 94, 307n4 Perotin, 80 Petrarch, Francesco, 3, 48, 49, 87, 199, 305n2 Peverara, Laura, 79 Philips, Peter, 22, 171, 321n12 Pirrotta, Nino, 105, 108, 114, 120, 280, 314n4, 317n35, 318n47, 319n53 Pocock, Gordon, 326–27n3, 329n28 Poizat, Michel, 315n22 Pope, Rebecca, 315n18 Powers, Harold S., 4, 305n6, 309n3 Press, Joy, 313n2 Prince (Rogers Nelson), 104, 123, 125, 311n12, 313n2, 318–19n51; “Do Me,

Index   |   339 Baby,” 123, 318n51; “I Would Die 4 U,” 318–19n51 Purcell, Henry, 206, 208, 210; Dido and Aeneas, 206, 208; “I attempt from love’s sickness,” 210 Pythagoras, 89, 216, 218 Quietism, 147, 242, 254–55, 257, 328n26, 329n31 Quinault, Philippe, 263, 267, 268, 330n9 Racine, Jean, 328n22 Raguenet, François, 325n13 Rambuss, Richard, 130, 317n36, 319n1, 319n3 Ramos López, Pilar, 314n6 Ranum, Patricia, 219, 263, 325n19, 329n4 Rause, Vince, 323n18 Reynolds, Margaret, 106, 315n10, 316n25 Reynolds, Simon, 313n2, 323n11 Rice, Anne, 315–16n22 Rinuccini, Ottavio, 28, 32, 94; “Dunque fra torbide onde,” 94; Euridice, 28, 32, 94 Robinson, Smokey, 318n51 Rore, Cipriano de, 84, 309nn1–2; “Mia benigna fortuna,” 309n1 Rosand, Ellen, 105, 276, 312n29, 314nn4– 5, 315n16, 317n37, 318n44, 323n19, 330n1, 331n8 Rosen, Charles, 251, 327n14 Rosselli, John, 315n22 Rossi, Salamone, 166, 321n9 Rossini, Gioachino, 261 Rouget, Gilbert, 322–23n11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 268, 270 Ruggiero, Guido, 318n49 RuPaul, 104 Saint-Simon, Claude Hanri de Rouvroy (comte de), 218, 325n18 Savall, Jordi, 307n6 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 16 Scheibert, Beverly, 327n11 Schenker, Heinrich, 38, 160, 221, 234, 238, 300, 308n16, 320n16 Schoenberg, Arnold, 194, 214, 308n17 Schubert, Franz, 66, 231, 306n20 Schütz, Heinrich, 3, 123–24, 130, 131, 148–58, 242, 277, 319n52; “Anima mea liquefacta est/Adjuro vos,” 130, 148–58, 151, 153, 155–57, 319n52; “O quam tu pulchra es,” 123- 24, 319n52;

Psalmen Davids, 148; Symphoniae Sacrae I, 148, 319n52 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 263, 329n5 Shakespeare, William, 14, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 313n34, 313n3, 315n13, 323n12; Antony and Cleopatra, 108, 110 Sheppard, Anthony, 310–11n8 Shuger, Deborah Kuller, 319n3, 331n16 Silbiger, Alexander, 321n11, 322n7 Small, Christopher, 322n2, 322n9 Smart, Mary Ann, 315n18 Smith, Bruce, 313n3, 314n7 Smith, Patricia Juliana, 315n10, 315n12 Song of Songs, 123–24, 132, 134, 148, 320n18, 323n15 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, 106, 273, 318n49, 330n14 Spinoza, Baruch, 325n15 Stallybrass, Peter, 108, 313n3, 315n19 Stein, Louise, 314nn5–6, 330n3 Stoltz, Rosine, 315n18 Stone, Sharon, 260 Stradella, Alessandro, 280–88, 315n15, 331n9; San Giovanni Battista, 280–88, 284–85, 287, 331n13; Susanna, 280, 331n9 Strauss, Richard, 106–07, 259, 283; Der Rosenkavalier, 106–07, 316n25; Salome, 259, 283 Stravinsky, Igor, 194, 322n4 Striggio, Alessandro, Orfeo, 33 subjectivity, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12–14, 28, 43, 45–75, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89, 100, 110–11, 124, 125, 166, 194, 199, 204–05, 208, 210–14, 216–18, 241–57, 303, 305n7, 306nn20–21, 311n12, 319n3, 323n12, 324n25 subjunctive, 201, 213, 231, 323n15 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 3, 324n26 Sutherland, Joan, 103 Sweelinck, Jan Pieterszoon, 299 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 12, 317n37 Tam, Grace, 319n2 Targoff, Ramie, 319n3 Tasso, Torquato, 47, 259, 262, 267–68; Gerusalemme liberata, 259, 262, 267–68 Taylor, Charles, 330n2 temporality, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12–14, 16, 21, 28, 35, 37, 42–43, 89, 90, 101, 116, 145, 147, 164–65, 166–68, 201–02, 203,

340   |   Index temporality (continued) 204–05, 207, 208, 209, 231, 238, 241– 57, 258, 268, 277, 278–79, 280, 281– 82, 322n1, 322n5, 331nn10–11 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 315n13 Teresa (Saint), 94, 132–34, 138, 144, 146– 47, 252, 255, 320n9, 320n13, 320n15 Terral, Boris, 325n10 Thomas, Dowling, 264, 330nn9–10 Timberlake, Justin, 112, 311n12 Tomlinson, Gary, 4, 5, 47, 48, 55, 306n10, 309nn4–7, 324n6 tonality, 2–5, 8–10, 14, 16–17, 21–2, 25, 26, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 66, 71, 74, 124, 139, 143, 158, 163, 178, 183, 187, 193, 202, 214, 219, 220, 221, 224–25, 226, 230, 236, 243, 248, 252, 256, 275–8, 280, 281, 289, 294, 299–99, 303, 305n1, 305nn5–6, 305n8, 306n19, 308n17, 308n20, 309n3, 321n3, 326n22, 330–31n5 Traub, Valerie, 313n3, 314n9, 317n31 Treadwell, Nina, 35, 307n10, 308n15, 312n24, 312n27, 315n11, 315n14, 320n10 Turner, Hames Grantham, 318n49 Tyler, Steven, 311n12

Valentino, Rudolph, 112 Vivaldi, Antonio, 44, 51, 98, 208, 214, 238, 277, 299, 300, 306n19, 308n20 Wagner, Richard, Götterdämmerung, 297 Wald, Elijah, 322n2, 326n21 Walser, Robert, 133, 216, 306n16, 313n2, 324n3 Warwick, Jacqueline, 101–02, 313n36 Watteau, Antoine, 255, 328–29n27 Wert, Giaches de, 153, 170, 307n9, 311n10, 311n20; “Tirsi morir volea,” 307n9 White, Barry, 112, 317n29 White, Hayden, 252, 328n17 Whiteman, Paul, 326n21 Wilde, Oscar, Salome, 143 Willaert, Adrian, 51, 87–88, 179 Williams, Michael A., 325n7 Williams, Raymond, 241–42, 326n2 Winter, Robert, 331n14 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 3, 178 Zaslaw, Neal, 325n16 Zbikowski, Lawrence M., 327n10 Zimmerman, Susan, 313n3, 314n9

Text 10/13 Sabon Displ ay Sabon Com p osi tor BookMatters, Berkeley P r i n t e r a n d Bi n de r Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group