Performing History: Approaches to History Across Musicology 9781644693551

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Performing History APPROACHES TO HISTORY ACROSS MUSICOLOGY

Performing History APPROACHES TO HISTORY ACROSS MUSICOLOGY

BOSTON 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: November, Nancy, editor. Title: Performing history: Approaches to History Across Musicology / edited   by Nancy November. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009722 (print) | LCCN 2020009723 (ebook) | ISBN   9781644693544 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644693551 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Music--Performance. | Music--Performance--History. |   Music--Interpretation (Phrasing, dynamics, etc.) | Music and history. |  Historiography. Classification: LCC ML457 .P497 2020 (print) | LCC ML457 (ebook) | DDC  780.7809--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009722 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009723 ISBN 9781644693544 (hardback) ISBN 9781644693551 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644694466 (ePub) Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover design by Ivan Grave. On the cover: Scenes from a tukumai memorial ritual on Takū, Papua New Guinea. Photographs by Richard Moyle, reproduced by permission. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA press@academicstudiespress. com www .academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Introduction1 Nancy November PART ONE HIP Experiences 1  Some Senses of History among HIP Performers  Mary Hunter 2 Counting to Four: The flûte du quatre in Charles Dieupart’s Six Suittes (1701)  Imogen Morris 3 The French Style of Viol Bowing and the enflé in the Works of Marin Marais  Polly Sussex 4 Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality in Performing Monteverdi’s Il pianto della Madonna  Daniela Kaleva PART TWO Performance as Celebration and Conservation 5 Celebrating and Enhancing a Virtual Past through Singing: The Polynesian Community on Takū  Richard Moyle 6 Reimagining Traditional Ritual Music of Sabah for Contemporary Performance as a Means of Conservation  Mia Palencia

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Contents

PART THREE Performing War 7 Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile  Allan Badley 8  Gallipoli to the Somme: A Musical Witness to History  Anthony Ritchie 9  Britten’s Primal Scream Sterling Lambert PART FOUR Staging Power and Enlightenment 10 Staging Power: The Role of Duchess Sophie Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1613–76) in Wolfenbüttel Court Festivities of the 1650s  Hannah Spracklan-Holl 11 An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage: Niccolò Piccinni’s Il regno della Luna Lawrence Mays PART FIVE Performing the Body and the Senses 12 “A New World is Opened up to View”: Orchestral Gesture in Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette  Inge van Rij 13 Italian Futurism: Music and the Senses in the Modern Age  Jennifer Rumbell PART SIX Performing the Popular 14 “Saxophones Sobbed Out Jazz”: New Zealand’s First Jazz Recording  Aleisha Ward 15 “To Display Her Chief Accomplishment”: Domestic Manuscript Music Collections in Colonial Australia Rosemary Richards

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Author Biographies 337 Index341

Introduction NANCY NOVEMBER

[O]ral traditions exhale past into present, inhale future into past. The common Pacific adage “We face the future with our backs” indicates that appreciation and knowledge of the past is vital for shaping a future. —Selina Tusitala Marsh, “Here Our Words”*

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usic histories speak, shape, and act. This was foremost in my mind when I formulated the title of the conference on which this book is based, the 2017 Combined Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia and the New Zealand Musicological Society: “Performing History” (10–12 December, The University of Auckland). Musicological societies worldwide have opened their doors to interdisciplinary studies, encouraging cross-fertilisation between music sub-disciplines (perhaps especially in Commonwealth countries), and so ensure that theorists, performers, teachers, and composers of music are included. But as musicology as a discipline opens up, are we in the process losing sight of the discipline’s historical dimension, and why it matters? To cite just one piece of recent evidence: listening to today’s Music students talking about history courses, one gets a monochrome definition of what one “does” in such a setting: “Oooh, you’re doing a history course” [laughter], “writing essays?” “Yes.” Inspired by indigenous scholars and writers, such as Marsh, I wanted our conference to underscore not just the breadth of musicology but the “breath”—vitality or relevance—of music history. Yes, music historians sit in archives. Yes, we write and read. A lot. But we also perform numerous other roles, not limited to critiquing, empathising, uncovering, listening, creating, and enabling. So, for example, historically literate Music graduates might be *Selina Tusitala Marsh, “Here Our Words,” in The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, ed. Moshe Rapaport (Honolulu, HI: The Bess Press, 1999), 166–78.

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expected not just to write essays but also to understand and articulate their ways of being and knowing, and their positions in society; thus to have a sense of belonging in a larger community; to use knowledge from the past to shape their futures; and to lead the work for recognition of different cultural ways of being and knowing. The essays chosen for this volume offer glimpses of the diverse ways music historians “do” history, and the diverse ways in which music histories matter. The diverse relationships that music can have with history—and the correspondingly various roles of the music historian—can be gleaned from some of the gerunds used in the authors’ titles. The musical works—and the music historians—represented in this volume are counting, celebrating, enhancing, reimaging, witnessing, creating, sensing, and staging; they are creating the past, and experiencing the past, in and through all of the senses. Diverse lines of evidence are required for the studies documented here, and a keen sense for appropriate methodologies. The scholars represented have done their fair share of archival work, and writing. But they have also been interviewing performers, composing, and talking to audience members. The modes of reading represented here are as various as the kinds of evidence explored, including, for example, reading historical accounts against other contextual backdrops, and reading “between the lines” to access other voices than those provided by mainstream interpretation or traditional musicology. This book’s chapters are structured into six key areas that emerged at the conference, starting with historically informed performance (HIP). Mary Hunter explores how historically informed performers experience history. Her evidence includes published materials by older-generation HIP performers, and interviews with younger ones; she describe three kinds of historical thinking used by performers and notes the complex relation between historical “facts” and the performers’ senses of freedom and autonomy. This provides a useful backdrop for understanding the approaches of the three performers who wrote the three chapters that follow. Each one has uncovered aspects of an original performance context in order to open up the performance possibilities of one or more historical works today. Imogen Morris addresses Dieupart’s use of the flûte du quatre, via contextual understanding of the recorder-playing scene in England and on the Continent, with a view to informing instrument choice in modern-day performance. Polly Sussex considers a particular expressive swell used in bowing technique in Marais’s day, comparing this with the sound ideal of the modern string player, and thus suggesting a new approach to High-Baroque French bowing technique. And Daniela Kaleva shows how historically informed performance

Introduction

can take in visual as well as written and organological sources, to embrace performance-led research: she explores the use of visualization techniques to inspire modern-day performers of Monteverdi’s Il pianto della Madonna. The ethnomusicological perspectives of the next two chapters further open up the view of what it means to “perform history.” Richard Moyle’s exploration of song in the Polynesian community on Takū questions the pervasive image throughout Polynesia of song lyrics as a reliable repository of accurate accounts of the past; song becomes a means by which to reinterpret the past, according to the intentions of the singer; this can include, for example, partisan accounts based on family politics, and selective accounts for personal or familial aggrandizement. Mia Palencia’s practice-based approach considers how a past culture of song might be conserved, not by some process of museumification, but rather by making it relevant. The titikas of the Indonesian Orang Sungai is closely analysed and set in context. Palencia then describes how its distinctive musical characteristics can be used in combination with Western contemporary genres to produce new pieces for performance. In the next five chapters the emphasis is on particular musical works that can be seen to “tell,” “enact,” or “perform” history in various ways. So often the discipline of History has been one of wars. Here we take a step back, into the realm of aesthetic experience, considering the historical representation of wars and the work such representations do in shaping how we view, understand, remember, and come to terms with those events. Allan Badley examines two late eighteenth-century works, Viennese representations of the Battle of the Nile, considering the composers’ access to information about the battle, their understanding of it, and the extent to which creative licence is privileged above historical fidelity in each. Anthony Ritchie offers a composer’s perspective on the subject, discussing his own Gallipoli to the Somme, written to commemorate World War I and performed internationally. What is the purpose of composing and performing war history? What is the most effective way of representing war in music and words? He explores what it means to commemorate war and the danger of distorting reality to make war more manageable for audiences. Sterling Lambert then considers Britten as a composer in dialogue with other composers, and with history, in his War Requiem. Ostensibly “doing” history by celebrating the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction in the Second World War, War Requiem might also be understood to relate to World War II in the Far East, and specifically the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He reads Britten’s War Requiem together with Bach’s St. John Passion, arguing that both are about sacrifice on behalf of humanity.

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More overt “doing of historical work” through music is to be found in opera. Hannah Spracklan-Holl offers a critical reading of the surviving sources from Sophie Elisabeth’s 1655 festivities, Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung and Der Minervae Banquet, focusing on staging of dynastic power in their performance. Theories of performativity provide a framework for an examination of the text, music, and staging (suggested by the accompanying illustrations) of these festivities. Lawrence Mays reads Niccolò Piccinni’s dramma giocoso Il regno della Luna (1770) as forward-thinking in that it combined the Enlightenment view of a planned ideal future with the historicist notion of societal evolution. This work uses the moon as a striking stage on which to project and interrogate topical issues of the late eighteenth century, including the political position of women, commerce, militarism, colonialism, and interaction with the Other. These writers are all “doing” history in diverse ways, through performance, composing, recomposing, reading, rereading. The next two writers consider cases where diverse methodologies are not only helpful, but highly necessary for uncovering what we might term the historical work of the musical work: these writers consider how particular composers and schools of composers used various modalities to perform history. Inge van Rij shows how Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette responds to the physical gestures that so inspired Berlioz, in the sonic imitations of narrative detail, and in the gestures of the players and conductor on the stage. She draws on Berlioz’s writings, accounts of the performance he witnessed, and nineteenth-century theories of gesture, exploring the relationship between musical performance and gesture in historical terms. Jennifer Rumbell examines how for the Italian Futurist movement, listening to music—and often also performing it—went beyond the ear to entail a multisensory experience. She, too, draws on diverse sources, ranging from theoretical texts to Futurist venues. Other ways of “performing” history than those of the traditional Western music historian—who emphasises published documents—allow us easier access to other histories outside the mainstream. The final two chapters emphasise this point. Aleisha Ward discusses the significance of New Zealand’s first jazz recording, a one-minute musical featurette film of Epi Shalfoon and His Melody Boys, performing a jazzed arrangement of a popular Māori song E Puritai Tama E (or He Pūru Taitama). The featurette, and its fascinating history, speak to the developing jazz culture and music industry in New Zealand, and the local conceptualization and recontextualization of jazz circa 1930. Rosemary Richards shows how Australian colonial domestic manuscript music collections aided music-making and were also forms of life writing and artistic

Introduction

expression. The women who owned them left us traces of their own histories, by copying, collecting, collating, binding, preserving, contemplating, annotating, and memorialising the musical contents. I am grateful to the team of fifteen authors for their hard work and their many fascinating insights, and to the following members of the Conference Organizing Committee for help with vetting the submissions: Gregory Camp, Nick Braae, and Francis Yapp. Thanks also to Ekaterina Yanduganova for her guidance on this volume from the outset. For the timely completion of this volume I am thoroughly indebted to Janet Hughes for assistance with editorial suggestions and proof reading, and to Aleisha Ward for her help with proof reading. This book is dedicated to my family, Aron and Nikolaus Gohr, for their patience and good humour while I organized the 2017 conference and edited this resulting book.

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CHAPTER 1

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers MARY HUNTER

ABSTRACT History is an acknowledged presence for most performers in the HIP (historically informed performance) tradition. On the basis of published materials by older HIP performers, and interviews with some younger ones, I describe three kinds of historical thinking used by performers. The first, “sonic history thinking,” asks (crudely put) “what did the music sound like back then?” The second, “contextual history thinking,” asks, “what did it mean or feel like back then?,” and the third, “transhistorical thinking,” asks “what essence remains in the music from then till now?” Each of these modes of thinking, though not necessarily separate from the others in practice, demands its own epistemology, its own areas of obligation and autonomy, and its own phenomenology of the past. One of the most interesting things to emerge from performers’ comments is the complex relation between historical “facts” and a sense of performerly freedom and autonomy. In choosing Egisto, Vincent Dumestre and Benjamin Lazar hope to enable French audiences to see at last who Cavalli was, and also to shed light on a work that is all too rarely revived, and when it is, is always very far from the original. For this Italian opera, Le Poème Harmonique will be using the same approach, based on close study of the sources, preserved in Venice and Vienna, as it has already used for French opera: a thorough study of the musical and literary texts leading to new choices of instrumentation, phrasing and pronunciation; research into period performance (gesture, scenography, costumes, lighting), not with the

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Mary Hunter aim of simply reconstructing the work, but rather of working out a free and well-informed scenographic language.1

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his anonymous passage, from the web page of the period-instrument ensemble Le Poème Harmonique, notes that historical research provides theatrical director and musician alike with “new choices,” which seems obvious and unremarkable. However, the passage also implies that such research directly provides the resources for a “free” scenographic (and, implicitly, musical) language. It argues that meticulous and wide-ranging historical research tells us some kind of truth about how it was back then (“who Cavalli was”; this new production is not “far from the original”), but also implies that it is this very attention to historical truth that opens the door to a free-play area. This complex discourse about the relation between historical research and the freedom and autonomy of the performer has long been characteristic of HIP (Historically Informed Performance). Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s description of working on the St. Matthew Passion with period instruments and original parts for his 1971 recording notes that stunning novelty and a sense of autonomy for the performers was the immediate effect, rather than a sense of historical accuracy.2 Moreover, in the Epilogue to Bernard Sherman’s 1997 Inside Early Music, a collection of interviews with HIP pioneers, he quotes Andrew Parrott as saying something similar to the Poème Harmonique author: “The challenge of absorbing new information, rather than constricting and limiting the performer, acts as a stimulus to the creative imagination and can also prove positively liberating. It does not so much dictate what not to do as offer us new ideas of what we might choose to do.”3 From the outside, the intimate connection between a feeling of liberation and novelty and painstaking work in the archives might seem surprising. Indeed, in a Bachtrack review of the Poème Harmonique Egisto, Fernando Remiro seems relieved that the archival work leaves so few explicit traces: “Casting away the pitfalls of historicism, [Lazar’s] historical accuracy does not intend to provide a pale dummy of a Baroque opera, but rather gives birth to a creature that never 1 Vincent Dumestre, “Egisto,” accessed September 1, 2018, https://www.poemeharmonique. fr/en/spectacle/egisto (emphasis added). The first performance of this production was at the Opéra Comique, 2012. 2 Nikolaus Harnoncourt, “The First Performance of the St. Matthew Passion by the Concentus Musicus,” in Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialogue: Thoughts on Monteverdi, Bach and Mozart, trans. Mary O’Neill (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1997), 74. 3 Bernard Sherman, Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 392.

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

existed before, an imperfect and fascinating reflection of a lost world composed of echoes and illusions.”4 My principal aim in this essay is to examine the senses of history communicated in HIP performers’ mostly verbal discourse. The performers I include are from several generations, from 1960s pioneers to current performers in their twenties and thirties. My material from the older ones includes their own writings and transcriptions of interviews I consider serious (that is, not marketing plugs or pre-concert puffs). The material from the (mostly) younger performers is based on semi-structured interviews I conducted during a 2017 workshop mounted by the Oxford-based project Transforming Nineteenth-Century Historically Informed Performance.5 I am grateful to have been allowed both to participate in the workshop as a musician and to interview some of the participants. My primary contentions in this essay are, first, that there are several ontologically (but not always discursively) distinct senses of history in performer discourse; second, that discourse about all these senses of history very often creates a space (sometimes overtly, sometimes more obliquely) for an assertion of creativity and autonomy; and third, that assertions of creativity and autonomy can differ according to the particular sense of history that underpins them. My hope is that an initial sorting out of these different notions of history and their associated constructions of “performer power” will be not only of intellectual interest, but also potentially clarifying and empowering to performers in search of support for their acknowledgment of creative liberty. In the Epilogue to Inside Early Music, Sherman (with due caveats) categorizes his pioneering interviewees by their relation to history: Type Ones are inspired by the historical record and seek to keep investigating it for more information and inspiration; Type Twos are willing to “flout history when they prefer something else”; and Type Threes use different aspects of the historical record to undermine the idea of Werktreue and empower the performer, especially in encouraging improvisation.6 This would seem like a reasonable categorization, especially if types of attitude could replace types of performer; in other words, if 4 Fernando Remiro, “Cavalli’s Egisto in Luxembourg,” review of Egisto by Benjamin Lazar (dir.) and Vincent Dumestre (cond.), Grand Théâtre, Luxembourg, December 7 2013, bachtrack.com, accessed September 1, 2018, https://bachtrack.com/review-dec-2013-luxembourg-egisto. 5 For an overview of this project, see Clare Holden and Eric Clarke, “Transforming NineteenthCentury Historically Informed Practice (Transforming C19 HIP),” accessed July 7, 2018, https:// c19hip.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/c19hip/documents/media/tchip_info_pack_2.pdf. 6 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 391.

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Sherman were to acknowledge more fully that any given performer could easily embody all three attitudes, sometimes even simultaneously. On the basis of my interviews as well as longstanding observation of the HIP scene in my home region of New England, I would say that one could categorize attitudes in very much the same way today. Sherman comes to his conclusion by analyzing his subjects’ discourse (though he does not use this term); as I read it, he is interested in how each performer uses something they would call or understand as history. I am more interested here in asking what HIP performers believe history is, and in the consequences of that definition for their praxis. As with any study of discourse about an essentially non-verbal activity, and especially verbal discourse about something other than the practical and problem-solving elements of the activity (“let’s try it faster here,” “I can’t hear the cello,” “the sound is too edgy,” “this is boring”), it is extraordinarily difficult to tease out performers’ understanding of and attitudes to such an abstract force as “history.” There surely is often a sense of historical propriety embedded in some of the problem-solving talk (for example, does the judgment that a sound is “too edgy” have a historical element?), but one should not presume it, and it is often not helpful to ask directly, since post-factum justifications do not necessarily or reliably reflect the stew of motivations actually involved in an interpretative choice. However, even given the relative inaccessibility of the shape or details of “history” as an agent in the ongoing praxis of performers, there is no doubt that it is at the very least a persistent shadow presence for many HIP musicians. When I asked my interviewees whether history was a presence for them, I got no fully negative answers. Several musicians said essentially that it was in the background but not top of mind in the act of performing: one string player, for example, noted, “Inevitably because of the thinking that goes into it, it [history] will be [there somewhere], but in the actual moment of playing, I just want to be hearing a sound in my head and doing it and responding to what’s in the room, and I guess what I hope is that the preparatory work I’ve done and sound I’m hearing includes what I’ve found out.” Others mentioned the importance of imagining themselves into the bodies of historical performers: another string player mentioned the “physiological connection with this [eighteenth-century] life, this way of being.” And a wind player said, “When you pick up a period style instrument and play from these sources, you’re effectively trying to be inside a musician that played it.” Others noted the emotional charge of the simple fact of oldness or historical connection: one said, “I like antiques … like an antique piano. It can give you feelings about the past.” Another

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

said about playing Mozart in Mantova, where the composer had traveled as a child, “I don’t know why it sounds better but it does.” Others noted a kind of connection to history also shared by non-HIP players: this included interest in the biographies of composers and the circumstances of origin of works. All agreed that history served importantly as a resource for the imagination, whether to paint a picture of a time and place, or to offer new opportunities for interpretative exploration. I did not define “history” in my questions to these players; I was interested in exploring their responses in a more open-ended way. Their responses, together with the written comments of mostly older practitioners, suggest that two kinds of question—overlapping, to be sure, but also quite distinct—may often shape an HIP performer’s sense of history. One question is “what did it sound/look like back then”; the other is “what did it mean and/or feel like back then.” Each of these questions both presupposes and generates its own version of historical consciousness, by which I simply mean both the uncomplicated awareness that there exists a past relevant to the music under consideration and a more considered sense of the relation of that past to the present. Each sort of historical consciousness includes both a particular epistemology, which is to say a way of thinking about historical knowledge, and a particular phenomenology of the past, which is to say a felt sense of the way the past relates to the present. Despite the distinctions I will draw between these two senses of history, I do not mean to suggest that they are in any way mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they seem to exist in a perpetual tangled embrace.

SONIC HISTORY THINKING AND PERFORMER FREEDOM The first kind of historical consciousness I will discuss answers the question “what did it sound/look like back then?” Historical instruments and historical sources like treatises, pictures, accounts of performances and original scores and parts are typically the materials used to produce answers. Fortepianist Malcolm Bilson, for example, says in his interview with Bernard Sherman: “I personally think that Schubert’s piano music is very much tied to these instruments. … [O]ne thing that’s very important in Schubert but that one doesn’t hear much in modern performance is rhythmic inflection.”7 Bilson used the acoustic and haptic information from old and replica pianos, along with relevant treatises, to pioneer and justify a kind of phrasing and articulation very different from the 7 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 305.

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mainstream “Steinway” norm. Singer Julianne Baird engages in a similar kind of exercise during her interview with Sherman: she uses treatises and broader historical accounts partly to understand a historical change in vocal technique, but also to set some parameters for the historical justification of her own technical choices: “Glottal articulation became unpopular when, in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century, performance moved out of princely chambers and private rooms and into larger spaces such as the opera houses and concert halls. … Agricola … explains the acoustical factor behind the demise of glottal articulation. [He] recommended instead a detached articulation of passages, or battuta, as Tosi names it. … Tosi’s battuta was used for most passages [passaggi] of the Italian and German high Baroque.”8 I read this as saying “This is how the sound changed in the course of the seventeenth century; that gives me some sense of the repertories in which glottal articulation is to be expected.” These kinds of questions and answers about what it sounded like back then all represent pretty normal “performance practice” research. They obviously include a broad range of issues, from the absolutely material to the abstractly expressive. But they are united by the overarching epistemological assumption of factuality. By that I do not mean that performers who do their research into instruments and treatises and the like naively assume that whatever they find is uncomplicatedly true, or that if it is true it must be obeyed. What I do mean is, first, that the resources performers use to answer the question “What did it sound like back then?” tend to suggest at first glance that correctness and accuracy are “out there somewhere” and even if not completely achievable, are still a yardstick for success. For example, we know for a fact that fortepiano hammer heads were often covered in leather; that the beginning of an up bow is harder to confuse with the beginning of a down bow using a pike-head bow; that vibrato was often not applied to every single note; that ornaments were routinely added to the written music; that asynchronous left and right hands were entirely normal in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century piano playing, and so on. Of course, performers also know that actual old instruments no longer necessarily produce the sounds that they did when they were new, that written sources are inconsistent and incomplete, and (as regards late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performance practices) that recordings represent a firehose of information whose historical usefulness needs to be very carefully judged. But an epistemology with factuality at its base always involves taste and creativity being exercised within, or (just as likely) conceived against, a frame of what feels 8 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 231.

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like more or less verifiable truth. For the purposes of this essay, I call this intellectual framework “sonic history thinking,” that is, a sense of history focused on the often-verifiable practical and material details of sound-production. With respect to the phenomenal, or felt, sense of the past that sonic history thinking creates, I would say that it generally posits something of a rupture, certainly a lack of continuity, between the past and the present moment. Instruments, treatises, and recordings tend, unsurprisingly, to be mined for their differences from current sounds and practices. Common examples from an infinity of choices include the short decay of the fortepiano compared to the resonance and cross-strung complexity of the modern grand, which Malcolm Bilson discusses with Sherman,9 and which he has continued to use as a touchstone in his thinking about HIP, the ubiquity of ornamentation,10 which one could say almost defines the HIP movement, and the use of shorter, more articulate phrasing in singing even into the twentieth century. Sonic history thinking thus figures the enterprise of HIP as at least in part, and at least at times, a kind of defamiliarization. Of course by the 1990s and even before for many listeners, historically inflected performance was not unfamiliar anymore, so defamiliarization may not be exactly the right word. But even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I think it is fair to say that a fundamental aim of the sonic history element of HIP is still based on the idea of presenting a sound-world, or set of sound-worlds, distinct from the current mainstream norm for whatever music is being performed, and whose distinctness from a modern norm has at least some connection to, or justification via, historical investigation. As John Butt writes, “Rather than leading us to impersonate the practices of a past age as if they were our own, HIP more often leads us to appreciate a difference that we would not otherwise have noticed.”11 It is this sense of history—or, more fairly, a radically impoverished version of it—that gives rise to the now-tired notion that asking how it sounded back then, looking for sonic differences from the present and applying them to performance, is a slavish, bloodless, or mechanical activity. To be fair to such criticism, to the extent that the question of what it sounded like back then is answered by citing factual evidence, one might not expect a sense of “freedom” (as referenced in the passage from the Poème Harmonique website, above) to arise from 9 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 300–1. 10 See, for example, Malcolm Bilson, “Knowing the Score” (video lecture), accessed September 1, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVGN_YAX03A. For a description, see Bilson, “Knowing the Score,” accessed September 1, 2018, http://malcolmbilson.com/kts.php. 11 John Butt, Playing with History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 65.

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a fact-oriented epistemology. But in my interviews with current HIP performers, as well as in the couple of large-group discussions during the course, the idea of a greater freedom in HIP than in “mainstream” practice was remarkably pervasive; and that idea of freedom was often directly related to the painstaking investigation of sonic history, as it is in my opening quotation. Part of that sense of freedom is a result of the fact that no amount of available information can lead to a definitive conclusion about how the music sounded in its own time. It is a truism of the field that the sources of information are not only full of gaps but also offer widely various answers to the same question. A young cellist I interviewed observed, “You know that these people [treatise writers] hated doing that, or these people loved doing that and it’s just a matter of which side you take and what you think once you’ve experimented with it.” Moreover, not only do the sources disagree among themselves, but there is disagreement about how to read even a single source—is it prescriptive or descriptive, for example?—and this doubt also forces the performer very consciously to “insert” her own creative and autonomous powers into the process. Philippe Herreweghe describes one of the inherent inadequacies of treatises: “When an explanation about music is only in words, very often one can exaggerate, as people in the eighteenth century did about, for example, articulation.” Even scores cannot be relied upon to tell “the truth” (should such a thing exist). One of my interviewees, a distinguished HIP practitioner, noted, “With older music I’m much more aware of how easily mistakes can crop up, and how, if you’re engraving a music plate it’s very easy to thump the thing in the wrong place [that is, for the engraver to punch a wrong note onto the staff line]. … We kind of overestimate how determined the performance is by the score. And you get much more aware of this when you see how old music is put together.” Furthermore, there were always, then as now, multiple and diverse practices going on at the same time, including idiosyncratic national and regional habits, cosmopolitan vs backwater practices, amateur vs professional capacities, not to mention the infinity of idiosyncratic personal distinctions. In this way of conceiving of “history,” the performer’s “free” creative and/or autonomous contribution is essentially forced on her by the gaps and contradictions in the factual information. However, the experience of filling in the information gaps does not seem to feel like the product of pressure or coercion. Quite to the contrary: the historical information provides a framework for experimentation which is both stimulating and comforting. In one fascinating insight, a wind player noted that the effort of working with early twentieth-century recordings and trying to emulate some particular interpretations (that is, being in possession of a level of information

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

impossible to achieve with any other medium) actually conferred a greater feeling of freedom than working with more apparently incomplete sources. She noted that the recordings gave her a “tangible set-point” which then made it clear where and how she could “deviate from that mark.” This interview, like many of the others, communicated the great joy and excitement involved in the process of taking historical information as factual and then using it to contribute to present-moment music-making. As one of my interviewees put it, “You decide many things, you don’t just follow the same pattern.” To be fair, a significant proportion of my interlocutors’ comments about freedom were in the context of comparisons between HIP and non-HIP performance, and these invoked the pedagogical and social cultures of HIP versus the mainstream musical world as much as the intellectual and musical process of coming to an interpretation. But a persistent thread runs through these comments that relates a sense of freedom and empowerment precisely to the recognition of the spaces left by the sources and the ways in which bringing those spaces to consciousness feels liberating. However, sonic history thinking is not simply about the lacunae that performers’ ideas can fill. The very possibility of a closeness to historical truth remains powerfully seductive for some performers. Some areas of music history (French Baroque theatrical music is a prime example; perfectly preserved historical instruments is another; recordings yet another) offer huge amounts of information, and do indeed dangle the possibility that with deep immersion in the sources we might almost “get there” if only we could just learn a bit more: a possibility that can remain tantalizing even in the full knowledge that it will never be attained. “Historical plausibility” (however we might interpret it) remains a reachable goal with some music under some circumstances, and some performers find this deeply appealing. One of my interlocutors remarked, for example, “I do get excited by the possibility that it might be possible to get closer to what the composer expected, but that’s just me. Some people I know think, well that’s just ridiculous, how can you … but that fuels me, I get really excited about the fact that maybe this sound or that sound was what was expected of this moment.” Attempted closeness to the composer’s acoustic world is one version of historical plausibility, closeness to a period musician is another: one of my interlocutors said “Especially when I’m working with an original instrument, I’m effectively trying to understand the physical relationship that the original owner of it had, in order to understand how it works and why it reacts the way it does.” My point here is that it is the very factuality of sonic history thinking—its trade in evidence that is often verifiable—that is appealing. The general truth-claims of Western art music (for example, its supposed capacity

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to plumb the depths of the “human soul,” its power to bypass implicitly deceitful words and touch the emotions directly, and its transhistorical resonance for many audiences) are given specificity in the sonic-history-thinking aspect of HIP, and it is not surprising that many (though not all) HIP performers find the historical facts seductive.

CONTEXTUAL HISTORY THINKING AND FACTS My second sense of history addresses the question “what did it mean and/or feel like back then?” I’m calling this “contextual history thinking.” Keyboard player and music director William Christie points to the most usual version of this when he describes his students’ familiarity with the art, architecture and literature of the French Baroque: “They probably can talk a great deal about what was going on elsewhere in the culture of France: they have notions of painting, sculpture, literature, history—all of these things are very important.”12 Similarly, in his interview with Bernard Sherman, cellist Anner Bylsma uses contextual history thinking and contextual resources in exactly this way when describing modern performances of Vivaldi, which he deems dreadfully dull: “Many modern soloists when playing Vivaldi do not seem to have ever looked at any caricatures by, say, Ghezzi, Tiepolo, or Guardi. People often just play scales and chords, with no feeling for that period or nationality.”13 Looking at such caricatures from Vivaldi’s time and place gives Bylsma a sense of strongly marked character, of contrast and of humor that feed his imaginative engagement with Vivaldi’s music. Biographical information also counts in this category: for example, in a recent interview the Dutch harpsichordist and conductor Ton Koopman notes: “[Bach] was a normal believer by the standards of his time [that is, he was not abnormally devout], and this normal belief is strongly evident in his church cantatas. This is the point of view that informs my performances of these works. I don’t perform them as if, in German towns in the 18th century, the only thing people did on Sunday was go to church and read the Bible. … Musicians who approach Bach from a puritanical perspective tend to apply few or no ornaments, and they are too restrained in their application of dynamics and too uniform in their articulation.”14 12 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 267. 13 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 216. 14 Uri Golomb, “Interview with Ton Koopman,” accessed October 15, 2017, www.bach-cantatas. com/Articles/Koopman-Golomb.pdf. According to Golomb, this interview took place in December 2002. See his “Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2004), 125.

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

The resources used in all these examples are non-musical, and their value is that they come from the same culture as the music. Paintings and literature can point to general aesthetic meanings, to the sorts of features most prized or reviled in the arts; and sources like literature and historical accounts can give us a sense of (for example) the power structures in a given society, the ways human bodies existed in their social spaces, or the purposes for which the arts were commissioned, purchased, and used. This information from the music’s context is typically used analogically to inform a performance: a Watteau painting will not tell me when to do notes inégales, for example, but I can use it to help me imagine how I’d like my inégales to feel, or what effect I’d like them to create. Contextual history thinking tends to position the contribution of the performer in relation to generalities and principles rather than in relation to the specifics used in sonic history thinking. It is easy to imagine how paintings, literature, biographical information, or social history could generate principles (such as elegance as a primary aesthetic effect in the galant style, sentimentality as a feature of eighteenth-century culture, Schumann as an especially poetic composer). However, to the extent that contextual history thinking is as much a mode of thought as a set of resources, it can also be generated from more directly musical materials. For example, the paucity of bowing markings in orchestral parts preserved from the nineteenth century15 might lead me to imagine that the sort of visual discipline characteristic of modern orchestras was lacking in nineteenth-­ century ensembles, to generate a more overarching principle of interpretative non-­uniformity in orchestral playing, and then to aim for that in performance. That overarching principle of non-uniformity derived from musical sources would count as an example of contextual history thinking.16 With regard to the felt relation between present and past there is a striking difference between contextual history thinking and sonic history thinking. Where the latter tends to posit a sense of difference between the present and the past, contextual history thinking, while still noting some information from, or quality of, the past, is more likely to modernize and familiarize it by 15 Claire Holden, leading an orchestral rehearsal at the 2017 Oxford workshop, described this situation (see n. 5). 16 There is ample evidence of striking non-uniformity in sound recordings of early twentiethcentury orchestral playing: see Robert Philip, “Traditional Habits of Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Recordings,” in Performing Beethoven, ed. Robin Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 203. Quoted in Claire Holden, “Re-creating Early Nineteenth-Century Style in a 21st-Century Market: An Orchestral Violinist’s Perspective,” unpublished paper, 14.

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bringing that information into the imaginative world of the present. Ton Koopman’s statement about Bach’s “average” religiosity, for example, is well suited to a modern world in which many mainstream Protestant churches are shrinking and some extreme religious affiliations are associated with dangerous behaviors. And when Nicholas McGegan likens the effect of the star system of Handelian opera to contemporary audiences seeing Barbra Streisand walk onstage (the interview was conducted in the mid-1990s), he is engaging in contextual history thinking to bring a phenomenon of eighteenth-century cultural life into the imaginative world of the present.17 This kind of thinking is in no way particular to HIP: when modern-cello teacher Yehuda Hanani tells a student, in order to elicit a more lively performance from her, that Bach and his family liked to hang out over a beer,18 he is turning a historical icon into a “regular guy”; or when historians, critics, and teachers associate Debussy with Impressionism in visual art, they are associating his music with a set of paintings that everyone has seen, whether in art museums or on scarves, notepaper, and umbrellas. How does contextual history thinking connect to performers’ exercise of imagination and sense of autonomy? Since the principles and generalities of contextual history are already products of the imagination, whether artistic, scholarly or historical, for a performer to think of music in terms of historical aesthetic effect, social function, biographical relevance, or political meaning is simply to continue the imaginative work already done by those who provide the contextual stimuli. In principle, then, contextual history thinking quite overtly encourages, and indeed is part of a continuum of, imaginative activity. The contextual-history-thinking model is not one of filling in, or even exploiting gaps or inconsistencies left by the historical record, but of “riffing on” information that may or may not be literally true. One of my interviewees, particularly attached to eighteenth-century music, finds solace and inspiration in what he sees as the optimism of Mozart’s Figaro—a fictional character. Another notes: “I love reminding myself that [the composers] were humans. [Here she tells the story about Bach pulling a dagger on a bassoonist whom he had already called a nanny goat.] If you think of the composers as saints whose works you can never play like the recordings you idolize, you might as well hang it up. I gravitate towards the more humanizing sides of history rather than the more idolizing.” 17 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 252. 18 “Yehuda Hanani: Bach Masterclass Part 2,” You Tube video, 7:07, recorded at the CCM, May 25, 2009, posted by “novamediatrust,” June 17, 2009, accessed July 3, 2019, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=VmkvMJCVysk.

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

To these performers the point of the contextual history is not its point-by-point accuracy, but the connection it makes with their own lives, and thus the space it provides to make the music “relatable.” On the face of it, then, a contextual-history-based discourse of historical imagination provides a ready-made space for performers to assert their own ideas; and indeed both HIP and non-HIP performers regularly make a historically remote work or highly abstract activity meaningful by deploying aspects of its historical context in recognizable modern terms. Thinking of Shostakovich as an anguished dissident, or the Enlightenment as an age of elegance are examples of this. At the same time, however, neither my interview respondents nor older HIP performers in their published statements explicitly connect this kind of imaginative history with the senses of freedom and autonomy that regularly arise in connection with sonic history thinking. I have not heard or read any HIP performer say that it is freeing or empowering to imagine Bach’s biography or French Baroque painting, or to make analogies between past situations and the present. Stimulating, helpful, fun, to be sure, but not liberating. I have no provable ideas about why this is so, and it may be that I have simply not found the performers who talk in this way. My hunch is that the discourse of freedom in relation to the historical “facts,” however genuinely and deeply felt, may be in part a defensive response to the longstanding dismissal of historical awareness as in some sense mechanical and bloodless. But I believe that the sense of freedom conferred by factuality is also a response to the often especially self-aware and self-reliant process of making interpretative choices in the HIP world. When the historical record so clearly delineates the parameters of what is known and what is not, the performer (given the time, space, and circumstances to do so) can take full responsibility for turning the lacunae into living music, and that responsibility can be, and often is, experienced as freedom and/or autonomy. My hunch about the absence of this discourse in contextual history thinking is partly that this is what most HIP musicians were taught as children and young students as part of mainstream discourse, and is thus taken for granted in a way that ­decision-making around historical factuality is not. But there is also a discursive twist in the way contextual history thinking is used. Whereas attention to factuality is said to generate a feeling of freedom, the more frankly interpretative—even imaginative—ideas that are part and parcel of much contextual history thinking (Bach as only averagely religious, Watteau as providing insights into Rameau and Charpentier, rhetoric as integral to the musical experience) are often presented as accepted fact, or at least not the result of as much exercise of the historical imagination as they actually represent. And perhaps because these contextual

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“facts” tend to concern general principles or overarching attributes of composers or works rather than specific practices, they reach deeper into performers’ consciousnesses than apparently more cut and dried information, and thus make less space for performers’ assertions of imaginative autonomy. The gravitational pull towards an “averaged-out” but permanently unstable discursive center, where, simultaneously, facts are freeing and exercises of the imagination are truths, puts the performer in a discursive place where she can convincingly assert both her autonomy and her allegiance to historical plausibility (if not accuracy). The tension in this center is not just between “rules” and “freedom,” but crucially between the familiarity that makes art communicative and the distance that makes it interesting. Novelist Hilary Mantel dramatizes this distinction as follows: “[As a young novelist] I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.”19 In other words, modern readers could be convinced of the historical accuracy of the setting by learning about the wallpaper, which I understand Mantel to be saying was likely to be a historically-accurate color, different from what is currently found in wallpapers. The wallpaper alone, however, is of little interest. Readers need the man’s torments to stay interested in the story, but these torments might need to be anachronistic to keep readers connected—sixteenth-century theological agonies, for example, will probably not do the job. The wallpaper needs the man to be of any interest, and the man needs the wallpaper to convince readers that his situation is historically plausible, given that Mantel is writing historical fiction. As far as analogies to HIP are concerned, it might work to equate wallpaper to the use of period instruments or the deployment of ornamentation, and the man’s torments to the overall emotional impression of the music, but one quickly runs into unhelpful trouble (what about vibrato—wallpaper or torment?). The point here is not the exactitude of the analogy between fiction and music but the comparable ways in which two distinct ways of thinking about history, both in fiction and in musicmaking, exist as conceptually distinct but practically wholly interdependent. One common category of HIP thought—especially in relation to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music—demonstrates the entanglement of sonic 19 Dame Hilary Mantel, “The Day is for the Living” (Reith Lecture no. 1, Halle St. Peter’s, Manchester, 2017), accessed July 3, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp. For further exploration of Mantel’s ideas about history and fiction, see my editorial about HIP as historical fiction in Eighteenth-Century Music 15, no. 2 (2018): 137–41.

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

and contextual history thinking. This is the notion of music as rhetoric or oratory. The rhetorical conception of music has a robust and impeccable historical pedigree, evidenced in overwhelming numbers of historical sources. In modern times it has been comfortably and frankly used not only to identify rhetorical figures20 and to match the inflection of the notes with a verbal model,21 but also, and in some ways more powerfully, to stimulate (and justify) playing in a more generally theatrical or communicative manner than mainstream practice.22 Fortepianist Malcolm Bilson takes a position of specificity in his interview with Sherman (though in his praxis he also acts on the broader ideas of music as oratory.) Here he says: “If music is like speech [and he is arguing that it is], then inflection is very important in it too, and the rules of inflection are very clear in all these sources. … Stronger downbeats, stronger dissonances, hold these notes longer and these ones shorter.”23 He extrapolates from a general principle to a historically-supported prescription about the minutest details of performance, though of course the relative weights of any two downbeats or the relative strength of any dissonance is entirely within his power to determine. We might map the relations of contextual and sonic history in this process as follows: a) “there’s a general principle about music as rhetoric” [contextual] ® b) “this suggests that downbeats and dissonances would have been, and now should be, treated like inflected elements of speech” [sonic] ® c) “If I do this in a way that simulates the sounds of rhetorical speech with which I and my audience are familiar [which may or may not simulate the sounds of historical speech—we do not know], this will result in a performance that engages the audience in a similar way to the ways eighteenth-century audiences were engaged” [contextual].

TRANSHISTORICITY There is a third category of thinking about history in HIP that intersects interestingly with the sonic/contextual history binary. This is transhistoricity—the notion that past minds, objects, or ideas, are both as meaningful, and meaningful 20 See, for example, Vincent P. Benitez, “Musical-Rhetorical Figures in the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ of J. S. Bach,” Bach 18/1 (1987): 3–21, accessed September 1, 2018, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy. bowdoin.edu/stable/41640282. 21 See William Christie’s interview with Bernard Sherman, in Inside Early Music, 257–72. 22 See, for example, Tom Beghin “‘Delivery, Delivery, Delivery!’: Crowning the Rhetorical Process of Haydn’s Keyboard Sonatas,” in Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, ed. Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 131–71. 23 Sherman, Inside Early Music, 305.

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in many of the same ways, as they were in their own time. History in this formulation is neither an accumulation of verifiable information to be mined or supplemented nor a font of inventive interpretations to be built upon, but rather a more monolithic force to be simultaneously acknowledged and overcome. In a 1975 essay, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the transhistoricist mindset as “Romantic hermeneutics,” explained as follows: “text and interpreter are absolutely contemporaneous. Here is the triumph of the philological method: grasp the past spirit as the present, welcome the foreign as the familiar. … [W]e address our questions to an object already fully present, to an object which contains every answer.”24 In his article as a whole, Gadamer is articulating an overall position which insists on the historicity of everything and everyone, so he does not have a lot of patience for Romantic hermeneutics. His essay is also primarily about the distinction between the human and the natural sciences, which need not concern us here. But I think that we all recognize the sense of “an object fully present,” and grasping “past spirit as the present” as part of the culture of canonicity in which both mainstream and HIP performance participate. The main resource for a transhistorical mindset is usually the musical score: it is the object that both opens a window to the past and collapses the distance between then and now. And the idea that most reliably effects that collapse is genius. Genius is the central tenet of the most prominent transhistorical attitude in both mainstream performance and HIP: canonical works and oeuvres endure because they tap something about “the human spirit,” or because they achieve some kind of perfection. Now, a fundamental tenet of HIP from the beginning has been that scores actually do not convey the essentially orally-transmitted information that mainstream performers have tended to attribute to them; the signs on the page need to be relearned on the basis of historical information and for most periods of music the score turns out to be a radically less complete representation of the work than mainstream performance has often assumed. One of my interviewees described it as essentially a “lead sheet.” One would think that the historicization and ontological de-centralization of the score would weaken a transhistorical attitude, but that is not always the case. One school of HIP thought—typically belonging to an older generation of performer—involves the notion that relearning to read scores with their historical meanings actually reveals the essences of works—essences that have always been there and that, 24 Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Fantel, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 5 (1975): 22, accessed July 7, 2019, doi: 10.5840/gfpj1975512.

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

explicitly or implicitly, bear some relation to the composer’s intention. The frequently-used vocabulary of “cleaning off ” the accrued excrescences of Romantic performing traditions is an example of this kind of transhistorical thinking in the context of relearning to read scores. Stephen Cottrell writes about the Early Music movement in the 1970s and 80s: “purity of vocal sound was much prized. … Greater consideration was given to what were taken to be ‘the composer’s intentions’ as indicated in the score, with decades of editorial intervention stripped away.”25 Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s description of preparing his 1971 recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion also relies on a notion of the transhistoricity of great works: “We had often doubted the meaning of the finely differentiated articulations which Bach calls for in the parts written in his own hand and in his score, since they are usually drowned out in a magnificent mishmash of harmonic sounds. Now [that is, using old instruments and taking the markings in the score seriously] we were able to see how each individual musician could again take pleasure in his own eloquent, well-articulated playing, because every line ‘spoke’ and the interweaving sounds of the instruments as they played with and against each other suddenly became meaningful.”26 Even as Harnoncourt quite explicitly threw out Romantic performance traditions, he retained Romantic hermeneutics. In relation again to his St. Matthew Passion recording he writes, “All questions must be raised anew, with only Bach’s score itself accepted as the crystallization of a timeless work of art in a time-linked form of expression.”27 “Genius transhistoricity,” as we might call it, is not peculiar to HIP, of course. It is a standard component of mainstream classical performance ideology, as Richard Taruskin pointed out in the 1990s.28 My sense is that a younger generation of HIP practitioners is more skeptical in general about “works” and “essences,” particularly in light of their understanding of the sketchiness and contingency of scores and the variability of historical performances. When one 25 Stephen Cottrell, “Musical Performance in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: an Overview,” in Cambridge History of Musical Performance, ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 746. 26 Harnoncourt, “The First Performance,” 73 (emphasis added). 27 Harnoncourt, “The First Performance,” 73 (emphasis added). That Harnoncourt hung onto some sense of “the work” as existing in some sense outside history is confirmed by his remarks in a 2011 interview: “We must see the timelessness of this inspired art. All great art, whether poetry, painting or music, knows no temporal boundaries,” “Nikolaus Harnancourt in conversation with Olaf Wilhelmer,” digitalconcerthall.com, October 2011, accessed July 7, 2019, https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/interview/2463-3. 28 Richard Taruskin, “The Modern Sound of Early Music,” in Taruskin, Text and Act (Oxford University Press, 1995), 167.

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of my interlocutors said that she was trying to “be inside” a period musician (see above) I asked whether she wasn’t also trying to “be inside” the composer; her answer was “no, definitely not; I hadn’t even thought of that.” As I understand this, then, she is not aiming to communicate something about the particular work that has persisted across time, but rather to evoke something about a generic historical performance regardless of any modern worship of the given work. At the same time, it is hard on a practical level to avoid the idea that we know ontologically what a canonical work like the St. Matthew Passion is before we start to perform it; and to value it for the spiritual and aesthetic qualities to which we credit its persistence. The epistemology of transhistoricity is based on the validity of personal experience (“I know this is[for example] great because I feel it to be so”), and its phenomenology around historicity is a kind of radical familiarity (“This music talks about experiences that are simultaneously historical and present to me”). In non-HIP music-making, transhistoricity is arguably the primary mode of historical consciousness: history (or often simply age) is acknowledged as an element in a work’s value, but it is something the work has overcome to exist in the modern world, rather than embodying it. However within HIP culture, where some sense of history is more present, transhistorical thinking takes on a more complex role; and just as sonic- and contextual history thinking are embedded in each other, so transhistorical thinking joins them in the mix without obliterating either. If (to put it crudely) historical fact, fantasy, and worship are as completely tied to each other in both the discourse and experience of HIP as I have suggested, why try to separate them out? I would argue first, that as a general principle, it is better to have some clarity about the kind of thought one is engaging in than none. But perhaps more pertinently to the actual practice of HIP, I think it could be helpful to understand that each of these kinds of historical thinking provides its own discursive space for asserting the right, and even duty, of the performer to exercise her autonomy and creative freedom. Sonic history thinking can provide a framework that delineates the areas for creativity and can also empower the performer in the consciousness of making her own decisions. Contextual history thinking provides a series of imaginative models into which she can plug her own ideas, and transhistorical thinking puts her (and her audience’s) responses quite frankly at the center of the discourse. That these kinds of thinking have not always been recognized for the opportunities that they actually offer is a pity, but the articulate and thoughtful performers quoted in this essay make abundantly clear that at least in the world of HIP the various senses of history can be (and are) powerfully marshaled for their creative purposes.

Some Senses of History among HIP Performers

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beghin, Tom. “‘Delivery, Delivery, Delivery!’: Crowning the Rhetorical Process of Haydn’s Keyboard Sonatas.” In Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, edited by Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg, 131–71. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007. Benitez, Vincent P. “Musical-Rhetorical Figures in the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ of J. S. Bach.” Bach 18 (1987): 3–21. Accessed July 7, 2019. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.bowdoin.edu/stable/ 41640282. Bilson, Malcolm. “Knowing the Score.” Accessed September 1, 2018. http://malcolmbilson. com/kts.php. ——. “Knowing the Score” (video lecture). Accessed September 1, 2018. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=mVGN_YAX03A. Butt, John. Playing with History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Cottrell, Stephen, “Musical Performance in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: an Overview.” In Cambridge History of Musical Performance, edited by Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, 725–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Dumestre, Vincent. “Egisto.” Accessed September 1 2018. https://www.poemeharmonique.fr/ en/spectacle/egisto. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, and Hans Fantel. “The Problem of Historical Consciousness.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 5 (1975): 8–52. Accessed July 7, 2019. doi: 10.5840/gfpj1975512. Golomb, Uri. “Interview with Ton Koopman.” Early Music Magazine 24 (September 2003), 42–51. Accessed October 15, 2017. www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/Koopman-Golomb.pdf. ——. “Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception.” PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2004. Hanani, Yehuda. “Yehuda Hanani: Bach Masterclass Part 2.” You Tube video, recorded at the CCM, May 25, 2009. Posted by “novamediatrust,” June 17, 2009. Accessed July 3, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmkvMJCVysk. Harnoncourt, Nikolaus. “The First Performance of the St. Matthew Passion by the Concentus Musicus.” In Nikolaus Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialogue: Thoughts on Monteverdi, Bach and Mozart, 73–5. Translated by Mary O’Neill. Portland: Amadeus Press, 1997. ——. “Nikolaus Harnoncourt in conversation with Olaf Wilhelmer.” digitalconcerthall.com, October 2011. Accessed July 7, 2019. https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/interview/ 2463-3. Holden, Claire. “Re-creating Early Nineteenth-Century Style in a 21st-Century Market: An Orchestral Violinist’s Perspective.” Unpublished paper. Holden, Claire, and Eric Clarke. “Transforming Nineteenth-Century Historically Informed Practice (Transforming C19 HIP).” Accessed July 7, 2019. https://c19hip.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/c19hip/documents/media/tchip_info_pack_2.pdf. Hunter, Mary. “Editorial.” Eighteenth-Century Music 15, no. 2 (2018): 137–41. Mantel, Hilary, DBE. “The Day is for the Living.” Reith Lecture no. 1, Halle St. Peter’s, Manchester, 2017. Accessed July 6, 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp.

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Mary Hunter Philip, Robert. “Traditional Habits of Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Recordings.” In Performing Beethoven, edited by Robin Stowell, 195–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Remiro, Fernando. “Cavalli’s Egisto in Luxembourg.” Review of Egisto by Benjamin Lazar (dir.) and Vincent Dumestre (cond.). Grand Théâtre, Lxembourg, December 7, 2013. bachtrach.com. Accessed September 1, 2018. https://bachtrack.com/review-dec-2013-luxembourg-egisto. Sherman, Bernard. Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Taruskin, Richard. “The Modern Sound of Early Music.” In Richard Taruskin, Text and Act, 164–72. Oxford University Press, 1995.

CHAPTER 2

Counting to Four: The flûte du quatre in Charles Dieupart’s Six Suittes (1701) IMOGEN MORRIS

ABSTRACT Charles Dieupart’s Six Suittes are popular works among recorder players today. The use of flûte de voix (voice flute) in the first four Suittes and flûte du quatre (fourth flute) in the last two contributes substantially to this popularity, as these recorders offer unique timbres that would otherwise be rare in our repertoire. Although the flûte de voix is today accepted to be a recorder in d′, uncertainty remains regarding which size of recorder Dieupart intended as the flûte du quatre. This chapter addresses Dieupart’s use of the flûte du quatre, with a view to informing instrument choice in modern-day performance. The first part of the chapter reviews Dieupart’s life and his Suittes, then investigates the recorder-­playing scene in England and how Dieupart’s handling of the flûte du quatre fitted into it. The second part surveys references to recorders as fourth flutes from continental Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A relationship between Dieupart’s use of the flûte du quatre and the use of fourth flutes in other European centers is established, providing further context for Dieupart’s works for this instrument. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what a modern-day recorder player may learn from this contextualization.

C

harles Dieupart’s Six Suittes are popular works among recorder players today. The use of flûte de voix (voice flute) in the first four Suittes and flûte du quatre (fourth flute) in the last two contributes substantially to this popularity, as these recorders offer unique timbres that are otherwise rare in

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our repertoire. Although the flûte de voix is today accepted to be a recorder in d′, speculation continues regarding which size of recorder Dieupart intended as the flûte du quatre. Players commonly use a recorder in b♭′ to perform these pieces, but because this results in the music sounding an octave higher than it is notated—unlike the suites for voice flute which sound at written pitch— the last two suites assume a dramatically different timbre to that of the first four. Also, recorder player Conrad Steinmann has recently suggested that we may be using a recorder of an entirely incorrect nominal pitch for these works.1 This chapter addresses Dieupart’s use of the flûte du quatre, with a view to informing instrument choice in modern-day performance. It uses historical evidence—predominantly of an organological nature—to shed light on the practices of the past and, by extension, our own modern-day practices. The first part of the chapter reviews Dieupart’s life and his Suittes, then investigates the recorder-playing scene in England in relation to Dieupart’s handling of the flûte du quatre. The second part surveys references to recorders as fourth flutes from continental Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The discussion encompasses the sizes of recorder indicated by the terminology applied to them and the possible origins of these terms. A relationship between Dieupart’s use of the flûte du quatre and the use of fourth flutes in other European centers is established, providing further context for Dieupart’s works for this instrument. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what a modern-day recorder player may learn from this contextualization.

PART I François Charles Dieupart (after 1667–c. 1740) Dieupart was a harpsichordist, violinist, and composer active in England for most of his career but probably born in Paris after 1667.2 It is unclear exactly when he immigrated to England. The first mention of his being in London is 1 Conrad Steinmann, “Quartenmechanik, die flûte du quatre oder das heillose Durcheinander der Zahlen,” in Steinmann, Drei Flöten für Peter Bichsel: Vom Zauber der Blockflöte (Zurich: Rüffer & Rub, 2016), 162–9. 2 Dieupart’s first name is subject to some confusion. In general, however, it appears he used Charles in familiar situations, but François or the anglicized Francis for legal or official purposes.

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in an advertisement for a concert held on February 11, 1703, at Drury Lane, but he may have arrived at least a year earlier: a performance of his Six Suittes took place on March 6, 1702, and although no performers were listed in the advertisement, it is conceivable that Dieupart was among them, possibly playing the harpsichord.3 The Frenchman distinguished himself as a performer in the English music theater scene and collaborated with Thomas Clayton and Nicola Francesco Haym to stage in London Italian operatic works by composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Giovanni Bononcini. He also found significant success as a harpsichord teacher. While Dieupart is best known today for his Six Suittes, his output as a composer also includes concerti, sonatas, and instrumental music for operas and other stage pieces.4 Dieupart’s life before his emigration—and any influence it may have had on the conception of his Suittes—is almost a complete mystery. For his performance in Hampstead on September 11, 1734—his last documented stage appearance—he was billed as “Capt. Dupar, Scholar to the late celebrated Signor Corelli, and late Musick Master to his present Highness the Prince of Orange.”5 If he were truly a student of Arcangelo Corelli, it could be supposed that Dieupart was in Rome sometime during the 1680s and/or early 1690s. This could explain the interest in Italian music that persisted throughout his career.6 Also, Andrew Woolley suggests that Dieupart may have spent time in Germany, observing that the fixed order of movements, wide range of keys, and contrapuntal gigues which Dieupart’s Suittes exhibit are similar to German rather than French suites of the late seventeenth century.7

3 Michael Tilmouth, “Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers Published in London and the Provinces (1660–1719),” R.M.A. Research Chronicle 1 (1961): 47, accessed July 9, 2019, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25093640; Rudolf Rasch, “The Music Publishing House of Estienne Roger: Documents 1702,” 2, last modified July 10, 2018, https://roger.sites. uu.nl/wp-content/uploads/sites/416/2018/07/Documents-1702.pdf. 4 For further detail on Dieupart’s career in London, see David Fuller and Peter Holman, “Dieupart, Charles,” Grove Music Online, accessed May 24, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline. com/subscriber/article/grove/music/07781; John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, vol. 5 (London: T. Payne, 1776), http://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/ usimg/a/a9/IMSLP337343-PMLP544570-generalhistoryof05hawk.pdf. 5 Fuller and Holman, “Dieupart, Charles.” 6 Hawkins, A General History, 170. In addition to staging Italian operas as mentioned above, Dieupart’s performance of Corelli solos later in life is praised by Hawkins. 7 Andrew Lawrence Woolley, “English Keyboard Sources and Their Contexts, c. 1660–1720” (PhD diss., The University of Leeds, 2008), 216, accessed July 9, 2019, https://app.box. com/shared/2mbvi40vor.

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The Six Suittes: First Publication with Estienne Roger Dieupart’s Six Suittes were first published in 1701 by Estienne Roger in Amsterdam. He produced two editions; the first consists of parts for solo harpsichord, melody instruments (violin and recorder), and basso continuo accompaniment (basse de viole and archlute), which were sold together under the following title8: SIX | SUITTES DE CLAVESSIN | Diviseés en | Ouvertures, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gavottes, | Menuets, Rondeaux & Gigues | Composeés & Mises en Concert | Par | MONSIEUR DIEUPART | Pour un Violon & flûte avec une Basse | de Viole & un Archilut | Dédiées a | MADAME LA COMTESSE DE SANDWICH | A AMSTERDAM | Chez ESTIENNE ROGER Marchand libraire

Roger also announced the availability of another edition in 1701, which featured the melody and bass parts without the solo harpsichord part, as indicated by its title: SIX SUITTES | Divisées en | Ouvertures, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, | Gavottes, Menuets, Rondeaux | & Gigues | Propres à jouer sur la flûte ou le Violon | avec une Basse Continue | Composées Par | MONSIEUR DIEUPART | A AMSTERDAM | Chez ESTIENNE ROGER Marchand libraire

One copy of this edition has survived; although it was given a new title page, the music within is printed using the same plates as the earlier edition.9 To distinguish between the two editions, scholars commonly refer to the edition with harpsichord as the 1701 edition and that without it as the 1702 edition. These labels evidently stem from the timeline of François Vaillant’s advertisements of the availability of the works for purchase in London, in which the version with solo harpsichord was advertised five months earlier than that without.10 Based on Roger’s advertisements in Amsterdam, however, both editions were published at the end of 1701.11 In order to avoid perpetuating 8 For extant editions see RISM A/I D 3042. 9 GB-DRc, Pr. Mus. C. 31. See RISM A/I D 3044. 10 Rasch, “The Music Publishing House of Estienne Roger: Documents: 1701,” 4–5; Rasch, “Documents: 1702,” 2. 11 Rasch, “Documents: 1701,” 5–6.

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inaccuracies by using publication dates to name the two versions, I shall instead refer to the edition with solo harpsichord part as edition A and that without as edition B.

The Six Suittes: Performance Practice Today, the most common instrumentation heard in live concerts and audio recordings of these works are harpsichord solo and recorder solo with basso continuo. This appears to be predicated on a mistaken belief that edition A alone represents two distinct performance settings, specifically (1) solo harpsichord suites, which were subsequently arranged for (2) a melody instrument and basso continuo, and that both of these versions were sold together.12 It is a truism that the explicit naming of basse de viole and archlute on the title page indicates the preferred accompanying instruments for the latter option. However, by inspecting the published materials closely, we can uncover a wider variety of performance possibilities. Using the materials of edition A, the suites may be performed as accompanied harpsichord works in the manner discussed extensively by Matthew Hall.13 He convincingly demonstrates the Suittes’ position in the French pièces en concert tradition, in which the melody and bass instruments were conceived as accompaniments to the harpsichord solo. While previous studies of the works discount this as an option on the basis of differences between the harpsichord and instrumental parts, Hall argues that it is precisely these variants that allow the parts to fit together while not undermining the idiosyncrasies of the individual instruments.14 Edition A also allows performance of the suites by harpsichord alone. It seems this was a popular option: in 1712, Roger began offering the harpsichord part for purchase alone,15 and the suites appear in handwritten manuscripts of solo keyboard works across Europe.16 12 Fuller and Holman, “Dieupart, Charles.” 13 Matthew Hall, “Suites en concert: An Overlooked Performance Tradition” (unpublished manuscript, Boston University, 2012), 19–20 and 24–9, accessed July 9, 2019, http://www.matthewjhall.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/hall-suitesenconcert.pdf. 14 Woolley, “English Keyboard Sources,” 209; Hall, “Suites en concert,” 24–9. 15 Rasch, “The Music Publishing House of Estienne Roger: Catalogues in Facsimile: Catalogue 1712,” 13. 16 See Bruce Gustafson and David Fuller, A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699–1780  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 253, 255, 260–1, 268–9; Hall, “Suites en concert,” 6; Woolley, “English Keyboard Sources,” 205–10, 212, 214–16.

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Meanwhile, edition B evidences the performance practice most commonly heard today—melody instrument with basso continuo accompaniment. While the title page designates recorder or violin as the melody instrument, Roger’s catalogue listing indicates that the oboe would also be suitable.17 The broader indication of une basse continue, rather than specifically naming instruments, implies a range of accompaniment possibilities including the harpsichord. All three performance options are equally legitimate; it is not a case of one being preferable to or more “correct” than the others. The different editions could be perceived as a mere business trick predicated on appealing to as many amateur musicians as possible. More importantly, however, the versatile instrumentation offered by the Suittes suggests that Dieupart, like many other French baroque composers, was composing “music” and that the specific instrumentation was the domain of the performer, in terms of the choice of instrument and its effect on the interpretation of the piece.

Recorder Playing in Eighteenth-Century England Although the recorder was mostly a secondary instrument for professional musicians, it was all the rage among the English gentry and nobility by the end of the seventeenth century. Tutor books were published for the gentleman amateur, beginning with John Hudgebut’s A Vade Mecum for the Lovers of Musick in 1679. These tutor books were designed for learning the common flute in f ′, sometimes referred to as the concert flute or consort flute, but recorder players in England had a wide range of additional instrument sizes at their disposal. James Talbot collected information on various instruments from around 1685 to 1701. In his manuscript, he describes recorders made by Pierre Jaillard Bressan, a Frenchman by birth who became one of the most popular recorder makers in England in his time. Aside from recorders in f ′ (which Talbot names treble flute), instruments at the following nominal pitches are listed: “Fifth higher [c′′]. Eighth higher [f ′′]. Voice, Third lower [d′]. Tenor 5th [sic.] lower [c′]. Bass [F] Double Bass [C].”18 The larger sizes of recorder have their own specific names, while the smaller sizes of recorder garner names based on their 17 Rasch, “Catalogues in Facsimile: Roger 1702,” 11. 18 Anthony Baines, “James Talbot’s Manuscript. (Christ Church Library Music MS 1187). I. Wind Instruments,” The Galpin Society Journal 1 (1948): 18, accessed July 9, 2019, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/842118. The lowest note of each instrument, given here in square brackets, is notated on the stave in the original text. On page 11 of the article, the recorder in F is listed as “Pedal or Double Bass.”

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intervallic relationship to the pitch f ′. William Tans’ur Sr. demonstrates this in his The Elements of Display’d (1772): “of Flutes [recorders] there are many Sizes, as a Concert Flute; a Third Flute; a Fifth, and a Sixth, and an Octave Flute.”19 In order to simplify the use of so many sizes, recorders were treated as transposing instruments. Parts were written as if for the recorder in f ′, and players fingered as if playing this instrument while actually using a different size. The recorder would then “transpose” the music into the correct sounding key. To this end, tutor books commonly furnished their readers with a chart, or scale, to help transpose music. Works were also published to include parts ready-transposed for the appropriate recorder, for example the concerti by William Babell, Robert Woodcock, and John Baston, and the recorder parts in songbook periodicals such as The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music. Thus, amateur players only needed to be proficient in one fingering system in order to play all sizes of recorder and, by extension, pieces in a wide variety of keys. Although this system of playing was practiced often, it was not without its detractors. Writing in around 1732, Thomas Stanesby Jr. promotes using a recorder in c′ as the common flute in order to eliminate the need to transpose at all.20 His comments reflect recorder players’ heavy reliance on the system, remarking that they had become so accustomed to it that they were no longer aware of what note they were actually playing. He indicates the frustrations composers faced with the current system, particularly in finding and utilizing the correct transposition, which was presumably more difficult for non-wind players such as Dieupart.

The Use of Recorder in the Six Suittes In Dieupart’s Six Suittes, the composer calls for two different recorder sizes. The first four suites require a flûte de voix, or voice flute, today accepted to be a recorder in d′.21 The voice flute is an instrument predisposed to the playing of sharp keys and, as such, in use it simplifies the fingerings of the first four suites, which are written in A major, D major, B minor, and E minor respectively. When a player uses a voice flute for these suites, the lower notes are mostly 19 William Tans’ur Sr., The Elements of Musick Display’d: […] (London: Stanley Crowder, 1772), partial facsimile reprint found in Susi Möhlmeier and Frédérique Thouvenot, eds., Flûte à Bec: Europe 1500–1800, vol. 4 (Courlay: Fuzeau, 2001), 163 (emphasis original). 20 Thomas Stanesby Jr., “A new System of the Flute a’ Bec or common English Flute. […]” ([London?]: n.p., [1732?]), facsimile reprint in Möhlmeier and Thouvenot, Flûte à Bec, 53–4. 21 For detailed information on the voice flute see David Lasocki, “Die Voice Flute und ihre Herkunft,” Tibia 42, no. 3 (2017): 483–500.

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brought into range. However, the pitch d♯′ is occasionally required, and is difficult to produce on an instrument without double holes as was standard in the eighteenth century. In the 3e Suitte there is also an isolated c′, which is unplayable on a voice flute. These cases are possibly of less concern in an en concert performance setting—an accompanied harpsichord solo—as the notes would also be played by the violin and harpsichord. In order to perform the last two suites in the collection, the player requires a flûte du quatre, or fourth flute. Although there are no descriptions of fourth flutes from either Talbot or Tans’ur, it could reasonably be assumed that this is a recorder in b♭′, an interval of a fourth above f ′. This would be in keeping with other instruments higher than f ′, including the third flute in a′, fifth flute in c′′, sixth flute in d′′, and octave flute in f ′′. Indeed, one instrument in b♭′ by Bressan has survived, and all the joints are marked with the number 4, likely a reference to their tuning a fourth above f ′.22 And an extant head-joint from an instrument by Stanesby Jr., presumably in b♭′ from its size, features a “4” beneath the maker’s mark, as does a recorder in b♭′ made by Hartley.23 Also inscribed with this number, however, are two instruments in b♭, both by Stanesby Jr.24 Despite the fact that b♭ is a fifth below f ′, rather than a fourth above, the inscriptions imply that both sizes of B♭recorder (in b♭′ and in b♭) were deemed fourth flutes in the baroque period.25 This is also how they are named today. When performing the last two suites, the recorder player benefits from using a fourth flute. As the suites are in F Major and F Minor respectively, a recorder with a predisposition towards flat keys simplifies the fingerings for these two suites in the same way that the voice flute does for the first four. Contrary to the practice in “ready-transposed” recorder parts, instructions for transposing the recorder part are provided at the beginning of each suite by either Dieupart or his publisher Roger, presumably for the player to write out the music themselves. While the indications for the flûte de voix parts result in 22 GB-Oxford: Bate (ex. Hunt), number 0109, see Phillip T. Young, 4900 Historical Woodwind Instruments: An Inventory of 200 Makers in International Collections, 2nd ed. (London: Tony Bingham, 1993), 35. 23 USA-Anonymous, see Young, 4900 Historical Woodwind Instruments, 220; private collection of Peter Holtslag, Bad Bevensen. 24 GB-Oxford: Bate, number 0402, and NL-Amsterdam: Brüggen (no accession number), see Young, 4900 Historical Woodwind Instruments, 220. 25 It is also possible that these recorders are considered fourth flutes due their being tuned a fourth above the bass in f—a simple transposition of the f ′-b♭′ relationship to the octave below—but we have no evidence to corroborate this thinking.

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the correct transposition, problems arise in the indications given for the last two suites, those for flûte du quatre. What one would expect, in accordance with established practices of the time, are indications for transposition into C major and C minor respectively; using a B♭-recorder, these would result in the correct sounding keys. However, the printed indications are for transposition into G major and G minor. On a fourth flute this results not only in the wrong sounding key but also in a range of g′–g′′′, which is too low for the instrument. One solution put forward by Conrad Steinmann is to use a recorder in e♭′ for these suites.26 Certainly, this instrument’s nominal pitch lends itself to playing pieces in flat keys, and transposing to G major/G minor does result in F major/F minor at sounding pitch. The required ambitus, however, is c′–c′′′ at sounding pitch, which is out of the range of a recorder with a lowest note of e♭′. There is also no accounting for calling a recorder in e♭′ a flûte du quatre, it being in no way related to the pitch f ′ by the interval of a fourth, either above or below. To return therefore to the B♭-recorder as the most likely candidate for the part, employing another fingering system seems a more likely answer. If one supposes a system of transposition based on the fingerings of a recorder in C, rather than in F, a solution may be found. When C-fingerings are used to play in G major and G minor on a B♭-recorder, the correct sounding keys (F major and F minor respectively) result. But the question is, of course, why? There is no known precedent for a transposition practice based on C-fingerings in England, where fourth flutes were at their most popular. More than anything, the use of a new fingering system was likely to have been baffling to genteel English amateurs, accustomed as they were to their F-fingering system, as it would have required more flexibility in their note-reading skills than they appear to have cultivated. In order to ascertain where this C-fingering system may have originated, it is necessary to consider what was happening in continental Europe at the time, beginning with Dieupart’s home country.

PART II The Recorder in France There is much to link the recorder-playing traditions in France and England in the late baroque period. The first baroque recorders were brought to England 26 Steinmann, “Quartenmechanik,” 168–9.

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from France when their players emigrated there in 1673 with composer Robert Cambert. They evidently brought their practices with them, as English recorder methods reflect French ornamentation practices and fingerings; Jacques Hotteterre’s treatise on wind playing was also received favorably and translated often. Also, Frenchman Bressan was a popular woodwind instrument maker in England during this period. The development of the baroque recorder, commonly (although contentiously) attributed to the Hotteterre family in the 1660s, produced a recorder ensemble featuring instruments in F and C, which was used in France into the following century.27 In 1701, mathematician and physicist Joseph Sauveur documented the following names and ranges of the various sizes: dessus, f ′′–g′′′′; haute-contre, c′′–d′′′′; taille, f ′–g′′′; quinte, c′–d′′′; and basse, f–d′′.28 The instrument names therefore refer to the recorders’ functions within the ensemble, rather to their relation to a particular solo instrument. In his survey of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s orchestration, Jürgen Eppelsheim demonstrates that Lully uses recorders of the dessus, taille, and quinte sizes, as well as two sizes of bass, the petite basse in f and the grande basse in F.29 Lully also requires his players to read “at pitch” in a variety of clefs, rather than providing transposed parts.30 In other words, despite the strong connections between English and French recorder-playing traditions, their practices for designating and notating recorder parts clearly differed. It is likely that Dieupart was a relative of Nicolas Dieupart, a wind player named in the accounts of the Grand Écurie at French court between 1667 and 1700 as a member of the Crômorne et Trompette Marine.31 Nicolas was also engaged by the Chambre du Roy and he participated in performances of Lully’s operas in 1685.32 Even though there is no corroborative evidence, it is probable that Charles Dieupart gained some of his preliminary knowledge of wind 27 See David Lasocki, “Recorder,” Grove Music Online, accessed May 24, 2017, http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/23022. 28 Joseph Sauveur, Principes d’acoustique et de musique […] ([Paris?]: n.p., 1701), “Planche III,” accessed July 9, 2019, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1510877z. 29 Jürgen Eppelsheim, Das Orchester in den Werken Jean-Baptiste Lullys (Tutzing: Schneider, 1961), 173. 30 Ibid., 64–97. See also Lenz Meierott, Die geschichtliche Entwicklung der kleinen Flötentypen und ihre Verwendung in der Musik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1974), 172–3, plates 7 and 8; it was not until the eighteenth century that Michel Pignolet de Montéclair utilized transposition for recorder parts in his Les festes de l’été (1716) and Jephté (1732); among French composers, this practice remained the exception rather than the rule. 31 Fuller and Holman, “Dieupart, Charles.” 32 Bruce Haynes, The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy 1640–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 126–7.

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instruments from Nicolas. However, given the lack of evidence for recorders in nominal pitches other than F and C, it is unlikely that Dieupart encountered there the specific recorders that he used for his Suittes.

Counting to Four: The Quartflöte in c˝ The recorder consort tradition that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generated diverse recorder sizes. These are most comprehensively detailed in Michael Praetorius’s De Organographia. Published in 1619, the second book of his Syntagma Musicum documents a consort of recorders, or Stimmwerck, consisting of instruments in eight different sizes, specifically the Großbaß in F, Baß in B♭, Basset in f, Tenor in c′, Alt in g′, Discant in both c′′ and d′′, and klein Flöttlein/Exilent in g′′.33 After an established tradition of building recorders in intervals of fifths, Praetorius is the first theorist to list two forms of the Discant size, in c′′ and d′′, being a fourth and fifth above the Alt in g′ respectively. However, Praetorius does not assign consort voice functions to the Discant in c′′ in his chart of ranges, which suggests that it was not used as a consort instrument at the time he was writing.34 Its inclusion in the treatise, therefore, could refer either to Praetorius’ recommendation that consorts be tuned in alternating fourths and fifths (suggested in the section regarding shawms but arguably applicable to recorders as well) or to the instrument’s use as a solo instrument, pitched a fourth above the other main solo instrument of the time, the Alt in g′.35 It is likely that this recorder in c′′ is the same that is referred to as Quartflöte (and variants thereupon) in inventories throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, beginning in 1635.36 While none of the inventory listings specifies the nominal pitch of the instrument, the name is certainly apt for a recorder tuned at the interval of a fourth, rather than a fifth, above g′. Moreover, Tobias Eniccelius’s Melismata epistolica (1667) calls for two Quart-Flöten on its title page.37 33 Michael Praetorius, De Organographia, vol. 2, Syntagma Musicum (Wolfenbüttel: Elias Holwein, 1619), 34, accessed July 9, 2019, http://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/ 8/8e/IMSLP68476-PMLP138176-PraetoriusSyntagmaMusicumB2.pdf. 34 Ibid., 21. 35 Cf. the Quartfagott and Quartposaun listed by Praetorius, as well as the Quartzinck which ­flourished later in the seventeenth century. 36 See David Lasocki, A Listing of Inventories, Sales, and Advertisements relating to Flutes, Recorders, and Flageolets, 1631–1800 (Bloomington, IN: Instant Harmony, 2010). 37 Tobias Eniccelius, Melismata epistolica, oder des theuren Poeten Martin Opitzens Sontags- und der fürnebsten Fest-Episteln, in die Music mit nur einer Vocal-Stimm, zweyen Quart-Flöten oder Violinen, einen Viol di Gamb u. einen General-Baß zum Clavicymbel Spinett oder Regal &c. […] (Kiel: Joachim Reumann, 1667).

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While the parts are marked simply with Flauto, their ranges suggest that the composer had recorders in c′′ in mind.38 The Quartflöte appears in composer Georg Daniel Speer’s treatise of 1697.39 While no substantial description of the recorder of any size is printed, the instrument is referred to in the German-Italian terminology table, in which Flauto is translated as Flöte, and Flautino as Quartflöte.40 Speer also provides a fingering chart for the Quartflöte, which illustrates an instrument in C (Figure 1);41 that the Quartflöte is equated to the Italian flautino in the terminology listing demonstrates that it is in c′′. Most of the fingering chart resembles those for baroque recorders, especially the fingerings for the upper octave, but it does feature d′′′ played with all holes open and c♯′′′ with the thumb-hole closed, which are common sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fingerings.42 Speer’s chart exhibits strong similarities to Paulus Matthysz’s fingerings, suggesting that a similar instrument is being described in both. These sources show us that another form of fourth flute—in this instance related to the alto in g′—was in use at a time when Dieupart was likely travelling and when Roger was establishing his publishing shop; in other words, at a time when both composer and publisher were probably gathering knowledge of practices beyond their native France. The Quartflöte was evidently used to some extent in the eighteenth century as well. However, by this time, the newly-developed recorder in f ′ was rapidly gaining popularity across Europe, and confusion mounted in descriptions of the recorder family given by theorists, particularly in relation to the Quartflöte. Despite the growing prevalence of recorders in f ′, the Quartflöte in c′′ retained its name and with it the reference to the interval of a fourth. Theorists, however, endeavored to relate it to the recorder in f ′; as a result of their attempts the instrument’s name seems to have 38 The recorder in c′′ was in use as a solo instrument in Italy as well, usually indicated with flautino; see Peter van Heyghen, “The Recorder in Italian Music, 1600–1670,” in The Recorder in the 17th Century: Proceedings of the International Recorder Symposium Utrecht 1993, ed. David Lasocki (Utrecht: STIMU Foundation for Historical Performance Practice, 1995), 28–32. 39 Georg Daniel Speer, Grund-richtiger kurtz-, leicht-, und nöthiger jetz wolvermehrter Unterricht der musikalischen Kunst, 2nd ed. (Ulm: Georg Wilhelm Kühnen, 1697), accessed July 9, 2019, http://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/9/92/IMSLP490279-PMLP591518-speer_ grund-richtiger_unterricht.pdf. 40 Ibid., 285. 41 Ibid., 257. 42 Cf. Paulus Matthysz, “Vertooninge en onderwyzinge op de Hand-Fluit,” in Der Fluyten Lusthof, ed. Jacob van Eyck, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Paulus Matthysz, 1649), accessed July 9, 2019, http://ks.imslp.net/files/imglnks/usimg/2/21/IMSLP177614-PMLP201599-der_ fluyten_lusthof_amsterdam_1649.pdf.

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Figure 1.  Speer’s fingering chart for Quartflöten.

lost its meaning, suggesting that Quartflöte was a seventeenth-century term that later theorists were attempting to understand retrospectively. In 1701, Thomas Balthasar Janowka published a treatise in Prague in which Quart-Fleten are described as being a fourth above the Fletnæ Discantisticæ in f ′, but an octave above the Fletnæ Mediæ in c′. He also states that the Quart-Fleten is rarely used.43 In contrast to Janowka’s statement, the recorder in c′′ itself appears in works during the eighteenth century, named more frequently for its physical size with terms such as flautino and flauto piccolo. These terms were not exclusive to the recorder in c′′, and were used to describe all manner of small recorders. Johann Philipp Eisel most likely took Speer’s text as his source of information for his 1738 treatise, as his fingering chart for the Quart-Fleute is identical.44 In his text, he describes the Quart-Fleute as being a fourth above the Fleute-Douce 43 Thomas Balthasar Janowka, Clavis ad thesaurum magnae artis musicae (Prague: Jiří Laboun, 1701), 44, http://dig.vkol.cz/dig/10428/popis.htm. 44 There are other indications to suggest Eisel consulted Speer: for example, their texts describing the cornetto are almost identical.

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in f ′, and even provides a table to demonstrate this (Figure 2).45 Meanwhile, the German-born Norwegian Johan Daniel Berlin lists a Quart-Fløite in c′′, QuintFløite in d′′, and Octav-Fløite in f ′′ in addition to the Fløite in f ′ in his Musicaliske Elementer in 1744, thus further extending the confusion in terminology.46 In Johann Gottfried Walther’s Musicalisches Lexicon (1732), the entry regarding the Quartflöte reads: “Flauto (ital.) Flûte (gall.) eine gemeine oder Quart-Flöte mit sieben Ober-Löchern, und einem Daumen-Loche; gehet vom c′ bis ins c′′′ durch diejenigen Tone, so Tab. XI. F. 4 zu finden.” (Flauto [ital.] Flûte [gall.] a common or fourth flute with seven upper holes and one thumb-hole; has a compass of c′ to c′′′ comprising the pitches shown in Tab. XI. F. 4).47 David Lasocki proposes that this demonstrates the Quart-Flöte to be a recorder in c′ (an interval of a fourth below f ′) and therefore equates it with the instrument that Walther also lists under the French name Taille:48 “Taille, die Alt-Flöte; gehet vom c′ bis ins c′′′.” (Taille, the Alt-Flöte [alto recorder]: has a compass of c′ to c′′′).49 Although this makes mathematical sense, it is inconsistent with any other indication regarding the Quartflöte. Peter Thalheimer, discussing Walther’s entry for the flageolet, observes that the range of the flageolet is named as d′–e′′′ and notated as d′–c′′′. Remarking that with such a range (regardless of the contradictory upper limits), the flageolet could no longer be known as a “klein Pfeiffgen” (small flute or whistle), as Walther calls it, he concludes that Walther is indicating the notated pitch used for the instrument’s music, rather than its actual sounding pitch.50 In light of the foregoing evidence regarding the Quartflöte’s pitch, it is likely that 45 Johann Philipp Eisel, Musicus αυτοδιδαχτοσ, oder Der sich selbst informirende Musicus […] (Erfurt: Johann Michael Funcken, 1738), 80 and Table 12, accessed July 9, 2019, http:// conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/7/75/IMSLP537463-PMLP863447-eisel_ musicus_autodidaktos_1738.pdf. He also includes a similar chart to show the difference between the Zinck (Cornetto) in a and Quartzinck (Cornettino) in d′; the order of the instruments in the chart is the same, that is, the Quartzinck to the left of the Zinck. 46 Johan Daniel Berlin, Musicaliske Elementer […] (Trondheim: Jens Christ. Winding, 1744), 101, accessed July 9, 2019, http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/f/f2/IMSLP181504PMLP317200-berlin-mus_element.pdf. 47 Johann Gottfried Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon oder Musicalische Bibliothec […] (Leipzig: Wolffgang Deer, 1732), 247, accessed July 9, 2019, http://imslp.org/wiki/Musicalisches_ Lexicon_(Walther%2C_Johann_Gottfried), translation mine. Tab. XI. F. 4 depicts all chromatic notes between c′ and c′′′. 48 David Lasocki, “The C Recorder in the 18th Century,” American Recorder 11, no. 1 (1970): 20. 49 Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, 250, translation mine. 50 Peter Thalheimer, “Der flauto piccolo bei Johann Sebastian Bach,” Bach-Jahrbuch 52 (1966): 139; Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, 247, translation mine.

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Figure 2.  Eisel’s comparison of the Quart-Fleute and Fleute douce.

Walther’s entry for the Quartflöte also reflects this naming practice, and thus the entry quoted above concerns an instrument in c′′, while the entry for the Taille refers to the recorder in c′. Based on the arias by Eniccelius, the fingering charts of Speer and Eisel, and Walther’s range indication for the instrument, there were clearly expectations for recorder players in continental Europe to be able to play C-fingerings as notated rather than to rely on transposition. This contrasts sharply with

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the English practice, but may provide the underpinnings for a (misguided) assumption on either Dieupart or Roger’s part that a C-fingering system existed in England at the time.

The Inventory of Nicolas Selhof Inventories of estates can hold valuable information as to which instruments were in popular use. One such inventory details the property of Nicolas Selhof in 1759.51 Selhof was a bookseller in The Hague, and during his lifetime amassed an array of musical works and instruments of great international breadth. The catalogue contains not only print material but also around 600 manuscripts, the circulation of which may have contributed substantially to Selhof ’s business.52 There are also listings for instruments and related accoutrements, implying that Selhof sold these as well.53 Two works from a now-unknown composer named Beckurs are listed among the manuscripts and have fourth flutes in their instrumentation; neither of these works are extant: 2480 Concerto a 7, 2 Flutes Octaves a Bec, 2 Flutes Quarto a Bec, 1 Hautbois, 1 Cor de chasse, & Basso par Beckurs 2483 Concerto a 4, Flagolette, quart Flute, 1 Violino & Basso por Beckurs54

Although in the case of listing 2483 it is not certain whether a form of recorder or a transverse flute is intended, the order and types of instruments with which these fourth flutes are listed may indicate the use of a recorder in either c′′ or b♭′. The instrument listings also include “Une Flute de quart de Beukern,” but no specific nominal pitch for this recorder can be ascertained.55

The Fluta di Quatre The recorder was especially prevalent in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century. While it was popular in its f ′ incarnation by this time, the recorder in g′, 51 Nicolas Selhof, Catalogue d’une trés belle Bibliothèque de Livres (The Hague: A. Moetjens, 1759); facsimile reprint in Catalogue of the Music Library, Instruments and Other Property of Nicolas Selhof, Sold in The Hague: 1759, ed. Alec H. King (Amsterdam: Frits Knuf, 1973). 52 King, Introduction Nicolas Selhof Catalogue, xii. 53 Ibid. 54 Nicolas Selhof, Catalogue d’une trés belle Bibliothèque de Livres, 224. 55 Ibid., 256.

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named flauto italiano by the Italian composer and wind player Bartolomeo ­Bismantova in 1677, may also still have been in considerable use.56 A large amount of repertoire for the recorder was written by Italian composers in the first few decades of the eighteenth century.57 One such composer was the ­Venetian Diogenio Bigaglia, who is also reputed to have been a recorder player of considerable skill.58 In 1725, a collection of Bigaglia’s sonatas was published in ­Amsterdam by Michel-Charles Le Cène; the complete title page reads thus: XII | SONATE | a Violono Solo o Sia Flauto | e Violoncello o Basso Continuo | DEL SIGNOR BIGAGLIA | PADRE BENEDETTINO | Opera Prima | A | AMSTERDAM | Aux depens de MICHEL CHARLES LE CENE | Libraire No. 522

In 1966, Hugo Ruf published a modern edition of the A minor sonata, the seventh work in this collection.59 Instead of taking the 1725 publication as his source, he used a manuscript entitled Sonata a fluta di quatre e basso which is located in a private collection and no longer available for consultation. In his original Preface, Ruf describes the fluta di quatre as a recorder in c′′, but in the revised edition, published in 1982, he alters his stance, identifying the instrument as one in b♭′ instead.60 Thiemo Wind has compared the sonata in the manuscript version (as published by Ruf) with the one published by Le Cène.61 Wind concludes that, without access to the original manuscript, one must assume the work published by Ruf to be an arrangement of that from Le Cène: “Here we see an example of the way in which an arranger adapted a composition to his own taste and to that of his own time.”62 He identifies substantial changes in the manuscript version not only to the 56 Federico Maria Sardelli, Vivaldi’s Music for Flute and Recorder, trans. Michael Talbot (Aldershot: Ashgate in association with Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, 2007), 129–31. Sardelli suggests that eighteenth-century players owned instruments in f′ and g′, allowing ease in playing in flat and sharp keys respectively. 57 For an enumeration of works see ibid., 7–8. 58 Ibid., 19–20. 59 Diogenio Bigaglia, Sonate A-Moll für Sopranblockflöte und Basso continuo (rev. ed., score and parts, with basso continuo realization), ed. Hugo Ruf (Mainz: Schott, 1982). 60 Ruf, Preface to Sonate A-Moll. 61 Thiemo Wind, “Bigaglia’s Sonata in A Minor: A New Look at Its Originality,” Recorder and Music Magazine 8, no. 2 ( June, 1984): 49–54, accessed July 9, 2019, http://www.thiemowind.nl/ wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Bigaglia-Sonata-in-A-minor-A-new-look-at-its-originality.pdf. 62 Ibid., 54.

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recorder part, but also to the bass. Of particular interest are the points at which the bass has been transposed an octave higher, bringing it closer in pitch to the recorder. This indicates that the recorder sounded an octave higher than written, making the part unsuitable for a recorder in f ′.63 Even on a recorder in g′, while theoretically playable an octave higher than written, the part would require significant use of the upper registers of the instrument, making it unnecessarily demanding. In both versions, the range of the recorder part is e′–a′′: not suitable for an instrument in f ′ or g′, but possible on a recorder in either in c′′ or in b♭′, in both cases sounding an octave higher than written. Although it cannot be ascertained without studying the original manuscript, it seems unlikely that the arranger wrote the fluta di quatre part with transposing notation. If transposition had been used for the part, it would have been a conclusive indication of which instrument was to be used, thus clarifying Ruf’s confusion. A minor can be played with relative ease on both instruments, but it is simplest on a recorder in c′′. Assuming the continued popularity of the recorder in g′ in Italy in the 1720s, the name fluta di quatre is fitting, as it is a fourth above g′. It is therefore possible that this manuscript represents an example of the fourth flute being an instrument in c′′.

The Flauto alla quarta Another indication related to the interval of a fourth is flauto alla quarta, found in works by Johann Hugo von Wilderer and Georg Philipp Telemann. Two arias from Von Wilderer’s opera Nino overó La Monarchia Stabilita (1703), “Potrai vedermi piangere” and “Lusignol che si lagna,” contain parts for flauti alla quarta.64 Both arias feature an alto voice, and the flauti alla quarta are stipulated alongside parts for flauti humana.65 The music for the flauti alla quarta utilizes a C3 clef with a total range of c-a′: this could suit a recorder in c′, which would cause the part to sound an octave higher than written. Von Wilderer also includes three flauti alla quarta in the alto aria “Dormi, Giocasta” from the opera Giocasta (1696).66 Here, the first two parts employ a 63 Ibid., 50. 64 Modern editions in Peter Thalheimer and Klaus Hofmann, eds., Flauto e voce II: Geistliche und Weltliche Arien: Originalkompositionen für tiefe Stimme, Blockflötenensemble und Basso continuo, music score (Stuttgart: Carus, 1998), 22–4; Thalheimer and Hofmann, eds., Flauto e voce XI: Originalkompositionen für Mezzosopran oder Alt, zwei bis drei Blockflöten und Basso continuo, music score (Stuttgart: Carus, 2015), 29–32. 65 Discussed in Lasocki, “Die Voice Flute,” 488 and 499, n. 28. 66 For a modern edition see Thalheimer and Hofmann, Flauto e voce II, 20–1.

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G2 clef and the lower part uses a C3 clef. Thalheimer and Hofmann demonstrate that all three parts are intended for recorders in c′, with the lowest part sounding an octave higher than written.67 Telemann’s Aesopus bei Hofe, TWV 21:26, had its first performance in Hamburg in 1729. While a complete score is not extant, the aria “Piu del fiume” is published in Der getreue Music-Meister.68 The accompanying instrumental part is marked Flauto alla quarta, ò Oboe, ò Violino and utilizes a G2 clef. It is suitable for a recorder in C; however, it cannot be ascertained whether it should be in c′, in which case it would sound in the same octave as the oboe or violin, or c′′, an octave higher.69

CONCLUSION Recorder players in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had a variety of fourth flutes available to them. The terminology applied to each was the result of distinctive but coexistent performance practices, which took different treble instruments—either in f ′ or g′—as their foundation. Those based on the alto in f ′ represent a response to newer instrumental developments, while the term Quartflöte, based on the alto in g′, is clearly a link to earlier consort-playing traditions. The last two Suittes by Dieupart present a unique example of a system of transposition based on C-fingerings, and it seems likely that this arose due to a conflation of fourth flutes in B♭ and C, probably as a result of the overlap in their usage. However, in the absence of a handwritten manuscript from Dieupart, it cannot be confirmed whether these indications were provided by the composer or were added by Roger. Both Dieupart and Roger clearly had knowledge of playing styles and instrumentation beyond those of their native France. Roger published works from a vast international pool of composers and presumably had contacts from whom he might have gained information about fourth flutes in both B♭ and C. It is conceivable that Dieupart, not a wind player himself, entrusted his publisher with assigning the exact instrumentation and, consequently, the transposition indications. 67 Ibid. 68 Georg Philipp Telemann, Der getreue Music-Meister (Hamburg: Telemann, 1728–9), 38–9 (Lection 10) and 42 (Lection 11), accessed July 9, 2019, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b9009901m/f48.image. 69 Klaus Hofmann, Preface to Georg Philipp Telemann, Piu del fiume da diletto: Arie für Sopran, Sopranblockflöte oder Oboe und Cembalo sowie Streicher ad libitum (score and parts with basso continuo realization), ed. Klaus Hofmann (Neuhausen and Stuttgart: Hänssler, 1981).

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We know far more of Dieupart’s life after his move to England than preceding it. It is highly doubtful that he encountered recorders of any kind called fourth flutes in France, which suggests that he may have travelled elsewhere before departing for England. If, as Woolley suggests, Dieupart had ventured to Germany, or at the very least had contact with German composers and repertoire for the recorder, he may have learnt of the terminology for fourth flutes in C, especially the Quartflöte. Likewise, if he was a student of Corelli, he could have encountered a term akin to fluta di quatre during his time in Rome. If either or both of these speculations is true, it seems more likely that Dieupart was responsible for the transposition indications and the confusion of fourth flutes in C with those in B♭.70 For recorder players today, using C-fingerings as a basis for transposition is in no way as problematic as it would have been for our eighteenth-century counterparts. In fact, we find ourselves at a distinct advantage, because recorder players commonly begin by learning the recorder in c′′. With the transposition system clarified, we can now turn to the register of the recorder itself. While it is apparent that a B♭-recorder is required, the choice of b♭ or b♭′ may best be resolved through practical experience. In December 2017, I presented a concert which included performances of the 1re and 5e Suittes as accompanied harpsichord works. I played the recorder part alongside colleagues Graham McPhail (baroque violin), Polly Sussex (basse de viole), and Eddie Giffney (harpsichord). While the voice flute blended well with the ensemble in the 1re Suitte, a fourth flute in b♭′ proved difficult to mix with the ensemble in the 5e Suitte because of its pitch designation being an octave above the parts for the violin and harpsichord right hand. It is my view that a fourth flute in b♭ would have been preferable for the part, at least in the en concert setting, in order to fulfil its role as an accompaniment to the harpsichord rather than a solo part. However, when playing the Suittes as works for recorder, in which the recorder player assumes the role of the soloist, either size of B♭-recorder could be used. The treatment of the flûte du quatre in Dieupart’s Six Suittes represents a unique amalgamation of the many incarnations of fourth flutes in use across Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century. In light of this new historical context, it is clear that performances of these works allow recorder players to engage with a unique and important aspect of our instrument’s history on a practical level. With every performance we are, in a sense, performing history. 70 His knowledge of B♭-recorders was also probably based on second-hand information, as he had presumably never visited England at the time he was writing the Suittes.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Literature (Facsimiles, Reprints, and Transcriptions) Baines, Anthony. “James Talbot’s Manuscript. (Christ Church Library Music MS 1187). I. Wind Instruments.” The Galpin Society Journal 1 (1948): 9–26. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://www. jstor.org/stable/842118. Berlin, Johan Daniel. Musicaliske Elementer eller Anleedning til Forstand paa De første Ting udi Musiquen vor udi Den Musicaliske Signatur i den Bruug som den nu haves hos de fleeste, saa ogsaa Applicaturen paa nogle saa kaldte strygende og blæsende Instrumenter og andet mere Musiquen tilhørende […]. Trondheim: Jens Christ. Winding, 1744. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/f/f2/IMSLP181504-PMLP317200-berlin-mus_element.pdf. Eisel, Johann Philipp. Musicus αυτοδιδαχτοσ, oder Der sich selbst informirende Musicus, bestehend sowohl in Vocal-als üblicher Instrumentalmusique […]. Erfurt: Johann Michael Funcken, 1738. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/7/75/IMSLP537463-PMLP863447-eisel_musicus_autodidaktos_1738.pdf. Hawkins, John. A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. Vol. 5. London: T. Payne, 1776. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/a/a9/ IMSLP337343-PMLP544570-generalhistoryof05hawk.pdf. Janowka, Thomas Balthasar. Clavis ad thesaurum magnae artis musicae. Prague: Jiří Laboun, 1701. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://dig.vkol.cz/dig/10428/popis.htm. Matthysz, Paulus. “Vertooninge en onderwyzinge op de Hand-Fluit.” In Der Fluyten Lust-hof, edited by Jacob van Eyck. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Paulus Matthysz, 1649. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://ks.imslp.net/files/imglnks/usimg/2/21/IMSLP177614-PMLP201599-der_fluyten_lusthof_amsterdam_1649.pdf. Möhlmeier, Susi, and Frédérique Thouvenot, eds. Flûte à Bec: Europe 1500–1800. Vol. 4. Courlay: Fuzeau, 2001. Praetorius, Michael. De Organographia. Vol. 2, Syntagma Musicum. Wolfenbüttel: Elias ­Holwein, 1619. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/8/8e/­IMSLP68476PMLP138176-PraetoriusSyntagmaMusicumB2.pdf. Sauveur, Joseph. Principes d’acoustique et de musique, ou Système general des intervalles des sons et de son application à tous les systems et à tous les instruments de musique. Inseré dans les Memoires de 1701. de l’Academie Royale des Sciences. Par M. Sauveur […]. [Paris?]: n.p., 1701. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1510877z. Speer, Georg Daniel. Grund-richtiger kurtz-, leicht-, und nöthiger jetz wolvermehrter Unterricht der musikalischen Kunst. 2nd ed. Ulm: Georg Wilhelm Kühnen, 1697. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/9/92/IMSLP490279-PMLP591518-speer_grund-richtiger_unterricht.pdf. Walther, Johann Gottfried. Musicalisches Lexicon oder Musicalische Bibliothec […]. Leipzig: Wolffgang Deer, 1732. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://imslp.org/wiki/Musicalisches_Lexicon_ (Walther%2C_Johann_Gottfried).

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Catalogues, Inventories, and Other Primary Records Lasocki, David. A Listing of Inventories, Sales, and Advertisements relating to Flutes, Recorders, and Flageolets, 1631–1800. Bloomington, IN: Instant Harmony, 2010. Rasch, Rudolf. “The Music Publishing House of Estienne Roger.” Accessed July 9, 2018. https:// roger.sites.uu.nl. Selhof, Nicolas. Catalogue d’une trés belle Bibliothèque de Livres. The Hague: A. Moetjens, 1759. Facsimile reprint in Catalogue of the Music Library, Instruments and Other Property of Nicolas Selhof, Sold in The Hague: 1759. Compiled by Alec H. King. Amsterdam: Frits Knuf, 1973. Tilmouth, Michael. “Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers Published in London and the Provinces (1660–1719).” R.M.A. Research Chronicle 1 (1961): ii–vii, 1–107. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25093640. Young, Phillip T. 4900 Historical Woodwind Instruments: An Inventory of 200 Makers in International Collections. 2nd ed. London: Tony Bingham, 1993.

Secondary Literature Eppelsheim, Jürgen. Das Orchester in den Werken Jean-Baptiste Lullys. Tutzing: Schneider, 1961. Fuller, David and Peter Holman. “Dieupart, Charles.” Grove Music Online. Accessed May 24, 2017. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/07781. Gustafson, Bruce and David Fuller. A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699–1780. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Hall, Matthew. “Suites en concert: An Overlooked Performance Tradition.” Unpublished manuscript, Boston University, 2012. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://www.matthewjhall.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/hall-suitesenconcert.pdf. Haynes, Bruce. The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy 1640–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Lasocki, David. “The C Recorder in the 18th Century.” American Recorder 11, no. 1 (1970): 20–1. ——, ed. The Recorder in the 17th Century: Proceedings of the International Recorder Symposium Utrecht 1993. Utrecht: STIMU Foundation for Historical Performance Practice, 1995. ——. “Recorder.” Grove Music Online. In Oxford Music Online. Accessed May 24, 2017. http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/23022. ——. “Die Voice Flute und ihre Herkunft.” Tibia 42, no. 3 (2017): 483–500. Meierott, Lenz. Die geschichtliche Entwicklung der kleinen Flötentypen und ihre Verwendung in der Musik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Tutzing: Schneider, 1974. Sardelli, Federico Maria. Vivaldi’s Music for Flute and Recorder. Translated by Michael Talbot. Aldershot: Ashgate in association with Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, 2007. Steinmann, Conrad. “Quartenmechanik, die flûte du quatre oder das heillose Durcheinander der Zahlen.” In Conrad Steinmann, Drei Flöten für Peter Bichsel: Vom Zauber der Blockflöte, 162–9. Zurich: Rüffer & Rub, 2016.

Counting to Four Thalheimer, Peter. “Der flauto piccolo bei Johann Sebastian Bach.” Bach-Jahrbuch 52 (1966): 138–46. Wind, Thiemo. “Bigaglia’s Sonata in A Minor: A New Look at Its Originality.” Recorder and Music Magazine 8, no. 2 (June, 1984): 49–54. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://www.thiemowind.nl/ wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Bigaglia-Sonata-in-A-minor-A-new-look-at-its-originality.pdf. Woolley, Andrew Lawrence. “English Keyboard Sources and Their Contexts, c. 1660–1720.” PhD diss., The University of Leeds, 2008. Accessed July 9, 2019. https://app.box.com/ shared/2mbvi40vor.

Music Editions Bigaglia, Diogenio. Sonate A-Moll für Sopranblockflöte und Basso continuo. Revised ed. Edited by Hugo Ruf. Mainz: Schott, 1982. Dieupart, Charles. Six Suittes de Clavessin Divisées en Ouvertures, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gavottes, Menuets, Rondeaux & Gigues Composeés & Mises en Concert Par Monsieur Dieupart Pour un Violon & flûte avec une Basse de Viole & un Archilut Dédiées a Madame la Comtesse de Sandwich. Amsterdam: Estienne Roger, [1701]. Accessed July 9, 2019. https:// imslp.org/wiki/6_Suittes_(Dieupart%2C_Charles). ——. Six Suittes Divisées en Ouvertures, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gavottes, Menuets, Rondeaux & Gigues Propres à jouer sur la flûte ou le Violon avec une Basse Continue Composeés Par Monsieur Dieupart. Amsterdam: Estienne Roger, [1701]. Eniccelius, Tobias. Melismata epistolica, oder des theuren Poeten Martin Opitzens Sontags- und der fürnebsten Fest-Episteln, in die Music mit nur einer Vocal-Stimm, zweyen Quart-Flöten oder Violinen, einen Viol di Gamb u. einen General-Baß zum Clavicymbel Spinett oder Regal &c. […]. Kiel: Joachim Reumann, 1667. Telemann, Georg Philipp. Der getreue Music-Meister. Hamburg: printed by the author, 1728–9. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9009901m/f48.image. ——. Piu del fiume da diletto: Arie für Sopran, Sopranblockflöte oder Oboe und Cembalo sowie Streicher ad libitum, music score and parts with basso continuo realisation, edited by Klaus Hofmann. Neuhausen and Stuttgart: Hänssler, 1981. Thalheimer, Peter, and Klaus Hofmann, eds. Flauto e voce II: Geistliche und Weltliche Arien: Originalkompositionen für tiefe Stimme, Blockflötenensemble und Basso continuo. Stuttgart: Carus, 1998. ——. Flauto e voce XI: Originalkompositionen für Mezzosopran oder Alt, zwei bis drei Blockflöten und Basso continuo. Stuttgart: Carus, 2015.

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CHAPTER 3

The French Style of Viol Bowing and the enflé in the Works of Marin Marais POLLY SUSSEX

ABSTRACT In his first two books of Pièces for bass viol with continuo, published in 1689 and 1701, Marin Marais uses the standard doux (soft) and fort (loud) in the solo bass viol part to indicate dynamic levels. In Book III, however, of 1711, Marais uses a new sign, “e” (enflé), to show where to swell the tone. This essay examines the Plainte, number 55, from Book III, and the way Marais uses the enflé, comparing it with a Plainte by Caix d’Hervelois, pupil of Marais. This usage is compared with that of other Marais pupils. An Allemande from a first-edition copy of Marais’s Book II, in which detailed annotations have been made in ink, is also examined. Two contemporary treatises by le Sieur Danoville (1687) and Étienne Loulié (1690) provide evidence of the way Marais played. The string and bow tension of the bass viol are considered along with its quiet tone. These are compared with the sound ideal of the modern string ­player. Conclusions follow suggesting a new approach to High-Baroque French bowing technique.

Acknowledgements. My thanks go to Mary Elliott for generously helping me with information from her thesis and for sending me a digital copy of the full thesis later. David Howell reset both the Plainte by Marais and that of Caix d”Hervelois, at very short notice. The Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, NY, went to special trouble to make a high quality scan of the Marais Allemande, Book 2, from the volume in their collection. I am most grateful for their help.

The French Style of Viol Bowin

W

hen the Dolmetsch family started playing viols in the 1890s, they needed to recreate a lost tradition. Viol playing in England was no longer a mainstream musical activity. At that time, just playing the instruments was novelty enough; the players’ skill did not reach the virtuosic heights that have become normal today. Also, very little of the solo repertoire was known, the focus being on the English consort repertoire. Players in the latter part of the twentieth century have been able to devote more time to the instrument: not only to developing their technical capabilities, but now also to historical performance practices—studying how the instrument was played in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Facsimile editions have made the solo repertoire available to performers in the most authentic format. Younger players are already part of a modern tradition of recreated viol playing. But in this late twentieth-century “new tradition” lies the potential for moving away from the performance practice set out in the treatises of the late seventeenth century. It is easy for bass viol players to reinterpret what they have been taught, especially if they do not refer back to the source treatises. An aspect of this “new tradition” is that many modern bass viol players have started as cellists. For them it is natural to play with techniques borrowed from their primary instrument and related musical assumptions. As cello playing derives from the Italian violin tradition, there is potential to play all bass viol music with cello-style bow techniques. The Italian viol-playing tradition stretches back at least to 1500 but by the time of Marais, the Italians had abandoned the viol in favor of the violin family.1 In Northern Europe and in England, however, the viols, especially the bass, retained their place as solo instruments along with the newly fashionable violin family. The French, in particular, wrote extensively about the noble art of playing the viol; their treatises and hand-written documents are essential for an understanding of their techniques. Two treatises are notable for their information on French bowing technique. The first, L’Art de toucher le dessus et basse de [la] viol[l]e by le Sieur Danoville, was published in Paris in 1687.2 The second treatise is an unpublished manuscript of c.1690 by Étienne Loulié, entitled Méthode pour

1 The only substantial Italian treatise on viol playing is in two volumes: Sylvestro Ganassi, Regola Rubertina and Lettione Seconda (Venice: Marais, 1542–3). 2 Philippe Lescat and Jean Saint-Arroman eds., Méthodes et Traités, Viole de Gambe, France 1600–1800 (Courlay: Fuzeau, 2005), 8–19. French quotations in this article have been left in the original spelling, even where this is incorrect.

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a­ pprendre à jouer de la Viol[l]e.3 As Marais’s first book of pieces for the bass viol was published in 1686, these treatises are valuable contemporary accounts for their attention to the details of many aspects of good performance practice pertaining to his works. These and a posthumous account of how Marais played give us the clearest indications of how the French viol bow stroke was executed. An “e,” meaning enflé or exprimer, to swell the sound, is found over certain notes or parts of them in Book III and later books of pieces by Marais. It is an expressive device peculiar to the French bass viol. It indicates a crescendo, of unspecified magnitude, on one note. Unlike the messa di voce of Italianate music of the same period, which swells and diminishes the sound on long notes, neither Marais nor either of the two contemporary writers consulted here makes mention of a diminishing sound after the swell of the enflé. As we will see, it can be used on both short and long notes.

THE LIFE OF MARAIS Born in 1656, Marin Marais was not only a fine performer but also a respected teacher. In 1679, at the age of twenty-three, Marin became an Ordinaire de la Musique du Roy, a permanent position at the court of the French King Louis XIV, and he subsequently published his five books of bass viol pieces with royal publishing privilege. Marais taught at least three of his own sons to play the viol; one of them, Vincent, succeeded to his father’s position at court. Another son, Roland Marais, and at least three more of Marin’s pupils, Louis de Caix d’Hervelois, Jean Cappus, and Jacques Morel, went on to publish books of bass viol suites in the French tradition. We will come back to these later in examining the use of the enflé in works written by this next generation of bass viol players.

THE PIÈCES OF MARAIS Marais’s suites contain pieces ranging from easy to very difficult, in a variety of genres: preludes, dances, and many types of character pieces. They stand out as the largest French collection of bass viol suites, containing preludes, dances and pieces with fanciful titles (such as le Labyrinthe and le Jeu du 3 Ibid., 63–83. Both of these treatises are discussed in detail in John Hsu, A Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique (New York: Broude Brothers, 1981).

The French Style of Viol Bowin

Volant [the Tennis Match]), from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The introductory remarks to all five of his books make it clear that he was writing pieces for his pupils as well as for the general viol-playing public. He refers back to the reception of previous books and tries to clarify the ornamental and chordal writing where he feels he has not been well understood. This sequential didactic approach to published viol music was entirely new in France. To help the learner, Marais gives brief explanations of ornaments, and of some aspects of left-hand technique, such as the port de main or proper hand/wrist position.

FRENCH BOW TECHNIQUE ON THE VIOL Marais does not, however, give instruction for the right hand and arm, that is, the different bow strokes. Hubert le Blanc remarks in his famous essay of 1740 that Marais played with six different bow strokes.4 Of these six, the enflé is the only bow stroke that Marais actually describes. He must have thought that stylistically correct bowing technique cannot be described adequately on paper and needs to be demonstrated by the teacher, just as it does today. To understand the production of the enflé, we need to examine French bowing technique more generally. Twelve years after the death of Marais, defending the bass viol against the popularity of the now fashionable Violoncello, Le Blanc wrote: one can conceive more easily how much the way of playing in Italian sonata-style (producing a continuous sound, like the voice) … is more appropriate to the variety and nobility of the style than the manner of playing (French) Pièces, tick-tock, with lifted bow strokes, consistently off the string, reminding one strongly of the plucking of the lute and the guitar.5

Le Blanc also contrasts the two national bowing styles thus: [French viol bow strokes] are a single gesture (striking the string as the jack plucks the harpsichord string), and not multiple gestures like those of the Italians, where the bow, by use of smoothly-connected up-bows and 4 Hsu, French Baroque Viol Technique, 4. 5 “On concevra plus aisément combien la manière de jouer à Sonate (tirant un son continué, comme la voix … est plus propre à la varieté & noblesse du jeu, que celle de jouer les Pièces, tic-tac, par les coups d’archet enlevés, & tout en l’air, qui tiennent si fort du pincé du Luth & de la Guitarre.” Méthodes et Traités, 172 (my translation).

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Taken together, these statements give us a clear idea of Marais’ bow stroke. It is a style in which the up and the down stroke are not always joined smoothly. The design of the viol bow with straight stick, becoming a little concave when tensioned (unlike the convex stick of the violin-family bows), creates a slightly detached bow stroke. It appears that the French used this feature of the bow to create a greater or lesser degree of detachment between bow strokes. This has a profound effect on all aspects of articulation. Looking at the works of viol teachers who also wrote about the style, we find the treatises of Danoville and Etienne Loulié, of 1687 and 1690 respectively, especially informative, if somewhat abstruse. Danoville addresses himself in this published treatise to those who would like to learn to play, without necessarily having a teacher. Loulié’s handwritten treatise is simply a discussion of techniques, perhaps intended for later publication. Both writers describe the bow stroke as having three phases: the beginning, the middle, and the end. To begin the bow stroke, the middle finger applies pressure to the bow hair, followed by a release of pressure as the bow starts to move.7 If a bow stroke is intended to flow on to the next without this articulated beginning for the next stroke in the opposite direction, then it is described as a multiple bow stroke that has no beginning, only a middle and an end. The middle of the bow stroke can be sustained, nourri (nourished), or absent altogether in the case of a sec (dry) bow stroke. The end of the single bow stroke is a jetté, literally “thrown,” but whether this refers to the bow leaving the string or simply a throwing gesture by the wrist is not made clear. Le Blanc’s assertion that Marais played with bow consistently “off the string” does not specify which bow strokes took

6 “en ce qu’ils sont Simples (donnans leur coup sur la corde de la Viole, comme fait le Sautereau sur celle du Clavecin), & non pas Complexes, tels que ceux à l’Italienne, où l’Archet par le tiré & le poussé unis & liés, sans qu’on apperçoive leur succession, produit des roulades de Sons multipliés à l’infini, qui n’en paroissent qu’une continuité tels qu’en formoient les gosiers de Cossoni & de Faustina.” Ibid., 172 (my translation). This aspect of Marais’s bowing was drawn to my attention by Paolo Pandolfo in 2009. Cuzzoni and Faustina were famous Italian opera singers. 7 In bass viol playing, the tension of the hair is partly governed by the tension of the middle finger on the hair and only partly by the tension applied by tightening the screw before playing, or by inserting a (detachable) frog. In cello playing the bow grip from above means that the hair must be tensioned before playing starts.

The French Style of Viol Bowin

the bow into the air.8 Clearly, lifting the bow will not be possible in pieces with very fast détaché passages, as there is simply not enough time to lift the bow from the string and replace it again in time. In many of the Pièces of moderate and slower tempo, however, especially in the dances (Allemandes, Courantes, Menuets, Gavottes, and Sarabandes), it produces a sense of poise and elegance. This lifted bow stroke should not be confused with the violin and cello technique of bouncing the bow off the string using the tension of the hair and the string to create the momentum for either spiccato or sautillé.9 The French bass viol bow is long but light, and with the hand holding the bow near the point of balance, manipulation of the stick is easy. Lifting and immediately replacing the bow on the string is a comfortable manoeuvre. In modern string playing, a uniform bow speed with strong even tone, coupled with a continuous left-hand vibrato, creates the expression. In the French viol bow stroke, energy in the form of initial pressure on the string followed by quick release and movement is required to set the string vibrating. Without the initial “pluck” produced by the pre-tensioned bow hair, the beginning of the bow stroke can sound tentative. The pre-tensioning gives the sound a precise beginning, hence the resemblance to a plucked sound. This is followed by various ways of continuing the stroke, none of which require a constant bow speed or any left-hand vibrato. In fact, in expressive performance, the speed of the bow must be flexible and modulated with subtlety. Taking the bow off the string at the end of a bow stroke does not stop the sound quickly either, as the viol is so resonant. So the bow can be replaced for the new bow stroke whilst the preceding one is still ringing. Resonance is the one of the loveliest of the viol’s attributes. On an unfretted bowed instrument, such as a violin or cello, the left-hand fingers actually damp the resonance of the string; but on a fretted one, the finger, being placed behind the fret, allows the fret to create the pitch, each note sounding like an open string. Thus the sound of a viol rings on longer. The lighter construction of a viol, with its thin belly, also makes for a livelier response from the wood. These features were enhanced by the fastidious practice, not peculiar to the French, of holding down fingers in triadic passages until the fingers were required elsewhere; this was termed by the French the tenue de bien séance, or “hold for good execution.” 8 Méthodes et Traités, 172. 9 The differing tension of viol and cello bows is also tempered by individual preferences. The aim with tighter hair on a modern instrument is often to make the bow bounce more readily.

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This resonant quality of the viol begs the question: how is a staccato note played? The answer is that, in practice, the viol is too resonant to produce an effective staccato. A staccato dot in the modern understanding is absent in the works of Marin Marais; some chords are marked sec (dry) but this simply means that one should lift the bow after playing them.10 Dots placed above or below note heads, in the manner of staccato dots, mean “play the notes evenly without the usual inégale, or inequality.”11 These differences set French viol playing apart from performance on other stringed instruments and also from other traditions of viol playing—the earlier Italian tradition, the English and the German ones. We know though, that in music from places where French viol playing was regarded as the standard to aspire to, for instance in Potsdam at the Prussian Court, later in the eighteenth century, it is appropriate to use French techniques. Fortunately, modern viol players have studied the early treatises, and viol makers have studied how surviving instruments and strings were constructed. We now have a clearer picture of the thickness and tension of the gut strings used by the French. They were very particular about the dimensions and the quality of sound produced from their gut strings. Loud sounds were appropriate for dancing and outdoor music; softer sounds were required for house concerts. Le Sieur Danoville makes a telling comment about strings in his treatise: These two instruments [the treble and bass viols] should be strung with thin strings which can match the softness of their chords; and one will find nothing (in my opinion) which offends the ear more than a bass viol strung with thick strings, more suited to playing at Serenades and at the Ball than in concerts in private homes; one could say that doing so would degrade its quality because one can’t deny that it is the soul of the concert, as by its delicacy it blends with the sounds of the iron strings, unifying with its sustained sound the various tone qualities of other instruments, like harpsichords, theorbos, lutes, etc.12 10 In the Avertissement to his Second Book of Pièces, Marais gives a clear explanation of his varied use of dots, none of which amounts to a modern staccato articulation. 11 The French preferred running notes with conjunct movement to be played in a longer/shorter unequal rhythm with the degree of short and long a matter of taste and individual choice. In the works of Marais, dots show where NOT to make the notes unequal. Note, however, that by 1738 Roland Marais (son of Marin) described dots over notes as short detached bow strokes (des petits coups d’archet detaches); see 2.eme Livre de Pieces de Viole (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1738), 4. 12 “Ces deux instruments doivent estre montez de cordes deliées, qui puissent répondre à la douceur de leur harmonie; & on ne trouvera rien (selon mon sentiment) qui choque

The French Style of Viol Bowin

Here is a direct endorsement of a soft tone from the viol, so far from the modern aesthetic of bringing a strong, forceful tone from a violin or cello. Danoville makes the point that at an indoor concert, the gentle quality of the bass viol strung lightly can be savored and appreciated. Much of the viol music of Marais would have been heard at the palace of Versailles where the hard surfaces of marble floors and ceilings would have amplified the resonance of the bass viol, creating richness and volume. Today’s professional viol players try to emulate this effect by performing in churches or in small resonant spaces.

THE SIGN “E” IN MARAIS’ BOOK III In order to show how Marais uses the sign enflé in his Book III, I will examine one piece, the Plainte, or “Lament,” piece number 55 from Book III published in 1711. The Plainte is not a very common genre but, owing to its intrinsically expressive quality, it is a useful one for discovering examples of nuanced bowing in the form of the enflé. In his Dictionnaire de la langue française ancienne et moderne of 1728, the lexicographer Richelet defines the Plainte thus: Lamentation. The act of complaining, of lamenting, groaning, sighs, words which express a certain pain. (It) is also a piece of music of (a) gloomy nature. Marais has written a Plainte, of quite charming effect.13

A Lament of forty bars in common time marked Lentement, this piece relies on an unusual, sometimes highly disjunct but more often conjunct, melodic line of irregular phrase lengths, with only a few chords. The usual French ornaments grace the melodic line, particularly the tremblement (the trill) and pincé, the port de voix, and to start the piece the ornament called the plainte on the first note. This fluctuation in pitch on one note is our modern vibrato, which was used sparingly as an ornament in this repertoire and usually on the fourth finger. Elsewhere here davantage l’oreille que d’entendre un Basse de Violle montée de grosses cordes, plus propre à joüer des Serenades & au Bal, que dans des Concerts de ruelle; On peut dire qu’en usant de cette manière, c’est profaner son merite, parce qu’on ne peut pas disconvenir qu’elle ne soit l’ame des Concerts, puisque par sa douceur elle attendrit le son des cordes de fer, unissant par son son continu le son divisé des autres Instruments, comme Clavessins, Theorbes, Luths, &c.” Cited in Lescat and Saint-Arroman, Méthodes et Traités, 11. 13 Quoted in translation in the Introduction to Marin Marais, Pièces de Viole/Troisième Livre/ 1711, in Facsimile Jean-Marc Fuzeau/ La musique française classique de 1650 à 1800, (Courlay: Fuzeau, 1997).

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we find the flattement, a similar pitch fluctuation produced by a trill action but with the moving finger so close to the main note finger as to sound like a vibrato rather than a trill. This ornament appears on fingers other than the fourth. The ornament that appears most frequently, however, is the enflé, abbreviated to “e”: it appears thirty-six times, many more times than any other ornament, and many more times here than in other pieces where Marais uses it. Referring to the enflé for the first time in an explanation, at the beginning of Book III, Marais writes: The pleasing effect of the best pieces is infinitely diminished, if they are not performed in the style most suited to them, and not being able to give an idea of this style using ordinary notation I have been obliged to supply new marks which can guide players of my music to perform it as I intend—“e,” for example, means that you must express or swell the bow-stroke by putting more or less pressure on the string according to the demands of the piece. In this way one gives feeling to pieces which would be too uniform without it.14

The enflé is placed either above or after a note, depending on where the sound should be fullest. Often it is placed over the dot that belongs to a note, as in bar 26. Note that there is no general dynamic marking like fort (loud) or doux (soft). In fact, Marais uses them very little; the viol has a softish sound and the swells are enough to give expression to the Lament. Ex. 1 shows a modern edition in score, unlike the original edition, which appeared in two part books. This illustrates how the enflé and the harmony are linked to the expressive intention of the piece. Marais uses the enflé in at least three distinct ways: 1. For a heightened harmonic poignancy, either where there are suspensions, for example mm. 25–6, or in passages of rising tension, such as the sequence of rising ninth chords in mm. 14–17. 2. For melodic emphasis sometimes in a passage of wide leaps, for example, mm. 10–12. Here the swelled note is often on a weak beat. 3. For pathetic affect, as in mm. 20–1. 14 “Les plus belles pieces perdant infiniment de leur agrément, Si elles ne sont exécutteés dans le goût qui leur est propre, et ne pouvant donner une idée de ce goût en me servant des notes ordinaires j’ay êté obligé de supléer de nouvelles marques capables de faire entrer dans mes veûës ceux qui joûëront mes piéces—e—p. example. Signiffie qu’il fault exprimer ou enfler le coup d’archet en appuyant plus ou moins Sur la corde Selon que la piece le demande et cela quelque fois sur le commencement du tems ou sur la valleur du point comme la marque la désigne. de cette manière l’on donne de l’ame aux piéces qui sans cela seroient trop uniformes.” Marin Marais, Marin Marais Translated: An English translation of the playing instructions in Pièces de Viole, trans. Ian Gammie (St. Albans, Herts.: Corda Music Publications, 1989), 5.

The French Style of Viol Bowin

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The French Style of Viol Bowin

The swell of sound in the enflé bow stroke needs careful interpretation. Loulié says that the enflé or exprimé, as it is also called, must begin as softly as possible without the initial bow pluck. He explains that “one need not pluck the string but rather start with as little sound as possible and increase the power of the sound gradually as long as one continues to push or pull the bow.”15 He mentions no decrease in the volume of sound. In fact, the Plainte is not a common genre but Marais did write more than one in this book. Piece No. 81 in Book III is another example, also sprinkled liberally with the enflé sign.

THE ENFLÉ IN THE WORKS OF PUPILS OF MARIN MARAIS We can see more clearly the qualities of the Plainte we have just examined if we compare it with one written by a Marais pupil, Louis de Caix d’Hervelois. Louis was probably born in 1680 and lived until 1759. Like his teacher Marais, he published five books of Pièces de Viole. This piece comes towards the end of his first book of Pièces, thought to have been published in 1715, only four years after the appearance of Marais’s third book.16 Here we have a much simpler lament, more like an air to be sung. There are enough chords in the solo line to make the harmony clear without a bass line, but Caix d’Hervelois, like Marais, published a figured bass in a separate part book. It is a very pleasing piece but without sophisticated harmonies. The phrasing is a regular 4- or 8-bar structure and there is no use of the enflé. In fact de Caix d’Hervelois does not use the enflé anywhere in his five books of pieces. It would be interesting to know why he did not use the sign, especially as his music is pleasing and expressive and always tuneful. Perhaps the earlier “affected” style did not suit his aesthetic. Similarly Jacques Morel, another pupil of Marais, appears not to have used the enflé in the one book of his pieces available.17 15 “[I]l ne faut point gratter la Corde il faut commencer par la faire sonner le moins qu’il est possible et augmenter la force du son a mesure qu’on continue a pousser ou a tirer l’Archet.” Méthodes et Traités, 76. Also quoted in Hsu, A Handbook, 4, n. 9. 16 There is another Plainte in Book 2; see Louis de Caix d’Hervelois, Second Livre de Pièces de Viole/avec la basse continue (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1719), 91; facsimile in La Musique Classique de 1650 à 1800, ed. Jean Saint-Arroman (Courlay: Fuzeau, 2006), no. 175. 17 See Jacques Morel, Ir. Livre de Pieces de Violle (Paris: Barlion, 1709), accessed July 10, 2019, http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/f/f4/IMSLP411681-PMLP666919-morel_suites_violes.pdf. Morel’s other Suites may survive in a library but are not published in modern editions.

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Example 2.  Plainte, by Louis de Caix d’Hervelois from Premier Livre de Pièces de Viole/avec la Basse-Continuë (Paris: l’Auteur, Foucault, c.1715), in La musique française classique de 1650 à 1800, no. 168, ed. Jean Saint-Arroman (Courlay: Fuzeau, 2005).

In the works of Jean-Baptiste Cappus, also a pupil of Marin, our search for the next generation of enflé signs is rewarded. Little is known of Cappus, a native of Dijon, and few of his works survive. The date of his birth is unknown but he died in 1751. Cappus published his first book of Pièces for the bass viol in 1730, nineteen years after the publication of Marais’ Book III. In his four Suites, Cappus uses the enflé very little and only for melodic as opposed to harmonic emphasis. Fig. 1 shows a Sarabande.18 Bars 1 and 11, at the double bar, are unaccompanied so there is no chord underneath. Elsewhere, the “e” is placed over a simple 5/3 chord. The “e,” therefore, serves as pathetic affect only, without reference to harmony or sequence as we find it used in Marais. 18 Jean-Baptiste Cappus, Premier Livre de Pièces de Violle (Paris, 1730), accessed July 9, 2019, http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/9/98/IMSLP438277-PMLP713001cappus1.pdf.

The French Style of Viol Bowin

Figure 1.  La Niquette. Sarabande, by Jean-Baptiste Cappus, from Suite No. 1 in G (Paris, 1730).

Fig. 2 comes from a work by Marais’s own son, Roland Marais, whose dates are exactly those of J. S. Bach, 1685–1750. His second book of Pièces for the bass viol was published in 1738. This is a charming little Rondeau with a typically obscure title, le Balalud; often such titles are names of people whose identities are lost in history. In this faster, more Italianate piece, the enflé is used simply to emphasize melodic syncopation and has lost its function as an enhancement of the melody for pathetic affect or as an underscoring of poignant harmonies. Roland Marais uses the sign for the same melodic function in his other pieces. Here and in the other second-generation composers, the enflé appears at the beginning of a note, not halfway through it; it has become more like an accent sign, perhaps reflecting changing fashion with a simple rococo melodic line and accentuation off the beat. Inevitably, it leans towards the Italian style, which was overtaking the French style in popularity by 1738. Comparing Marais’s usage of the enflé with that of his pupils, we see in them a growing emphasis on melodic whimsy unattached to luxuriant

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Figure 2.  Le Balalud, by Roland Marais. II.eme Livre de Pieces de Viole, 1738; repr. Paris: Zurfluh, 1981), 36

The French Style of Viol Bowin

harmonies or sequential drive. The enflé is used to underline melodic syncopation and style galant elegance but at the cost of a deeper meaning. Roland Marais belonged to a new generation of viol players and his style was more modern. Marin Marais invented the sign and remains the only composer to explore the full potential of swelling the sound on specific notes in the bass viol suites of the French High-Baroque.

AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY In 1979, an edition of Marais Book II, which had been in the Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, New York State, since just after the Second World War, became the subject of a Masters thesis. Players of the viol in the 1970s were charting new territory, with Jordi Savall in particular leading the new wave of interest in the High-Baroque French bass viol repertoire. Students at the time relied on often faint and blurry microfilms of original editions held in libraries in Europe and the USA. Mary Elliott, a Music student at the University of Rochester, was one of these students of the bass viol. She played Marais from a printed microfilm of the Sibley Music Library copy. The print was heavily annotated with almost indecipherable marks, which, after many months of investigation, Mary managed to interpret as abbreviated French performance directions. The annotations occur in only some pieces, first in pencil and then in ink over the top.19 Note that this is Book II, not Book III, and here we find the “e” sign of Book III written in, by hand, where appropriate. Could this be Marais himself, trying out a range of signs in teaching a pupil? The repertoire of signs is much greater than those found in the published Book III. Figure 1 shows an instance of one of the annotated pieces in this edition. This important discovery seems to have gone largely unnoticed until Sarah Cunningham, an English bass viol player, revisited the volume.20 There are at least thirty different handwritten marks or words, in addition to those actually printed. These marks give an excellent lesson in French 19 Mary Elliott described these markings as an “extraordinary and unprecedented document of specific performance practice and musical sensibility” (communication by email on May 25, 2019). This important source is described in Deborah A. Teplow, Performance Practice and Technique in Marin Marais’ Pièces de Viole (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 139, n. 2. 20 Sarah Cunningham, “Lessons from an Eighteenth-Century Master of the Viol: Some Markings in a Copy of Marais’ Book II,” in A Viola da Gamba Miscellany/Proceedings of the International Utrecht Viola da Gamba Symposium, Utrecht 1991, ed. Johannes Boer and Guido van Oorschot (Utrecht: STIMU Foundation for Historical Performance Practice, 1994), 85.

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Figure 3.  Allemande (No. 128) from Marin Marais, Pièces de violes. Composées par M. Marais, ordinaire de la musique de la Chambre du Roy Deuxième livre (Paris: Bausson, 1701). (Courtesy of Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester)

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The French Style of Viol Bowin

interpretation at a detailed level; some of those here in the Allemande are the enflé, tapé (hit), jetté (thrown), elevé (lifted), détaché (separate), ap = appuyé (leant on), filé (spun, usually used in smooth passages), également (played with notes of equal length) and the as = aspiration or “sigh” (the shortened second note of a pair of quavers). These marks represent a level of sophistication of interpretative detail previously unknown, at least in the late twentieth-century revival of French viol literature. For Marin to have made a point of using the sign “e” in Book III and to have written his prefatory remarks, he must have felt that the page needed to convey more information about the style or the affect required. These markings on the page tell us that the desirable style was highly cultivated and exquisitely expressive. It is worth remembering here that Marais had a viol-playing colleague at court. Antoine Forqueray, born probably in 1671, was about fifteen years younger than Marais. His works are as difficult as the most demanding of Marais’s. Only one book of his Pièces arranged into Suites was published posthumously by his son, Jean-Baptiste in 1747. Nowhere in these works do we find marks of expression, but ornaments are notated meticulously. Certainly, playing this Allemande and paying attention to each marking opens a window into a new sound world that is not as dominated by the melodic line as the contemporary Italian Sonata style; it soon starts to take on a logic of its own. The short bursts of expression must have been a feature that the French cherished in this indulgent and definitely “high-society” style. This quest for beauty in every detail is a facet of Marais’s music too infrequently acknowledged. There is a case to be made for playing much of this repertoire at a slower tempo than is fashionable in twenty-first-century performances, so that the beauty of the detail can be admired. With excellent sound recordings readily available, interpretation often becomes a matter of emulating the player who is most famous.21 Rather, we should reevaluate the source and consider the slow, dignified pace of life at Versailles, compared with our modern lives with their fast pace and crammed activities. Modern performers of this repertoire need to investigate further the French bow stroke as reported by contemporary writers on French viol technique. We need to question whether the accepted modern way of performing this music has developed from our received bowing techniques, derived from 21 Jordi Savall has put out a selection of pieces from the five Marais books in a boxed set from Allavox Heritage, Paolo Pandolfo recorded several Marais compilations with Glossa, John Dornenburg recorded pieces from Book III for Centaur. There are more from other fine players.

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violin-family practice of the twentieth century. We need a better understanding of the gentle quality of the viol that was so much admired as an aesthetic. Some modern performers string their viols with thick strings, thus making them louder and changing the sound quality.22 Performing today in large halls and attempting to match the volume of a cello on an instrument with a limited decibel output is to change the essential character of the instrument and the sumptuous music written for it. If we can accept its fine qualities and change our own attitudes as to what is normal in the concert hall, we have a chance to recapture, as performers, the magic of an ancient instrument. Many performers do choose smaller venues to make this possible. The French bass viol enjoys a large repertoire and deserves our sincere efforts not to make it sound loud, impressive, showy or Italianate. We need to read, study, play, reread, and keep questioning in a spirit of continual enquiry without assuming omniscience. If we understand something of the artifice, the singularity, and the costly elegance of the lives of those in Paris and at Versailles for whom Marais was writing his music, then we have a better chance of interpreting his music with a more appropriate vision. Conversely, the music may teach us something about the aesthetic of those who played these beautiful pieces when they were first published.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Cunningham, Sarah. “Lessons from an Eighteenth-Century Master of the Viol: Some Markings in a Copy of Marais’ Book II.” In A Viola da Gamba Miscellany: Proceedings of the Utrecht Viola da Gamba Symposium, Utrecht 1991, edited by Johannes Boer and Guido van Oorschot, 85–101. Utrecht: STIMU Foundation for Historical Performance Practice, 1994. Hsu, John. A Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique. New York: Broude Brothers, 1981. Lescat, Philippe and Saint-Arroman, Jean, eds. Méthodes et Traités, Viole de Gambe, France 1600– 1800. Courlay: Fuzeau, 2005. Marais, Marin. Marin Marais Translated: An English translation of the playing instructions in Pièces de Viole. Trans. Ian Gammie. St. Albans, Herts.: Corda Music Publications, 1989. Teplow, Deborah A. Performance Practice and Technique in Marin Marais’ Pièces de Viole. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986.

22 Reported to me by my luthier. He made a viol identical to another maker’s one; his was strung authentically and the other was strung heavily. The sound was astonishingly different.

The French Style of Viol Bowin

Scores Caix d’Hervelois, Louis de. Premier Livre de Pièces de Viole/avec la Basse-Continuë. Paris: l’Auteur, Foucault, c.1715. Facsimile in La musique française classique de 1650 à 1800. No. 168. Edited by Jean Saint-Arroman. Courlay: Fuzeau, 2005. ——. Second Livre de Pièces de Viole/avec la basse continue. Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1719). Facsimile in La Musique Classique de 1650 à 1800. No. 175. Edited by Jean Saint-Arroman. Courlay: Fuzeau, 2006. Cappus, Jean-Baptiste. Premier Livre de Pièces de Violle, Paris 1730. Bremen: Edition Baroque, 2012. Ganassi, Sylvestro. Regola Rubertina and Lettione Seconda, Venice: Marais, 1542–3. Marais, Marin. Pièces de Viole/Troisième Livre/1711. In La musique française classique de 1650 à 1800. No. 100. Courlay: Fuzeau, 1997. ——. Pieces de violes. Composées par M. Marais, ordinaire de la musique de la Chambre du Roy [Second livre]. Paris: Bausson, 1701. Accessed July 10, 2019. https://urresearch.rochester.edu/ institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=11950&versionNumber=1. Marais, Roland. II.eme Livre de Pieces de Viole Avec la Basse chifrée en partition. Paris: Zurfluh, 1981. Morel, Jacques. Ir. Livre de Pieces de Violle. Paris: Barlion, 1709. Accessed July 10, 2019. http:// conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/f/f4/IMSLP411681-PMLP666919-morel_ suites_violes.pdf.

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CHAPTER 4

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality in Performing Monteverdi’s Il pianto della Madonna DANIELA KALEVA

ABSTRACT Il pianto della Madonna by Claudio Monteverdi is a non-liturgical sacred piece in recitative style. Published in the sacred compilation Selva morale e spirituale (Venice: Magni, 1640–1641), it articulates Marian piety at its most intense: Mary’s grief. A mournful lamentation and visual imagery in the text depict her desperation and resignation after the Crucifixion of her son. The print was dedicated to the devout Eleonora Gonzaga of the Mantuan and later Habsburg courts. This study explores emotions in a historically informed performance of the lament in a concert of Marian Italian music from the first half of the seventeenth century featuring Jacob Lawrence (tenor), Hannah Lane (triple harp), Nicholas Pollock (theorbo) and Calvin Bowman (organ) and the author (performing Mary) at the Trinity College Chapel, University of Melbourne, on August 13, 2016. The research considers emotions as actions performed by bodies and produced in a specific cultural and historical context and deploys mixed methods of performance research: rhetorical analysis of text content and structure, and visualization techniques to spur the performers’ imagination of the charged religious imagery in Monteverdi’s masterful musical setting. A bodycentered enquiry became an idiosyncratic lens for experiencing enacted embodiment of devotion.

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

T

he challenge of modern performances of sacred music is that they are removed from the original places, cultures, and purposes for which the music was produced. Emotions in historically informed practice afford a novel experience of and perspective on sacred repertoire. Contextual history offers a useful point of access into historical emotions, for researching and creating performances of historical works today. This study explores the process of a historically informed performance of Marian Italian music from the first half of the seventeenth century, with special reference to the sacred lament Il pianto della Madonna by Claudio Monteverdi, first published in Selva morale e spirituale (Venice: Magni, 1640–1). The performance took place at Trinity College Chapel, the University of Melbourne, on August 13, 2016. It showcased rising stars of Australian early music: Jacob Lawrence (tenor), Hannah Lane (triple harp) and Nicholas Pollock (theorbo) with organist and composer Dr Calvin Bowman (organ) and myself as Mary. Titled Il Pianto della Madonna: Religious Passions of the Italian Baroque, the program was curated by Hannah Lane and featured music by Claudio Monteverdi, Tarquinio Merula, Giovanni Cima, Francesca Caccini, and Girolamo Frescobaldi.1 When I set out to facilitate this historically informed interpretation, my objective was to explore the rhetorical import of the text, including its emotional content and the production of emotions in performance by leading the ensemble through a text-based analysis informed by rhetorical theory. I did not expect that the concert would evolve into a hybrid performance during which I would enact the Blessed Virgin Mary’s emotions, nor could I foresee that I would come to feel strong devotion during the performance process. (The Latin text and English translation of Il pianto della Madonna are provided at the end, in Table 1.) In the program notes, I discuss Mary as the most frequently portrayed female saint in Western art; depictions of her embody ideals of womanhood, purity, and an exemplary life of love, faith, hope, and charity as well as her crucial position as mother of Christ, protectress, intercessor, and mother of the Roman Catholic Church. The program notes for the performance describe the emotional impact of the music thus:

1 The author would like to thank the artists, and the editor and reviewer of this chapter and acknowledges the in-kind and financial support of the University of South Australia and the Associated Investigators Scheme of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800).

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Daniela Kaleva [The] affecting properties of the pieces: engulf the listener with an effulgent opulence and eloquence which deploys the senses to stir the heart and excite religious fervour. Poetry, music and performance become tools that elevate the Virgin Mary above human existence as in Nigra sum by C. Monteverdi. At the same time, these performance texts give her a commanding physical presence and emotional depth. There is an interior intimacy in the way the subject who adores her expresses these emotions in O dulcedo meliflua by G. Cima and Maria dolce Maria by F. Caccini. Often the poetic language is sensuous and not dissimilar to that of love poems, for instance, O quam pulchra es by C. Monteverdi.2

It was hoped that an accurate historical approach to the sonic elements of historical performance practice—tempo, rhythm, figured bass realisation, articulation, and ornamentation—would express the emotional content of the music. However, one could not guarantee that in the context of a desacralized modern society, the image of the grieving Mary would appear in the imagination of performer or spectator when the performance was not part of a religious ritual. The performance process, therefore, centred on the rhetorical structure of the text, including the emotions involved, and explored their religious and historical context to understand them better. Since I specialize in body-­ centered research and historical gestural movement, I felt constraints as a historian, and those of contemporary sacred concert conventions.3 I suspended temporarily the passive role of the historian-observer, and reenacted episodes in Mary’s life during the performance to situate visually the joyful mysteries of the Rosary that Il pianto della Madonna references. During no. 4 Canzonetta spirituale sopra alla nanna by Merula, I enacted the first and fourth joyful mysteries—the Annunciation of the Angel to Mary and the presentation of 2 See Daniela Kaleva, “Il PIanto Della Madonna: religious Passions of the Italian Baroque— Program Notes,” Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, accessed July 11, 2019, http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/media/258546/ il-pianto-della-madonna-program.pdf. 3 On transfers from scripted to embodied meaning in the interpretation of recitative see Daniela Kaleva, “Translating Text into Motion: Performance Analysis for Singers and Directors,” in Music Research: New Directions for a New Century, ed. Michael Ewans, Rosalind Halton, and John A. Phillips (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004), 64–74; and Kaleva, “Performative Research: A Performance-led Study of ‘Lamento d’Arianna’ with Historically Informed Rhetorical Gesture,” in Musicology Australia 36, no 2, Music Performance and Performativity, ed. Jane Davidson (2014): 209–34.

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

Figure 1.  Daniela Kaleva as Madonna with Child during Merulo’s Canzonnetta spirituale sopra alla nanna, Hanna Lane, Nicholas Pollock and Jacob Lawrence (Calvin Bowman is behind the little organ) (Photo: Radost Ratcheva)

Figure 2.  Daniela Kaleva as Mary under the Cross during the performance of Monteverdi’s Il Pianto della Madonna, Hanna Lane, Nicholas Pollock and Jacob Lawrence (Calvin Bowman is behind the organ) (Photo: Radost Ratcheva)

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Jesus in the Temple—the Prophecy of Simeon (see Figure 1).4 In no. 9 Il pianto della Madonna by Monteverdi, I represented her sorrow according to the fifth sorrowful mystery, the Crucifixion (see Figure 2). This performance process offered a new method of understanding the production of emotion in Marian sacred music.

HISTORICAL PERFORMANCE CONTEXTS Il pianto della Madonna à voce sola sopra il Lamento d’Arianna (The Madonna’s Lament for Solo Voice over Arianna’s Lament) has been given an honorable place in Selva morale e spirituale—the last collection of sacred music issued during Claudio Monteverdi’s life. The recitative style of the composition sets it apart from the rest of the extra-liturgical sacred pieces in the collection.5 Il pianto della Madonna is a sacred contrafactum of Lamento d’Arianna from the opera Arianna (1608, Mantua). The piece has been disseminated as a solo lament and a five-part madrigal, since the opera score has been lost. The five-part arrangement was first printed in Monteverdi’s Il sesto libro de’ madrigali (Venice: Amadino, 1614). Prints of the solo lament include Lamento d’Arianna (Venice: Magni, 1623) and in Il maggio fiorito, edited by G. B. Rocchigiani (Orvieto: Fei et Riuli, 1623).6 Il pianto della Madonna comprises the first four sections of the secular lament, with a new text in Latin that voices Mary’s lamentations at the foot of the Cross. The grieving Mary or Mater Dolorosa is often portrayed weeping, with hands clasped in prayer or folded in front of her body. These are intended as gestural expressions of the passion of Grief (see Figure 3).7 Early modern 4 Simeon’s prophecy (Luke 2:34–5): “34 Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, 35 so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” The One Year Bible NIV (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2012), 407. 5 Andrew Weaver, “Divine Wisdom and Dolorous Mysteries: Habsburg Marian Devotion in Two Motets from Monteverdi’s Selva morale et spirituale,” Journal of Musicology 24, no. 2 (2007): 237–71. The facsimile set of part books is available online, accessed January 13, 2016, http://imslp.org/wiki/Selva_morale_e_spirituale%2C_SV_252-288_(Monteverdi%2C_Claudio). 6 See Tim Carter and Geoffrey Chew, “Monteverdi, Claudio,” Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy, accessed March 23, 2018, http:////www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/ view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000044352. 7 See the facial expression of this passion in Charles Le Brun, “La Tristesse,” Méthode Pour

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

Figure 3.  Charles Le Brun, ‘La Tristesse (Fig. 21)’ in Méthode Pour Apprendre À Dessiner Les Passions, 22, accessed September 10, 2018, https://archive.org/ details/methodepourappre00lebr/page/n7

philosophers such as René Descartes, perceived the agency of an external source to cause passions or affects. In his Passions of the Soul Descartes writes: “That which is passion in regard of the subject, is always action in some other Apprendre À Dessiner Les Passions (Amsterdam: François van der Plaats, 1702), 22 (Fig. 21), accessed September 10, 2018, https://archive.org/details/methodepourappre00lebr/ page/n7; and expression represented by the hands in Ploro, in John Bulwer, Chirologia: Or, The Natural Language of the Hand, and Chironomia: Or, The Art of Manual Rhetoric (London: Harper, 1644), 151 (Fig. C), accessed August 10, 2018, https://archive.org/details/gu_chirologianat00gent.

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respect” or “action and passion are one and the same thing.”8 Visual images of such “actions” imprinted on face and body are compelling sources for today’s performers. Both the secular and sacred lament were associated with emotional practices that publicly expressed female grief in the context of courtly secular performance or religious practice. Lamento d’Arianna was the climax of Monteverdi’s second opera Arianna. Revered for its poignant setting of the text, the lament conveys the emotions of the betrayed Cretan Princess Arianna on the island of Naxos.9 The opera Arianna draws on the Greek myth of Ariadne on Naxos.10 Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos of Crete and is known as the wife of the wine-god Dionysus or Bacchus. Her name means “most holy” (ari, adnos) and her Roman name (Libera) means “free.” She helps the Athenian hero Theseus to kill her half-brother the Minotaur by giving him a thread to follow to find his way out of the monster’s Labyrinth. They flee Crete and Theseus abandons her on the desolate island of Naxos, breaking his promise to take her to Athens and marry her. In Ottavio Rinuccini’s libretto for Arianna, the lament is a catalyst in the transformation of the abandoned princess, who ascends into the realm of the gods.11 In the last two lines of the opera, Bacco proclaims her triumph over worldly concerns: Gloriosa mercé, d’alma, che sprezza/per celeste desio mortal bellezza (“A glorious reward for the soul who rejects mortal beauty for 8 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (Paris: Henry Le Gras, 1649), accessed August 10, 2018, http://net.cgu.edu/philosophy/descartes/Passions_Part_One.html. 9 Some publications include: Tim Carter, “Intriguing Laments: ‘Sigismondo d’India,’ Claudio Monteverdi, and ‘Dido alla parmigiana’ (1628),” Journal of the American Musicological Society 41, no. 1(1996): 32–69; Carter, “Lamenting Ariadne?,” Early Music 27, no. 3 (1999): 395–405; Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Paolo Fabbri, Il secolo cantante: per una storia del libretto d’opera nel Seicento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990); Paolo Fabri, Monteverdi, trans. Tim Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Margaret Murata, “The Recitative Soliloquy,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 32, no. 1 (1979): 45–73; Nino Pirotta and Elena Povoledo, Li due Orfei: da Poliziano a Monteverdi, (Torino: ERI, 1969); Mark Ringer, Opera’s First Master: The Musical Dramas of Claudio Monteverdi (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press 2006); Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” Musical Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1979): 346–59; Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); idem, “Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi’s ‘via naturale alla immitatione,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 34, no. 1 (1981): 60–108; and Richard Wistreich, ed., Monteverdi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 10 For textual sources see Bojan Bujic, “Rinuccini the Craftsman: A View of his L’Arianna,” Early Music History 18 (1999): 75–117. 11 Discussed in Nicholas Routley, Arianna Thrice Betrayed (Armidale: University of New England, 1998), 13; and Bojan Bujic, “Rinuccini the Craftsman,” 112–3.

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

the love of God”). Koldau and Ficarella argue that the contrafactum Il pianto della Madonna offers a refined mode of spiritualization of the secular Lamento d’Arianna in the way protagonist, narrative, and passions are changed but also fit with the music.12 The opera Arianna was created for the festivities celebrating the union of Francesco IV Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Margaret of Savoy in Mantua in 1608. In the historical context of its premiere and early reception, A ­ rianna’s lament could be interpreted as a moral lesson for young noble ladies who had to submit to arranged marriages,13 as a “marriage to death rite,” and as a “­coming-of-age ritual.”14 Bonnie Gordon argues that the lament was a way of demonstrating the perils of rebelling against the institution of arranged marriage and yielding to seduction.15 Performance style was an essential factor in the early reception of the lament. Moans, cries, wrought facial expressions, and bodily movements depicted an agony that is beyond verbal expression. This theatrical production of emotions was masterfully executed by commedia dell’arte actress Virginia Ramponi Andreini16 who premiered Lamento d’Arianna. Her performance of Arianna’s lament has been singled out as important for both the conception of the lament in the opera Arianna and for early opera reception.17 Virginia Andreini also performed the sacra rappresentatione La Maddalena (Mantua, 1617) with music by various composers including Monteverdi.18 La 12 Linda Maria Koldau and Anna Ficarella, “‘Non sit quid volo sed fiat quod tibi pacet’: I contrafacta sacri del ‘Lamento d’Arianna’ di Claudio Monteverdi,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 36, no. 2 (2001): 281–314. 13 Suzanne G. Cusick, “‘There was not one Lady who Failed to Shed a Tear’: Arianna’s Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood,” Early Music 22, no. 1 (1994): 21–41. 14 Anne MacNeil, “Weeping at the Water’s Edge,” Early Music 27, no. 8 (1999): 415. 15 Bonnie Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59. 16 Virginia Andreini, known as La Florinda, was the romantic lead in the Fedeli troupe. For witness accounts see, among others, Federico Follino, Compendio delle sontuose feste fatte l’anno MDCVIII nella città di Mantova, per le reali nozze del serenissimo prencipe D. Francesco Gonzaga con la serenissima infante Margherita di Savoia (Mantua: Aurelio e Ludovico Osanna, 1608), 29–65. For the inception history and structure of the opera Arianna, see Carter, “Lamenting Ariadne?” 17 Emily Wilbourne, Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of Commedia dell’Arte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 51–129. 18 Giovanni Battista Andreini, La Maddalena sacra rappresentatione di Gio Batta Andreini fiorentino all’ill.mo et eccel.mo don Alessandro Pico principe della Mirandola et.c (Mantua: Aurelio, e Lodouico Ossanna, 1617), accessed August 15, 2018, https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_ M1f_6QFFuYsC.

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Maddalena was revived in Vienna with a contrafactum of Lamento d’Arianna titled Lamento della Maddalena.19 Selva morale e spirituale was a collection of sacred musical works dedicated to the devout Catholic Eleonora Gonzaga (1598–1655), Holy Roman Empress, German Queen and Queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia. Weaver suggests that the Marian lament at the end of the volume together with the motet Ab aeterno were intended to honor Eleonora Gonzaga.20 She was the youngest daughter of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, who employed Monteverdi and supported his early opera composition. Eleonora Gonzaga married into the Habsburg dynasty in Vienna in 1622 and, at the time of the collection’s publication, was the widow of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, who reigned from 1619 until 1637.21 In relation to the Christian narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Il pianto della Madonna presents Christ’s Passion from the viewpoint of his mother and expresses her grief and resolve to endure. There are two possible historical performance contexts, both related to Marian devotional practices: 1) the annual Celebration of the Fifteen Mysteries in honour of the fifteen miraculous events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary as commemorated in the Rosary; and 2) performances for Marian confraternities in either Venice or Vienna.22 Marian devotion was a central practice in the Habsburg court. Marian fervour was not only part of religious practice but also a political strategy during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and counter-reformation, which Ferdinand II deployed to unify the Holy Roman Empire under the auspices of the Catholic Church. The Blessed Virgin Mary and the controversial doctrine of the Immaculate Conception were central to the Pietas Austriaca (Habsburg Piety)—the 19 See Herbert Seifert, Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof im 17. Jahrhundert (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1985), 29–30 and 434; John Whenham and Richard Wistreich, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 324; Lorenzo Bianconi, Music of the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 210–11. Linda Maria Koldau indicates that a different sacred contrafactum of Lamento d’Arianna may have been performed at the Viennese court, see her Die venezianische Kirchenmusik von Claudio Monteverdi (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), 112–13. 20 Weaver, “Divine Wisdom and Dolorous Mysteries,” 237–71. 21 Matthias Schnettger, “Die Keiserinnen aus dem Haus Gonzaga: Eleonora die Ältere und Eleonora die Jüngere,” in Nur die Frau des Kaisers?: Kaiserinnen in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Bettina Braun, Katrin Keller, and Matthias Schnettger (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 117–40. 22 Weaver, “Divine Wisdom and Dolorous Mysteries,” 258–62.

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moral and religious code that underpinned Habsburg political culture and identity during the Baroque period.23 Eleonora Gonzaga’s life was embedded in religious devotion, which intensified when she became a widow. In 1637, she established the celebration of the Fifteen Mysteries associated with the praying of the Rosary during Lent. It took place on the last three Saturdays before Easter in the Augustinian Church calendar, and the Viennese court would have participated in the devotion of the Holy Rosary. The text of Il pianto della Madonna directly relates to the most sorrowful mystery of the Blessed Virgin—the Crucifixion—in this prayer sequence.24 The performance style of such works may have been influenced by the established tradition of dramatised sacred performances, which would have included “five sermons on each day (one for each mystery), painted scenic backdrops, and motets performed by the court chapels.25 Confraternities were organizations of lay people who practiced particular devotions, among them the veneration of the Holy Virgin. Marian confraternities were a center of emotional religious practices with a long tradition that dates to early modern times. At the time of Monteverdi’s residence in Venice, the confraternities were run by men and were very influential patrons of arts and music, including Monteverdi’s work.26 In Vienna, Marian confraternities were funded by the Emperor and employed court musicians.27 Italian confraternities dedicated to the devotion of the Rosary were female-centered and commemorated the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary, the Crucifixion in particular.28 Miri Rubin establishes that confraternities facilitated devotion through mimesis, or deliberate enactment by imitation of Christ’s or Mary’s suffering: “It was the very suffering of Mary that was praiseworthy, and worthy of remembering; this was the emotional challenge posed to confraternity members.”29 23 Andrew H. Weaver, Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III: Representing the Counter-Reformation Monarch at the End of the Thirty Years’ War (Furnham: Ashgate, 2013), 49; and Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004). 24 Weaver, “Divine Wisdom and Dolorous Mysteries,” 237–71. 25 Ibid., 262. 26 Jonathan Glixon, Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260–1807 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 252–3. 27 Geraldine H. Rohling, “Exequial and Votive Practices of the Viennese Bruderschaften: A Study of Music and Liturgical Piety” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1996). 28 Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 103. 29 Miri Rubin, Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), 99.

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They were “directed towards an empathetic experience of Mary’s pain through the recitation of vernacular chants that situated the devout in the position of the mother looking on at the death of her son.”30 In my personal reflection I observed: I am standing in front of the Madonna Addolorata at the Cattedrale di San Rufino in Assisi [see Figure 4]. Her size is imposing. Rays of gold contrast the blue hues of her dress. Her heart is pierced with seven golden daggers, but her face is looking upwards to God in a blissful gaze. Her hands are elevated to illustrate the high emotion. They are open. Devoid of the usual classical position with the third and fourth fingers together, they indicate her uncontrolled emotion of rapture.31 On the opposite end is a statue of the crucified Jesus rendered in the same style. I finally understand Mary’s resignation in the last line of the lament: Vivat maestum cor meum pleno dolore, pascere, fili mi, matris amore (“May my heart live in sadness, full of pain, to suffer, my son, with a mother’s love”). The statue overwhelms me. I return to the cathedral to see it again and uphold it in my memory after leaving Assisi.32

This was a moment of realization when I understood Mary’s grief and rapture and began to feel empathy for Mary. I used the image of the statue and its expression during rehearsals with the ensemble to explain and illustrate emotions. I also integrated the pierced heart into the costume I wore and used the statue’s gesture at the end of my performance of Il pianto della Madonna.

RESEARCH METHODS With a focus on emotions, this research is situated in historically informed performance and a performative paradigm allowing enquiry into creative practice through mixed methods.33 Reflection was incorporated into the performance process as follows: artists’ pre-rehearsal and post-performance questionnaires, 30 31 32 33

Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Penguin: 2009), 250–5. See the passion Rapture—Le Ravissement in Le Brun, Méthode, 6–7 (Fig. 7). Personal recollection from June 18, 2016. Bradley C. Haseman, “A Manifesto for Performative Research,” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 118, no. 1 (2006), 98–106; and Haseman, “Rupture and Recognition: Identifying the Performative Research Paradigm,” in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

Figure 4.  Madonna Addolorata, Cattedrale San Rufino, Assisi (photo: Daniela Kaleva)

individual feedback sheets after each rehearsal, a post-performance focus group with the artists, and a post-performance audience survey, and audio recordings and video footage of both rehearsals and the performance.34 I use an autoethnographic voice to present my experience.35 The preparatory score (musical 34 With ethics approval from the Ethics Committee at the University of South Australia. 35 See among others Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1 (2011), accessed March 12, 2018, http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095; Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis, “Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal,” in Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, ed.

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score with designations for figured bass, instrumentation, rhetorical structure, emotions and religious images pertaining to the text was used to provide interpretative visual cues for the singer. The audience survey asked fifteen questions about various aspects of the performance, the respondents’ prior knowledge, and demographics. Monique Scheer considers emotions from the perspective of practice theory, as “actions of a mindful body” that is “deeply socialised,” and points out that an important factor in the process by which emotions shift through time and between cultures is the way “the practices in which they are embodied, and bodies themselves, undergo transformation.”36 Emotions research, therefore, warrants experimentation with embodiment and bodies. Performance that “consists of ritualised gestures and sounds” facilitates a temporary transformation into a different reality and involves different actions from everyday behaviour.37 A body-centered approach can facilitate a transformation from a contemporary and neutral body to a historically stirred body.38 Barbara Bolt suggests that performative research aims “to recognize and ‘map’ the ruptures and movements that are created by creative productions.” Since these moments of crisis often produce novel solutions, she argues, “the problem for the creative arts researcher is recognizing and mapping transformations that have occurred.”39 There was in fact a major rupture in our performance process that resulted from tensions over performance values, between sacred concert performance and sacred theatrical performance. I felt that our contemporary audience would need visual imagery of Mary and her grief because there were no such visible images in the performance space, and the text was to be sung by a male voice. My decision to “embody” Mary created a rupture in the performance process, as it was demonstrated to the ensemble only during the

36 37 38 39

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis (Bowen Hills, QLD: Australian Academic Press, 2009), 1–20; David Butz and Kathryn Besio, “Autoethnography,” Geography Compass 3, no. 5 (2009): 1660–74; and Tami Spry, “Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis,” Qualitative Inquiry 7, no. 6 (2001): 706–32. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 219–20. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (Loddon: Routledge, 2017), 52. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and Roberta Mock, “Researching the Body in/as Performance,” in Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, ed. Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 220–3. Barbara Bolt, “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts?,” Working Papers in Art and Design 5 (2008), accessed Jan 16, 2018, http://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0015/12417/WPIAAD_vol5_bolt.pdf.

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last rehearsal, and the ensemble was not prepared for another performing body and its movements. The embodied Mary did not fit with the conventions of the sacred concert canon. The exploration of the performance of religious emotion resulted in a hybrid performance. Mary Hunter’s work on historical consciousness among HIP musicians is most useful for analyzing the rupture that occurred. In Chapter 1, Mary Hunter proposes a framework involving three mindsets or kinds of historical consciousness that performers may tap into when interpreting historical works to create a sense of connection between past and present. They include sonic and contextual history and transhistoricity.40 We were working with the sonic and the contextual mindsets.

THE REHEARSAL PROCESS The interpretation of the lament was developed over five months. We explored the charged religious imagery of the Latin text and the expressive word-painting underscored by Monteverdi’s musical setting by analysing the text structure and content of Il pianto della Madonna using rhetorical analysis, analysis of the “passions” involved, and visualization techniques. For the concert, the ensemble quickly prepared eight other Marian sacred pieces. While the artists had substantial experience in performing early music, none of them had studied rhetoric formally. According to their responses to the first questionnaire, they were interested in participating because they wanted to learn mostly about rhetoric applied to music performance, historical emotions, tactus,41 melody, harmonic structure, phrasing, and ensemble work, and less about musical devotional practices and gesture. Their expectations were, for example, to gain “further insight into Monteverdi,” “a deeper understanding of the performance of this music as well as a chance to try lots of different approaches to continuo realisation,” “a greater understanding of musical/historical rhetoric and historical rehearsal techniques,” and “a new perspective on performance of sacred Italian seventeenth-century music.” In the rehearsal process as director I facilitated a text-based exploration. We had four sets of two-day sessions. I worked with tenor Jacob Lawrence 40 Mary Hunter, Chapter 1. 41 In this context, the minim is approximately one beat per second or metronome mark 60. On tactus in the first half of the seventeenth century, see Lodovico Zacconi, Prattica di Musica Seconda Parte (Venice: Alessandro Vincenti, 1622).

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individually on the first day and with the ensemble on the second day allowing Jacob to lead the ensemble into the new interpretation of the piece as influenced by the ideas we had discussed. To frame the rehearsal process, I distributed two key articles and discussed them with the ensemble: Andrew Weaver’s analysis of the content of Selva morale e spirituale according to religious practices in the court of the Habsburgs; and Kjeldsen’s article on rhetorical visuality. Rhetorical visuality refers to the role of visual elements in the creation of a believable narration within a particular socio-cultural context. In rhetorical analysis, rhetorical visuality is understood as embedded in visible and para-visible symbol constructs in the text and their performance in space and time.42 Kjeldsen surveys the seminal rhetorical treatises Institutio oratoria by Quintilian, The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle and De oratore by Cicero, proposing that “we should consider ancient rhetoric as a visual discipline, as an art imbued with visuality.”43 In the Institutio oratoria (6.2.29), Quintilian asserts “the first essential is … that we should be moved ourselves before we attempt to move others.”44 Quintilian poses an important question and provides a solution: But how are we to generate these emotions in ourselves, since emotion is not in our own power? … There are certain experiences which the Greeks call phantasai and the Romans visiones, whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes. It is the man who is really sensitive to such impressions who will have the greatest power over the emotions.45

The artists were asked in Question 6 of the post-performance questionnaire, whether the background material provided about the performance context, religious practices and veneration of the Virgin Mary were beneficial in the development of their interpretation. They found this background “very useful” and “informative, but difficult to relate to the live performance.” One wrote that it helped to “understand the religious symbolism of the music.” 42 Jens E. Kjeldsen, “Talking to the Eye: Visuality in Ancient Rhetoric,” Word & Image 19, no. 3 (2003): 133–7. 43 Ibid., 133. 44 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian with English Translation, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler, vol. 126 of Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1921), 433. 45 Ibid., 433–4.

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

The historically informed approach to sound included work with tactus as a way of locating keyword emphasis correctly in the piece, to retain the rhetorical import of the speech and at the same time the cohesion of the ensemble. In the post-performance questionnaire, one artist reflected: “We used fairly strict tactus for the other works in the program” and “it really helped us to perform a program on very little rehearsal.” The artists also worked with Baroque pitch, and insisted on having an organ in the continuo section. The ensemble used a historical approach to developing the figured bass as we did not have a prepared performance score. In the questionnaire responses they listed figured bass treatises and early opera sources as primary sources they usually consult, among them those by Aggazzari46 and Zacconi.47

Rhetorical structure and argument The text of Il pianto della Madonna focuses on the theological dogma of Mary as Mother during the Passion of Christ, and in particular on her grief. For instance, a striking body metaphor me deseris, heu, vulnus cordis mei (“alas you leave a wound in my heart”) at the beginning of the second section evokes the image of the ­Madonna Addolorata or Our Lady of Sorrows. From a theological point of view, rather than emphasising Christ’s pending resurrection, the ending of the lament remains absorbed by the maternal affections of love and sorrow, and thus the ­dogma of Mary as Mother of God.48 Mary’s ordeal offers a personal ­perspective—she speaks in impassioned language, in the first-person singular. The textual analysis involved identifying the main argument, describing the structure, looking at figures of speech and emotives (verbal expressions of the emotions Mary is experiencing), and identifying keywords and related religious imagery. A rhetorical analysis of the text’s structure indicates an emphasis on emotional appeal or pathos, accentuated by the frequent use of emotives.49 The contrafactum is composed only of the first four sections of the lament, with a structure similar to that of the five-part madrigal Lamento d’Arianna. Mary argues that she must die. This is stated in the exordium (introduction)—the 46 Agostino Agazzari, Del Sonare Sopra’l Basso Con Tutti Li Stromenti E Dell’ Uso Loro Nel Conserto (Siena: D. Falcini, 1607), accessed August 10, 2018, http://www.greatbassviol. com/treat/agazzari.pdf. 47 See Anne Smith, The Performance of 16th-Century Music: Learning from the Theorists, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 48 Ibid., 306. 49 This text analysis is according to the second canon of rhetoric dispositio or taxis (arrangement).

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first musical section of the lament (mm. 1–10).50 In the second line, Mary refers to herself in the third person, establishing her credibility as a grieving mother, and makes her point with a rhetorical question giving her emotions as the reason for her plea: Quisnam poterit matrem consolari in hoc fero dolore, in hoc tam duro tormento? (“Who can console a mother in this cruel sorrow and in such harsh torment?”), see Appendix 1 for full text and English translation by Tony Liddicoat. This request is reinforced by the repetition of Iam moriar mi fili (“Now let me die, my son”). At the beginning of the second section of the lament (mm. 11–35), Mary describes the situation in the narratio not by setting out the events that led to her son’s Crucifixion, but in terms of her own emotional response to the situation. In a compelling antithesis at the end of this section (mm. 36–49), Mary juxtaposes the consequences (partitio or divisio). In the third section of the lament (mm. 50–70), in a series of rhetorical questions (confirmatio), Mary searches for the logic of the Crucifixion. She concludes that it would be sweet to die and that to die with Jesus would be glory and life itself (nam tecum mori est illi gloria et vita). In the last section (refutatio), Mary becomes infuriated by the silence of her son and calls for an abyss to take him and engulf her too: velox, o terrae, centrum aperite profundum et cum dilecto meo me quoque absconde (mm. 71–80). She quickly recovers from her anger to realize that her desire to die is unreasonable. She resigns herself to the will of God and her grieving. In this peroratio, Mary piously surrenders to her suffering, which she qualifies as that of a loving mother: Vivat maestum cor meum pleno dolore, pascere, fili mi, matris amore (“May my heart live in sadness, full of pain, to suffer, my son, with a mother’s love”; mm. 81–8).

Analysis of the emotions I gave the artists modern and early modern definitions of emotions in a rehearsal sheet titled From the Sources. For the historical analysis of emotions, I referred to descriptions and images in treatises by John Bulwer and Charles Le Brun.51 We went through a process of viewing and discussing the passions as listed by Le Brun, which included desire, rapture, veneration, profound veneration, joy, love, terror, extreme despair, horror, admiration, crying, weeping, sorrow, fear, scorn, anger, and wrath. Jacob Lawrence determined which ones applied 50 Claudio Monteverdi, Pianto della Madonna, Selva morale e spirituale (1640/41) à voce sopra il Lamento d’Arianna, ed. Peter Rottländer (Choral Public Domain Library, 2009), accessed August 14, 2018, http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/e/e3/Mont-pia.pdf. 51 Bulwer, Chirologia; and Le Brun, Méthode.

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to the four sections in general, and then to individual phrases. Marian art and sculpture that I photographed on a trip to Italy during the rehearsal period supplemented the primary pictorial sources on the passions.

Visualization Visualization is the power of the mind to create images of existing and nonexisting people, places, objects, and other phenomena. Using Quintilian’s idea of visiones and affective performance, I relied on visual imagery from the historical sources listed above. During the rehearsal process, I facilitated the identification of keywords in the text that conjured images of Italian Marian art and visual representations of the emotions, using them as emotional cues. During the last rehearsals, I led the ensemble into visualizations of the Cross and Calvary to stimulate their imagination of place and Mary’s emotional journey. The rehearsals achieved more than I expected. I was satisfied to witness how Jacob Lawrence rehearsed with the ensemble, applying concepts from classical rhetoric and historical analysis of the passions. The novel rehearsal techniques prompted some realizations. In April, Jacob Lawrence wrote in the reflection sheet after the rehearsal: “Emotion can provide rhythmic impetus”; he was discussing tactus in this rehearsal. In May, he exclaimed, “Visualisation works!,” and also said, “the allocation of passions can help to cement rhetorical structure.” Hannah Lane noted: “If we make more space in the continuo realisation and focus on the rhythm of the text and the emotions of keywords, we can be actually free to be more expressive than if we are playing more notes.” She also observed: “Rhetorical structure can greatly enhance the musical expression. It was useful to experience this practice as opposed to purely theoretically.” Working with a modern edition by the Choral Public Domain Library and consulting the facsimile of the original print, the artists “relearned” and “reshaped” the musical score by placing markings including translations of words, rhetorical designations of sections and passions, instrumentation and icons relating to word-painted imagery. For instance, using Le Brun’s passions and corresponding images, Jacob Lawrence distinguished the gradation from Weeping to Crying in the first two lines. I encouraged him to use icons to represent place (Calvary, the imagined abyss), character, emotion (he used emoticons for sadness) and objects (the nails on the cross). The artists indicated in both the final questionnaire and the post-­ performance focus group discussion that the analysis of both text and passions affected their interpretation, mostly impacting on dynamics, timbre, musical

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emphasis, and ornamentation. While performing Il pianto della Madonna, they estimated that their emotional intensity was on average higher (3.50 out of 5) than during the other pieces (2.75 out of 5 where 1 is no or little emotion and 5 is most intense emotion). Only one of them felt something close to religious devotion: “I experienced a spiritual and emotional connection to the music … which could be compared to a feeling of religious devotion.” Another one “applied the idea of the codified passions somewhat” to the rest of the works. They found the visualization exercises “very effective” and “very useful in rehearsal, difficult to implement in performance.” Overall, the artists were satisfied with the sound they achieved and how the continuo supported the voice.

MIMESIS AND EMOTION The historical context mindset involved a different process for me because I had been working on Lamento d’Arianna in various capacities—producer, dramaturg and actor influenced by historically informed performance and historical acting techniques, writing reflexively and presenting conference papers on this topic. Half-way through the rehearsal period, I went on an unplanned trip to Italy where I came face to face with the living Roman Catholic tradition. I visited many religious sites such as the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the Duomo in Arezzo which has a beautiful chapel devoted to Mary, and the sacred sites in Assisi. The trip instigated a process of immersion in Roman Catholic visual culture and the message of salvation, and amplified my contemplation of Mary’s grief, and the meaning and structure of Il pianto della Madonna. I was born Christian Orthodox, though during my childhood and adolescence in communist Bulgaria I was not allowed to practice religion. I woke up to spirituality in my twenties after I migrated to Australia. I pursued Eastern philosophy which was instrumental in my understanding of the symbolic meaning of the Christian story and allowed me to relate better to Roman Catholic beliefs. The Latin contrafactum expresses the grief of the Blessed Virgin Mary after the death of her son. I reflected on how depictions of Mary embody ideals of womanhood, purity, and an exemplary life of love, faith, hope, and charity. I understood the significance of her role in the salvation process. I learned that the wounded heart of Mary relates to the dogma that she is the Mother of God, and that it is a theme of the devotions of the Holy Rosary, Mary’s Seven Sorrows and the Stations of the Cross. I also bought a rosary from the Saint Francis Cathedral bookshop in Assisi and attempted to practice this devotion regularly during the rehearsal process.

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

Upon my return to Australia, I travelled to Melbourne for rehearsals and visited the venue of the concert, Trinity College Chapel. I chose the chapel because it is both a well-known early music venue and a sacred place. I am perplexed. The old Anglican Church was beautiful with the Australian decorative elements. The opulent palette and magnificence of Marian baroque art is just not there. I jump with excitement to see the beautiful stained window above the altar. It is the Crucifixion! There is the grieving Mary dressed in blue! Alas, the concert will take place on a winter evening, and the stained glass will not be visible. I realize that my ideas to project images of Mary onto Jacob’s body or onto a screen behind the ensemble will not work for various practical and budgetary reasons. How am I going to bring into this space the image of the Virgin Mary?52

The only solution I could find was to use my rhetorical gesture skills and embody Mary so that she could appear physically in the performance space. Mary Hunter explains that the contextual history mindset “may from the get-go be looking for a plausible fantasy to fill out with historical information” and “allows the performer to create a quasi-fictional ‘character’ that uses historical information primarily as an imaginative resource.” In this performance I was not in character performing Mary, although I was dressed as Mary with a costume furnished by Shane Dunn. Rather, I was imitating Marian art as an act of devotion. Using Marian iconography to inform my movements, I emulated her posture, facial expression, and gestures as I had seen them in the numerous depictions I had researched of the Annunciation, Madonna and Child, and the Crucifixion. While Jacob Lawrence could vocalize Mary’s speech and emotions, I could concurrently express them visually by embodying Mary imitating her iconic gestures. I was satisfied that sonic and visual communication were coordinated in the spoken and gestured utterances. Rather than emphasizing and expressing the words that Jacob Lawrence was singing through detailed gestural action, I was moving between poses from iconic gesture to iconic gesture. I reserved the image of the Madonna Addolorata in San Rufino with her pierced heart, elevated arms and eyes directed to God for the end of Il pianto della Madonna (see Figure 2). During the days leading up to the performance and during the performance, my emotions grew to unprecedented devotional heights; I was 52 Personal recollection from from July 12, 2016.

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continually researching images of the Annunciation and Mary under the Cross on the internet, even watching videos of reenactments of the Passion and devotional processions. My interior life was taken over by visiones of Mary. I felt as if I was walking on air despite the increasing urgency of preparations for the performance. I was able to stay aware of Mary’s image and the heightened emotion of veneration while paying attention to details as a producer of the performance—flying from Adelaide to Melbourne with lighting equipment, organizing rehearsals, ticketing, setting up lights, arranging and directing the filming, and finally performing. My decision to appear as Mary disrupted the performance process. This late change was difficult for the ensemble as they did not expect it. The experience provoked them. They found it “jarring,” “confronting,” even having “a strong negative effect on their ability to perform,” “challenging,” and “retrospectively effective, but in performance somewhat distracting.” They felt we needed specific rehearsal techniques to incorporate this novel approach, as they were focusing on sonic expression rather than a theatrical rendition of the lament. Having the camera in front of them and glitches with the filming also disrupted their performance. According to Hunter’s framework of HIP consciousness, there was a clash between the sonic mindset of the ensemble and their internalized visions of the story, and the externalized mimesis of Mary that they could not see being positioned behind me. The artists were confused about this hybridization. They found the actions unpredictable and tricky to reconcile, and could not see the visual layering of emotional expression that I was performing. More time to observe how the physical movement extended the sonic expression that they were producing would have enhanced the negotiation of enacted embodiment in this new format of delivery. During the post-performance focus group discussion, Nicholas Pollock suggested that an edition with English translation and designations of the emotions could have facilitated this process better. Jacob Lawrence recognized that the physical embodiment of Mary worked well as a substitute for having the archival images projected. Situated in historically informed performance and mixed-method performative research, this study investigated contextual history as a means of understanding the production of emotions when performing the Marian recitative lament Il pianto della Madonna by Claudio Monteverdi. Performance and the performance process offered me, the historian, a space for enquiry through collaboration with professional musicians. The lens of rhetorical visuality offered a new perspective, and rehearsal and performance methods for

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negotiating past and present. Journeying into Catholic culture through its stories, images, symbols, and beliefs was essential in the process. Rhetorical visuality analysis and rehearsal methods was used to help the artists tap into the religious import of the narrative. Born in experimentation, idiosyncratic methods such as the preparatory score with markings of rhetorical structure and the passions yielded unconventional solutions in rehearsal and performance. Hunter’s framework of HIP consciousness was useful for interrogating the disruption in the performance process and the subsequent transformation into a hybrid performance between concert and theatrical paradigms. This study is an example of how performers might deploy interpretative decision-making with an awareness of historical context and emotional practices including their own. For me, the journey of this research project opened a window of knowledge about devotional practices through Marian sacred music. The continuous euphoric feeling I experienced at the height of the performance has disappeared now as I am not practicing devotion to Mary regularly. I can still enter this state, albeit with a much lesser intensity, when I think of Mary and the Madonna Addolorata in San Rufino. Table 1.  Il Pianto della Madonna, Selva Morale e Spirituale (Venice: Magni, 1640–1641). English translation by Anthony J. Liddicoat 1 Iam moriar mi fili. Quisnam poterit matrem consolari in hoc fero dolore, in hoc tam duro tormento? Iam moriar mi fili.

Now let me die my son Who can console a mother in this cruel sorrow and in such harsh torment? Now let me die my son.

2 Mi Iesu, o Iesu, mi sponse, dilecte mi, mea spes, mea vita, me deseris, heu, vulnus cordis mei.

My Jesus, o Jesus, my bridegroom, my love, my hope, my life, alas you leave a wound in my heart.

Respice, Jesu mi, precor, respice matrem tuam, quae gemendo pro te pallida languet, atque in monte funesto, in hac tam dura et tam immani cruce tecum petit affigi.

Look upon me, my Jesus, I pray, look upon your mother, who languishes for you groaning and pale and who asks to be nailed to the harsh and so brutal cross on that monstrous mount.

Mi Iesu, O Iesu mi, o potens homo, o Deus en inspectores, heu, tanti doloris quo torquetur Maria.

My Jesus, o my Jesus, O powerful man, o God behold those who look, alas, upon the many sorrows that torture Mary.

Miserere gementis tecum quae extincta sit quae per te vixit.

Have mercy on she who groans with you that she may die who lived for you.

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Daniela Kaleva Sed promptus ex hac vita discedes, o mi fili, et ego hic ploro.

But you are quick to leave this life, o my son, and I weep for you here.

Tu confringes infernum hoste victo superbo, et ego relinquor praeda doloris solitaria et maesta.

You break apart hell, vanquishing the proud enemy and I am left behind a prey to sorrow, alone and morning.

Te pater almus teque fons amoris suscipiant laeti, et ego te non videbo, o Pater, o mi sponse.

From you gentle father, from you may the joyful receive the fountain of love but I will not see you, o Father, o my betrothed.

3 Haec sunt promissa Archangeli Gabrielis?

Is this the promise of the Archangel Gabriel?

Haec illa excelsa sedes antiqui patris David?

Is this the high seat of our forefather David?

Sunt haec regalia sceptra quae tibi cingant crines?

Is this the royal crown that binds your hair?

Haecne sunt aurea sceptra et sine fine regnum affigi duro ligno et clavis laniari atque corona?

Is this the golden sceptre and the kingdom without end to be put on the harsh cross, torn with nails and the crown?

Ah Iesu, ah Iesu mi, en mihi dulce mori!

Ah Jesus, ah my Jesus, lo for me it would be sweet to die.

Ecce plorando, ecce clamando rogat te misera Maria, nam tecum mori est illi gloria et vita.

Behold with weeping, behold with crying, poor Mary calls you, for to die with you is glory and life.

Hei, fili, non respondes!

Alas my son you do not reply!

Heu, surdus es ad fletus atque querelas!

Alas you are deaf to my tears and complaints.

4 O mors, o culpa, o inferne ecce sponsus meus mersus in undis!

O death, o sin, o hell, behold my betrothed sunk beneath the waves!

velox, o terrae, centrum aperite profundum et cum dilecto meo me quoque absconde!

Quickly, o earth, open the abyss and take me away too with my beloved.

Quid loquor?

What am I saying?

Heu, quid spero misera?

Alas, what can I, a wretch, hope for?

Heu, iam quid quaero?

Alas, what can I seek now?

5 O Iesu, o Iesu mi, non sit quid volo, sed fiat quod tibi placet.

O Jesus, o my Jesus, may it be not as I want but as pleases you.

Vivat maestum cor meum pleno dolore, pascere, fili mi, matris amore.

May my heart live in sadness, full of pain, to suffer, my son, with a mother’s love?

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agazzari, Agostino. Del Sonare Sopra’l Basso Con Tutti Li Stromenti E Dell’ Uso Loro Nel Conserto. Siena: D. Falcini, 1607. Accessed August 10, 2018, http://www.greatbassviol.com/treat/ agazzari.pdf. Andreini, Giovanni Battista. La Maddalena sacra rappresentatione di Gio Batta Andreini fiorentino all’ill.mo et eccel.mo don Alessandro Pico principe della Mirandola et.c. Mantua: Aurelio, e Lodouico Ossanna, 1617. Accessed August 15, 2018. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_ M1f_6QFFuYsC. Bartleet, Brydie-Leigh, and Carolyn Ellis. “Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal.” In Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, edited by Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis, 1–20. Bowen Hills, QLD: Australian Academic Press, 2009. Bianconi, Lorenzo. Music of the Seventeenth Century. Translated by David Bryant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Black, Christopher F. Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Bolt, Barbara. “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts?.” Working Papers in Art and Design 5 (2008). Accessed January 16, 2018. http://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0015/12417/WPIAAD_vol5_bolt.pdf. Bujic, Bojan. “Rinuccini the Craftsman: A View of his L’Arianna.” Early Music History 18 (1999): 75–117. Bulwer, John. Chirologia: Or, The Natural Language of the Hand, and Chironomia: Or, The Art of Manual Rhetoric, London: Harper, 1644. Accessed August 10, 2018. https://archive.org/details/gu_chirologianat00gent. Butz, David, and Kathryn Besio. “Autoethnography.” Geography Compass 3, no. 5 (2009): 1660– 74. Carter, Tim. “‘Intriguing Laments: ‘Sigismondo d’India’: Claudio Monteverdi, and ‘Dido alla parmigiana’ (1628).” Journal of the American Musicological Society 41, no. 1(1996): 32–69. ——. “Lamenting Ariadne?” Early Music 27, no. 3 (1999): 395–405. ——. Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Carter, Tim, and Geoffrey Chew. “Monteverdi, Claudio.” Grove Music Online. Edited by Laura Macy. Accessed March 23, 2018. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/ view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000044352. [Cicero]. Ad C. Herennium De Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium). Translated by Harry Caplan. Vol. 403 of Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, 1964. Coreth, Anna. Pietas Austriaca. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004. Cusick, Suzanne G. “‘There was not one Lady who Failed to Shed a Tear’: Arianna’s Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood.” Early Music 22, no. 1 (1994): 21–41. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Paris: Henry Le Gras, 1649. Accessed August 10, 2018. http://net.cgu.edu/philosophy/descartes/Passions_Part_One.html.

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Daniela Kaleva Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1 (2011). Accessed March 12, 2018. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095. Fabbri, Paolo. Il secolo cantante: per una storia del libretto d’opera nel Seicento. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. ——. Monteverdi. Translated by Tim Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Follino, Federico. Compendio delle sontuose feste fatte l’anno MDCVIII nella città di Mantova, per le reali nozze del serenissimo prencipe D. Francesco Gonzaga con la serenissima infante Margherita di Savoia. Mantua: Aurelio e Ludovico Osanna, 1608. Glixon, Jonathan. Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260–1807. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Gordon, Bonnie. Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Haseman, Bradley C. “A Manifesto for Performative Research.” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy: Quarterly Journal of Media Research and Resources 118, no. 1 (2006): 98–106. ——. “Rupture and Recognition: Identifying the Performative Research Paradigm.” In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, edited by Estelle Barrett Estelle and Barbara Bolt, 147–57. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Kaleva, Daniela. “Translating Text into Motion: Performance Analysis for Singers and Directors.” In Music Research: New Directions for a New Century, edited by Michael Ewans, Rosalind Halton, and John. A. Phillips, 64–74. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. ——. “Performative Research: A Performance-led Study of ‘Lamento d’Arianna’ with Historically Informed Rhetorical Gesture.” Musicology Australia 36, no 2, Music Performance and Performativity, edited by Jane Davidson (2014): 209–34. ——. “Il PIanto Della Madonna: religious Passions of the Italian Baroque—Program Notes.” Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Accessed July 11, 2019. http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/media/258546/il-pianto-della-madonna-program.pdf. Kjeldsen, Jens E. “Talking to the Eye: Visuality in Ancient Rhetoric.” Word & Image 19, no. 3 (2003): 133–7. Koldau, Linda Maria. Die venezianische Kirchenmusik von Claudio Monteverdi. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001. Koldau, Linda Maria and Anna Ficarella. “‘Non sit quid volo sed fiat quod tibi pacet’: I contrafacta sacri del ‘Lamentdo d’Arianna’ di Claudio Monteverdi.” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 36, no. 2 (2001): 281–314. Le Brun, Charles. Méthode Pour Apprendre À Dessiner Les Passions. Amsterdam: François van der Plaats, 1702. Accessed August 10, 2018. https://archive.org/details/methodepourappre00lebr. MacNeil, Anne. “Weeping at the Water’s Edge.” Early Music 27, no. 8 (1999): 407–18. Murata, Margaret “The Recitative Soliloquy.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 32, no. 1 (1979): 45–73.

Contextual History through Rhetorical Visuality Metzger, Heinz-Klaus und Rainer Riehn, eds. Claudio Monteverdi: um die Geburt der Oper, MusikKonzepte 88 (Munich, Germany: Edition Text und Kritik, 1994). Monteverdi, Claudio. “Lamento d’Arianna.” In Claudio Monteverdi, Il sesto libro de’ madrigali Venice: Amadino 1614. ——. Lamento d’Arianna. Venice: Magni, 1623. ——. Il maggio fiorito. Edited by. G. B. Rocchigiani. Orvieto: Fei et Riuli, 1623. ——. Selva morale e spirituale. Venice: Magni, 1640–41. ——. Pianto della Madonna, Selva morale e spirituale (1640/41) à voce sopra il Lamento d’Arianna, edited by Peter Rottländer. Choral Public Domain Library, 2009. Accessed August 14, 2018. http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/e/e3/Mont-pia.pdf. Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer and Roberta Mock. “Researching the Body in/as Performance.” In Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, edited by Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson, 210–35. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Pirotta, Nino, and Elena Povoledo. Li due Orfei: da Poliziano a Monteverdi. Turin: ERI, 1969. Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian with English Translation. Translated by Harold Edgeworth Butler. Vol. 126 of Loeb Classical Library. London: W. Heinemann, 1921. Ringer, Mark. Opera’s First Master: The Musical Dramas of Claudio Monteverdi. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press 2006. Rohling, Geraldine H. “Exequial and Votive Practices of the Viennese Bruderschaften: A Study of Music and Liturgical Piety.” PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1996. Rosand, Ellen. “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament.” Musical Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1979): 346–59. Routley, Nicholas. Arianna Thrice Betrayed. Armidale: University of New England, 1998. Rubin, Miri. Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. ——. Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. London: Penguin: 2009. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Loddon: Routledge, 2017. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220. Schnettger, Matthias. “Die Keiserinnen aus dem Haus Gonzaga: Eleonora die Ältere und Eleonora die Jüngere.” In Nur die Frau des Kaisers?: Kaiserinnen in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Bettina Braun, Katrin Keller, and Matthias Schnettger, 117–40. Vienna: Böhlau, 2016. Seifert, Herbert. Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof im 17. Jahrhundert. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1985. Smith, Anne. The Performance of 16th-Century Music: Learning from the Theorists. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011. Spry, Tami. “Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis.” Qualitative Inquiry 7, no. 6 (2001): 706–32. The One Year Bible NIV. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2012. Tomlinson, Gary. “Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi’s ‘via naturale alla immitatione.”’ Journal of the American Musicological Society 34, no. 1 (1981): 60–108.

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Daniela Kaleva ——. Monteverdi and the End of Renaissance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Weaver, Andrew. “Divine Wisdom and Dolorous Mysteries: Habsburg Marian Devotion in Two Motets from Monteverdi’s Selva morale et spiritual.” Journal of Musicology 24, no. 2 (2007): 237–71. ——. Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III: Representing the Counter-Reformation Monarch at the End of the Thirty Years’ War. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Whenham, John, and Richard Wistreich, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Wilbourne, Emily. Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of Commedia dell’Arte. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Wistreich, Richard, ed. Monteverdi. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Zacconi, Lodovico. Prattica di Musica Seconda Parte. Venice: Alessandro Vincenti, 1622.

CHAPTER 5

Celebrating and Enhancing a Virtual Past through Singing: The Polynesian Community on Takū RICHARD MOYLE

ABSTRACT The pervasive image throughout Polynesia of song lyrics as a reliable repository of accurate accounts of the past has long been assumed to be valid but never tested. Because of its small population and large song repertoire, the Polynesian community on Takū allows us to assess this image and, because of the communal retention of traditional religious practices, such an assessment can extend beyond human-composed songs to those received from spirit ancestors. In a culture where deliberate and conscious adherence to precedent permeates most domestic and ritual activities, lyrics of many songs sung publicly nonetheless record partisan representations within family politics, the loving exaggeration of a fisherman’s success, and the occasional selective representation for personal aggrandizement. In a musical context such apparent anomalies, which are known and largely tolerated, form a nexus of ideology and history facilitated by a separation of public and private memory. This chapter examines the reasons for such creative distortions and the audience reactions.

T

he study of the historical accuracy of song lyrics in mainland Polynesia has been largely overlooked. Kaeppler and Love omit any systematic examination from their encyclopedic coverage of the region, as does McLean’s

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own survey.1 The situation is similar in studies of the larger island groups. For example, in a foreword to his classic collection of old Maori waiata, Apirana Ngata principally focuses on the antiquity and sound qualities of the melodies,2 and the Preface to a 1988 report by the Waitangi Tribunal summarizes a longstanding view still prevalent in both scholarly and government thinking: “Waiata [chants] have a cultural function, to preserve the stories of great events and noble people in tribal history and lore.”3 Implicit in this statement is an acceptance of waiata’s historical accuracy, and similar assumptions are found in the literature on Hawaii,4 Samoa,5 Tonga,6 and Uvea and Futuna.7 Regarding the Polynesian outliers, too, mention of the topic of accuracy is absent from the most recent survey.8 And yet, as a form of verbal expression, deliberately or accidentally, song lyrics are as susceptible as other verbal media to factual inaccuracies—­ exaggeration, bias, selectivity—and indeed because of this they may be particularly effective as a political tool. In Samoa, for example, recordings of pro-nationalistic songs created almost seventy years earlier so polarized listeners after their repatriation in 2000 that they were eventually banned from being

1 Adrienne L. Kaeppler and J. W. Love, eds., The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 9, Australia and the Pacific Islands (New York: Garland, 1998); Mervyn McLean, Weavers of Song: Polynesian Music and Dance (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999). 2 Apriana Ngata, Ngā Mōteatea. The Songs: Part Two, trans. Pei Te Hurinui Jones (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004), xi–xii. 3 Waitangi Tribunal, Department of Justice, “Report of the Waitangi Tribunal on the Muriwhenua Fishing Claim. Wai 22,” accessed January 23, 2017, https://forms.justice.govt.nz/ search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_68478237/Muriwhenua%20Fishing%20Report%20 1988.compressed.pdf. 4 For example, Samuel H. Elbert and Na Mahoe, Na Mele o Hawai’i nei: 101 Hawaiian songs (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1982); Mary Kawena Pukui and Alfons L. Korn, The Echo of our Song: Chants and Poems of the Hawaiians (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973); Helen H. Roberts, Ancient Hawaiian Music (New York: Dover Publications 1967); Amy K. Stillman, Sacred Hula: The Historical Hula ’ala’apapa (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. 1998); and Elizabeth Tatar, Nineteenth Century Hawaiian Chant (Honolulu: Department of Anthropology, 1982). 5 Richard Moyle, Traditional Samoan Music (Auckland: Auckland University Press in association with the Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1988). 6 Richard M. Moyle, Tongan Music (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987). 7 Edwin. G. Burrows, Songs of Uvea and Futuna, Bulletin 183 (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1945). 8 Richard Feinberg and Richard Scaglion, Polynesian Outliers: The State of the Art, (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburg, 2012).

Celebrating and Enhancing a Virtual Past through Singing

broadcast, by Government order.9 In similar vein, singing as a medium in Polynesia for either spontaneous or planned ridicule has also been widely reported.10 If we accept that lyrics do not necessarily present a balanced and accurate picture of the past, then on a practical level, how best to examine them? How to ascertain what really happened? And in an oral tradition, whose word should we accept? Further, assuming that any inaccuracy was not the result of innocent misunderstanding, how might the motivation for composition be identified? Inevitably, the complexities will increase as the numbers of affected people themselves increase, and the likelihood of finding answers to such questions may be inversely proportional to population size. For that reason, I examine the historical accuracy of song lyrics in one of Polynesia’s smaller communities, Takū. (All song lyrics cited in this article are given in the original language in Table 1 at the end of this chapter.) Takū live in a single village on a small and isolated atoll of the same name in Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Province. Although linked linguistically, culturally, and historically to adjacent but distant atolls (which are also Polynesian outliers), Takū decided some forty-five years ago to ban missionaries and churches, and to continue to practice traditional Polynesian religion, creating a dimension of enduring social and ideological separation from its Christianized island neighbors.11 Takū’s musical activities during the fieldwork period (most

9 Richard M. Moyle, “The Banning of Samoa’s Repatriated Mau Songs,” in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation, ed. Frank Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 491–502. 10 For example Elsdon Best, Games And Pastimes Of The Maori: An Account Of Various Exercises, Games And Pastimes Of The Natives Of New Zealand, As Practised In Former Times; Including Some Information Concerning Their Vocal And Instrumental Music (Wellington: Government Printer, 1976), 188, 195, and 204; Edwin G. Burrows, “Polynesian Music and Dancing,” Journal of The Polynesian Society 49 (1949): 329–46 and 349; William W. Donner, “‘Don’t Shoot the Guitar Player’: Tradition, Assimilation and Change in Sikaiana Song Performances,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 96 (1987): 201–22; Samuel H. Elbert, “Chants and Love Songs of the Marquesas Islands,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 50 (1941): 53–91; McLean, Weavers, 286; and Moyle, Samoan Music, 144–6. 11 One result of almost seventy years of government- and community-controlled access to the atoll has been a dearth of research; my own publications have resulted from community requests and active involvement: “Collection or Theft? Germans on Takū,” Pacific Arts 21–22 (2000): 103–108; Nā Kkai—Takū Musical Fables (Boroko: Institute for Papua New Guinea Studies, 2004); Songs from The Second Float: A Musical Ethnography of Takū Atoll, Papua New Guinea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); A Dictionary of Takuu (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2011); Ritual and Belief on Takū: Polynesian Religion in Practice (Adelaide: Crawford House, 2018).

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years between 1994 and 2010) were varied and frequent: group singing and dancing averaging some twenty hours each week, and the five-day grief-ending tukumai ritual incorporating up to thirty hours of formal and informal performances. In order to meet the almost constant requirement for new songs and dances, each of the five clans making up the community had until relatively recently its own purotu performance specialist who both created new works and taught the singers and dancers. Although it was originally represented as relating to a West European phenomenon, Christopher Small’s now twenty-year-old theory of musicking12 also applies to Takū.13 The nub of Small’s theory is that “musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships that model … ideal relationships as the participants imagine them to be.”14 One continuum on which such relationships operate is that of time past.15 When Takū undertake actions in the present or interpret the past, value is placed on the ability to cite precedent as an explanatory authority, either to justify a particular course of action or to identify the likely cause of failure. The corollary is that where a situation is unprecedented, it may be met with disinterest, caution, or concern, but more frequently with non-comprehension. A man routinely explains his own failure to catch fish by assigning blame on a unique and therefore unprecedented event occurring before the canoe set out; that is, he will give a deflective interpretation of the past, and other men usually at least say they believe him. A unique event witnessed before a local death is believed to have been an omen of that death, which is by definition discoverable as such only in retrospect and so never publicized at the time it happened; it is an interpretation of history. For example, when a four-legged chicken hatched in 1998, most adults refused even to look at it, let alone suggest a meaning beyond its being an omen. But of itself, and at the time, it was a non-understandable event because it evidently had no precedent. The ritual regalia worn by officials on all formal occasions embodies the authoritative emblems of distant ancestors. Simple logic dictates that that authority cannot hold without a general acknowledgement of a particular shared understanding of the past, which itself constitutes a precedent for contemporary attitudes and action. 12 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 13 Moyle, Songs from The Second Float, 270. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 Elsewhere (Ritual and Belief ), I examine Takū notions of time past.

Celebrating and Enhancing a Virtual Past through Singing

The theft by German collectors in the early 1900s of an ancestor figure and the immediate cessation of the associated rituals was not followed a century later with a resumption of the rituals when the figure was discovered in a German museum and, at least theoretically, could be repatriated under a United Nations Convention.16 The stated reason was ignorance of the old rituals and fear of the consequences of unwittingly breaching any precedent. Whether they are later deemed to constitute precedent or not, past events are preserved mostly in memory, and on Takū some memories are in turn formalized and publicly presented in the form of commemorative songs. However, as psychologist Michael Corballis notes,17 “[Memory] was clearly not designed by nature to be a faithful record of the past. Rather, it supplies us with information—some true, some false, and always incomplete—that we use to construct stories.” Corballis’s generalization resonates on Takū, where each set of song lyrics presents a poet/composer’s version of selective parts of a past event,18 a version always intended to foreground certain events and people in a favorable light, sometimes independently of what is generally accepted to have occurred. And by such means, recent history is creatively retrieved and represented. Moreover, public presentations of remembered life in the form of song lyrics are themselves selectively positive. That is, mention of failures, losses, disappointments, even catastrophes known to have occurred and recounted freely in spoken narrative are transformed into their opposites in poetic memory. The two memories coexist but when articulated are separated into spoken and sung, that is, private and public, individual and corporate. One could argue therefore that there is no such thing as a history of Takū, only multiple indigenous versions which converge and diverge at points in their timeline according to social context and their mode of delivery. A salient feature of the lyrics of a sample of 1,000 songs recorded during fieldwork is that all the contents use past-tense verbs. Takū sing only about their past, and what they experience in the present or anticipate for the future is articulated only in non-musical utterances. When discussing their songs, Takū distinguish between those created by humans (hatuhatu, “composed”) and those of distant spirit origin (i mua, “from long ago”). By far the largest category of human-composed songs are 16 Moyle, “Collection or Theft?,” 103–8. 17 Michael Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (Auckland: Auckland University Press 2014), 32. 18 I use the term “composer” to include the creator of the song poetry, since with very few exceptions they are one and the same person.

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tuki, whose function is summarized as ki ahu te tautai, “to praise the master-­ fisherman.” Fish is Takū’s primary food source, and most families eat fish at least twice daily. In an otherwise egalitarian society, tuki songs are the vehicle for celebrating a brief and tightly controlled moment of prominence among equals when an outstanding catch is recognized and praised. Men say that the high social status of the tuki genre, and the possibility of multiple performances of the song if it proves popular, incentivizes them to at least try and outperform fellow fishers. Most tuki are intended for first performance in the context of the tukumai grief-ending ritual, which is scheduled some months after a local death. When a man dies, two or more tuki are composed for the ritual, and similarly a woman is praised poetically for helping distribute her husband’s astonishingly large catch among her family, or portrayed as gazing with admiration at the large numbers of fish in the canoe.19 In addition, the lyrics of all 531 tuki I recorded adopt the first-person singular perspective, so that each individual singer imaginatively “becomes” the poetic narrator: the singer personalizes the remembered experience, and so establishes a link between each singer and the people, the events described, and the memory (real or imagined). Just as fishermen have an apparently inexhaustible supply of reasons why a fishing trip was not successful, so too a composer of tuki has a wide variety of means available to modify or relate selectively the elements of local history; the following are two examples. In one tuki, a dead man is portrayed as recalling an exceptional fishing catch which initially appeared quite possible: My canoe landed fifty tuna, Whereas everyone else made empty boasts about their own catch.

Men pointed out privately to me, however, the impossibility of landing more than thirty tuna using the method described in this song,20 so the claim of a larger catch was considered false. A dead man summoned a huge school of rainbow runner fish to approach the canoe: My family assigned the fish to be there in the sea. The canoe was filled with 300 fish. 19 Tuki lyrics for a dead child may be limited to portraying him/her in the company of a parent when the catch is brought ashore. 20 Trolling with a shell lure, now discontinued.

Celebrating and Enhancing a Virtual Past through Singing

When this song was first sung, another fisher told me angrily that the composer had included the catch numbers from other canoes on the same day to reach this figure. Later in that same song, the composer then boosted his already inflated figure by adding the catch numbers from other canoes fishing both then and at a later date: My child’s fish were laid out for presentation, And then the 500 were distributed.

By such means—historically positioning named individuals as fictive witnesses to non-existent events—the stated aim of the tuki, as it is generally articulated, is realised. Apart from occasionally inaccurately reporting catches, a tuki composer may also use the first performance at the tukumai ritual to assert or justify a particular course of action to the particular family’s social or material advantage, disguising the act by placing the empowering words poetically in the dead person’s mouth and therefore beyond falsification. Tuki lyrics routinely adopt the perspective of the dead family member, which not only adds emotional intensity but also provides unassailable protection against any skepticism. On his mother’s death in 2002, one man composed a tuki whose lyrics took the first-person perspective of a close relative, a common enough approach. But the final verse of the song departed from the usual expressions of personal grief to make a claim on the family land: I returned home to my sisters’ place, Then we stayed in my grandfather’s house, with everyone’s approval.

It was common knowledge that the grandfather’s house did not belong to that family, and they lived in it under sufferance through the mother’s own distant connection to the clan. Out of sympathy for the grieving family, however, no public comment followed the performance of the song, which was not sung again, but there was lingering private resentment. Which leads to questions: can Takū’s past be over-enhanced? Can distortion or exaggeration go too far? Yes. Speaking of such lyrics, Takū say, E hatu matani koi, “Just composing air,” or E hua matani koi, “Simply singing air.” One particular 2004 tuki was widely but privately criticized for its nonetoo-subtle attempt to overturn an existing adoption arrangement. The usual

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expressions of grief are personalized as the dead woman’s spirit does a flypast of the atoll: I stood crying from grief for my father and mother I cruised around the sky, crying at grief for my island.

The woman then reveals the song’s purpose: she wants her surviving young child to be adopted by her sister: I cried to my sister: adopt my “bird” as your own I cried to sister, Huata: adopt my beloved child as your own.

The child had been the subject of an unresolved custody dispute among family members, and the composer hoped to enhance his own claim by creating the appearance of a request from the dead mother herself. Several Takū saw this as a ruse and told me privately, E mē pe se mē nā aitu, “It was created so as to appear as coming from the spirits.” Takū’s stance on maintaining traditional forms of secular and religious authority means that a similar situation applies to songs believed to be spirit-composed. Takū’s belief system is evidenced through articulations, artefacts, and activities. For coping with situations beyond human control, including social disunity caused by death, the community has an elaborate system focusing on invoking, acknowledging, and entertaining residents of the Afterworld, their ancestors.21 Takū can exploit the residual element of uncertainty in many human activities by ascribing it to the supernatural, a move whose legitimacy almost by definition cannot be challenged since ancestors contact only individuals, and then privately in their visions or dreams. Because they are spirits, ancestors have powers unavailable to humans, and because they are also ancestors, they retain a duty of care to surviving family members in time of need. But ancestors can also be pro-active and contact their families, most commonly through a song which they create and send via a medium in trance.22 The largest category of these spirit-composed songs from long dead ancestors, and those most frequently performed, are in the form of the sau, a women’s synchronized dance song. Fewer than twenty exist, and the last was

21 Moyle, Ritual and Belief. 22 Ibid., 128–32.

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learnt from a spirit medium in the 1980s.23 Just as a Takū fisherman can insulate himself with a wall of excuses against accusations of incompetence after returning with a small catch, so too Takū’s singers can and do deflect accusations of ignorance about the lyrical content of spirit-composed songs. This is possible because, unlike human-composed songs, which acquire significance only when a singer or listener understands the lyrical references—and this is a universal expectation in a small community—ancestor-composed songs are expected to contain linguistically opaque material. As I was once told, if you can understand the words of a song, then it is human-composed, and if you cannot, then it must be spirit-composed. Attractive though it may be, this binary rationale is susceptible to abuse because it presents an argument that is, at best, difficult to disprove. Sau are the longest of Takū’s dances, the alternating slow and fast sections taking as long as twenty minutes to perform. The performance ability of the medium when singing the lyrics from the spirit-composer is matched by the clan’s ability to memorize it in its entirety at a first hearing, since by convention the medium awakes with no recollection of the event.24 Most adult Takū understand the words of a sau but not necessarily their context or significance, but lexical knowledge alone cannot substitute for cultural knowledge, as the following three examples illustrate: I was angry with my father, and I came I directed my anger to the cemetery, and I came. Rubbed with oil, my father brought word Rubbed with oil, you died because of me, Pūoti. My canoe arrived in front of the reef. I turned towards it, I turned it, towards the problematic channel.

What do they mean? Takū say they do not know. One sau boasts of luxurious accommodation in the afterworld in the form of soft bedding. On the death of the woman Te Utua, another—unnamed— 23 At that time, the ariki (paramount chief) died off-island, creating an unprecedented dilemma: lacking the presence of his corpse, the community did not know how to transfer his spiritual authority to the nominated successor (ibid., 11–12). Such authority was deemed essential when overseeing the kind of séance that produced sau dances. 24 Ibid., 129.

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fellow ancestor commented on her arrival in the afterworld, referring to her lovingly as her own child: A spirit arrived at my island Teutua’s spirit arrived. My child had a bed She had two bedspreads.

In what circumstances in the tropics would two bedspreads ever be needed by one person? Takū say they do not know. In living memory of Takū’s residents, no tuki song has been stopped in mid-performance by an audience member publicly contesting the accuracy of a particular incident described in the lyrics, suggesting that the need to maintain the appearance of idealism is greater than any agreed desire for historical accuracy. However, the power of private skepticism is such that no tuki song containing the kinds of historical inaccuracies outlined above has survived more than its initial performance, whereas others considered to be “true” can have a performance lifetime lasting several generations. As the poet Marie Howe once said, “Memory is a poet, not an historian”25 and when Takū use song poetry to re-present local history, the desire to create and sustain an ideology outweighs the niceties of agreed communal memory. Judging by the genealogy of individuals identified in Takū lyrics, this practice of creative retrieval of recent history has been in operation for several generations, and it continued throughout my own fieldwork period. It is a form of agreed behavior, which tolerates the lyrics of parts of tuki songs describing events that common knowledge can demonstrate to be inaccurate if not untrue, but chooses not to do so publicly. The higher value of an idealized image—that is, the end—justifies the departure from historical accuracy, which is the means. For their part, spirit-composed songs are not constructed as clear chronologies with the intent of informing or explaining, but rather demonstrate how particular sets of events conform, or can be made to conform, to an idealized image of the physical atoll and its inhabitants both human and spiritual: to that extent, singing is a corporate assertion of precedent. Takū are untroubled that they may not understand all the words of spirit-given songs because words of themselves do not exist except by utterance, and uttered words not 25 Marie Howe, AZQuotes.com, Wind and Fly LTD, 2018, accessed May 01, 2018, http://www. azquotes.com/quote/867376.

Celebrating and Enhancing a Virtual Past through Singing

only embody lexical and cultural meaning but also have a social impact during the utterance. Indeed, a general lack of understanding of the linguistic content of an ancestral utterance appears to be fundamental to its acceptance as unquestioned, and unquestionable, truth. Two events in the past ten years have brought about major changes to Takū culture. A series of tidal surges over the island in 2008 and the progressive abandonment of regular shipping stimulated an exodus—still ongoing—of two thirds of the population. Fewer than 150 are said to remain. No outrigger canoes have been built for at least two years because the men skilled in building them have left, and no new tuki songs praising recent pelagic fishing success have been composed because the small fiberglass monohulls now in use are too unstable to venture onto the ocean for such fish. The ritual at which new tuki are first sung after a local death and the women’s sau dances routinely performed have been shortened through sheer lack of knowledgeable personnel. Performance of spirit-composed dances is now limited to one or more sections rather than complete compositions. And so, while it is possible to extract and examine only the musical effects of such rapid changes, as I have done here, the broad changes continue to impact on Takū society as a whole. With that in mind, if Small’s theory that musical performance models ideal relationships still operates on the island—and this is simply not known at present because of ongoing communications problems—then enhancement of the past in song lyrics will itself be greatly enhanced through sheer lack of empirical historical evidence. That said, the contents of this chapter constitute my version of Takū versions of how their past has been interpreted. However, a further dimension of memory may be added to this personal account because, as a result of recent changes, it now seems possible that even the accounts of the expression of precedent through singing may themselves soon be confined to the past. Performance of Takū songs, whose lyrics consistently narrate positive past outcomes of socially acceptable behavior, serves to reinforce to singers and audience alike the norms of behavior and to set precedents for contemporary action and attitudes. In the interests of conformity to such norms, accounts of the recent past detailing non-conforming activities either selectively omit such activities or creatively alter them in favor of the singers’ family. To a degree, those Takū who themselves recall the events as they are sung tolerate any discrepancy in the poetic account, accepting by their acquiescence the precedence of the ideal over the actual. Any tuki song deemed to have significantly misrepresented recent events in the collective memory in the formal setting of a

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tukumai is unlikely to be sung again on any informal occasion, even though it was unchallenged at the time of first performance. In the context of an event characterized by its sound, silence is its own message. For Takū, past reality is necessarily a human construct, formalized in group singing and shielded from criticism if not skepticism by the poetic placement of any contentious statement in the mouth of a recently dead resident. However, although the many hours each week that Takū spend singing confirm the social significance of such group behavior, the communal ear is only partially deaf to any poetic misrepresentation of that past. Table 1.  Song texts quoted in the chapter. Translated by Richard Moyle. My family assigned the fish to be there in the sea; The canoe was filled with 300 fish.

Ni tuku iho te ika aku tama ē no tauhia e te tai; Ni no tuku iho te kamai utuhia e te torunarau.

My child’s fish were laid out for presentation, And then the 500 were distributed.

Ī tuku iho ai te ika a taku tama lā, uatia e te rimanārau; Ī tuku iho ai te atu Hareata rā, uatia e te rimanarau.

I returned home to my sisters’ place, Then we stayed in my grandfather’s house, with everyone’s approval.

Hanaiho ki hare a te henua aku kave, Nonoho mai te hare aku tipuna e nonoho ma te henua nei.

I stood crying from grief for my father and mother I cruised around the sky, crying at grief for my island.

E tū nau ka tani i taku aroha i tamana ma taku tinana, Nau e tataka i vae te lani, e tatani ai nau ma taku aroha i taku henua, tuku ē

I cried to my sister: adopt my ‘bird’ as your own I cried to sister, Huata: adopt my beloved child as your own.

Nau tani atu ki taku taina ki purutia taku manu ka noho ma koe Nau tani atu ki Huata ki purutia taku tama sere ka noho ma koe

I was angry with my father, and I came I directed my anger to the cemetery, and I came.

A ē, ko roto nau ki taku tamana, nau ku au. A ē, ko tuku aku roto ki Te One, nau ku au.

Rubbed with oil, my father brought word Rubbed with oil, you died because of me, Pūoti.

Ā te hekau ni lana aku tamana e iā nau e ka roro; Ae taku sara ko koe a ku oti e Pūoti e ea.

My canoe arrived in front of the reef. I turned towards it, I turned it, towards the problematic channel.

Uāīē, tau taku vaka ki te tai taku ākau Ka huri ake nau e, ka huri ake nau ē, te ava ka sē vilosia mai

A spirit arrived at my island Teutua’s spirit arrived. My child had a bed She had two bedspreads

A, ni momori te sau taku henua e, A, ni momori te sau a Te Utua e, A, ni moe taku tama ki te uhiuhi e, Āī, ko taku tama ki te uhi lua e,

Celebrating and Enhancing a Virtual Past through Singing

BIBLIOGRAPHY Best, Elsdon. Games And Pastimes Of The Maori: An Account Of Various Exercises, Games And Pastimes Of The Natives Of New Zealand, As Practised In Former Times; Including Some Information Concerning Their Vocal And Instrumental Music. Wellington: Government Printer, 1976. Burrows, Edwin G. Songs of Uvea and Futuna. Bulletin 183. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1945. ——. “Polynesian Music and Dancing.” Journal of The Polynesian Society 49 (1949): 329–46. Corballis, Michael. The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014. Donner, William W. “‘Don’t Shoot the Guitar Player’: Tradition, Assimilation and Change in Sikaiana Song Performances.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 96 (1987): 201–22. Elbert, Samuel L. “Chants and Love Songs of the Marquesas Islands.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 50 (1941): 53–91. Elbert, Samuel H., and Noelani Mahoe. Na Mele o Hawai’i nei: 101 Hawaiian songs. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1982. Feinberg, Richard, and Richard Scaglion. Polynesian Outliers: The State of the Art. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburg, 2012. Howe, Marie. AZQuotes.com, Wind and Fly LTD, 2018. http://www.azquotes.com/ quote/867376, accessed May 01, 2018. Kaeppler, Adrienne L., and J. W. Love, eds., The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 9. Australia and the Pacific Islands. New York: Garland, 1998. Ngata, Apriana. Ngā Mōteatea The Songs: Part Two. Translated by Pei Te Hurinui Jones. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004. McLean, Mervyn. Weavers of Song: Polynesian Music and Dance. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999. Moyle, Richard M. Tongan Music. [Auckland]: Auckland University Press, 1987. ——. Traditional Samoan Music. Auckland: Auckland University Press in association with the Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1988. ——. “Collection or Theft? Germans on Takū.” Pacific Arts 21–2 (2000): 103–108. ——. Na Kkai—Taku Musical Fables. Boroko: Institute for Papua New Guinea Studies, 2004. ——. Songs from The Second Float: A Musical Ethnography of Takū Atoll, Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 2007. ——. A Dictionary of Takuu. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2011. ——. Ritual and Belief on Takū: Polynesian Religion in Practice. Adelaide: Crawford House, 2018. ——. “The Banning of Samoa’s Repatriated Mau Songs.” In The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation, edited by Frank Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret Woods, 491–502. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Alfons L. Korn. The Echo of our Song: Chants and Poems of the Hawaiians. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973. Roberts, Helen H. Ancient Hawaiian Music. New York: Dover, 1967.

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CHAPTER 6

Reimagining Traditional Ritual Music of Sabah for Contemporary Performance as a Means of Conservation MIA PALENCIA

ABSTRACT Can Sabahan traditional ritual music be adapted for performance, in combination with contemporary music themes and instrumentation, as a means of conserving their musical heritage? The native tribes of Sabah have a rich and diverse traditional music heritage, and music played a vital role in ceremonial events. In recent times, Sabah has experienced a decline in the significance and presence of traditional music. The modernization of some traditional rituals is a significant contributor to this decline. The implication of this is that there is a need for traditional Sabahan music to be conserved and developed if it is to survive the test of time. This study documents a practice-based research project focused on traditional folk songs of Sabah, Malaysia, and their possible application to contemporary composition for performance. In this chapter, the titikas of the Orang Sungai is closely analyzed, presenting contextual background information and revealing its distinctive musical characteristics, which were subsequently used in combination with Western contemporary genres to produce new pieces for performance. The resulting new works have the potential to generate exposure of and interest in traditional Sabahan folk music among a new audience, and to encourage a revival of interest within the Sabahan community in its own traditional music heritage.

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I

t is a balmy evening in the city of Kota Kinabalu on July 18, 2018, and the energy in our green room is positively electric. As I look around at the excitement and joy on the musicians’ faces, I wonder what our Sabahan audience will think when they see us take the stage: a Sabahan contemporary singersongwriter, performing a suite of cross-cultural collaborative music with the help of forty-three concert musicians, who have travelled all the way from Tasmania. Born and raised in this very same city, my initial venture into music began as a jazz vocalist, culminating in two albums strongly rooted in jazz and popular music styles. Consequently, when my focus shifted to songwriting, I relied heavily on Western popular music idioms for inspiration and themes to shape my songs. In 2010, I relocated to Australia to study and conduct research at the University of Tasmania’s Conservatorium of Music. Towards the end of my undergraduate study, I began to question the significant lack of Sabahan themes in my own musical narratives. When I was growing up in Kota Kinabalu, there was minimal access to traditional Sabahan music. What little I was exposed to took the form of stage presentations at school events and official ceremonies. No forms of traditional music were taught in school. Interestingly, however, there was ample opportunity to learn Western instruments such as the piano and violin. By contrast, there was never occasion to hold, let alone play, traditional instruments; they were novelty items bought by tourists as souvenirs. As a modern-day immigrant in Australia, I found myself increasingly reflecting on the country and family I had left behind, and how I could remember them in my music. Inspired by this sentiment, I was moved to acquaint myself with traditional music from my homeland, and to see how elements of our rich musical heritage could be incorporated into my own work. This chapter documents a practice-based research project focused on traditional folk songs of Sabah, Malaysia, and their possible application to contemporary composition for performance. For this project, the “historical artefacts” took the form of four folk songs. These songs were closely analyzed, presenting contextual background information and revealing their distinctive musical characteristics, which were subsequently used in combination with Western contemporary genres to produce new pieces for performance. This experiment with cross-cultural music has created an opportunity to analyze forms of music that are largely unknown outside of Sabah. The resulting new works have the potential to generate exposure of and interest in traditional Sabahan folk music among a new audience, and to encourage a revival of interest within the Sabahan community in its own traditional music heritage.

Reimagining Traditional Ritual Music of Sabah

BACKGROUND Known to locals as “The Land Below the Wind,” the Malaysian state of Sabah is located in the northern region of the island of Borneo, sharing borders with the Malaysian state of Sarawak, the Indonesian region of Kalimantan, and the Southern Philippines. Sabah is home to thirty-two officially recognized indigenous tribes, all of which have unique cultural identities and musical traditions.1 At the start of this project, it was unclear to me why a local such as myself had had limited exposure to our diverse traditions of music. As the pieces of the puzzle unfolded, however, it became apparent to me that the price of modernity had proved to be heavy indeed. As with many other cultures in the region, the rapid process of Westernization in Malaysia has developed at the expense of its traditions.2 The invasion of Western arts has caused numerous cultural traditions to disappear slowly without documentation.3 Sadly, Sabah has not been spared. As early as 1910, ethnographer and archaeologist Ivor H. N. Evans observed in Among Primitive Peoples in Borneo: Unfortunately the process of disintegration and decay has often been aided and hastened by the efforts of well-meaning but misguided missionaries and others, who, instead of attempting to arrest the progress of many of the innovations, which have been partly responsible for the decay of savage races, have deliberately aided in their adoption, and have done everything in their power to break down old customs, religious or otherwise.4

It was important for me to discover that customarily, music did not exist in a theatrical form in Sabah.5 Rather, it was a fundamental part of the many rituals and social events of each tribe, such as wedding celebrations, religious ceremonies and harvest festivals.6 As these ceremonies have been modernized over time, the 1 Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan, Selected Papers on Music in Sabah (Sabah: University Malaysia Sabah, 2004), 3. 2 Charles de Ledesma, “At the Crossroads: Malaysian Music Fights for Survival,” in World Music, ed. Simon Broughton et al. (London: The Rough Guides, 1994), 433. 3 Margaret J. Kartomi, “Traditional Music Weeps and Other Themes in the Discourse on Music, Dance and Theatre of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 367. 4 Ivor H. N. Evans, Among Primitive Peoples in Borneo (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1922), 32. 5 Edward Frame, “The Musical Instruments of Sabah, Malaysia,” Ethnomusicology 26, no. 2 (1982): 248. 6 Frame, Musical Instruments, 248.

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corresponding musical traditions have also begun to disappear. Whereas previously gong music would have featured prominently at a wedding, nowadays it is more popular to hire a local band or a karaoke set.7 Another significant factor in the decline of Sabah’s musical traditions lies in its conventionally informal music practices and education. In the past, “musicians” were individuals who displayed musical talent, regardless of class or gender.8 The passing of musical knowledge happened through a process of enculturation rather than formal instruction.9 This means that if a child demonstrated any musical inclination, he would learn by emulating the adult musicians.10 Previously, families gathered at the end of the day to play music, tell stories, and produce crafts, thus ensuring the transfer of cultural knowledge from generation to generation.11 Nowadays, new technologies have replaced these traditions as sources of entertainment, effectively hindering the vital process of enculturation and transmission.12 In his 1982 survey of traditional Sabahan musical instruments, author Edward Frame concluded: In doing research in Sabah I was constantly aware that many musical forms and instruments will soon disappear from the society because there are few young people interested in performing. Certain forms (such as the beating of the gongs) remain strong, but others (such as the playing of the suling and sundatang) are becoming rare.13

Learning this made me more determined than ever to acquaint myself with these musical forms that were fast disappearing for my people. The question then became, how does one learn tribal music thousands of miles from any tribal musicians to learn from? Was it possible to learn via other means, and if so, what resources were available to me? Had other Sabahan musicians attempted similar case studies? There is very little record of these musical traditions in printed sources or audio and visual recordings. Most of the scholarly works available are anthropological or ethnomusicological in nature, focusing on Sabahan traditional instruments and rituals. The music of Sabah has also been mentioned in various 7 Pugh-Kitingan, Selected Papers, 64. 8 Frame, Musical Instruments, 249; Pugh-Kitingan, Selected Papers, 19. 9 Pugh-Kitingan, Selected Papers, 19. 10 Frame, Musical Instruments, 249. 11 Pugh-Kitingan, Selected Papers, 63. 12 Ibid. 13 Frame, Musical Instruments, 272.

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encyclopedias and reference books. These articles often focus on music from a geographical perspective, providing some information on Sabahan music in the context of Malaysia or Borneo (Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, Kalimantan).14 A number of significant focused studies on traditional Sabahan music have been conducted by Dr. Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan, who holds the Kadazandusun Chair at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah. Her compilation of research papers was published as Selected Papers on Music in Sabah in 2004, and remains the most detailed study of Sabahan traditional music that has been published thus far.15 Pugh-Kitingan continues to document and examine ritual music and dance across ethnic groups in Sabah, the most recent of which focused on Dusunic tribes.16 When I recalled the limited Sabahan traditional music I had access to in my youth, the music of the Kadazandusun people stood out above the other tribes. Despite not having any familial ties to this tribe, I was familiar with their popular form of music and dance called the sumazau. The Kadazandusun are the largest ethnic group in Sabah.17 In the many dialects of the Kadazandusun tribes, there are various terms for dance.18 They include magarang, sumayau, mongigol, and, in the case of the Kadazandusun of the Penampang district, sumazau.19 While the sumazau is more recently popular as a social dance, in former times it played a role in rituals to connect with the spirit world.20 These days, it is commonly found at a variety of events, including staged festivals, concerts, and even church services.21 How did the sumazau transition from its traditional ritual roles to the 14 Patricia Matusky, “Borneo: Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, Kalimantan,” in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music volume 4, eds. Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 823–38. 15 Pugh-Kitingan, Selected Papers. 16 Pugh-Kitingan, “Balancing the Human and Spiritual Worlds: Ritual, Music, and Dance Among Dusunic Societies in Sabah,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 46 (2014), 170–90. 17 Arnold Puyok and Tony Paridi Bagang, “Ethnicity, Culture and Indigenous Leadership in Modern Politics: The Case of the Kadazandusun in Sabah, East Malaysia,” Kajian Malaysia 29, no. 1 (2011): 177. 18 N.a., “Kadazan Dusun,” in Siri Etnik Sabah ITBM—UMS, ed. Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan (Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan, 2012), 182. 19 Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan, “Dance and Ritual in Sabah,” in Sharing Identities: Celebrating Dance in Malaysia, ed. Mohd Anis Md Nor and Stephanie Burridge (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 170; “Kadazan Dusun,” 182. 20 Hanafi Hussin, “Performing Arts as Healing Ritual Tools: Drum Beating and Sumazau Dance in Monogit Ritual of Penamapang Kadazan of Sabah,” Jurnal Jabatan Pengajian Asia Tenggara 11 (2006): 10. 21 Hanafi Hussin, Judeth John Baptist, and Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan, “Enriching the Soundscape and Dancescape of Sabah Through Sumazau,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (2018): 198.

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public domain, where it continues to engage a wider audience as an iconic cultural element of the Sabahan identity?22 In his chapter about musical sustainability, Schippers discusses “successful” musics and their ability to “brave major changes in context, while other musics continue to struggle.”23 In this context, how has the sumazau been preserved, while other forms of Sabahan traditional music continue to disappear? In order to better understand the transformation of the sumazau from the sacred to the secular, it was necessary for me to delve deeper into its history, and the history of its people. Traditionally, the Kadazandusun subsisted on agriculture, primarily cultivating rice, along with fruit trees and vegetables.24 The stages of their rice planting involved rituals performed by their priestesses.25 The essential parts of these ritual performances included drum-beating, a gong ensemble, and the sumazau. The sumazau was also performed in other contexts, for example to cure illness, to allow a good harvest, and during celebrations such as wedding ceremonies. 26 Unlike the interior tribes of Sabah, the geographical location of the Kadazandusun allowed them early access to education. In 1882, the Catholic Mill Hill Mission opened schools for the indigenous population on the West coast, where the current capital city of Kota Kinabalu lies.27 The Mill Hill schools taught literacy to their students through their local dialect and progressively shifted to English by the third or fourth year.28 In the 1950s and 60s, a small group of educated Catholic locals emerged from these schools with the ability to speak and write confidently in both English and a Romanized version of their language.29 This gave rise to a “Society of Kadazans” in 1953, who were dedicated to the protection and preservation of their culture.30 This nationalist movement was further manifested in the publication of their own “Kadazan Corner” in the local newspaper, a Kadazan dictionary, and the first radio broadcast

22 Ibid., 182. 23 Huib Schippers, “From Ca Tru to the World: Understanding and Facilitating Musical Sustainability,” in Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, ed. Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis (Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press, 2009), 206. 24 Hussin, Baptist, and Pugh-Kitingan, “Enriching the Soundscape,” 198. 25 Ibid., 187. 26 Ibid., 183. 27 Anthony Reid, “Endangered Identity: Kadazan or Dusun in Sabah (East Malaysia),” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28, no. 1 (1997): 125. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 126.

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in their own language.31 The local response to their daily radio program was so enthusiastic that by 1960, “Radio Sabah” was transmitting in the Kadazan language for fourteen hours a week. The Kadazan radio station was largely staffed by Kadazans from the Penampang district, and played a crucial role in the development of their local music in the early 60s. The popularity of their radio program created a need for local music, and since there were no commercial records available in the local dialect at the time, much of their library (approximately four hundred pieces) was recorded in its studio.32 The earliest and most comprehensive compilation of Sabahan sound recordings was made by Dr. Ivan Polunin in the late 1950s and released in 1961 as Murut Music of North Borneo on the Folkways label.33 As the demand for Kadazandusun music grew, local record labels such as Kinabalu Records began recording the music on vinyl for local distribution.34 Unfortunately, these recordings are rare, and it was not possible to access them for this project. As the worldview of the Kadazandusun has evolved over time, so too have their life routines and practices. Changes to their economic, social, and political aspects have sparked a need to preserve their identity.35 While modern lifestyles have replaced their rice cultivation practices, their rice farming rituals have been adapted for the stage.36 The sumazau continues to be performed during their annual harvest festival (Kaamatan) as well as state gatherings, often in combination with modern instrumentation and arrangements. Sumazau dance and music traditions also continue to be passed on via classes for children at village community halls. This legacy of Kadazan music continues to manifest itself in the local popular music being produced in Sabah today. Many Kadazandusun popular songs incorporate elements of the sumazau, helping to cement it as an iconic part of Kadazan heritage, as well as the Sabahan identity.37 While the prominence of the Kadazan community as a major tribe of Sabah has allowed the continuation and popularity of its music, the music of many other indigenous tribes has not been exploited, and is rarely heard outside of its tribal settings. The sumazau is a compelling example of how traditional music can be conserved for successive generations, despite the loss of its ritual context. 31 Ibid. 32 Anthony Reid, “Endangered Identity,” 126. 33 Ivan Polunin, Murut Music of North Borneo, Folkways Records, FE4459, 1961, 33 1/3 rpm. 34 Ibid. 35 Hussin, Baptist, and Pugh-Kitingan, “Enriching The Soundscape,” 196. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 181.

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METHODS Now that I was equipped with this new knowledge, where to next? Reflecting on the success of the Kadazandusun tribe in conserving their sumazau, I wondered if I could draw from their example to benefit the music of other tribes. Could other forms of Sabahan traditional music also be adapted for the stage, in combination with contemporary music themes and instrumentation? What methodology and methods would I need to achieve this? Schippers discusses the work of “applied” ethnomusicologists, whose approach “acknowledges recontextualization of performance practices, institutionalizing transmission processes, changing audiences and markets in terms of business models and technology, as well as increasingly fluid relationships between ethnic background and musical tastes/activities, particularly in relation to youth culture.”38 In its authentic setting, music in Sabah was not actively taught. Instead, it was passed down through the process of enculturation. A child who was interested in learning an instrument did so through observation and direct participation. To learn the nuances of Sabahan traditional music forms, it appeared necessary for me to undergo a similar process, in a practice-based research project utilizing autoethnographic methods. The use of autoethnography in the field of music research is gaining momentum, “fuelled by increasing numbers of musicians wanting to examine, understand and communicate the personal stories behind their creative experiences.”39 Ellis and Bochner describe projects in this genre as “distinctly characterised by a focus on intimate involvement, engagement, and embodied participation.”40 Without Sabahan people to engage with directly, I needed to access the music in other ways. The album that served as my main reference for this project is a collection of twenty traditional folk songs entitled Traditional Music of Sabah.41 Each piece on the recording is unique to a tribe or geographical region of Sabah. Due to the extensive and varied nature of traditional Sabahan music, the scope of the study was limited to four folk songs as the material for inspiration. The four traditional Sabahan music forms chosen for this project were the titikas of the Orang Sungai, the Suluk daling-daling, the 38 Huib Schippers, “From Ca Tru to the World,” 204. 39 Bartleet and Ellis, Music Autoethnographies, 6. 40 Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Analysing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35, no. 4 (2006): 434. 41 Traditional Music of Sabah, from author’s personal collection (no label or disc number).

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adai-adai from the West coast of Sabah, and the sumazau of the Kadazandusun tribe. My method of study involved researching the history behind each of the folk songs, then analyzing and immersing myself in the songs to gain an understanding of their function, style, form, and instrumentation. Each song offered unique characteristics to be exploited in the compositional process, and fused with my knowledge of Western contemporary composition where possible. Gaining a musical understanding of the material required an immersive and approximation-based approach. In a music-learning context, Barrett describes this as the franchise to “have a go.”42 She highlights the element of approximation as a crucial part of the learning process, as it allows the learner to evaluate and refine his work in its proximity to the desired outcome. So, I started by first listening to the audio example, followed by a period of teaching myself to play and, in the case of the vocal pieces, sing the song. Often, this process would highlight aspects of the piece that I could utilize in the compositional process. In the compositional phase, I reflected on the distinctive characteristics of each musical form, and how they could be recontextualized incorporating contemporary Western themes. As I did not have the advantage of speaking any of the tribal dialects associated with these musical forms, I opted to write lyrics in the English language. I did, however, look to my own personal history and ties with these tribes to influence the narratives of the new pieces to reinforce the Sabahan connection. The meanings and stories behind music autoethnographies gain further significance through performance, by engaging and challenging the audience on various levels, including the intellectual, embodied, and emotional.43 Once the pieces were composed, the crucial conclusion to the project was for them to be performed. Recruiting the Derwent Valley Concert Band (DVCB) to my cause, I worked closely with Melbourne-based arranger and orchestrator Mark Buys to create arrangements for the pieces in Western concert band format. I then returned to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, to premiere this suite of new works with the DVCB in July 2018 to a Sabahan audience. The following sections document this journey, outlining a historical overview and musical analysis of the titikas, and the piece that was subsequently written and arranged for performance. I also reflect on the challenges of this 42 Margaret Barrett, “Music Education and the Natural Learning Model,” in Teaching Music, ed. Gary Spruce (London: Routledge, 2005), 64. 43 Bartleet and Ellis, Music Autoethnographies, 10.

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research project, as a Sabahan composer trying to make sense and music out of limited fragments of a traditional music history far away in time and place from the land and people to which it belongs.

PHASE ONE: ANALYSIS My primary motive in choosing the titikas for this project was one of personal history, as my paternal great-grandmother was from an Orang Sungai tribe. This traditional form of music was also the focus of a recent study which was fundamental to my own project. In this ethnomusicological study, a small group of scholars travelled to Bukit Garam to observe titikas music performed by the Orang Sungai tribe.44 Based on interviews, recordings, and transcriptions, they provided a detailed musical analysis of the titikas, encompassing musical structure and scales, melodic contours, forms, and rhythmic patterns. While studies of the Orang Sungai tribe do exist, the majority of them have concentrated primarily on ethnographic elements such as demographics, culture, and belief systems.45 The Bukit Garam study is rare and important in archiving indigenous Sabahan music, and passing on musical knowledge to successive generations. The titikas is a form of instrumental music belonging to the Orang Sungai tribe of Sabah. “Orang Sungai” translates to “river people,” and refers to the people who settled along the Kinabatangan, the longest river in Sabah. The Orang Sungai music ensembles that perform the titikas are distinctive in that their instruments are made from wood, instead of the metal gong ensembles of the coastal tribes. The four main instruments used in the Orang Sungai music ensembles are the gabang, kantung, gong kayu, and gandang tambur. The primary instrument is the gabang, a wooden xylophone commonly made out of pogil or mangkapun wood, both of which are abundant in the area. The gabang consists of eight to twelve flat wooden plates laid on a horizontal frame in order of pitch, starting with the lowest pitch to the left of the performer, with a tuning system related to the pentatonic scale. The kantung are slit-gongs made from wood or bamboo. The kantung player provides an underlying rhythmic pulse, while the rest of the ensemble 44 Ian Stephen Baxter, Agnes Ku Chun Moi, Jinky Jane Simeon, and Andrew Poninting, “An Analysis of Orang Sungai Music at Bukit Garam, Sandakan,” in Essays on World Music and Preservation, ed. Loo Fung Chiat et al. (Bergisch Gladbach: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012), 13–41. 45 Ibid., 13.

Reimagining Traditional Ritual Music of Sabah

Figure 1. A gabang. Reproduced by permission from Ian Stephen Baxter et al., “An Analysis of Orang Sungai Music at Bukit Garam, Sandakan,” in Essays on World Music and Preservation, edited by Loo Fung Chiat, Loo Fung Ying and Mohd Nasir Hashim (Bergisch Gladbach, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012)

plays counter-rhythms. The gong kayu is a variation of the gabang, consisting of four large wooden plates that produce low frequencies. The gandang tambur drum completes the ensemble. It is a single-headed drum which utilizes goatskin or cowhide stretched across the top of a hollowed log. The titikas is played differently each time, as it is heavily improvised on by its performers. It relies primarily on the gabang player, who introduces a motif which is then developed and extemporized upon by the ensemble. The audio version of the titikas that I was able to access opens with the gabang player, who begins the piece by playing a scale. This is to provide the listeners with a basis for the tonality of the piece. The gabang player then establishes a motif consisting of quavers and semi-quavers spanning a measure in common time (see Example 1). This phrase is picked up by the percussionist, who mimics the rhythmic pattern. The rhythmic pattern remains constant throughout this piece, while the melody is extemporized using the other notes of the scale. The intensity remains constant throughout the duration of the piece, creating a trance-like quality.

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Example 1.  Traditional folk song, Titikas, opening scale followed by motif

Like the sumazau, the titikas is passed down orally, and performers rely on memory to play the pieces.46 However, there is a strong element of improvisation in this music. While the term titikas is used to broadly describe the style of Orang Sungai music, the musical elements of this form can vary depending on the area in which the music is played, and the musical (and improvisational) abilities of the performers.47 The titikas is most commonly performed during Orang Sungai wedding ceremonies. It is also occasionally played at harvest festivals to accompany dance and to welcome important guests.48

PHASE TWO: COMPOSITION Source Before I composed a piece based on the titikas, I first considered its unique elements. A fundamental aspect of the titikas is that it is largely improvised, albeit within a loose structure. Both the melodic and rhythmic motifs are established in the first few measures of the piece, and it has a strong pulse centered in simple duple time. These components form a strong basis for the ensemble to improvise and expand upon. With these observations in mind, I set out to compose a new piece to “hero” the motif transcribed in Example 2, with a focus on emphasizing the textural quality of the titikas. Without an ensemble, the challenge then was to recreate the layered effect of the titikas in a solo performance format. This initiated the idea of experimenting with a loop pedal, a microphone, and my voice. The general concept was to sing the primary motif of the titikas and loop it in real time, adding vocal layers to expand on the original 46 Ibid., 18. 47 Ibid., 35. 48 Ibid., 27.

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idea. Through several sessions of trial and error, I was able to refine and loosely fix these vocal layers, which I would be able to recreate in a performance setting. The result of these experiments is a piece entitled “Source.” It begins with the primary motif, which is sung and layered. This is followed with a simple percussive rhythm to provide a pulse to the piece. Once these two layers are established, low notes are sung to establish a harmonic center. With a bass line in place, I would sing a secondary motif, which is a harmonic part a minor third above the original motivic melody. This results in a bed of music, as shown in Example 2. As the titikas is an instrumental form of music, I debated over the appropriateness of singing any lyrical verses in my composition. Historically, the titikas ensemble played to accompany dance. However, I lacked both an ensemble to play with me and the dancers to play for. To make it a compelling performance piece, I felt that this modernized version of the titikas required a new context. How could it, as Bartleet and Ellis asked, be representative of something bigger

Example 2.  Excerpt from “Source,” bars 13–15

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than a personal creation, and also demonstrate a dynamic relationship between the self and the social and cultural context of creation?49 For me, the answer lay in my connection to this tribe and their music. Drawing from this, the resulting short verse is a strong statement about my family ties and its connection to the Kinabatangan river, where the Orang Sungai are from: I was born from very strong women I was born from very strong men Like a river, and its continuous flow I have come before, and so too shall I go

There are three ways in which “Source” is tied strongly to the titikas. The first is that it establishes a primary motif at the start of the piece, and continues to expand on that motif as the piece progresses. The layers provided by the titikas ensemble are emulated in “Source” by using a loop pedal to create vocal layers. Finally, once the “bed of noise” is established, I can improvise freely over the music, drawing from my jazz knowledge to produce an active, spontaneously creative piece that is quite different each time it is performed. As can be seen in Example 4, however, “Source” is not limited to a pentatonic scale. Western contemporary harmony is freely employed, incorporating major seven (see Example 2: measure 13, beat 1), minor seven (see Example 2: measure 13, beat 2) and half diminished chords (see Example 2, measure 13, beat 3) that are not normally found in traditional Sabahan music. Baxter et al observed that the titikas was loud and played at a consistent intensity throughout the performance.50 While I chose to emulate this trance-like quality of the titikas in the initial part of the song, the addition of an improvised melodic verse provides the opportunity for the dynamic intensity of the piece to grow as it progresses. As “Source” was intended for performance, this allows dynamic expression to reinforce the words to the song, thus creating more interest for an audience.

PHASE THREE: ARRANGEMENT While “Source” was originally intended as a solo vocal piece, the opportunity to re-imagine it in a Western concert band format created new scope for me to experiment with and make a stronger connection to the original instrumentation 49 Bartleet and Ellis, Music Autoethnographies, 9. 50 Baxter et al., “An Analysis,” 33.

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of the titikas. In the initial stage of the arrangement process, I had to provide arranger and orchestrator Mark Buys with background information about the project. We discussed the history of the titikas, its general mood, texture, and narrative, and how we could use the timbral textures of the concert band instruments to emulate some of the traditional instruments of the Orang Sungai. As in Example 3, the concert band arrangement for “Source” begins with the percussion section introducing the rhythm for 4 measures, followed with a variation of the titikas motif on the xylophone in C minor. This continues for 8 measures to establish the rhythm, pulse, and energy of the piece before the saxophone section brings in the original titikas motif (see Example 1), as illustrated in Example 4. The arrangement staggers the entry of the instruments, creating a similar layered effect to that explored and utilized in the original vocal arrangement. The introduction develops further to create dynamic intensity, before dying away to allow space for the vocal melody. Once the verse concludes at measure 40, the saxophone and trumpet sections take it in turn to reiterate the vocal melody, producing a call and response effect. This erupts into a frenetic descending melody by the flute and piccolo sections, evoking imagery of cascading water. In each case, the cascading melody returns to the titikas with a restatement of the original motif, as illustrated in Example 5. Retaining as many characteristics of the titikas as possible continued to be an essential consideration in the arranging phase. It was important to both myself and Buys to retain some level of improvisation in the arrangement. Therefore, while the instrumentation of the piece was fixed, the arrangement allowed the vocal melody to be loosely improvised during performance. Like the initial vocal arrangement of “Source,” Buys’s arrangement adhered to the motivic, layered texture of the titikas. The use of the xylophone in the concert band allowed a stronger timbral connection to the gabang, something that the human voice was unable to achieve so successfully. Overall, the use of Western instruments to interpret this traditional Sabahan music was rewarding, in that some sounds of the Sabahan instruments could be emulated while the overall sound was still irrefutably Western. This, combined with the free employment of Western chord shapes and harmonies, created a cohesive and unique blend of musical ideas.

BRAVING NEW CONTEXTS Returning to the original idea of this project, can Sabahan traditional music forms be adapted for performance, in combination with contemporary music

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Example 3.  Opening bars 1–8 of “Source,” as arranged for DVCB by Mark Buys

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Example 4.  Titikas motif, as arranged for saxophone, bars 13–16

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Example 5.  Flute and piccolo sections, bars 49–56

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themes and instrumentation, as a means of conserving their musical heritage? On the basis of my study, the answer is yes. This project has provided me with an opportunity to engage with the history of my people, by investigating and analyzing lesser-known traditional Sabahan folk songs as a basis for new compositions. Understanding the history of the titikas yielded meaningful insight into its form and function, helping to inform the musical direction and narratives of the new pieces. The creation of these new works has led to various performance opportunities, to both Australian and Malaysian audiences. In this way, a ritual music that would otherwise have only been heard at a tribal wedding on the banks of the Kinabatangan river has been absorbed into a new body of contemporary works that has been, and can continue to be, performed to new audiences. In retrospect, the greatest challenge for me during this project was geographical distance. Without a tribe to teach me, I had to find other ways to engage with the music and learn its collective history. This was achieved by locating what limited knowledge had been documented and published, and by accessing recordings of these music forms, which were rarer still. Without a written culture, much of this music has been played and passed down through memory.51 Documenting the music on paper for future generations, then, is an important first step. The nuances of the music can, however, be difficult to convey via the Western music notation system. During our rehearsals with the DVCB, for example, I had to play the audio samples of the titikas to the Tasmanian ensemble in order for them to execute the motifs in an “authentic” way. So creating more recordings of the music in its traditional form is equally imperative. While Tasmania is certainly far from the origin of these musics, the limits on my access to them are shared even by local Sabahans. In order for the group of Sabahan scholars to observe the titikas in situ, for instance, they had to travel to Bukit Garam, a remote area that requires considerable travel from any major town. If we are to see a revival of interest and increase the chances of Sabah’s traditional musical heritage surviving into the future, I believe that creating better access to and engagement with the music is a vital part of the solution. A titikas ensemble from Bukit Garam has already taken steps in the right direction by training their youth to play and to perform their music at major festivals around the state.52 Local efforts such as these are laudable, and could make bigger strides with government support.53 51 Baxter et al., “An Analysis,” 18. 52 Ibid., 35. 53 Ibid.

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The traditional music of Sabah is as diverse as its people, each tribe possessing a musical heritage that is unique in style. This rich musical history of my people provides tremendous scope for further analysis, experimentation, application and performance. While the prospect of their traditional music being recontextualized and performed by forty-five Tasmanians a world away from their remote riverbank village may never be imagined by a Sabahan tribe, perhaps such “major changes in context”54 must be braved, if we are to learn how our musical history can be conserved and sustained for future generations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barrett, Margaret. “Music Education and the Natural Learning Model.” In Teaching Music, edited by Gary Spruce, 58–68. London: Routledge, 2005. Bartleet, Brydie-Leigh, and Carolyn Ellis. Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal. Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press, 2009. Baxter, Ian S, Agnes Ku Chun Moi, Jinky Jane Simeon, and Andrew Poninting. “An Analysis of Orang Sungai Music at Bukit Garam, Sandakan.” In Essays on World Music and Preservation, edited by Loo Fung Chiat, Loo Fung Ying, and Mohd Nasir Hashim, 13–41. Bergisch Gladbach: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012. Ellis, Carolyn S., and Arthur P. Bochner. “Analysing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35, no. 4 (2006): 429–49. Evans, Ivor H. N. Among Primitive Peoples in Borneo. London: Oxford University Press, 1990. Frame, Edward. “The Musical Instruments of Sabah, Malaysia.” Ethnomusicology 26, no. 2 (1982): 247–74. Hussin, Hanafi. “Performing Arts as Healing Ritual Tools: Drum Beating and Sumazau Dance in Monogit Ritual of Penamapang Kadazan of Sabah.” Jurnal Jabatan Pengajian Asia Tenggara 11 (2006): 1–19. John Baptist, Judeth, and Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan. “Enriching The Soundscape and Dancescape of Sabah Through Sumazau.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (2018): 181–204. Kartomi, Margaret J. “Traditional Music Weeps and Other Themes in the Discourse on Music, Dance and Theatre of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 366–400. Ledesma, Charles de. “At the Crossroads: Malaysian Music Fights for Survival.” In World Music, edited by Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, David Muddyman, and Richard Trillo. London: The Rough Guides, 1994. Matusky, Patricia. “Borneo: Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, Kalimantan.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, edited by Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams, vol. 4, 823–38. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. 54 Schippers, “From Ca Tru to the World,” 206.

Reimagining Traditional Ritual Music of Sabah N.a. “Kadazan Dusun.” In Siri Etnik Sabah ITBM—UMS, edited by Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan, 182. Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan, 2012. Pugh-Kitingan, Jacqueline. Selected Papers on Music in Sabah. Sabah, Malaysia: Universiti Malaysia Sabah, 2004. ——. “Dance and Ritual in Sabah.” In Sharing Identities: Celebrating Dance in Malaysia, edited by Mohd Anis Md Nor and Stephanie Burridge, 166–86 (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011). ——. Kadazan Dusun. Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan & Buku Malaysia, 2012. ——. “Balancing the Human and Spiritual Worlds: Ritual, Music, and Dance Among Dusunic Societies in Sabah.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 46 (2014): 170–90. Puyok, Arnold, and Tony Paridi Bagang. “Ethnicity, Culture and Indigenous Leadership in Modern Politics: The Case of the Kadazandusun in Sabah, East Malaysia.” Kajian Malaysia 29, no. 1 (2011): 177–9. Reid, Anthony. “Endangered Identity: Kadazan or Dusun in Sabah (East Malaysia).” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28, no. 1 (1997): 120–36. Rutter, Owen. The Pagans of North Borneo. London: Hutchinson, 1929. Schippers, Huib. “From Ca Tru to the World: Understanding and Facilitating Musical Sustainability.” In Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, edited by Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis, 197–207. Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press, 2009.

Discography Atama. My Tribal Roots. Label and disc number unknown, 2005. Polunin, Ivan. Murut Music of North Borneo. Folkways Records FE4459, 1961.

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CHAPTER 7

Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile ALLAN BADLEY

ABSTRACT On December 22, 1798 the Wiener Zeitung announced the publication of a new characteristic sonata by Johann Baptist Wanhal titled Die grosse See-Schlacht bei Abukir. Wanhal was not the first composer in Vienna to publish a work capitalizing on Nelson’s sensational victory over the French fleet off Alexandria in the battle fought over August 1–3, 1798. On November 14, Ferdinand Kauer had announced, as the first issue of his Musikalische Monatschrift, a characteristic work for fortepiano, violin, and violoncello styled Nelsons grosse See–Schlacht. The works of both Kauer and Wanhal are more than just “characteristic” works in the military style. They are explicitly programmatic and present coherent, consistent, and largely accurate narratives of the battle even if their treatments differ at times in emphasis and musical structure. In considering these two works, questions arise about the composers’ access to information about the battle, their understanding of it, and the extent to which creative license is privileged above historical fidelity in the final form each work takes. This paper also argues that works of this type can offer a rich and at times novel perspective on the relationship between music and the wider world at this critical time in European history.

T

he French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars that followed were not the first global conflicts, but their unprecedented scale, savagery, and cost made them harbingers of the catastrophic conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. Although their battles raged over a huge geographical area that ran from the West Indies to the Nile Delta and from the Iberian Peninsula

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to Russia, the public at large had never before been so well informed—or cynically misinformed—about their conduct nor able to follow the course of these events so closely in newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, and other ephemera. Major battles generated huge public interest and were memorialized in paintings, engravings, poems, and music as well as newspaper reports, published dispatches, and other sources of information. A notable feature of many of these artistic productions is their incorporation of imagery based on factual accounts of the events concerned. A tension between historical fidelity and artistic license is evident in many programmatic compositions of the period. Artistic license was frequently exercised when there were gaps in the documented narrative, but there is evidence that even when composers had access to reliable information they still felt free to interpolate new episodes in their programmatic structures to create works that were “new,” distinctive, and commercially attractive to publishers. Such approaches can be seen in two musical depictions of the Battle of the Nile published in Vienna in 1798. On 22 December of that year the Wiener Zeitung announced the publication of a new characteristic sonata by Johann Baptist Wanhal, titled Die grosse See-Schlacht bey Abukir.1 It is a curious announcement. Unusually long and at 1 See Wiener Zeitung 102 (December 22, 1798): 3873. Unser Herr Wanhal, welche sich durch eine lange Reihe von Jahren als musikalischer Schriftsteeller [sic.] in Stücke jeder Art, auf die uneigennüßiggste Weise rühmlich bekannt gemacht hat, zeichnette sich vorzüglich die letzte Kriegszeit durch Verfassung verschiedener Gelegenheitsstücke aus, welche derr [sic.] Unferfertigte nach und nach unter der Adresse Jooseph [sic.] Eder und Kompagnie im Stiche verlegte. Unnter [sic.] diesen Musikstücken hatten 3 characteristische Klaviersonaten das besondere Glück, alle Ständen amn [sic.] meisten zu gefallen; denn seine Schlacht bey Würzburg wurde selbst in Feindes Landen gesucheet [sic], und an die höchsten Höfe Europens gesendett [sic.]; die allehöchste k.k. Familie schenkte ihr das alldergnädige Wohlgefallen.—Ein so ungetheilterr [sic.] Beyfall konnte nicht anders als für den Herrn Verfasser schmeichelhaft seyn, und ihn zur Fortsetzuung [sic.] ähnlicher Arbeiten aufmuntern.—Er hat alsso [sic] seine wenigen übrigen Stunden dahin verwendett [sic], über die letzte merkwürdige Zeitsgeschichte eine vieerte [sic] characterische Sonata zu schreiben, betitlet:/Die grosse See-Schlacht bey Abukir,/gesetzt fürs Piano Forte,/welche aus des Unterzeichneten Verlag für 1fl. 20kr. Tägglich [sic.] zu haben ist: In Wien bey Herrn Kunst=uund [sic.] Musikalienhändler Träg in der Singerstrasse beym Greifen die hintere Stiege imn [sic.] Hof links, im 2ten Stock links die letzte Thür. Auswärts in jeder der vorzüglichsten Handlungen derr [sic.] Provincialhaupstädte, oder durch postfreye Briefe an den Unterzeichneten.   Das ganz abgenutzte Werk obiger Schlacht bey Würzburg wird wieder ganz neu gestochen, und da es in einer Arbeit gebet, mit einem neuen militärischen Rondo veesehen [sic], nächstes erscheinen./Ignaz Sauer,/Inhabe des Kunstverlages der 7 Schwestern in Wien, in der Währingergasse im k.k. Waisenhaus wohnhaft.

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times extravagantly misspelled even by eighteenth-century standards, it gives very little information about the work itself but reminds the reader of Wanhal’s reputation as a musical storyteller (ein musikalischer Schriftsteller). The notice makes particular mention of a recent work, Die Schlacht bey Würzburg, which had proved so popular that it was even sought after in enemy lands. More surprising, however, are the convoluted circumstances of the new work’s publication, which are partially in evidence in the text of the announcement. No fewer than three publishers are referred to: Joseph Eder, publisher of Die Schlacht bey Würzburg and other characteristic pieces by Wanhal; Johann Traeg, the founder of one of the busiest and most reputable copying establishments in Vienna and now an increasingly important publisher; and lastly, Ignaz Sauer, the work’s actual publisher.2 Sauer, who in January 1798 had founded his Kunstverlag zu den sieben Schwestern after terminating his partnership with Eder at the end of previous year, had not yet secured a publishing license, and Otto Erich Deutsch postulates that Sauer may have chosen Traeg as the nominal commissioner of the work because Eder had published a Nelson-themed work several weeks earlier.3 On balance it seems likely that Sauer approached Wanhal with the idea of composing a keyboard work that capitalized on the strong interest in news of Nelson’s spectacular victory over the French fleet. The possibility that the initiative came from Wanhal himself cannot be entirely ruled out since he appears to have taken a keen interest in the progress of the war and even contributed financially to its support. In 1798 his name appears on a list printed in the Wiener Zeitung of individuals who had allowed war loans issued in 1797 to be treated as a gift, and at 24 Gulden, Wanhal’s donation was more substantial even than those made by some members of the nobility.4 Nonetheless, had Wanhal proposed the idea himself, it seems strange that he did not seek to publish the work with Eder given the success of Die Schlacht bey Würzburg. Eder’s apparent 2 Alexander Weinmann, “Sauer,” Grove Music Online, accessed July 5, 2019, https://doi-org. ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.24631. See also Alexander Weinmann, Verlagsverzeichnis Ignaz Sauer (Kunstverlag zu den Sieben Schwestern), Sauer und Leidesdorf und Anton Berka & Comp. (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1972). 3 Otto Erich Deutsch, Admiral Nelson and Joseph Haydn, ed. Gitta Deutsch, Rudolf Klein (Norwich: The Nelson Society, 2000). 4 “Fortsetzung des Verzeichnisses derjenigen Parteyen von der Stadt Wien, welche bey Gelegenheit des für das Jahr 1797 ausgeschriebenen Kriegsbarlehens nachstehende Beträge als freywillige Geschenke angebothen haben,” Appendix to Wiener Zeitung 27 (April 14, 1798): 972. I am indebted to Halvor Hosar for drawing this information to my attention.

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failure to commission Wanhal to compose such a work may have been due to his association with the composer and music director Ferdinand Kauer, whose composition Nelsons grosse See-Schlacht had been advertised in the Wiener Zeitung as early as November 14.5 The announcements in the Wiener Zeitung establish an apparently unambiguous chronological relationship between these two works, but they do not tell the complete story. It is not possible to infer conclusively from this information, for example, whether Wanhal composed his work in response to the publication of Kauer’s or whether he wrote it more or less simultaneously but was unable to publish it first because of Sauer’s failure to obtain a license. As we shall see, the two works share many points of similarity in their programmatic structures and for obvious extra-musical reasons. But Wanhal and Kauer approach the composition of their works in very different ways. Drawing on accounts of the battle published in the Wiener Zeitung, it is possible to determine which information about the battle was readily available to Kauer and Wanhal and at what point. War news unsurprisingly dominated the content of the Wiener Zeitung in the last months of 1798. Brief reports from correspondents across Europe offered a fragmented picture of events, and to read them today is to understand something of the difficulty faced at the time by Governments and their military commanders as they tried to formulate strategies on the basis of incomplete and out of date information. The full picture often took months to form as reports were received, studied, and verified. By the time orders were drawn up and relayed back to the theatre of operations, the situation had invariably changed in unforeseen ways. For that reason, it was understood that commanders were permitted to exercise their initiative in taking the fight to the enemy. Nelson, unrivalled among his contemporaries in this respect, possessed the ability to act swiftly, decisively and unconventionally. He was a naval commander of genius. On August 8, 1798, the Wiener Zeitung published a brief notice to the effect that the French fleet had sailed in the direction of Egypt and must have arrived in the harbor at Alexandria in the first days of July.6 Confirmation of the French fleet’s presence at Alexandria did not appear in print until September 8 5 Wiener Zeitung 91 (November 14, 1798): 3424 and Wiener Zeitung 97 (December 5, 1798): 3658. 6 “Nur so viel ist gewiß, daß die Französ. Flotte ihre Richtung durchaus nach Egypten nahm, auch allem Unscheine und mehreren Nachrichten zu Folge, in den ersten Tagen des Monaths Julius im Hafen von Alexandria eingelaufen seyn muß.” Wiener Zeitung 63 (August 8, 1798): 2378.

Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile

when the Wiener Zeitung reported that, according to the London papers of August 21, an express from Egypt had just confirmed that the French fleet had arrived at Alexandria on July 7.7 This notice was followed in the very next issue by a brief report on the strength of the Royal Navy as reported by the Admiralty. That the Wiener Zeitung included this report is perhaps indicative of the interest in the naval war even in land-locked Vienna, as much as its geopolitical importance, and the figures must have astounded many readers. In 1798, the Admiralty advised that the total number of serviceable armed vessels, ranging from cutters of 10 guns to 100-gun ships of the line, amounted to some 700 ships, a number greater than at any point in their history, requiring an establishment of 120,000 sailors.8 On September 22 news broke in Vienna of the epic battle between the British and French fleets at Abukir Bay. Nelson had given the honor of carrying his duplicate set of dispatches to the Admiralty in London to Thomas Bladen Capel, his Signal-Lieutenant at the Nile, whom he had newly promoted to the command of the 16-gun sloop Mutine.9 Taking the overland route, Capel (Deutsch erroneously identifies him as Captain Thomas Bladen) left Egypt in the middle of August, brought the news first to Naples on September 3 and arrived in Vienna en route to London on September 21.10 The following day, the Wiener Zeitung published a reasonably full account of the battle which was clearly based on the dispatches brought by Capel. The news must have been 7 “In den Londner Blättern vom 21. Aug. list man Folgendes: ‘Wie wir vernehmen, ist heute ein Expresser aus Egypten mit der Nachricht angekomen, daß die Französiche Flotte am 7. Jul. im Hafen von Alexandria eingelaufen ist.’” Wiener Zeitung 72 (September 8, 1798): 2724. The same issue also reports that the Lion, one of the ships sent from Cadiz to reinforce Nelson and carry munitions, had captured the Spanish frigate Dorothea, 44, off Carthagena and attacked three other frigates in the chase: “Das Englische Kriegsschiff Lion, welches von Cadiz abgegangen ist, um der Flotte des Admirals Nelson Munizion zuzuführen, hat bey Carthagena, die Spanische Fregate Dorothea von 44 Kan. genommen, und 3 andere Fregaten in die Flucht geschlagen.” 8 “Nach Berichten aus London, vom 21, Aug. läßt die Admiralität gegenwärtig alle noch brauchbare Kriegsschiffe ausrüsten, und auslaufen, so daß man gegenwärtig die bewaffneten Kriegsschiffe von Kutter zu 10 Kanonen, bis zum Linienschiffe von 100 Kanonen, auf 700 rechnet; eine Seemacht, die England zu keiner Zeit gehabt hat. Da zur Bemannung derselben 120,000 Matrosen erfordet werden, so ist der Preßgang sehr stark, und wird auch an Sonnund Feyertagen, bey Tag und bey Nacht, fortgesetzt. …” Wiener Zeitung 74 (September 15, 1798): 2790. 9 William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, accessed October 20, 2017, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Naval_Biographical_Dictionary/Capel,_Thomas_ Bladen. 10 Deutsch, Admiral Nelson and Joseph Haydn, n. 3.

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in general circulation within hours because in the same issue, Artaria and Company advertised for sale a portrait of Nelson engraved by Johann Neidl which was based on an original painting by the English artist Daniel Orme (1766–1832).11 This advertisement was printed in a number of issues over the following weeks. According to the report: The English fleet, under the command of Nelson, had left the harbor at Syracuse on July 25 in search of the enemy fleet. On August 1 towards evening, the English Admiral met with the French fleet at Abukir where it was anchored in battle order. Nelson ordered an immediate attack and the engagement lasted, with short intervals of quiet, until the August 3. On the first day, at 10 o’clock in the evening, the 120-gun French flagship L’Orient blew up with the loss of 1,000 men. On the following day the Timoleon, 74, suffered the same fate. In the end, nine other ships, two of 80 guns, and seven of 74, and a frigate, were captured by the English. Two further ships, one of 80 guns and the other of 74, and two frigates, badly damaged, escaped, probably to Corfu. Two frigates and a bomb boat (Bombardier-Galliote) were also burned.12

11 “Bey Artaria und Comp./ am Kohlmarkt, ist ganz neu zu haben:/ Das Portrait/des Admirals Sir H. Nelson. Nach einem Originalgemälde des berühmten Orme/in Bartolozischer Manier punsirt von/J. Neidl./Man glaubt, daß bey gegewärtigen Ereignissen dem Publikum dieses besonders schöne und vollkommen ähnliche Portrait eines so grossen Mannes angenehm seyn wird, dessen ausgezeichnete Heldenthaten in der Geschichte Englands Epoche machen./Ein sehr reiner Abdruck kostet 1fl.” Wiener Zeitung 76 (September 22, 1798): 2916. 12 See ibid., 2863: Den weiteren von dem Treffen bey Alexandria allhier eingegangen Nachrichten zu Folge, hat die Englische Flotte, unter den Befehlen des Admirals Nelson, am 25. Jul. den Hafen von Syracus verlassen, um neverdings die feindliche Flotte aufzusuchen. Am 1. August gegen Abend, traf der Englische Admiral mit seiner Flotte, bey Abukir ein, wo die Französische Flotte vor unter und in Schlachtordnung stand. Der Englische Admiral ließ sogleich angreifen, und das Treffen dauerte, mit kurzen Zwischenräumen von Ruhe, bis den 3. August. Schon den ersten Tag, um 10 Uhr abends, flog das Französische Admiralschiff, L’Orient, von 120 Kanonen, in die Luft, und die ganze Besatzung, die aus 1000 Mann bestand, ging damit zu Grunde. Am folgenden Tage hatte das Kriegsschiff Timoleon, von 74 Kanonen, ein gleiches Schicksal. Endlich wurden 9 andere Schiffe, 2 von 80, und 7 von 74 Kanonen, wie auch eine Fregate, von den Engländern erobert. Zwei andere Schiffe, eines von 80, das andere von 74 Kanonen, wie auch 2 Fregaten, sind in einem sehr kümmerlichen Zustande, entkommen, und haben sich, wie man vermuthet, nach Corfu geflüchtet. Zwei Fregaten und eine Bombardier-Galliote sind verbrant worden.

Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile

There follows a short statement concerning the size of the two fleets and their respective casualties: 218 dead and 677 wounded in the British fleet; 5,336 dead, drowned, and burned in the French fleet and 3,705 prisoners taken.13 The next report about the battle appeared in the Wiener Zeitung on September 29 in the form of a communiqué issued by the French Redacteur which notably conceals the full extent of the catastrophe.14 A further update, printed on October 3, notes that Admiral Brueys was cut down by a cannonball before L’Orient caught fire and the Chief of the General Staff, with part of the crew, escaped overboard before the ship went up in flames.15 More significant in view 13 See the German original: Die Englische Flotte bestand aus 13 Kriegsschiffen, und einem Schiffe von 50 Kanonen. Sie hat keines ihrer Schiffe in Gesechte verloren. An Todten zählt sie 21 und an Verwundeten 677 Mann. Unter den estern ist ein Kapitain, und unter den letzteren der Admiral Nelson selbst, aber seine Wunde ist nicht gefährlich. Die Französiche Flotte, wie aus dem Ungeführten erhellet, bestand au seine Schiffe von 120 Kanonen, aus 3 von 80, aus 9 von 74, aus 2 Fregatten von 40, zwey von 36, und einer, von 18 Kanonen, wie auch einer Bombardier-Galliote. Auch hatten die Franzosen eine Bombe-Batterie auf der Spitze von Abukir. Nach dem Berichte des Französischen Komissars, verlor die Französische Flotte an Getödten, Ertrunken und Verbrannten, 5226, und nach der Anzeig des Königl. Großbrittanischen Kommissars, an Gefangenen, 3705 Mann. Der Admiral Nelson hat die eroberten Schiffe nach Gibralter gesand, und blokiret den Hafen von Alexandria, wohin sich 2 Linienschiffe (ehemahls Veneziansiche) und alle Transportschiffe geflüchtet. 14 See Wiener Zeitung 78 (September 29, 1798): 29. Nebst dem meldet der Redacteur vorläufig die Niederlage der Französ. Flotte bey Alexandria, jedoch bloß mit folgenden Worten: “Die Toulone flotte unter dem Admirale Bruis, die an der Egyptischen Küste bey Beguineres, (östlich von Alexandrien) vor Unter lag, und sich zur Rückkehr nach Frankreich anschickte, ist von der Englischen Flotte, die Weit starker, als die unsere an der Zahl und Stärke der Schiffe war, angegriffen worden. Von beyden Seiten würde das Gesecht mit einer hartmächtigkeit fortegesetzt, von der man in der Geschichte kein Beyspiel hat. Während des Treffens wurde das Französ. Admiralschiff verbrannt, und 2 oder 3 Schiffe wurden in Grund gebohrt, andere, sowohl Englische als Französische Schiffe, scheiterten auf der Küste, nachdem sie alle ihre Masten verloren hatten: andere Französische Schiffe, deren Schicksal man unruhig ist, wurden gänzlich entmastet. 15 “Diesem Berichte ist ein anderer von der bey Alexandria vorgefallenen Seeschlacht beygefüget, welcher mit den schon darüber erschienen Berichten ganz übereinstimmert, und nur den Umstand meldet, daß der französ. Admiral Brüyes, noch vorher als der L’Orient in Brand gerieth, durch einen Kanonenschuß ungekommen war, und der Chef der Generalstabs, mit einem Theile der Mannschaft, sich über Bord gerettet habe, bevor das Schiff in Feuer aufging.” Wiener Zeitung 79 (October 3, 1798): 2982.

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of the fact that the Admiralty itself had not yet received the official dispatches, is Artaria and Company’s advertisement in the same issue of a plan of the battle which shows the number and positions of the ships of the line along with their names and complements.16 This information can only have come via Capel, who must have been given instructions by Nelson to provide as full and accurate an account of the battle as possible when he reported to their erstwhile Austrian allies. Further evidence of this can be seen in the publication of a table listing the strengths of the two fleets in the following issue (October 6) along with details of the French casualties. Since Capel did not arrive in London until October 2, he must have left copies of all this information in Vienna. It cannot have been lost on Viennese readers that the English fleet, described by the French Redacteur as being far larger in number and in strength than the French, had considerably fewer guns and men.17 Over the next few weeks, further information about the battle and its aftermath appeared in the Wiener Zeitung; it included a translation of Nelson’s own dispatch to the Admiral of the Fleet, John Jervis, Earl of St. Vincent, immediately after the battle. In keeping with the conventions of the Royal Navy at the time, Nelson’s dispatch is brief and communicates the barest essentials: the outcome of the battle, the forces engaged, and the losses in ships and men, or the “Butcher’s Bill” as it was known in the service. Of the tactics employed and the conduct of the battle itself there is little said: Vanguard, off the Mouth of the Nile, 3rd August, 1798. My Lord, Almighty God has blessed his Majesty’s Arms in the late Battle, by a great Victory over the Fleet of the Enemy, who I attacked at sunset on the 1st of August, off the Mouth of the Nile. The Enemy were moored in a strong Line of Battle for defending the entrance of the Bay [of Shoals], flanked by numerous Gun-boats, four Frigates, and a Battery of Guns and Mortars 16 “Bey Artaria und Comp./am Kohlmarkt, ist ganz neu zu haben:/PLAN/der am 1. 2. und 3. August 1798 am Ausflusse des Nils zwischen der Königl. Großbritanischen Flotte unter den Befehlen des Admirals Nelson und der Französischen unter den Befehlen des Admirals Bruis, vorgefallenen Seeschlacht. Auf diesem Plan, dessen Originalität und Richtigkeit man allerdings verbürgen kann, findet man die Anzahl der Linienschiffe, derselben Stellung, Namen und Mannschaft genauerst verzeichnet. Zugleich hat man, so viel es die kürze der Zeit erlaubt, darauf gesehen, den Plan dieser so wichtigen Seeschlacht dem Publikum rein und deutlich gestochen, unterscheidend illuminirt, und auf schönen Papier abgedruckt, zu liefern. Kostet 30kr.” Ibid., 2995. 17 Wiener Zeitung 80 (October 6, 1798): 3023.

Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile on an Island in their Van; but nothing could withstand the Squadron your Lordship did me the honor to place under my command. Their high state of discipline is well known to you, and with the judgment of the Captains, together with their valor, and that of the Officers and Men of every description, it was absolutely irresistible.18

An item published four days later, however, conveys a great deal more detail about the conduct of battle. The origin of the report is a communication from London dated October 5, which opens with a brief account of the public reaction to news of the victory. What follows is an account of the battle in the Wiener Zeitung based on private letters from English officers and documents taken from the French: The French admiral was prepared for battle; he knew that the English fleet was approaching, and a few days before their arrival, English ships appeared at the head of the bay reconnoitering the position of the French. He therefore fortified a small island that covered the entrance to the bay, threw up batteries on the landward side, and placed a large number of gunboats at the entrance through which the English fleet would need to pass. His fleet, which consisted of 13 ships of the line, one of which was a threedecker of 120 guns, commanded 1,190 guns with 10,810 men on board. He drew up his fleet at the head of the bay in shoaling water with a protective sandbank to the rear so that in event of the English ships breaking through the line of battle they would be stranded. Thus, Brueys expected Admiral Nelson who arrived on August 1 with his squadron consisting of 13 ships of the line, a 50-gun vessel and a brig, commanding 1,026 guns and 8,168 men. With an indescribable cold-bloodedness and with the 18 See Wiener Zeitung 84 (October 20, 1798): 3173. Schreiben an den Admiral Grafen von St. Vincent, Ober Kommandeur u. vor Cadiz Vanguard, an der Mündung des Nils, den 3. Aug. 1798. My Lord! Der almächtige Gott hat Sr Maj. Waffen in der letzten Schlacht, durch einen grossen Sieg über die Flotte des Feindes gesegnet, die ich bey Niedergang der Sonne, am 1 Aug. an der Mündung des Nils angriff. Der Feind lag in einer mächtigen Schlachtordnung vor Unter, um den Eingang in die Bucht zu vertheidigen; an den Flanken hatte er zahlreiche Kanonen=Böthe, 4 Fregaten und vorwärts eine Insel mit einer Batterie von Kanonen und Mösern; aber nichts konnte der Flotte widerstehen, welche Eu. unter mein Kommando zu geben mir die Ehre erwiesen haben. Ihre vortreffliche Disciplin ist Ihnen wohl gut bekannt, und mit der Einsicht der Kapitaine, ihrem Muthe, so wie mit dem Muthe der Offizier und der gesammten Mannschaft, war sie durchaus unwiderstehlich. …

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Allan Badley resolution to destroy or overthrow the whole hostile fleet, he attacked her that same evening, at 6.30, and broke through the French line. Only one ship, Culloden, 74, grounded as the French Admiral hoped. The remainder found enough water to manoeuvre and the gunfire was heavy from both sides. Around 9.45 the French flagship was in flames. Admiral Brueys, who had already received three wounds, was cut in two by a cannonball. At the same time Captain Casabianca also lost his life. The confusion on board increased and at 10 o’clock the ship blew up. Many French and British ships were damaged as a result of the explosion and for ten minutes afterwards the guns fell silent on both sides.   After that they redoubled their fire and this phase lasted until 3 in the morning. Around 5 o’clock the battle was renewed with great vigour. At 9 o’clock, another French ship, Timoleon, blew up. The two fleets were now so intertwined that the observer on the shore could not distinguish one from the other. The canon fire thundered out and a third French ship, the frigate Arthémise, burnt to destruction. Around 2 in the afternoon, the two French ships of the line Guillaume Tell and Genereux, along with the two frigates Diane and Justice, with full sails and a good wind, without which the English ships could not pursue them, fled steering eastwards. Soon afterwards, the thunder of the guns ceased, and the French ships struck their flags.19 19 See Wiener Zeitung, 85 (October 24, 1798): 3025–6. Was von diesem Siege näher bekannt wurde, folgt hier aus Privatbriefen von Englischen Offizieren und aus angefangenen Französischen Berichten. Der Französische Admiral war vorbereitet zur Schlacht; er wußte, daß die Englische Flotte sich nähere, und einige Tage vor der Ankunft derselben erschienen Englische Schiffe auf der höhe der Bucht, welche die Stellung der Franzosen rekognoscirten. Ihr Admiral befestigte daher eine kleine Insel, die den Eingang in die Bucht deckte, warf Batterien an der Landseite auf, und stellte eine Menge Kanonböte an den Eingang, um den Engländern das Einnehmen streitig zu machen. Seine Flotte, die aus 13 Linienschiffen bestand, wovon eines ein Dreydecker von 120 Kanonen war, führte 1190 Kanonen und hatte 10810 Mann an Bord. Diese lag nahe an dem Ufer vor Unter, um das Durchbrechen der Schlachtordnung zu verhindern, und im Falle es geschehen sollte, die Englischen Schiffe alsdann strandend zu machen. So erwartete Brueys den Admiral Nelson, der am 1. Aug. mit seinem Geschwader erschien, das aus 13 Linienschiffen, eine Schiffe von 50 Kanonen, und eine Brigg bestand, 1026 Kanonen führte, und 8168 Mann am Bord hatte. Mit einer unbeschreiblichen kaltblütigkeit und mit dem Entschlusse, die ganze feindliche Flotte zu zernichten oder umzukommen, grifft er sie an demselben Abend, um halb 7 Uhr an, und durchbracht ihre Schlachtordnung. Nur einem seiner Schiffe der Culloden, von 74 Kanonen geschah, was der Französische Admiral hoffte, es werde allen widerfahren: es blieb festsitzen,

Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile

Printing of reports relating to the battle continued, although from this point the stories largely concern the aftermath. It is reported on October 31, for example, that Nelson has been created a Baron under the name and style Baron Nelson of the Nile and Burnham Thorpe.20 It is further reported that the illuminations and festivals held throughout the kingdom to celebrate the victory cost more than the powder and shot used in the battle.21 It is also in this issue of the Wiener Zeitung that the action is first referred to as the Battle at Abukir; hitherto in all communications, including those from Nelson, it is referred to as having taken place off Alexandria or at the Mouth of the Nile. While Artaria in Vienna had been quick off the mark in offering for sale a portrait of Nelson and a plan of the battle, news of an impending musical tribute did not appear until November 14 when the composer Ferdinand Kauer printed an announcement advising readers that the first issue of his promised Musikalische Monatschift, to appear in December, would contain a new work titled Nelsons grosse See-Schlacht for fortepiano, violin, and violoncello. A detailed program for the work is included in the advertisement: und konnte sich erst nach geendigter Schlacht wieder losmachen. Die übrigen fanden Wasser, um manövriren zu können, und das Kanonfeuer war sogleich auf beyden Seiten heftig. Um ein Viertel auf 10 Uhr stand schon das Französischen Admiralschiff in Brand. Die Englische Flotte verdoppelte alsdann ihr Feuer. Der Admiral Brueys, der bereits 3 Wunden erhalten hatte, ward nun von einer Kugel getödtet, welche seinen Leib in zwey Theile schmetterte. Zu gleicher Zeit verlor auch sein Kapitain Casabianca das Leben. Die Verwirrung stieg auf das höchste, und das Schiff flog um 10 Uhr in die Luft. Viele Französische und Englische Schiffe wurden dadurch beschädigt, und daher schwiegen die Kanonen 10 Minuten lang auf beyden Seiten. Alsdann fingen sie aber ihn Feuer mit verdoppelter Wuth wieder an, und dieses dauerte bis 3 Uhr des Morgens. Um 5 Uhr erneuerte sich die Schlacht mit der größten Lebhaftigkeit. Um 9 Uhr flog ein anderes Französiches Schiff, der Timoleon, in die Luft. Die zwey Geschwader vermengten sich so unter einander, das die Zuschauer am Ufer die Schiffe nicht mehr von einander unterschieden konnten. Das Feuer der Kanonen würthete fort, und ein drittes Französisches Schiff, die Fregate Athemise, verbrannt gleichfalls. Um 2 Uhr Nachmittags, entflohen die 2 Französischen Linienschiffe Guillaume Tell und Genereux, wie auch die 2 Fregaten Diane und Justice, mit vollen Segeln und einem guten Winde, ohne daß die Englischen Schiffe sie verfolgen konnten, und steuerten ostwärts. Bald darauf schwieg der Donner der Kanonen, und die Französischen Schiffe stricken die Flaggen. … 20 Wiener Zeitung 87 (October 31, 1798): 3278. 21 “Alle Provinzial-Zeitungen sind voll von Beschreibung des Enthusiasmus, womit man den glorreichen Sieg des Admirals Nelson in allen Städten und Dörfen des Königreiches gefeyert hat. Man hat berechnet, daß der Zoll von den bey der Illuminazion verbrauchten Lichtern und dem bey den Freundfesten vertunkenen Welne, der Schatzkammer weit mehr einigebracht habe, als alles in der Schlacht bey Abukir verschossene Pulver und Bley gekostet hat.” Ibid., 3278–9.

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1. Introduction. Advantageous position of the French fleet before Aboukir in Egypt. 2. Nelson’s determination to attack the fleet. 3. Nelson’s appeal to the crews. Preparation for death or victory. 4. Manoeuvring of the smaller ships. 5. The approach of the English fleet. 6. The courageous attack. 7. Breakthrough of the enemy’s line. 8. Violent cannonade. 9. The French flagship L’Orient is set on fire. 10. She blows up. 11. General stupefaction and sudden pause in the cannonade. 12. The battle is resumed. 13. Cannonade and combat with renewed fury. 14. Timoléon and Artémise are on fire. 15. Escape and pursuit of the Guillaume Tell, Généreux, Diane and Justice. 16. The remaining French ships strike their flags. 17. The stranded English ship Culloden is refloated. 18. Surrender of the French ships. 19. Tending of the wounded, reception of the prisoners, burial of the dead. 20. Celebration of victory.22 Even the most cursory reading of Kauer’s program makes it obvious that it closely follows the account of the battle published on October 24. Indeed, so closely does it follow the report that we can be certain that Kauer cannot have 22 “Nelsons grosse See-Schlacht,/für das Forte piano, Violin und Violoncello./Die darin vorkommenden Gegenstände sind:- Nr.1 Introduction. Vortheilhafte Stellung der französischen Flotte bey Abukir in Egypten. Nr.2 Nelsons Entschlossenheit, dieselbe anzugreifen. Nr.3 Nelsons Anruf an das Schiffvolk, Vorberreitung zum Tod oder zum Sieg. Nr. 4 Das Laviren der kleineren Schiffe. Nr. 5 Seemarsch der nährenden englischen Flotte. Nr. 6 Der muthvolle Angriff. Nr. 7 Durchbrechung der Französischen Linie. Nr. 8. Heftige Kanonade. Nr. 9 Das französische Admiralschiff L’Orion [sic] geräth in Brand. Nr.10 Fliegt in die Luft. Nr. 11 Allgemeine Betäubung und plötzlich unterbrochene Kannonade. Nr. 12 Das Treffen beginnt auf das neue. Nr. 13 Kannonade und Gesecht mit doppelte Wuth. Nr. 14 Timoleon und Artemise brennen. Nr. 15 Flucht und Verfolgung des Wilhelm Tell, Genereux, der Diane und Justice. Nr. 16 Die übrigen französischen Schiffen streichen ihre Flaggen. Nr. 12 [sic.] Das gestrandete englische Schiff Culloden wird flott. Nr. 18 Übernahme der französischen Schiffe. Nr. 19 Verpflegung der Verwunderten, Aufnahme der Gefangenen, Begrabung der Todten. Nr. 20 Freudenschaft über den erhaltenen Sieg.”

Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile

drafted his program prior to that date. Moreover, the omission of the association with Abukir in the title suggests that he may have drafted his program before October 31, the date that particular name for the battle first appeared in print. Given that news of the battle was now several weeks old, Kauer’s decision to write a programmatic piece based on it seems to have been made only after the publication of the most detailed and vivid of the accounts. What had appeared earlier was dry and factual and hardly written in a manner to fire the imagination. Kauer’s omission of the wounding and death of Admiral Brueys, which offered great dramatic possibilities for musical treatment, shows that he consciously imposed some limits on the content of the program. Although we cannot be certain when Wanhal made the decision to compose his work or accepted a commission to do so, it is certain that he had access to much the same information as Kauer, including the all-important account of the battle printed on October 24: 1. Introduction [Andante] The High Admiralty in London appoints Sir Horatio Nelson to command of the Fleet. 2. Maestoso The English crew goes aboard. 3. Allegro moderato Admiral Nelson gives orders for departure. The anchors are weighed. Spreading of the sails. The ships depart. The French fleet is sighted in the Mediterranean. The dispatch boats discover the enemy and bring the news. Council of War. 4. Tempo Militare Nelson exhorts the crews to give battle. The crews are ready to conquer or die. Signal for the attack. 5. Allegro moderato The fleet closes on the enemy and attacks. The attack becomes lively. Beginning of the cannonade. Heavy canon fire. The English break through the enemy’s line. They furiously attack the enemy’s flagship. It is set on fire and blows up. General stupefaction and dead silence. The most intense canon fire from full broadsides. General pursuit of the disordered enemy fleet. [An English ship capsizes]. Two enemy ships collide and burn. Others are being chased. Some strike their flags. A few ships try to save themselves by flight. The enemy fleet is beaten and almost entirely destroyed.

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6. Andante The English Nation welcomes the hero. 7. Finale all’Inglese Victory celebrations.23 A comparison of the two programs shows that Kauer follows the printed account of the battle so closely that his composition functions at one level as a kind of musical gloss. That Wanhal deliberately omits readily available details such as the names of enemy ships is significant in the context of his program as a whole. The programmatic content of the first three movements of Die grosse SeeSchlacht bei Abukir is largely of Sauer’s or Wanhal’s own invention. Since there is little compelling justification for the opening episode in the narrative—the deliberations at the Admiralty—its function as a slow introduction is to impose a tone of appropriate gravitas. The third movement complex allows Wanhal to compose some generic nautical music depicting, for example, the weighing of anchors and spreading of sails. More importantly, the fluid structure and pace of this section quickly advances the narrative: the French fleet is sighted in the Mediterranean; the dispatch boats (avisos) discover the enemy and bring news; a council of war takes place. The compactness of the sixty-seven-bar section compresses the narrative elements, each characterized by its own distinctive musical identity, which heightens the sense of dramatic action. Nelson’s order to sail is suitably imperious, and makes prominent use of the king topic, while the weighing of the anchors is also appropriately evocative. The spreading of the sails and the departure of the fleet is marked by a change of tempo and the music 23 “1. Introduction [Andante]: Die hohe Admiralität in London ernennt den Sir Horatio Nelson zum Befehlshaber der Flotte. 2. Maestoso: Die englische Mannschaft begiebt sich an Bord. 3. Allegro moderato: Admiral Nelson ertheilt Befehl zur Abfahrt. [Allo molto]. Spannung der Segel. Die Anker werden gelichtet. Die Schiffe segeln ab. Die feindische französische Flotte wird im mittelländischen Meere gesuchtet. Die Aviso Schiffe entdecken die feindliche Flotte, und bringen Nachricht. Kriegsrath hierüber. 4. Tempo Militare: Nelson ermuhtet das Schiffsvolk zur Seeschlacht. Die Mannschaft ist bereit zu siegen oder zu sterben. Signal zum Angriff. [Allo moderato]: Die Flotte nähert sich der feindlichen und greift an. Der Angriff wird lebhaft. Anfang der Kanonade. Starkes Kanonenfeuer. Die Engländer durchbrechen die feindliche Linie. Sie setzen dem feindlichen Admiralschiffe heftig zu. Dies brennet und springt in die Luft. [Betäubung und Todtenstille] Fassung und erneuerten Angriff. Der Angriff wird noch lebhafter. Das hefitgste Kanonenfeuer aus vollen Ladungen. Allgemeine Jacht auf die Unordnung gerathene feindliche Flotte. Die Engländer entern. Zwei feindliche Schiffe brennen und krachen. Andere werden verfolget. Diese streichen die Flagge. Einige Schiffe suchen sich durch die Flucht zu retten. Die feindliche Flotte wird geschlagen und fast zernichtet. 5. Andante: Die englische Nation empfängt ihre Helden. 6. Finale all’Inglese: Siegesfeyer.”

Historical Fidelity and Creative License in two Viennese Battles of the Nile

Figure 1.  Wanhal, Die grosse See-Schlacht bei Abukir – link between sections 3 and 4

is suitably energetic. But the sighting of the French fleet, attended by the abrupt introduction of syncopation, an increase in surface rhythmic activity, and modulation to the relative minor, brings a new urgency to the music. The brief Council of War is set over a dominant pedal, which finds resolution in the first bar of the following section: thus, the harmonic and tonal aspects of the music evoke the program—the Council of War leads to Nelson’s appeal to the crews who are ready for death or victory (see Figure 1). With this exhortation the work reaches its tonal highpoint, A major. In the great battle that follows, A major is sedulously avoided even though the movement is cast in D major. The hermeneutic implication of Wanhal’s tonal architecture is clear: Nelson’s exhortation and the crews’ resolution to seek victory or death demonstrate the nobility and willingness for self-sacrifice that elevates the hero above lesser men. But can the obvious differences in programmatic structure between the two works be construed as evidence that Wanhal knew Kauer’s finished composition or was familiar with the advertised program? The answer would help to narrow down the period during which Wanhal composed the work. It seems unlikely, although by no means impossible, that there would have been time for the work to be commissioned, composed and engraved between December 5, when Kauer’s work was advertised in the Wiener Zeitung, and December 22, when Wanhal’s work was announced .24 His avoidance of replicating episodes 24 “Ankündigung/In der Joseph Ederschen Kunst und Musikalienhandlung am Graben, oder bey dem Verfasser, wohnhaft in der Leopoldstadt, rückwärts dem Theater, beym ­goldenen

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which occur early in Kauer’s work suggests that he was probably familiar with the advertised program and may have begun work on his own composition sometime after November 14. That Wanhal explicitly links the battle with Abukir in the work’s title shows that he (or Sauer) paid close attention to the latest reports printed in the newspaper. With their reliance on the same sources of information, it is unsurprising that the two programs share a high proportion of common material (see Table 1). Table 1.  Common elements in the narratives of Kauer and Wanhal Kauer

Wanhal

Nelson’s appeal to the crews: preparation for death or victory.

The crews are ready to conquer or die.

Breakthrough of the enemy’s line.

The English break through the enemy’s line.

The French flagship L’Orient is set on fire.

They furiously attack the enemy’s flagship. It is set on fire…

She blows up.

and blows up.

General stupefaction and sudden pause in the cannonade.

General stupefaction and dead silence.

Cannonade and combat resumed with renewed fury.

The most intense canon fire from full broadsides.

Timoléon and Artémise are on fire.

Two enemy ships collide and burn.

Escape and pursuit of Guillaume Tell, Généreux, Diane & Justice.

Others are being chased.

The remaining French ships strike their flags.

Some strike their flags. Some ships try to save themselves by flight.

Surrender of the French fleet

The enemy fleet is beaten and almost entirely destroyed.

Celebration of victory

Celebration of victory

Although Kauer’s work is marginally the longer at 459 bars (Wanhal’s composition is 406 bars), it has disproportionately more individual sections even if some of them are very short and form part of longer musical complexes. Wanhal’s composition is more compact with fewer movements to encompass much the same narrative action. Ring Nr. 424, ist um 2fl. täglich zu haben:/Nelsons grosse Seeschlacht./Für das Forte piano, mit Begleitung einer/Violin und Violoncello./Verfassert und zugeeignet Sr. Königl. Hoheit/August, Prinz von England./von Ferdinand Kauer.” Wiener Zeitung 97 (December 5, 1798): 3658.

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The success of all program music ultimately rests on the intelligibility of the program to the audience. With topical works such as our two Battles of the Nile, composers, publishers and performers could be confident that the broad outline of the program was familiar to their audiences through access to common sources of information. Composers might employ well-established musical signifiers to communicate expressive detail, or experiment with rather more subtle organizational techniques to convey meaning, but such techniques occupy a secondary place to the overt communicative framework imposed by the program itself. The relationship between the program and the music is accentuated in Wanhal’s Die große See-Schlacht bei Abukir by the placement of narrative cues at appropriate places in the music, which the player can clearly choose to read out loud in performance. Kauer, on the other hand, numbers each section in the fortepiano part and provides a key at the end of the final section so that the performer can unpick the narrative. That these numbers are not printed on the violin and violoncello parts emphasizes the dominant role of the fortepiano in the ensemble and the agency given the performer in interpreting the work and in explaining it to an audience. Superficially, Kauer’s work is the more impressive: its weightier instrumentation and more technically challenging keyboard writing enable him to create more obvious dramatic effects. But Wanhal’s finely-honed technique is evident in many small details in the music, none more so than those in the lengthy fifth-movement complex which lies at the heart of the work. This opens with the signal to attack (Wanhal cleverly suggests the sound of the drums beating to quarters) and ends with the near total destruction of the French fleet. The music is dramatic, highly effective and cleverly pictorial at times. It has a sense of pace and direction that reminds us of Wanhal’s mastery of the symphony, and it is easy to imagine that an orchestral version of this work might have proved highly successful. Its most striking effect, however, is the use of silence after the destruction of the French flagship and at this moment he shows himself to be more daring than Kauer. The destruction of the French flagship was something that witnesses would never forget. It became the subject of many paintings and prints and it remains to this day the image most usually associated with the Battle of the Nile. It featured in all the printed accounts of the battle, and the all-important report printed in the Wiener Zeitung on October 24 stated that after the explosion, that the guns fell silent for ten minutes. Kauer signals the destruction of L’Orient with a swirling, rising, arpeggiated figure

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that culminates in a diminished chord followed by a minim rest with fermata: the “General stupefaction and sudden pause in the cannonade” (no. 11) is depicted by a descending figure that spans a full two octaves and unfolds over a pedal point. The passage itself is well-wrought if formulaic in conception, but it is less effective in depicting this critical moment in the narrative (see Figure 2). Wanhal, by contrast, chooses to interpret “General stupefaction and deathly silence” with daring fidelity. Flames flicker fitfully for several bars, punctuated by rests (Dieses brennet), before a rapid scalic passage (und springet in die Luft) ends with an explosive, szforzando dominant-seventh chord. The scalic passage is less dramatic than Kauer’s virtuosic flourish, but it is followed by three bars of notated rests under which is set the text “Allgemeine Betäubung und Todtenstille.” In the breathtaking simplicity of this gesture lies its brilliance. (See Figure 3). By the end of the eighteenth century, a very clear intellectual and aesthetic divide existed in instrumental music between large-scale, complex works such as symphonies and string quartets, which occupied the positions of greatest prestige, and smaller works—in particular, dances and other kinds of musical ephemera—which were accorded considerably lower status. Occasional works such as battle pieces and other novelties might bring commercial success but they won for their composers little in the way of professional acclaim. These pieces were intended to be suitable for amateur performers of modest technique to play in domestic settings. There is no reason to believe that the two works considered in this paper sit outside this tradition to any great extent, yet their topicality and attempted historical veracity suggest that for a time at least, their function was more complex than mere entertainment. The works informed, if only through their programs; and they celebrated personal heroism and the triumph of an ally over a dangerous enemy. Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet brought him a peerage, although a rather more modest one than he felt he deserved, and a coffin fashioned from part of the mainmast of L’Orient, in which he lies inside his elaborate sarcophagus in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. What Die grosse Seeschlacht bei Abukir brought Wanhal is far less certain but he did compose one further Nelson work, Die Seeschlacht bei Trafalgar, which was published in 1806. Although the work has some fine moments, it is less interesting both musically and structurally than the earlier composition. No real attempt is made to construct a coherent narrative and the mortal wounding and death

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Figure 2.  Kauer, Nelsons grosse See-Schlacht – “Allgemeine Betäubung”

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Figure 3.  Wanhal, Die grosse See-Schlacht bei Abukir – “Allgemeine Betäubung und Todtenstille”

of Nelson, which should have possessed a dramatic intensity similar to the destruction of L’Orient, is curiously muted. While Wanhal’s detractors might ascribe this to a waning of his powers, or perhaps see it as a measure of his lack of interest in the work, it is possible that the deficiencies of Die Seeschlacht bei Trafalgar und Tod Admiral Nelsons can be traced to the press coverage of the battle in the Wiener Zeitung, which lacks a direct counterpart to the gripping, blow by blow account of the earlier battle. Die grosse Seeschlacht bei Abukir is an occasional piece and as such it automatically fails to command the respect accorded to the composer’s works in more prestigious genres. Yet its very existence and the form it takes arguably reveals more about this enigmatic man’s character and engagement with the society in which he lived than any of his symphonies, concertos, or string quartets. More importantly, this work, Kauer’s, and others like them, offer a rich and at times novel perspective on the relationship between music and the wider world at this critical time in European history.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Deutsch, Otto Erich. Admiral Nelson and Joseph Haydn. Edited by Gitta Deutsch, Rudolf Klein, and The Nelson Society. Norwich: The Nelson Society, 2000. Kauer, Ferdinand. Nelsons grosse See-Schlacht für das Fortepiano mit Begleitung einer Violin und Violoncello. Erste Monatschrift. Vienna: Eder, 1798. O’Byrne, William Richard. A Naval Biographical Dictionary. Accessed October 20, 2017. https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Naval_Biographical_Dictionary/Capel,_Thomas_Bladen. Wanhal, Johann Baptist. Die grosse See-Schlacht bei Abukir. Vienna: Sauer, 1798. Weinmann, Alexander. “Sauer.” Grove Music Online. Accessed July 11, 2019. https://doi-org. ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.24631 Weinmann, Alexander. Verlagsverzeichnis Ignaz Sauer (Kunstverlag zu den Sieben Schwestern), Sauer und Leidesdorf und Anton Berka & Comp. Vienna: Universal, 1972.

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CHAPTER 8

Gallipoli to the Somme: A Musical Witness to History ANTHONY RITCHIE ABSTRACT Anthony Ritchie’s oratorio Gallipoli to the Somme was written to commemorate World War I and has been performed in London and Oxford as well as New Zealand, the composer’s home country. It brings together an eclectic mix of literary and musical sources to make a humanist statement, based on the perspectives of soldiers, nurses, mothers, and others, from four different nations. The glue that holds it together is Alexander Aitken’s 1963 book Gallipoli to the Somme which recounts the experience of a New Zealand soldier in World War I. During the creative process, Ritchie found himself asking questions: What is the purpose of composing and performing war history? What is the most effective way of representing war in music and words? He explores what it means to commemorate war and the dangers of distorting reality to make war more manageable for audiences. Methods of critiquing the war through music are discussed, including the use of irony and immediacy as a way of uncovering truth. The artistic perils of voyeurism and the exploitation of suffering are grappled with. Ritchie outlines the musical means he uses to represent trauma in a way that is both sensitive and helpful to people hoping to manage trauma effectively.

D

uring the period 2014–2018, the First World War has been remembered through many artistic and musical works. This grim period of history has also been the subject of many books, articles, exhibitions, and films, ensuring that the war has been memorialized in the collective mind. In New Zealand, the centenary has spawned numerous musical compositions, including major works such as Ross Harris’s Requiem for the Fallen (2014), and John Psathas’s No Man’s

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Land (2016). This is not surprising given New Zealand’s extensive involvement in the war; no people travelled further to fight in the trenches, and only Britain’s loss of life in proportion to its population was greater.1 Anzac Day, which originated from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, has become “a symbol of a growing consciousness of our own identity.”2 In 2015, I was commissioned by the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra to compose a work for choir, soloists, and orchestra commemorating World War I. Premiered in 2016, the resulting oratorio, Gallipoli to the Somme, has enjoyed four more performances, including those in Oxford (UK) and London.3 During the process of reading around the subject and imagining music for the commission, I found myself grappling with two main ethical and philosophical questions about the artistic representation of war. What is the purpose of composing and performing war history? And what is the most effective way of representing war in music and words? My approach to answering these questions involved exploring the relationship between the composition and the knowledge gained from it, what Robin Nelson would call “doing-thinking.”4 By composing Gallipoli to the Somme I have discovered some significant ideas about the human condition, to be presented below. This practice-as-research paradigm has been useful in revealing how the performance of history is relevant to our contemporary context.5 The main purposes of composing an oratorio about World War I may appear self-evident: to commemorate, to remember, to honor the dead, to express grief. A public performance of such a work is a reminder of mistakes made and a plea for peace in the future. In the words of Wilfred Owen: “All a poet can do today is warn.”6 Kate Kennedy acknowledges the legitimacy of 1 Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand Illustrated (Auckland: Penguin, 2003), 264. 2 Christopher Pugsley, Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story (Auckland: Reed, 1998), 356. 3 To view the premiere, see Anthony Ritchie, Gallipoli to The Somme, posted by SOUNZ Centre for NZ Music February 13 2018, accessed July 11, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6J-iEC0BRFM. This film was published by the Centre for New Zealand Music in 2017, using a recording made by Radio New Zealand Concert. 4 Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2013). 5 For a succinct summary of practice as research see Suzanne Little’s “Practice and Performance as Research in the Arts,” in Dunedin Soundings: Place and Performance, ed. Dan Bendrups and Graeme Downes (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011), 17–26. 6 Edmund Blunden, ed., Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964).

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remembrance, but asks: do we also commemorate war through music in order to forget the reality?7 In other words, is there a danger of artistic representation of war that does not present a realistic scenario, leading to a type of historic amnesia, or historic distortion? Paul Fussell certainly thought so when he wrote about “the modern memory” of World War I, created through the lens of writing, art, and music following the war.8 There is a sense in which an artistic representation of conflict can somehow lessen the impact of the real thing by representing it in a manageable way for an audience.9 So there are good grounds for making art or music about war not only as truthful as possible, but as immediate as possible. Historic events can seem remote, forever encapsulated in grainy black and white photos and museum items. On the other hand, a composition about war can seek to make the event as relevant as possible to contemporary audiences by making it seem real and topical. Another purpose for my work was to tell personal stories through words and music. It concerned me that many histories of World War I are so epic that they cannot possibly be encapsulated in one piece of music. My approach was to follow specific individuals and their stories, so as to contribute to the immediacy of my work. Gallipoli to the Somme goes beyond prompting remembrance, memorialization, or warning, to critiquing the war and aspects of the culture surrounding it. Critiquing war through works of art has not stopped subsequent wars, and it is presumptuous to think an oratorio could really influence those in power. Nonetheless, when the work was performed twice by the Parliament Choir (Britain), the politicians in the choir commented that it was a timely reminder of the cost of war. Music can also bring people together in a common cause, as in John Psathas’s ambitious No Man’s Land, which included musicians from around the world performing together via video links. Psathas drew parallels between World War I and current wars, while reflecting positively on global music-making as an embodiment of hope for peace. Music and culture can bring nations together. But one must be wary of what James Thompson labels “Romeo-and-Julietism,” or artificial and overlyoptimistic resolutions of conflict represented in works of art.10 Sadly, that 7 Kate Kennedy and Trudi Tate, “Literature and music of the First World War,” First World War Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), 1–6. 8 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 Suzanne Little also identified this danger in her “Re-Presenting the Traumatic Real: Douglas Wright’s Black Milk,” in Dance and Politics, ed. Alexandra Kolb (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 233. 10 James Thompson, “Questions on Performances. In Place of War,” in Representations of War

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famous football game in Belgium between French, British, and German soldiers on Christmas Day, 1914 (the so-called “Christmas Truce”) was little more than a momentary lull in the killing. Kate Kennedy has pointed out that there is a difference between the experience of commemorating war as an individual and doing so as a massed audience. The private reading of books on war or individual viewing of paintings is different to being seated in a hall with hundreds of other people to listen to music whose subject is war. Kennedy writes that in a public setting “the act of mourning and commemoration becomes an inclusive act, which does not have a parallel in art.”11 She cites the example of John Foulds’s A World Requiem which, when performed in 1923, seemed to have a therapeutic effect on the performers and audience. Collective experience can create an atmosphere that more readily allows catharsis.12 I became aware of this during the rehearsals and performances for Gallipoli to the Somme: on more than one occasion choristers and audience wept during the oratorio. Music composed in response to war does not, of course, have to be commemorative or pro-peace. It can be celebratory and patriotic, like Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, or designed to recruit soldiers, like the Hungarian verbunkos. But Gallipoli to the Somme, however, is informed by a desire to remind listeners of the horror and futility of war from a humanist perspective: that is, the work espouses no religious or patriotic convictions and aligns itself to neither side of the conflict, but rather reflects on how the war affected a range of ordinary people.

OVERVIEW OF GALLIPOLI TO THE SOMME In what follows I focus on my method of composing war history through oratorio. This includes the choice of texts, the construction of a libretto, word-setting and other musical devices, and aspects of style. The way the oratorio is constructed is influenced by its purpose, even to the extent of affecting the Migration and Refugeehood, ed. Daniel H. Rellstab and Christiane Schlote (New York: Routledge, 2015), 189. 11 Kate Kennedy, “A Music of Grief: classical music and the First World War,” International Affairs 90, no. 2 (2014): 384. 12 David Hesmondhalgh discusses at length “the idea that there is something primal in humans that orients them towards shared experience and that music and dance meet those needs in modern societies in ways that are ultimately beneficial.” Why Music Matters (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 118.

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compositional style. The music is directly influenced by the historical nature of the subject as well as the context of its performance. The final part of the chapter focuses on what the work reveals, and whether or not it tells truths about the war. In this section I will refer to literature on the representation of war and violence in artistic works, which has informed my work. First, an overview of the work:

Part One—Departing 1. Prelude. Solo violin and orchestra. 2. E te ope tuatahi (The Angry-Eyed God). Chorus. Text by Sir Apirana Ngata. 3. Farewell. Soprano solo. Text by Helen Thomas. 4. The Train. Soprano, baritone solos, and chorus. Poem by Helen MacKay. 5. Journey to Gallipoli. Baritone solo and chorus. Words by Alexander Aitken, with music by Alexander Lithgow (March of the Anzacs) ­recomposed.

Part Two—Fighting 6. The Messenger Arrives. Chorus. Poem by Pat White. 7. Christmas at Gallipoli, 1915. Baritone solo and chorus. Text by Alexander Aitken. 8. All the Hills and Vales Along. Chorus. Text by Charles Hamilton Sorley. 9. Peace and War. Baritone solo. Text by Captain Spears. 10. Returning We Hear the Larks. Chorus. Poem by Isaac Rosenberg. 11. For You but not for Me (The Bells of Hell). Chorus. Text: anonymous, from a British airmen’s song from World War I. 12. At Zero Time. Baritone solo. Military plan of battle, Goose Alley, The Somme, 1916. Text reproduced in Alexander Aitken’s book. 13. Vive la compagnie! Baritone solo and chorus. Traditional song recomposed. 14. A German Episode. Baritone, soprano solos. Based on Aitken’s book and August Stramm’s poem Schrei (Scream). Includes re-compositions of Der Wegweiser (The Signpost) by Schubert, “Death March” from Saul by Handel, Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden (I had a comrade) by von Ludvig Uhland, traditional German war lament.

Gallipoli to the Somme

Part Three—Grieving 15. Ellen’s Vigil. Solo soprano. Poem by Lorna Stavely Anker. 16. Kemal Ataturk Memorial. Chorus, soprano solo. Text by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The glue that holds the tripartite structure together is the story of one soldier: Alexander Aitken (Figure 1). He was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1895 and educated at Otago Boys High and Otago University. He was a remarkable man in many ways, with a photographic memory, and became a professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University after the war. Aitken was also a fine musician, playing violin in professional orchestras in Britain, and composing music. According to Peter Fenton, “Eric Fenby, Delius’s amanuensis, described Aitken as the most accomplished amateur musician he had known.”13 Aitken took a violin with him when he went to Gallipoli in 1915, entertaining others at the front, and trying to raise spirits. He survived that campaign, and was then sent to the Somme. In September, 1916, he was wounded in the Goose Alley battle, one of those futile attempts to push the German line back; over 300 of his comrades from New Zealand died on that day. He lost his violin but a friend found it and a year later returned it to Aitken. In the years that followed Aitken suffered many psychological breakdowns but maintained a career and his love of music.14 Following his death in 1967 the violin was returned to Dunedin, where it is now permanently on display. In 1963 Aitken’s memoires were finally published, entitled Gallipoli to the Somme.15 The book was republished in 2018. It is written in a clear, lucid style and never wallows or glorifies his experiences. Aitken quietly critiques the war while preserving a seemingly objective attitude. His is one of many remarkable war stories, but it struck a chord with me, and not just because of his links to Dunedin and music; I wanted the piece to tell personal stories about the war. Aitken’s Gallipoli to the Somme is a book of prose, too lengthy to set to music in its entirety. I had to select a few key episodes from the book to represent Aitken’s experiences. These passages provide the chronological spine for the composition. We trace Aitken’s travels to Gallipoli initially, and then on 13 Peter Fenton, biographical note for premiere of Gallipoli to the Somme, Dunedin Symphony Orchestra (2016). 14 Peter Fenton shared with me a copy of an unpublished letter from Aitken to a friend, in which he mentions his “smashes” of 1927, 1929, 1934, 1941, 1948, and 1950. 15 Alexander Aitken, Gallipoli to the Somme (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2018).

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Figure 1.  Alexander Craig “Swotty” Aitken, 1923, Box-004-003 (Courtesy of the Hocken Collections – Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago)

to the Somme where he is finally wounded. Clustered around these passages poems, diary entries, and other historical texts that relate in some way to Aitken’s war are set to music. Together, they aim to make a statement about ordinary peoples’ experience of the war: soldiers, nurses, lovers, children, people of different nationalities. They are all represented in some way in this work, through diary entries, poems, traditional texts, and songs. There are no religious texts. This is deliberate: I wanted this work to speak to a wide range of people, both religious and non-religious. A number of nations are represented with texts from New Zealand, Britain, Germany, and Turkey. Gallipoli to the Somme performs history in order to bring it to life. With that aim in mind, I have chosen

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texts to set that were written by people during the war. I wanted to capture the immediacy of peoples’ experiences rather than filtering them through a more contemporary lens. Moreover, the texts are set in a deliberately simple, uncluttered manner, in order to make the words audible and preserve the immediacy of experience. Most of the choral and vocal textures are homophonic in nature. There is little use of melisma, and only occasional use of word-painting, a musical device where the meaning of a text is suggested by features of the vocal or instrumental lines. Word-painting can be found extensively in Britten’s War Requiem, but I felt that too much use of it would obscure my message by drawing attention towards the “cleverness” of the composer. In “The Train” from Gallipoli to the Somme, for example, the vocal and orchestral style is simple and direct, although the lingering agony of saying farewell to loved ones is underpinned by a relentless quaver pulse, which suggests both “the great clock in the station” and the train itself. There are more general examples of creating musical pictures, for example, by the use of silence (discussed later), but the musical portrayal of particular words or images in the text is not frequent. The choice of performers can affect the way an historical work is perceived. When Gallipoli to the Somme was performed in Britain, the choir was accompanied by the Southbank Sinfonia, a trainee orchestra for players who have completed their tertiary study. It was noted by many people that having young adults performing in a work about young adults dying in battle added power to the work’s message. Similarly, when British composer Jonathan Dove wrote his For an Unknown Soldier for school performers he was conscious of the singers “embodying the words” and “making it more immediate and vivid.”16

REPRESENTATION OF WAR IN GALLIPOLI TO THE SOMME It is acknowledged that there was a difference between how the war was represented in the media of the day, and its reality. The public hype surrounding men going to war and serving their countries stood in stark contrast to their experiences at the front. This theme returns time and time again in writings about the war.17 Following a battle at Armentières where many New Zealanders were killed, Aitken wrote: “Naturally there was no mention of such a set-back in our own 16 “Music and Memory: Jonathan Dove in conversation with Kate Kennedy,” Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation, University of Oxford Podcasts, accessed August 12, 2018, https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/music-and-memory-jonathan-dove-conversation-katekennedy. 17 See, for example, Pugsley, Gallipoli, 29.

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communiques, aiming as they did not at truth but at gloss.”18 In the broadcast media, too, words and music were used as propaganda tools to shield people from the truth of war. This led to cynicism and scepticism among soldiers and others, and a sense of being trapped in a monstrous lie. In his introduction to Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Jay Winter wrote: “They [Great War writers] told us of the ironic nature of war, how it is always worse than we think it will be, and how it traps the soldier—no longer the hero—in a field of overwhelming violence, a place where his freedom of action is less than ours, where death is arbitrary and everywhere.”19 Refusal to fight could mean execution for subordination. Faced with this horrifying situation, war writers and commentators frequently resorted to irony and black humour. One response to being trapped in the media-generated lie can be seen in the text “For You but Not for Me (The Bells of Hell),” an anonymous verse attributed to British airmen, which I set to music in my work. The heroic tone of the music, with rising horn calls and a strong pulse, rings hollow due to the cynical paraphrasing of a biblical text. This type of ironic response is not uncommon in music from the 1960s on. We can see this in the musical Oh What a Lovely War! or in the song “Out there, we walked quite friendly up to death” from the War Requiem by Britten.20 In Gallipoli to the Somme I adopted irony as a significant element for three main reasons: to highlight lies told in war propaganda, to include recomposition of existing music from the period, and to provide musical contrast within the oratorio. In Part One, for example, Aitken recounts the farewell his battalion received when setting sail for Gallipoli: a brass band played and marched, and Aitken found himself wondering why an “ability to play a brass instrument should exempt a man from coming on with us to Gallipoli.”21 He then shrugs it off, with “but the army was the army and had inured us to question any anomaly like that.” This was a cue for a quotation from Alexander Lithgow’s March of the Anzacs, recomposed for the wind, brass, and percussion in the orchestra.22 The upbeat, jovial mood of the march suggests bravery, and yet today’s audience, knowing the tragedy that follows, would be likely to hear it as empty propaganda. Knowing 18 Aitken, Gallipoli to the Somme, 102. 19 Jay Winter, introduction to The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), x. 20 Oh What a Lovely War! references various existing songs, assembled by Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop, 1963. It was made into a film Oh! What a Lovely War in 1969. 21 Aitken, Gallipoli to the Somme, 25. 22 Alexander Lithgow, March of the Anzacs (New York: Carl Fischer, 1916). Lithgow was a New Zealand composer (1870–1929) known as the “Sousa of the Antipodes” for his band music, such as Invercargill March.

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the tragedy that follows heightens the pathos of this musical interlude. Near the end of this section, Lithgow’s band music fades into fragments as the strings take over the texture with ominous chromatic lines, signifying Aitken’s arrival under the cover of darkness at Gallipoli Cove: the fantasy dies.

Figure 2.  “March of the ANZACS,” by Alexander Lithgow, 1916, Hocken Sheet Music Collections (Courtesy of the Hocken Collections – Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago)

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Example 1.  Extract from “Journey to Gallipoli” from Gallipoli to the Somme by Anthony Ritchie (Courtesy of the composer)

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Later in the oratorio, Aitken is preparing for the battle of Goose Alley, at the Somme, where he was wounded. A battle plan is presented to the Battalion: At zero time, 00, a dense barrage of shrapnel will fall 50 yards in front of assembly trenches and will continue 2 minutes. At +2 barrage will move forward; first wave will go over top. Barrage to move forward 100 yards every two minutes. … Wave will double to objective. Bayonet if necessary. Barrage will remain 200 yards beyond objective as long as required. Consolidate.23

Aitken then comments, “Such thoroughness bred confidence everywhere; there seemed every chance of success,” though the tone suggests the confidence might be misplaced. After the briefing his mates arrange a sing-song: “But now we sang, a little self-consciously at first; songs, already beginning to be rather out of fashion … such as Vive l’amour, vive la compagnie. We saw no irony in these words; we might have, could we have foreseen that at the same hour three nights later almost all the singers would be lying dead or wounded in no-man’s-land.”24 In my setting, Vive la compagnie (no. 13) follows on from “At Zero Time,” which is like a robotic recitative, as if the orders were being barked out at the soldiers. The objectified, orderly language (“bayonet as necessary”) contrasts with the chaotic reality of the Goose Alley attack that followed. Vive la compagnie, by contrast, is jocular and tuneful, but undermined by a relentless B natural in the orchestra, which creates a discord. Near the end the choral singers drop out one by one, until we hear one voice only singing vive la, followed by several bars’ silence, as the conductor continues to beat time to no one. The massacre is represented by the absence of singers and the faltering of a jovial song. So, the attack itself is represented by symbolic musical means, and silence, rather than the sounds of battle. There is irony here in the use of silence to represent what would have been an extremely noisy battle scene. Similarly, irony is used to make a statement about war in “A German Episode” (no. 14). Aitken hears a German soldier playing a flute in the trench near him and recognizes the tune as the “Dead March” from Saul, by Handel (1739). Noble baroque music is now the subject of “gallows humour”; a “classic” is brought down to size in the muddy trenches.25 In the same episode 23 Aitken, Gallipoli to the Somme, 144–5. 24 Ibid., 145. 25 There is also an added layer of irony, with Handel being German-born but residing in England for much of his life.

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Aitken hears Schubert’s Der Wegweiser (The Signpost) in his mind as he passes a sign pointing to Ypres, a Belgian town that by 1916 was already infamous for battles and death on a massive scale. Aitken is reminded of the ominous line in Der Wegweiser, “There’s a road that I must wander/Where no traveler returns.” Aitken, a lover of German music, faces the irony of going into battle against Germans. He sees things from the other side’s point of view, culminating in the terror-laden Schrei (Scream) at the end of the episode. Other examples of irony in the work are supplied by the text itself, as for example, in no. 11 “For You but Not for Me (The Bells of Hell).” Vernacular songs such as these were included to contrast with the more poetic ones, and to demonstrate a coping mechanism of soldiers. Kennedy, for example, cites the soldier and writer H. V. Morton, who emphasized how popular songs were a way of coping with the war: “the songs we sang in the Army were bits of history. In them is embalmed the comic fatalism which carried us through four years of hell.”26 Thus far I have mentioned three main components of the representing of war history in my music: an immediacy of approach through a simple musical language, the referencing of music from the era, and the use of irony. The use of a wide variety of texts and musical sources also indicates an eclectic approach to the composition, with disparate texts being juxtaposed and even overlapped in one example. This eclecticism was deliberate: I wanted a range of ideas and musics within the work, to emphasize the breadth of human experience and reinforce a critique of war through diverse personal responses. For example, Nos. 3 and 4 form a farewell sequence that combines two extraordinary texts by Helen Thomas (written about her poet lover Edward Thomas departing for the front), and Helen MacKay, a nurse who served in France. The two songs are linked by a two-note call, “Coo-ee!,” which was Edward Thomas’s old rustic call. This simple musical device echoes throughout the song that follows, “The Train,” which depicts families and lovers saying goodbye at a station, a familiar World War I scene.27 Frequently, text and its meaning are amplified by the use of silence in the orchestra, creating a sense of human vulnerability in the face of inhuman forces. When the soprano sings Helen Thomas’s words of farewell, the orchestra remains silent for over a minute (see the start of this extract above: “We were 26 Kennedy, “A Music of Grief,” 387. 27 At a function In New Zealand House before the London performance, Baroness Walmsley related her experience as a three-year-old, farewelling her father at the station before he left for the front.

Example 2.  Excerpts from Part One, nos.1–4, from Gallipoli to the Somme by Anthony Ritchie (Courtesy of the composer)

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alone in my room”), having just played a tutti passage fortissimo. Vulnerability is also suggested in monologues by the baritone representing Aitken, accompanied only by occasional ominous rumblings on the timpani. Aitken’s solitude and vulnerability are also represented by the long solo violin melody at the start of the oratorio. The ironic use of silence at the end of Vive la compagnie has already been mentioned. In the context of war, silence takes on a particular significance, as several writers have noted. Kennedy has observed that troops found silence unnerving, as it was associated with the dead.28 Silence is used in ceremonies as a means to remember the dead. Silence signifying vulnerability and death also finds a connection with the silence of soldiers, who frequently said nothing about their experiences when returned to civilian life. Gallipoli to the Somme is a broadly chronological work, indicated by the subtitles of the three main parts, “Departing,” “Fighting,” and “Grieving.” I felt it was important to represent the sequence of events as they unfolded over time, in order to situate the listener within the context of the time: what was it like to be involved in the war in 1916, for example, without knowing what lay ahead? In terms of the music, I wanted to avoid the danger of structural incoherence in a work that uses such an eclectic array of texts. So I framed the work with a section of music that is commemorative in style: the final chorus, using Ataturk’s healing memorial text,29 also appears at the start of the work, but scored for strings only. Violin solos in Nos. 1, 5, 7, 9, and 16 also act as a unifying device, as does the recurring battle music in Nos. 2, 6, 9, and 14. A further aim of these recurrences was to produce the illusion of a memory piece, as if Aitken was reliving experiences from the war. In this way, the recurring battle music is not only settings of specific texts but also a replay of trauma. One of the purposes of this work was to reveal lesser-known stories about the war by lesser-known people, and connect with vernacular writings. When I started work on my composition, Aitken’s story was only just becoming known in the popular media; his book had been out of print for many years prior to its republication in 2018. My intention was to reveal this story to a wider public. I had similar motives for including poems by little-known New Zealand writers Lorna Stavely Anker and Pat White. Anker’s poem, in particular, brought into focus the trauma inflicted on those at home and how it resonated through their lives. I was also 28 Kennedy, “A Music of Grief,” 392. 29 The text is on memorials in Wellington and Canberra, and can be found at “Atatürk Memorial,” accessed July 11, 2019, https://mch.govt.nz/nz-identity-heritage/national-monuments-war-graves/atat%C3%BCrk-memorial.

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interested in the tone of Aitken’s writing, which is understated and factual. He even resorts to his beloved mathematics as a way of rationalizing terrible situations. This is despite his numerous psychological breakdowns following the war; a different writer would have written a more emotional account of his experiences. I chose to capture this reserve, which has been frequently associated with the New Zealand character in older generations. The drama in Aitken’s music is quiet, understated, and this is aided by the economical accompaniments for the baritone. The representation of trauma became a major issue for me during the creative process. I was concerned to produce as truthful a representation of the war experience as possible, and in particular the experience of violence and trauma. Artistic representations of violent and traumatic incidents, in music, drama, film or other media, can be problematic, and have spawned a growing body of literature. Reenactments of war incidents on the stage or on film are open to the accusation of exploitation. In an article entitled “Re-presenting the Traumatic Real: Douglas Wright’s Black Milk,” Suzanne Little writes about the choreography which involves a reenactment of the infamous Abu Ghraib incident during the Iraq war.30 She asks: “How does one, or indeed, should one represent the ‘real’ suffering of others in artistic works and to what ends? Does framing of pieces as ‘art works’ discount criticism relating to ethical or political issues?” She also asks whether or not an art work “can really capture the essence of a traumatic experience … Does it make the unmanageable manageable?” In the case of Black Milk, she concludes that, sadly, it is open to the accusation of using other peoples’ suffering for entertainment, especially in the use of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs.31 Another example of trauma exploitation is the “kitschification” of 9/11, through various media. Smelik, for example, writes: “Representations of 9/11 constituted a case of ‘real virtuality’ that turned the disaster into a media spectacle.”32 In the sphere of music, I could understand the reluctance of American fellow composer John Adams when he wrote: “I had great difficulty imagining anything ‘commemorating’ 9/11 that would not be an embarrassment.”33 In his extraordinary book on soldiers’ experiences in World War I, Denis Winter summarizes this distance between artistic imaginings and reality by saying, “Battle was thus an experience which only those involved could

30 Little, “Re-Presenting the Traumatic Real,” 233. 31 Ibid., 252. 32 Anneke Smelik, “Mediating Memories: The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship,” Arcadia— International Journal of Literary Studies (2011): 307. 33 John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (New York: Picador, 2009), 263.

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understand.”34 Artists and composers who seek to represent war must acknowledge the limits of what their work can do and avoid voyeurism and exploitation. They must walk this tight-rope with great care. In Gallipoli to the Somme the backdrop of violence and trauma underpins everything, and is an essential component of the work. I aimed to reveal truths about the war through musical means that I thought were appropriate. The repetitive, ugly nature of battle, for example, is represented by battle music that is repetitive, ugly, and crude, with relentless use of the pounding pulse and drums. The first occurrence of battle music underpins a Maori war cry in no. 2, before the conflict. In its second iteration, it represents the fighting at Gallipoli and sets Pat White’s poem “The Messenger Arrives” (no. 6). Here, it is simply a list of ways to die: By bullet, shrapnel, highExplosives, bombs, grenade Incendiaries, ricochet, friendly Fire …35

The third time the battle music returns there are no words: the trauma is beyond words. Aitken’s violin is pitted against the full orchestra in a frantic cadenza, symbolizing one man fighting against insurmountable weaponry. As the technology of warfare grew, so too did the scale of death, injury, and trauma. In the fourth and final occurrence of the battle music the text by August Stramm that is used reveals a very human response to this situation: to scream, or Schrei. The German text is beyond logical meaning and includes specially constructed words. (A translation is provided.)36 The music mirrors this sense of trauma, with the “scream” represented by use of the soprano’s top register, over the fortissimo orchestral texture. The solo voice is intended to sound at odds with the orchestra in this context. Tage sargen Welten gräbern Nächte ragen Blute bäumen Wehe raumen alle Räume Würgen …

Days encoffining Worlds cemeterying Nights tower Bloods rear Woes expand all expanses Strangle …

34 Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 185. 35 Pat White, Gallipoli: In Search of a Family Story (Masterton: Red Roofs, 2005), 26. 36 “From Poetry to Music,” accessed July 20, 2015, https://www.frompoetrytomusic.eu/poem/ schrei/. The translation is by Isham Cook, accessed July 20, 2015, https://ishamcook.files. wordpress.com/2011/11/august-stramm-poems-19881.pdf.

Example 3.  Extract from ‘Ellen’s Vigil’ from Gallipoli to the Somme by Anthony Ritchie (Courtesy of the composer)

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In the song that follows, “Ellen’s Vigil,” the soprano sings the role of a mother who has lost three sons in three different battles: Passchendaele, Ypres, the Somme. Fifty years later she is still working through her trauma by endlessly digging her garden, searching for her sons. As in much of this work, the musical representation of the experience is simple and direct, aiming to keep the text firmly in the foreground.

RECEPTION Historian Kate Kennedy writes that “Music is especially suited to expressing trauma and exorcizing its legacy. …”37 By representing trauma and violence in these ways I hoped Gallipoli to the Somme would be relevant, meaningful, authentic, and moving. It felt like a risky venture. However, the reception of the work suggests that my approach has succeeded. Helen Watson-White, in New Zealand Opera News ( January 2017), described my methods as “painfully direct and subtly suggestive” and concluded “I cannot imagine how it could have been better done. …” Rod Biss, in The New Zealand Listener (November 2016), thought the work was a “virtual documentary-oratorio that succeeds in being both inclusive and a personal statement.” The emotional impact of the work was a common theme among critics, audience, and performers. One chorister from the UK Parliament Choir commented: “But perhaps the best comment on the piece were the quiet sobs from the sopranos as we finished the last ­movement—just so moving and powerful.”38 The layers of irony in the work were also recognized as an important ingredient, with William Dart, in The New Zealand Herald (April 2018), describing the “rousing Vive l’amour” as “grimly ironic in the context of the trenches.” Watson-White wrote: “there is also a poisonously bitter tone to many pieces. … Nothing is exempt from irony.” Audience members I spoke with commented on the ironic references to earlier music as well, and one performer in the UK performances requested permission to ‘ham up’ the quotation from Lithgow March of the Anzacs to make the irony more obvious (which I declined). Most listeners mentioned the re-composition of The First Noel as a poignant highlight, one correspondent writing: “and the men humming softly, softly … caught up in their own thoughts of home … how brilliantly you used the voice here … the voice of the violin, the voice of the men

37 Kennedy, “A Music of Grief,” 394. 38 Vivian Widgery, email correspondence ( June 20, 2018).

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… spine tingling.”39 The references to Schubert and Handel were mentioned by two correspondents only, suggesting the repertoire was not so well known and so the references’ point was largely missed. There was a positive response to the variety of texts used. Dart stated: “It stands out for both its scale and the care the composer has taken in compiling an impressive range of literary inspiration.” Possibly the most satisfying aspect of the reception was the desire of people to share their own family stories of the war with me, either verbally or by email, following concerts. In Oxford, for example, I was approached by a former member of the British army who had served in Iraq and been blinded, intimating that the music had made a genuine connection for him. This type of response was important for me and seemed to justify the work more than any aesthetic considerations. In conclusion, Gallipoli to the Somme represents history through composition and performance, and makes a humanist statement about the war. In order to make the work relevant and meaningful for audiences I use a simplified musical language that aimed to maximize the understanding of the texts in a concert hall. It includes the use of sparse instrumental accompaniments, silence, lack of melisma, and mainly homophonic textures, along with a deliberate eschewing of word-painting. The referencing of existing words and music, largely contemporaneous with the war, aims to add to the immediacy of the work. In addition, irony is used with musical elements that, on occasions, work against the surface meaning of the text. Quotations from existing music also add a layer or irony. All of these elements combine for various purposes: to critique a conflict that was futile, horrifying, and unnecessary; to reveal trauma and express it in a communal setting (the concert hall); to understand how it unfolded through the eyes of a diverse range of writers; to commemorate the victims of the war and provide a means of grieving; and to remind us of the need to avoid repeating past mistakes. In this context, the aesthetic qualities of the work seem less significant than might be the case in an abstract composition. Nonetheless, unity, coherence, flow, and a simple immediacy are important ingredients in fulfilling the purpose of the work. The trauma inflicted by World War I still resonates today. Judging by the reception, Gallipoli to the Somme contributes in a small but meaningful way to the body of creative work that seeks to represent trauma in order to help people manage it effectively.

39 Robyn Belton, email correspondence (October 3, 2016).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, John. Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Picador, 2009. Aitken, Alexander. Gallipoli to the Somme. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2018. Blunden, Edmund, ed. Poems of Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964. Fenton, Peter. Biographical note on Alexander Aitken for Dunedin Symphony Orchestra programme for the premiere of Gallipoli to the Somme, 2016. Unpublished. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hesmondhalgh, David. Why Music Matters. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Kennedy, Kate. “A Music of Grief: classical music and the First World War.” International Affairs 90, no. 2 (2014): 379–95. Kennedy, Kate, and Trudi Tate. “Literature and music of the First World War.” First World War Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 1–6. King, Michael. The Penguin History of New Zealand Illustrated. Auckland: Penguin, 2003. Lithgow, Alexander. March of the Anzacs. New York: Carl Fischer, 1916. Little, Suzanne. “Re-Presenting the Traumatic Real: Douglas Wright’s Black Milk.” In Dance and Politics, edited by Alexandra Kolb, 233–54. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Little, Suzanne. “Practice and Performance as Research in the Arts.” In Dunedin Soundings: Place and Performance, edited by Dan Bendrups and Graeme Downes, 17–26. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011. Pugsley, Christopher. Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story. Auckland: Reed, 1998. Ritchie, Anthony. Gallipoli to the Somme. Wellington: SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, 2016. Smelik, Anneke. “Mediating Memories: The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship.” Arcadia—International Journal of Literary Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 307–25. Stramm, August. Selected Poems. Translated by Isham Cook. Accessed July 20, 2015. https:// ishamcook.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/august-stramm-poems-19881.pdf. Thompson, James. “Questions on Performances. In Place of War.” In Representations of War Migration and Refugeehood, edited by Daniel H. Rellstab and Christiane Schlote, 183–190 (New York: Routledge, 2015). University of Oxford Podcasts. “Music and Memory: Jonathan Dove in conversation with Kate Kennedy.” Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation. Accessed August 12, 2018. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/music-and-memory-jonathan-dove-conversation-kate-kennedy. University of Oxford Podcasts. “The Rest is Silence” Panel-led Workshop 2. Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation. Accessed August 15, 2018. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ rest-silence-panel-led-workshop-2. White, Pat. Gallipoli: In Search of a Family Story. Masterton: Red Roofs, 2005. Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. London: Penguin Books, 1978.

CHAPTER 9

Britten’s Primal Scream STERLING LAMBERT

ABSTRACT Few pieces of music have so clearly “performed history” as Britten’s War Requiem, written to celebrate the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction in the Second World War. In its use of Wilfred Owen’s First World War poetry, moreover, the work clearly alludes to that conflict also. Less apparent is the way in which it might comment on World War II in the Far East, and specifically one of the most cataclysmic events in history—the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War Requiem culminates in what Paul Kildea describes as “one of the two great primal screams of his output.” The other is perhaps the similar gesture at the climax of the opening movement of the Sinfonia da Requiem, his 1940 response to a Japanese commission. In referring to this moment, War Requiem possibly makes reference to the Japanese conflict; indeed, Britten’s earlier plans for an oratorio about the bombing of Hiroshima suggest that this particular event was on his mind, chillingly evoked in this “primal scream.” However, this powerful outburst may also be understood to refer to a moment in the opening chorus of Bach’s St. John Passion—a work about sacrifice on behalf of humanity. Indeed, War Requiem’s allusion to the Sinfonia da Requiem suggests that Britten was sensitive to the impact of the nuclear attack on Japan, yet its simultaneous reference to the St. John Passion interprets this impact as a terrible but necessary price for peace.

B

enjamin Britten, as both composer of War Requiem and conductor at its first performance, could fairly be said to have been “performing history,” both literally and metaphorically, as few others have before or since. Here is a piece deeply engaged with the past on a multiplicity of levels. It is rooted in a Latin liturgy that had existed for hundreds of years, and been set to music many times.

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Equally clearly, the circumstances of its commission and first performance connect it inseparably to the Second World War; written for the dedication of the new cathedral at Coventry built to replace the one destroyed in the 1940 bombing raids, it was dedicated to four friends who, in one way or another, had been victims of that war. Finally, its idiosyncratic juxtaposition of the Latin Requiem Mass with Wilfred Owen’s First World War poetry makes distinct and unmistakable reference to that earlier war also. The two different sets of words, as well as the music that Britten gave to them, both relate to and conflict with one another in a striking parallel to the way in which the new cathedral itself, adjoining the ruins of the old yet set at right angles to it, both complements and challenges its predecessor. Britten was not simply re-performing world history (both liturgical and military), but also understanding his own personal history as both composer and performer. In doing so, he could be thought to have had more to say about the Second World War, and about warfare in general, than has previously been supposed. If Britten’s act of composition may be understood as a sort of metaphorical “performance,” then so too can music analysis. I too am “performing history,” tracing one small but important strand in the history of the composition of War Requiem: I propose a triangular relationship between the climactic moment of War Requiem, that of an earlier work by Britten, and the opening of a work by another composer that represented a major focus of Britten’s performance activities. Such a performance is certainly not without its perils; intertextual studies have traditionally focused either on relationships between works by the same composer or on those between works of different composers, but not both simultaneously, as this essay attempts to do. These are two very different types of relationship, one working within the discrete stylistic boundaries of a single creator, the other working across such boundaries and relying on assumptions of the later composer’s knowledge of the earlier one’s work. Bringing the two together runs the risk of weakening the case for each. Nonetheless, I do suggest that in War Requiem Britten makes reference to two different sources at once, one from within his own oeuvre and one from without, with the purpose of making a statement about an aspect of conflict not traditionally associated with his great choral work, nuclear war. My association is not entirely unprecedented. For most of Derek Jarman’s 1988 film adaptation of the piece, footage of World War I alternates with a dramatization clearly based on this same conflict. This, of course, is an entirely understandable response to a work whose defining feature could be said to be the insertion of Wilfred Owen’s First World War poetry into the

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traditional Latin text of the Requiem Mass. This changes, however, with the final movement, the “Libera me”; here, footage of more recent conflicts starts to appear, beginning with the iconic image of massed skulls in Cambodia, and this serves to remind us that the message of this work concerns far more than the tragedy of the 1914–18 “Great War.” But the truly devastating image occurs

Example 1.  Britten, War Requiem, “Libera me,” measures 8–9 and 142–6. “War Requiem” by Benjamin Britten. ©1959 By Boosey & Co Limited. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission.

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at the movement’s terrifying G minor climax, as footage of a nuclear explosion makes a striking point about the potential impact of modern warfare on everyone, not just the soldiers. Example 1 shows the opening of the movement, and the climax which transfigures the initial motive, labelled as x. The only instance of nuclear warfare occurred, of course, at the end of the Second World War. So its presence in Jarman’s film is in a sense very relevant, given that War Requiem was written in response to another striking civilian casualty of that war—Coventry Cathedral. Nevertheless, Britten’s use of World War I poetry was not the only way in which he seems to have resisted any direct association between his work and World War II. In a letter to his sister Barbara after the first performance, Britten expressed the feeling that “the idea of the War Requiem did come off, I think—aren’t those poems wonderful, and how one thinks of that bloody 1914–18 war especially.”1 Given that one of Britten’s earliest memories was of a German bomb exploding near his house during that war, it is understandable that this conflict should have occupied a prominent place in his awareness, yet it is also important to recognize that his attitude toward the succeeding one was complicated. During the early stages of the war, he had lived in safety in the USA, and upon returning to England had registered as a conscientious objector. Years later, he decided against describing the dedicatees of War Requiem—four soldiers—as “fellow sufferers” for fear that the public would object that he had not “suffered” as much as they had.2 Yet the background presence of World War II, in Europe at least, is simply unavoidable in War Requiem, given the circumstances of its creation. Less immediately apparent is the role of the war in Asia. But Jarman, with his well-placed mushroom cloud, prompts us (even if unintentionally) to consider the possibility of Britten’s awareness of nuclear warfare in his composition of War Requiem. In his recent biography of the composer, Paul Kildea described this climactic moment of the “Libera me” as “one of the two great primal screams in his output.”3 Kildea, in comparing the gradual buildup to this moment with the murmuring of angry sailors near the conclusion of the opera Billy Budd, would seem to be suggesting that the other “primal scream” is to be found here. However, this increasing agitation never reaches a climax as it does in War Requiem. Rather, it 1 Britten’s comment about War Requiem appears in a letter to his sister Barbara, probably from June 1962. Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, eds., Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976, vol. 5, 1958–1965 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), 407 n. 2. 2 Britten’s decision to omit “fellow-sufferers” from the dedication is documented in ibid., 382 n. 3. 3 Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 348 and 456.

Britten’s Primal Scream

Example 2.  Britten, Sinfonia da Requiem, “Lacrymosa,” measures 12–19 and 195–6. “Sinfonia Da Requiem ” by Benjamin Britten. ©1942 By Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. Copyright For All Countries. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission.

is quashed prematurely. A more meaningful analogy, perhaps, is the cataclysmic chord that serves as the climax of the opening “Lacrymosa” movement of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem of 1940, shown in Example 2. The devastating turn from the melodic implication of a major triad to a minor one (in the twofold statement of the motive labelled as y) conflicts violently with the underlying chords, which move from minor to major. Such an abrasive strategy might well have had as its source of inspiration the memorable moment near the start of Mahler’s sixth symphony, where a tonic major triad sours to minor. Britten has intensified the effect such that the mode mixture proceeds simultaneously in opposite directions. Britten certainly admired Mahler at this time: his diary entries from the ’thirties contain many effusive observations on Mahler’s music. A few years

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Example 3.  Mahler, Symphony no. 6, first movement, measures 59–60

later, in a 1942 article in defense of Mahler, Britten admitted that the composer had become his “new god” upon his first encounter in 1930.4 Yet if the climax of the first movement of Sinfonia da Requiem looks back, it also looks ahead to music of Britten’s own—the similar climax of the “Libera me” of War Requiem. Like that later movement, it too builds from a quiet opening theme toward a massive transfiguration of it. Indeed, the y motive could even be understood to be related to motive x in War Requiem—that is to say, the interval of a third filled in by step. Sinfonia da Requiem had a strange and unusual genesis. It was commissioned in 1939 by the Japanese government for the 2,600th anniversary of its empire, with the intention of its being first performed during the celebrations to be held the following year. Britten’s response was surprising. As he wrote in a letter to his publisher Ralph Hawkes: “I have a scheme for a short Symphony—or Symphonic Poem. Called Sinfonia da Requiem (rather topical, but not of course mentioning dates or places!) which sounds rather what they would like.”5 Quite what he meant by “topical” is not entirely clear, but if he was intending a gesture of mourning for the onset of war both in the Far East and Europe, it is hard to see how he could ever have imagined that this was something that the Japanese authorities would indeed like, given the state of war in which they already existed with neighboring China. Less than a year later, Britten finally made his intent clear in a newspaper interview in which he claimed that “I’m making it just as anti-war as possible,” dedicating the piece to

4 “On Behalf of Gustav Mahler,” Tempo 2, no. 2 (1942), 5; reproduced in Paul Kildea, ed., Britten on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 38. 5 Letter to Ralph Hawkes October 1939, in Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, eds., Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976, vol. 2, 1939–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 703.

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the memory of his dead parents.6 Sure enough, the piece was not accepted; the head of the commissioning committee objected that it “does not express felicitations for the 2600th anniversary of our country. Besides being purely religious music of a Christian nature, it has melancholy tone both in its melodic pattern and rhythm, making it unsuitable for performance on such an occasion as our national ceremony.”7 Britten was naturally indignant at this rejection, although happy enough to accept the fee which the Japanese government had already paid him, and the work was eventually given its first performance in New York in March 1941. However, this was by no means the end of Britten’s lifelong engagement with Japan. His extensive tour of the Far East in 1956 included a visit to the country that would prove to wield an enormous influence on the direction that his music would take thereafter. In particular, the restrained and stylized music and choreography of Noh Theatre was the inspiration for the new genre of church parable which Britten introduced with Curlew River eight years later. Indeed, he went so far as to claim, in a 1958 New Year’s broadcast to Japan (recorded in December 1957), that he counted Noh as “among the greatest theatrical experiences of my life.”8 He had earlier expressed similar feelings in a letter from Tokyo to the young Roger Duncan, where he had also found the space to be somewhat more candid about the Japanese people than he would ever have considered being in the radio broadcast: “It is by far the strangest country we have yet been to; like, in a way, going to a country which is inhabited by a very intelligent kind of insect … their way of thinking … can cause a great deal of harm and trouble in the world, because they are so clever and industrious, and also so very brave, and don’t worry about pain or death … like their behaviour in the last war, with prison camps and all.”9 It would be understandable if these rather crude sentiments had at least a partial basis in his bruising encounter with Japan over the Sinfonia da Requiem commission—indeed, he would have been reminded by a performance of the piece in a concert during their visit. However, Britten had shown a very 6 Britten in interview with the New York Sun, April 1940; quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 146. 7 Letter to the Director of the Cultural Bureau of the Japanese Foreign Office in Tokyo, from Prince Fuminaro Konoye, President of the Committee for the 2600th Anniversary, November 1940; in Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, vol. 2, 881. 8 Kildea, Britten on Music, 156. 9 Letter to Roger Duncan, February 21, 1956. In Philip Reed, Mervyn Cooke, and Donald Mitchell, eds., Letters from a Life, vol. 4, 1952–1957 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008), 408.

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different view of the country ten years earlier, in the aftermath of the atomic bombs that ended the war. At the time, Roger Duncan’s father Ronald had suggested to Britten that they work together to provide a response in words and music. He wrote in his subsequent memoirs: I went to Ben. “We must immediately write an oratorio about this,” I said, “something as artistically painful as the burns we’ve inflicted on the Japanese.” “Of course we must … let’s go for a walk and work something out.” By midnight we had sketched the plan for an oratorio in three parts. It was to be a full-scale work with chorus, soloists and symphony orchestra.10

Titled Mea Culpa, the work was to be dedicated “to an unknown child whose severed hand lay like a glove on the floor,” and its three parts were titled “The Garden,” “The Wrath,” and “The Choice.”11 Eventually, the project came to nothing, as Britten’s publisher, Boosey and Hawkes, was in disagreement with the British Broadcasting Company who were to broadcast the first performance. In the meantime, Britten and Duncan moved on to another activity—the opera The Rape of Lucretia, and Duncan later admitted ruefully: “It was a pity: the War Requiem could have been written in 1946 instead of 1961.”12 No music was ever written for Mea Culpa, and so its influence on the later War Requiem can only remain speculative. However, even as a mere concept it occupies an important place between the later choral work and the Sinfonia da Requiem—a piece strongly associated with Japan in the Second World War. As a result, it certainly invites consideration of the possibility that Britten’s sensitivity to the nuclear devastation wreaked upon Japan found its way into War Requiem, even alluding directly to the earlier Sinfonia and its initial movement’s climactic chord. In interpreting the similar moment in War Requiem in such a way, perhaps Derek Jarman was onto more than he realised. Yet the climactic chord of Britten’s “Libera me” may also make reference to a piece of music that belongs not to his earlier compositional career but rather to his parallel career as a performer. Johann Sebastian Bach had always been important to Britten. Early in life, his mother had expressed her hope that he would be “the fourth B,” after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Even if his admiration for 10 Ronald Duncan, Working with Britten: A Personal Memoir (Bideford: Rebel Press, 1981), 54–5. Quoted in Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Mervyn Cook, eds., Letters from a Life, vol. 3: 1946–1951 (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 155 n. 2. 11 Ibid., 158. 12 Duncan, Working with Britten, 56; quoted in Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography, 405.

Britten’s Primal Scream

the last two of these figures distinctly waned over time, his love of Bach’s music remained constant, and by the time of the first performance of War Requiem in 1962, Britten’s performances of Bach’s music as a conductor had grown to occupy such a large part of the annual Aldeburgh Festival that the establishment of a dedicated Bach festival in the nearby town of Long Melford was imminent. Of all the music by Bach that Britten performed, one work stands out in frequency and variety of performances—the St. John Passion. Introduced in 1954 to the Aldeburgh Festival in a memorable performance by Imogen Holst in which Britten played harpsichord continuo, he soon came to assume the role of conductor in subsequent performances, leading eventually to a landmark recording of the work in 1971 which in its own way shows Britten “performing history” in that the recording represents a milestone in the history of performance, of that work at least. Robert Tear, the tenor soloist in this recording, summarized the special attributes of Britten’s approach: “In Bach he never neglected the emotion, as do so many conductors today, but he did not allow the music to become sentimental in the old way. Britten found the happy medium.”13 The influence of the St. John Passion, and Britten’s experience performing it, upon the composition of War Requiem is apparent in a number of ways. Certainly, the parallels between the structures of the two works are not hard to see. Both pieces temper the overall narrative with a separate level of commentary. In the St. John Passion, the tenor Evangelist tells the story in recitative, with the help of various quoted characters and crowds. This central narrative is interspersed with commentary on the story provided by the chorus singing familiar chorales and also by soloists singing arias, as well as large-scale choruses that begin and end the work. In War Requiem, the procedure is inverted, so that the chorus, soprano soloist, boys’ choir and main orchestra is responsible for the central narrative in the form of the familiar Latin requiem text, while the commentary on this text is provided by tenor and bass soloists declaiming the various Wilfred Owen poems to the accompaniment of a smaller chamber orchestra. Important relationships exist between the two works in terms of content as well as form. The St. John Passion clearly concerns Christ’s passion, his suffering and self-sacrifice on behalf of all humanity, but Wilfred Owen associates passion with pacifism, both in his poems and elsewhere. In his poem “At a Calvary near Ancre,” used by Britten in the “Agnus Dei” of War Requiem, Owen likens the image of Christ on the cross to the soldiers who freely give their lives, while a letter to his mother in the midst of the First World War admits that 13 Alan Blyth, ed., Remembering Britten (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 154.

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“already I have comprehended a light which never will filter into the dogma of any national church: namely that one of Christ’s essential commands was: Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill.”14 This excerpt was included in the preface to the collection of poems which Britten used, and Britten marked this passage in his copy—the gesture of someone who twenty years earlier had stated, as a conscientious objector to the Second World War, “Since I believe that there is in every man the spirit of God, I cannot destroy, and feel it my duty to avoid helping to destroy as far as I am able, human life, however strongly I may disapprove of the individual’s actions or thoughts.”15 The correspondences set out above naturally invite consideration of the possibility of musical relationships between the two works. One such instance is the “Agnus Dei” of War Requiem, where the tenor declaims Owen’s “At a Calvary near Ancre” over a plainsong-like setting of the Latin text in the chorus. The overall effect, of the new against the backdrop of the familiar, is similar to that of the bass aria “Mein Teuer Heiland,” which occurs just after the death of Jesus in the St. John Passion. Here, the bass soloist sings over the whispered incantation of a chorale melody in the choir. An even more powerful reference to Bach’s work, however, lies in Britten’s “Libera me.” As in Example 1, the opening words of the text “Libera me, Domine” are later belted out by each voice part of the chorus in turn, as if in desperate attempt to compete with the gigantic orchestral sound. This is not quite the last, but certainly the most spectacular, of a series of direct addresses to God as “Lord” which punctuate the Latin Requiem liturgy. Part of its effect lies in the way in which the musical motive that Britten assigns these words at the outset, a chromatic “cambiata” figure, was initially whispered in low register yet is now practically shouted at the top of the range. The combination of these features with the G minor tonality invites serious consideration of the opening chorus of the St. John Passion as a background presence: a lengthy orchestral introduction, based on the same “cambiata” figure, gradually increases in intensity up to the point where the chorus enter with a forceful G minor chord and the word Herr (“Lord,” or “Sire” in the translation by Peter Pears and Imogen Holst, which Britten used). This is shown in Example 4, with the motive labelled once again as x. 14 The letter of May 16, 1917 appeared in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. and Memoir by Edmund Blunden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), 179; see Mervyn Cooke, Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7; and Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, 454. 15 May 4, 1942. In Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, vol. 2, 1046.

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Example 4.  Bach, St. John Passion, opening chorus, measure 1 and measures 19–20

Could Britten’s “primal scream” therefore be a reference—either to his earlier Sinfonia da Requiem or to Bach’s St. John Passion, or even to both? If so, what would he have meant by this? If it alludes to the Sinfonia, it does so to an avowedly pacifist piece, inextricably entwined with the Second World War in the Far East, and with Japan in particular. Of course, the piece was written at the start of the war, when Britten and many others viewed Japan unambiguously as an aggressor, and it accordingly comes across as inherently critical. In 1962, however, it is not too hard to imagine that the associations of the piece for Britten could well have been colored by events at the end of the war, when many, including Britten, were no longer viewing the country (the first and only victim of nuclear warfare) in such straightforward terms. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that Britten, as a pacifist, would become a long-standing member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, even participating in a benefit concert for it in 1959, just one year after its foundation. By the time of the first performance of War Requiem, a mere three years later, the prospect of nuclear war had never seemed more real, as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated just a few months later. That cataclysmic chord at the end of the Sinfonia’s “Lacrymosa” could well have acquired new layers of meaning in

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retrospect, and the piece itself could have acquired an element of sympathy that had not originally been intended. If this chord represents a presence from his earlier life as a composer, then another simultaneous presence might come from his life as a performer. Bach’s St. John Passion is, in its way, another pacifist work, one that concerns sacrifice for the good of all, a terrible act of destruction that was nevertheless necessary. In superimposing this layer of allusion, merging references to his activities both as composer and as performer, could Britten, despite his overt pacifism, be suggesting that the unspeakable devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in some way “nevertheless necessary” to end the war and bring peace at last? Certainly, it will always be debated whether the two atomic bombs were justified, and it is not the purpose of this paper to advance one view or another. What it does suggest, however, is that in Britten’s War Requiem, his “primal scream” may have had something important to say about it. As his friend Ronald Duncan claimed, the piece could have been written in 1946, but if it had, something valuable would have been missing. It seems, therefore, that in his 1971 recording of Bach’s St. John Passion, Britten was not simply “performing history” in the sense that the LP constituted a landmark in the history of performance. Britten, once again, was performing his own personal performance history by setting down on vinyl a piece that had meant an unusually great deal to him as a performer for almost twenty years. He was also performing his compositional history by making permanent his interpretation of a piece that had profoundly influenced one of his most important works, the War Requiem. That work, in turn, had seen Britten perform the history of his prior engagement with Bach’s masterpiece (not to mention his prior engagement with Japan, first expressed in his Sinfonia da Requiem). Thus Britten’s process of performing history is essentially a circular one—his relationship with Bach’s choral masterpiece both informed and was informed by his composition of War Requiem. Circular or not, however, such a process remains hidden (and thus not part of the meaning of the work) if it is not recognized—in this case through my own analytical “performance” of War Requiem, its composer and their history. This performance, in its turn, only came about as a result of the way Derek Jarman, intentionally or otherwise, was performing history through his own cinematic interpretation of the work. Britten’s War Requiem may represent a particularly striking example, but to a greater or lesser extent all composers perform their history in their creations. However, such a performance arguably only really exists when listeners (whether in a film, an academic paper or simply within their own heads) perform history too.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Blyth, Alan, ed. Remembering Britten. London: Hutchinson, 1981. Britten, Benjamin. “On Behalf of Gustav Mahler.” Tempo 2, no. 2 (1942): 5. Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Cooke, Mervyn. Britten: War Requiem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Duncan, Ronald. Working with Britten: A Personal Memoir. Bideford: Rebel Press, 1981. Kildea, Paul. Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century. London: Allen Lane, 2013. ——, ed. Britten on Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mitchell, Donald, and Philip Reed, eds. Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976. Vol. 2, 1939–1945. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. Mitchell, Donald, Philip Reed, and Mervyn Cooke, eds. Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976. Vol. 3, 1946–1951. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Owen, Wilfred. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited with a Memoir by Edmund Blunden. London: Chatto and Windus, 1955. Reed, Philip, Mervyn Cooke, and Donald Mitchell, eds. Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976. Vol. 4, 1952–1957. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008. Reed, Philip, and Mervyn Cooke, eds. Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976. Vol. 5, 1958–1965. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010.

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CHAPTER 10

Staging Power: The Role of Duchess Sophie Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1613–76) in Wolfenbüttel Court Festivities in the 1650s HANNAH SPRACKLAN-HOLL

ABSTRACT Seventeenth-century court festivities were highly symbolic means of asserting political authority in the German-speaking lands, which often marked important occasions such as a wedding or the birthday of a ruler. At the ducal court of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, these festivities took a variety of forms, and contributed to the growing reputation of this court as a cultural centre, especially in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). From 1652 to 1663, court festivities were regular events at Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel; several of these works were written by Duchess Sophie Elisabeth (1613–76), a musician and composer, to celebrate the birthday of her husband Duke August. During her short period of intense activity Sophie Elisabeth demonstrated her skills as an impresario and composer, and arguably dominated the cultural life of the court. Sophie Elisabeth’s festive compositions occupy a unique position as works composed by the spouse of a ruler, rather than by a composer working under noble patronage. They thus bear witness both to court life at Braunschweig-­Wolfenbüttel in the mid-seventeenth century and to the cultural activities of early modern German noblewomen. This chapter offers a critical reading of the surviving sources from Sophie Elisabeth’s 1655 festivities, Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung and Der

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T

he present-day geographically unified “Germany” bore little similarity to its early modern counterpart. Under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire, the German-speaking lands of this period consisted of many distinct domains, including imperial free cities, duchies, principalities, and bishoprics, among others. Each of these domains was self-contained and many were small polities encompassing multiple courts around a local power centre. The duchy of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, for example, included in the seventeenth century the principalities of Calenberg-Göttingen, Braunschweig-Celle, Braunschweig-Grubenhagen, and Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, ruled by the House of Guelph, was the ducal capital of Braunschweig-Lüneburg and its most important court centre. Like other courts in the early modern world, seventeenth-century Wolfenbüttel can be described as a “theatre state” with both practical and symbolic functions, in which rulers “engaged in rituals and ceremonies through which they exercised and performed power.”1 Many of these ceremonies were court festivities (Festspiele) which celebrated birthdays, marriages of state, and births, using ballet, processionals, and Singspiele. While these events were prominent at Wolfenbüttel during the reign of Duke Heinrich Julius (r. 1589–1613), they were somewhat neglected under his successor, Duke Friedrich Ulrich (r. 1613–34) during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). However, court festivity began to be revived after the war, during the reign of Duke August the Younger (r. 1634–66) and his consort, Duchess Sophie Elisabeth of Mecklenburg (1613–76). Sophie Elisabeth, in particular, played a significant role in the creation and continuation of court festivities at Wolfenbüttel from 1642 until Duke August’s death in 1666. This chapter examines Sophie Elisabeth’s role in consolidating her

1 Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, “Female Rule in the Courtly States of the Early Modern World,” in Frauen—Bücher—Höfe: Wissen und Sammeln vor 1800, ed. Volker Bauer et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018), 175.

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husband’s rule in the mid-1650s with the 1655 performance of two festivities she had composed entirely, Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung (1652/55) and Der Minervae Banquet (1655).2 Der Minervae Banquet, written later than Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung, consisted of an opening procession, the performance of Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung, a performance of a ballet called Ballet der Zeit, and a closing procession; it was for this reason that both festivities were performed in 1655.

COURT FESTIVITY AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POWER Between 1652 and 1663, court festivity was an important part of Wolfenbüttel’s cultural life, particularly the celebration of Duke August’s birthday, for which both the aforementioned pieces were performed. Court festivity during this period also had a wider impact on later musical change at Wolfenbüttel in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; Karl Wilhelm Geck contends that the beginning of a move toward opera in the duchy of Braunschweig-Lüneburg was already evident in the 1650s and 1660s. Geck divides these years into two parts: he dubs the first part, between the years of 1652 and 1656, the “era of Sophie Elisabeth.”3 At this time, Sophie Elisabeth frequently performed in the events which she had also written and organised.4 In the 1640s, by contrast, she had frequently collaborated with Justus Georg Schottelius; in the following decade, her stepson Anton Ulrich took control of writing libretti for the court’s festival life, with accompanying music by the Kapellmeister of the time, Johann Jakob Löwe.5 Court festivity in early modern Europe was an important means of princely representation in which a ruling family used performance to reinforce 2 Duchess Sophie Elisabeth, Der Minervae Banquet, welches zu sonderbaren Ehren/auff den ixxvii Geburtstag des durchläutigen hochgebohrnen Fürsten und Herrn/Herrn August … bestimmet geworden (Wolfenbüttel: Johann und Heinrich den Sternen, 1655), Musica fol. 1.1.2 (2), f. 3v, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. While Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung was presumably performed alone in 1652, the Textbuch for Der Minervae Banquet (1655) reveals that the former was performed within the latter in 1655: “Nach Endigung derselben gieng der Homerus wieder in den Berg hinein/und fing an eine Musicalische Freudens Darstellunge/wie sie nach der Lenge hieben beschreiben mit No. 1 bezeichnet.” However, each work has its own individual Textbuch. 3 Karl Wilhelm Geck, Sophie Elisabeth Herzogin zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg (1613–1676) als Musikerin (Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag, 1992), 80. 4 Geck, Sophie Elisabeth, 80. 5 Martin Ruhnke, “Wolfenbüttel,” in MGG Online, ed. Laurenz Lütteken (Kassel: Bärenreiter 1998), accessed September 11, 2018, www-mgg-online.com.

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court hierarchy theatrically and to assert its wealth and power within the court and in a wider context.6 At many German-speaking courts, the upheavals of the Thirty Years’ War resulted in a reduced emphasis on music and the arts, including court festivity, in favour of the war effort.7 In the aftermath of the war, however, the German-speaking nobility experienced a social and economic resurgence, and many courts began to reassess the political importance of displaying artistic and intellectual prestige in the performance of court festivity.8 These spectacles required a large allocation of resources to lavish celebration, and thus, through the spectacle of economic expenditure, displayed the extent of princely magnificence.9 Court festivities created in the early aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War also played an important role in the performance of postwar power, as investment in the arts demonstrated economic stability—real or ­performed—both to home courtiers and to neighbouring courts. Der Minervae Banquet and Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung were certainly spectacular events. Fortunately for today’s scholars, the individual Textbücher for these festivities are extant, providing details regarding staging, casting, sets, and music. Engravings illustrate both festivities, giving an indication of the splendour of their productions; the set for Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung, for example, was lavishly decorated for each of the festivity’s five scenes, with the figure of the celebrated Duke August at the centre of each.10 Like Sophie Elisabeth’s other festivities, both Der Minervae Banquet and Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung used members of the Wolfenbüttel court and important court guests as performers.11 As Mara Wade points out, this feature 6 Samantha Owens, “‘Eine liebliche/von vielen Violen bestehende Music:’ Ballet Instrumentation at German Protestant Courts 1650–1700: A Study of Libretti in Wolfenbüttel and Stuttgart Libraries,” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 41 (2008): 26. 7 See, for example, Gregory S. Johnston, A Heinrich Schütz Reader: Letters and Documents in Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 8 Stephanie M. Hilger, “She is the Moon and the Sun: Transgressive Gender Performances in the Work of Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess of Braunschweig and Lüneburg,” Colloquia Germanica 34, no. 3–4 (2001): 195. 9 Stephen Rose, “Music in the Marketplace,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, ed. Tim Carter and John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 58. 10 Duchess Sophie Elisabeth, Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung dem hochgebornen Fürsten Herrn August (Wolfenbüttel: Johann und Heinrich den Sternen, 1655), Musica fol. 1.1.2 (3), Herzog August Bibliothek. 11 The roles in Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung at its 1655 performance were presumably performed by several of the cast members for Der Minervae Banquet; however, it is unclear who performed in both festivities. See Duchess Sophie Elisabeth, Der Minervae Banquet, f. 2r–3r.

Staging Power

distinguished forms of court festivity—such as Singspiele, ballets, and banquets—from opera, and demonstrates their significance as a means of enacting court life on stage.12 The selection of certain people for particular roles thus had a political undertone: it was “informed by the etiquette of court society” and reinforced existing social protocol.13 From the 1650s, a number of members of the Wolfenbüttel court—not only the immediate ducal family—took part in court festivity as both performers and audience. The involvement of more people from a wider court circle in events used primarily to glorify the ruling duke suggests that, from the 1650s, festivity at Wolfenbüttel became increasingly political. As Gerhard Gerkens notes, no ballet or Singspiel written by Anton Ulrich ended without emphasising the power of the Guelph dynasty and its position among “the goddesses, gods, and heavenly figures.”14 This is also true of Sophie Elisabeth’s festivities, particularly in their use of heavenly and mythological figures as the primary characters on stage. Surviving printed sources provide us only with a sense of how court festivity at Wolfenbüttel was performed; however, the performances themselves gave their audience a clear visual representation of the dynasty’s divine power. After the Thirty Years’ War, courtly rulers throughout the German-speaking lands understood themselves as absolute, sovereign leaders whose courts were the centres of their states.15 Court performance thus provided an ideal platform for a ruler or dynasty to assert their political power. As elsewhere in early modern Europe, allegorical figures were used to this end at German-speaking courts; the virtues of such figures reflected the character of the ruler or ruling couple, and played a significant role in highlighting and consolidating courtly dynasty.

WOMEN, EDUCATION, AND DYNASTY Throughout the Holy Roman Empire, seventeenth-century hereditary courtly dynasties observed patriarchal structures in which power passed from a ruler to his son or another male heir under the laws of primogeniture; daughters of a 12 Mara R. Wade, “Emblems and German Protestant Court Culture: Duchess Marie Elisabeth’s Ballet in Gottorf (1650),” Emblematica 9 (1995): 62. 13 Sara Smart, Doppelte Freude der Musen: Court Festivities at Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 1642–1700 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989), 67. 14 Gerhard Gerkens, “Die Balletdichtungen Herzog Anton Ulrichs zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg,” Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch 14 (1964): 50. 15 Ute Brandes, “Baroque Women Writers and the Public Sphere,” Women in German Yearbook 7 (1991): 43–4.

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monarch were not usually candidates for rule. Yet, even in this context, women were able to wield political power in various ways.16 While they rarely ruled in their own right due to the laws of succession, aristocratic women often ruled as regents during the minority of their sons or the absence of their husbands.17 Despite this, the education of young aristocratic women did not take into account the possibility that they might assume power in their lifetimes. Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxony-Weimar, who became regent for her infant son as an eighteenyear-old widow, commented in the eighteenth century that “the last thing my upbringing was concerned with was educating me to be a regent”; this was true of the education of many princely children, especially princely daughters.18 While they may not have been educated in politics and statecraft, female members of the German-speaking Protestant nobility were well-educated from the sixteenth century, particularly those from north German areas such as Mecklenburg and Braunschweig-Lüneburg.19 It should be noted that while young princes received a more comprehensively humanist and less domestically-oriented education than young princesses, it was not unusual for young German-speaking noblewomen to receive an education in the arts. Languages, music, and painting, for example, were all practical, appropriately feminine activities—unlike the natural sciences, administration, or business—which could be easily practised in the home.20 Many of these women were married in their teenage years, and did not have the same access to further education as young noblemen. This background, along with the gendered perception of aspects of early modern knowledge, offers some explanation for the limits to their education. There were, of course, exceptions to the norm; however, the access women had to education was largely dependent on how their fathers or husbands viewed learned women.21 16 Wiesner-Hanks, “Female Rule,” 175. 17 Some exceptions include Queen Elizabeth of England (1533–1603), Queen Anne of England (1665–1714), Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689), and Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780). See Chapter 9, “Gynarchy–Women in Charge,” in Heide Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 18 Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon, 154. 19 Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit: Frau und Literatur, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 247. 20 Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon, 155. 21 The successive wives and daughters of Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, for example, were encouraged to attend classes in geometry and mathematics by Moritz. For more information on the significant role men played in women’s education; see Christina Frei, “Gender, Pedagogy, and Literary Societies: The Education of Women in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele” (PhD diss., University of California Davis, 2002), 32 ff.

Staging Power

While some German-speaking women gained overt political power through their position in the court hierarchy or from circumstances which prevented their husbands or sons from ruling, others could exercise some power at court by practising the arts. In the period immediately following the Thirty Years’ War, German-speaking noblewomen, whose education normally restricted them to the home, were allowed to “participate in the events [at court] that demonstrated dominance”—including court festivity—while their husbands were tasked with the political and financial responsibilities of post-war recovery. 22 During her marriage to Duke August, from 1635 until his death in 1666, Duchess Sophie Elisabeth made a political contribution to her ruling husband’s leadership through her public participation in the cultural life of the Wolfenbüttel court, particularly in the restructure and revival of court music after the Thirty Years’ War. While the war did not officially end until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, in 1642 August signed the Treaty of Goslar, which allowed the ducal family to return from Braunschweig to their capital, Wolfenbüttel, in September 1643, following the departure of a long-standing imperial garrison.23 In addition to her organisational contribution, Sophie Elisabeth wrote festivities in the 1640s and 1650s for important court occasions, most notably the birthday of August, and compiled and composed three collections of devotional and secular songs in French, German, and Italian.24 Two important figures with whom Sophie Elisabeth collaborated were the poet Justus Georg Schottelius, who wrote the libretti for several of Sophie Elisabeth’s festivities in the 1640s, and Heinrich Schütz, who provided the duchess with some instruction in music composition and assisted her with the restructure of the Wolfenbüttel Kapelle by providing musicians and music to the court.25 Sophie Elisabeth’s festivities are distinct from other seventeenth-century theatrical displays by virtue of being written by the spouse of a ruler to celebrate that ruler, at a time when such works were most often written by an employed composer working under noble patronage. It is also significant that Sophie Elisabeth herself performed in a number of her festivities, as well as writing them and taking responsibility for the organisation of their performances. While it was not unusual for noblewomen from German-speaking courts to take responsibility for the organisation of court festivity, nor to have a musical education, it was 22 Wiesner-Hanks, “Female Rule,” 176. 23 Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 632. 24 See Geck, Sophie Elisabeth, 470–527. 25 Karl Wilhelm Geck, email to author, January 11, 2017.

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uncommon for them to compose music for public performance rather than private devotion. Similarly, German-speaking noblewomen often used their language skills to translate Latin or French literature into German, but rarely did these women create original texts—with the exception of devotional song texts—themselves.26 Even women of high standing who were intensely involved in the organisation and performance of court festivity, such as Queen Anna of Denmark or Princess Magdalena Sibylle, rarely wrote compositions for performance themselves.27 Sophie Elisabeth’s independence in the creation of several of her entertainments further differentiates these events from others of the same period. Noblewomen like Sophie Elisabeth did not overtly influence or undermine their husbands, despite their frequent participation in court cultural life. Any influence or power a noblewoman gained from their responsibilities at court was always “in keeping with female virtues,” as the idea that women had a determined place in social hierarchy was widely accepted and fundamental to seventeenth-century gender roles. 28 Margravine Caroline Luise of Baden-Durlach (1776–1841), a well-educated noblewoman, argued that intellectually-inclined women should act “smartly” to avoid “betray[ing] their superiority,” and Heide Wunder points out that “the unwomanly dominant wife was seen as lusting for power … We thus have good reason to believe that smart wives did their part in making their role in the rulers’ politics undetectable.”29 However, in the circles in which noblewomen moved, their intellect and awareness of political issues was clear. In her article discussing the relationship between religious ideology and political action, Merry WiesnerHanks draws attention to the political implications of women’s polemical writing, noting that almost all religious writing of the sixteenth century was of a political nature.30 Mara Wade explores the use of religious emblem 26 Judith P. Aikin, “Devotional Songs by Women of the Ruling Families in Seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany,” in Der Hof: Ort kulturellen Handelns von Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Susanne Rode-Breymann and Antjie Tumat (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013): 335–51. 27 Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–1619) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); and Mara R. Wade, “Princess Magdalena Sibylle (1617–68) and Court Ballet in Denmark and Saxony,” in Der Hof: Ort kulturellen Handelns von Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Susanne Rode-Breymann and Antjie Tumat (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013): 352–75. 28 Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon, 159. 29 Ibid., 159–60. 30 Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “The Holy Roman Empire: Women and Politics beyond Liberalism, Individual Rights, and Revolutionary Theory,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 306.

Staging Power

books as Stammbücher, focusing a personalised copy of Andreas Friedrich’s Emblamata Nova (1618) owned and used by Dorothea of Anhalt (1607–34) and its use as a Stammbuch (autograph book/album).31 Since Stammbücher served as records of important family events, the moments commemorated in them serve as evidence of the ways in which dynasty was constructed and reinforced in the early modern period. Dorothea’s album is particularly interesting in this respect, as forty-nine of its seventy-four entries were made by women, including Dorothea’s aunt Sophie Hedwig (1561–1631), and her grandmother Elisabeth of Denmark (1573–1625).32 The number of these entries indicate that her familial relationships were significant to Dorothea and, more importantly, that the connections and interactions between women were an important aspect of her dynastic network. While these examples demonstrate that early modern women were often politically aware, this awareness was always linked to more appropriately feminine practices—such as religious expression, as evident from their use of emblem books—and was most often practised in women’s spaces such as the home. It is thus difficult to determine the extent to which women’s voices in their own writing or actions during their public stage performances were subversive, and what kind of power they wielded in these instances. Writing about Sophie Elisabeth’s performances, Stephanie M. Hilger argues that the duchess “demonstrates complicity with the dominant male discourse … while simultaneously transgressing the boundaries [of this discourse]” in order to perform discursive conventions in ways that allow her to create her own individual agency within Wolfenbüttel’s social and gender hierarchy. 33 While Hilger’s assertion that manipulating the space in between the public and private—the courtly stage—allowed Sophie Elisabeth to take a decisive stance in the performance of her power is persuasive, an alternative reading suggests that this power was not only the duchess’s. The following discussion aims to demonstrate, rather, that Sophie Elisabeth uses Der Minervae Banquet and Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung as an opportunity to perform the power of Duke August, the Guelph 31 Andreas Friedrich, Emblemata Nova (Francoforti: Iennis, 1617). The copy belonging to Dorothea of Anhalt has been digitised by the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, accessed July 10, 2019, http://diglib.HAB.de/wdb.php?dir=drucke/231-noviss-8f. Dorothea of Anhalt was Duke August’s second wife. 32 Mara R. Wade, “Dorothea of Anhalt, Fürstin von Braunschweig-Lüneburg: The Emblem Book as Stammbuch,” in Bauer, Frauen–Bücher–Höfe: Wissen und Sammeln vor 1800, 305. 33 Hilger, “She is the Moon and the Sun,” 198.

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dynasty and, significantly, the place of women within this dynasty and their indispensable role in its continuation both as the mothers of male heirs and as representatives of their husbands. She does this by identifying herself with the goddess Minerva, casting other women in significant roles as female allegorical figures, and placing women in prominent physical positions on stage.

SOPHIE ELISABETH’S SELF-IDENTIFICATION AS MINERVA Der Minervae Banquet was the second of Sophie Elisabeth’s three festivities in the mid-1650s, preceded by Der Natur Banquet in 1654 and followed by Glückwünschende Waarsagung und Ankunft der Königin Nicaulae in 1656, all of which were conceived and performed for Duke August’s birthday.34 Sophie Elisabeth performed the titular female role—Nature, Minerva, and Queen Nicaulae, respectively—in each of these works, which placed her in a unique position as both composer and performer. It is also unusual that Sophie Elisabeth took the primary role in the performance of her own festivities, as it was more common for noblewomen at the highest level of court hierarchy to appear on stage as part of an ensemble or in a subordinate position to male figures.35 Sophie Elisabeth’s self-identification as the most important figure on stage was thus a powerful statement of her status within the court and, significantly, her relationship to her non-performing husband. But since the primary function of Sophie Elisabeth’s festivities was to celebrate her husband’s birthday, he played the most important role in their performance as the reason for and focus of the event, even when he did not literally perform on stage. While all of Sophie Elisabeth’s 1650s festivities feature prominent female figures, Der Minervae Banquet stands out for the sheer number of these women, all of whom were played by women, and the importance they are granted on the stage. This is evident in the festivity’s surviving Textbuch, which, along with its sole engraving of the performance’s female figures, rather than its male figures, contains detailed descriptions of the procession and its order. Forty-two-yearold Sophie Elisabeth-as-Minerva is the first woman in the procession, following

34 The 1655 festivities were performed for August’s seventy-sixth birthday. 35 For example, Queen Anna of Denmark’s performances at the Stuart court. See McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage.

Staging Power Table 1.  The Seven Liberal Arts in Der Minerva Bankett. Woman

Role

Christina Elisabeth, Countess of Barby-Mühlingen

Geometry

Age 21

Relationship to Guelph dynasty Married Duke August’s son Rudolph August in 1650

Elisabeth-Juliana of SchleswigHolstein

Music

22

Married Anton Ulrich in 1656

Sibylle Ursula, Duchess of Braunschweig-Lüneburg

Astronomy

26

Duke August’s daughter, Sophie Elisabeth’s stepdaughter

Maria Elisabeth, Duchess of Braunschweig-Lüneburg

Arithmetic

17

Daughter of August and Sophie Elisabeth

Christine Margareta von Mecklenburg

Rhetoric

40

Sister of Sophie Elisabeth

Martha Juliana von Krosigk

Grammar

–

–

Antonia Sibylla of BarbyMühlingen

Dialectic

14

Sister of Christina Elisabeth.

Prometheus.36 Minerva is then followed by the seven liberal arts, played by women close to the duchess and the Guelph dynasty (Table 1). The seven liberal arts are then followed by the nine muses, played by young women all from different courts. After their procession, the seventeen women seat themselves on Mount Parnassus, “within which sweet music was hidden,” with Sophie Elisabeth-as-Minerva at the top and the liberal arts and muses below her.37 At this point in the procession, Prometheus collected the male members of the procession (who are not depicted in an engraving), who arranged themselves around the already seated women, before Prometheus received orders from Minerva to collect August from his chamber in order for the celebrations to continue.38 Two particular myths about Minerva, the Roman goddess of music, the arts, wisdom, medicine, poetry, and war, help to understand the implications of Sophie Elisabeth’s self-characterisation as the goddess in Der Minervae Banquet. The first is her origin story, in which she bursts from her father Jupiter’s head, adult, armed, and fully clad in armour. The second comes from Book Six of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and concerns a weaving competition between a Lydian girl, Arachne, and Minerva. After hearing Arachne’s claims that her weaving skills are superior to Minerva’s, the goddess challenges Arachne to a contest to

36 Prometheus was played by Friedrich von Kramm. Sophie Elisabeth, Der Minervae Banquet, f. 2r. 37 Ibid., f. 3v. 38 Ibid., f. 3v.

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determine who can weave the finest tapestry.39 Ovid describes both tapestries in vivid detail; of Minerva’s he writes: [she] fashions the Hill of Mars on the Acropolis at Athens and that longago contest to name the land. The twelve celestial gods sit in august majesty on their lofty seats: An exact rendering identifies each one like a signature. … To herself she gives a shield, a sharp spear, a helmet, and the aegis that protects her breast.40

This description bears a striking resemblance to the engraving by Conrad Buno which illustrates Der Minervae Banquet, in which Minerva is the focal point (Figure 1). She stands in front of Mount Parnassus holding a shield and spear and wearing a helmet and aegis, surrounded by the seven liberal arts and the nine muses. Each of the muses and liberal arts, like the gods in Ovid’s story, are depicted in detail and they are also clearly identified by numbers and letters. While the resemblance between Buno’s engraving and Ovid’s description of Minerva’s tapestry may be coincidental, both highlight the figure of Minerva as a powerful woman and leader. Sophie Elisabeth’s leading position in Der Minervae Banquet is physically overt; she begins the procession of women— following Prometheus—and sits in the highest position on stage. Although Prometheus is the first figure on stage, his actions throughout the procession are on the command of or performed in the service of Minerva, emphasising her position of authority in the context of the performance. The association of the duchess with powerful female figures was not restricted to festivities of her own creation. Three of Anton Ulrich’s works— the prologue to Amelinde (1657), Ballet der Natur (1660), and Ballet des Tages (1659)—liken Sophie Elisabeth to the figures of Minerva, Nature, and Time.41 While allegorical figures were used to extol the virtues of a ruler or ruling couple at German-speaking courts, aside from Louis XIV, rulers themselves rarely played these figures on stage. This type of royal embodiment creates a two-body identity, described by Mark Franko as a moment in which a temporal body—that of a mortal ruler—performs an atemporal identity—that of an immortal god or goddess—in order to assure an audience of the ceaselessness 39 Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Michael Simpson (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 95. 40 Ibid., 95. 41 Geck, Sophie Elisabeth, 84–91.

Staging Power

Figure 1. Sophie Elisabeth, Der Minervae Banquet, f. 2v. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Musica fol. 1.1.2 (2). Reproduced with kind permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (Creative Commons).

of a dynasty and its power.42 In Der Minervae Banquet, Sophie Elisabeth’s dual identity as both herself, the duchess, and Minerva, the goddess, affirms her position as the highest-ranked woman at the court and her place in the continuation of the Guelph dynasty. This hierarchy is further emphasised by the mythological relationship between Minerva, the nine muses, and the seven liberal arts. Book Five of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ends with Minerva’s visit to the nine muses on Mount Helicon. During this visit, Ovid positions Minerva as the leader of the muses by highlighting her skill in the domains over which the muses rule and affirming her power 42 Mark Franko, “Majestic Drag: Monarchical Performativity and the King’s Body Theatrical,” The Drama Review 47, no. 2 (2003): 72.

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over them; one of the muses explains to the goddess that “if thou hadst stooped to us, Minerva, we had welcomed thee most worthy of our choir.”43 This affinity between the muses and Minerva is paralleled in Der Minervae Banquet, in which Sophie Elisabeth assumes the role of Minerva and leads not only the nine muses and the seven liberal arts in the festivity’s performance but a new generation of Guelph women who embody these figures. Through this performative process, the duchess therefore makes both the continuity of dynasty and women’s important place in this dynasty clear to the festivity’s audience.

THE GLORIFICATION OF AUGUST By organising side-by-side performances of Der Minervae Banquet and Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung, as was the case in 1655, Sophie Elisabeth highlights the importance of women to the success of a male ruler’s reign. Both festivities serve to glorify August as a leader by divine right. In Der Minervae Banquet, male and female allegorical figures are led by Prometheus and Minerva as they make short speeches espousing the virtues of the duke and his leadership; however, the figure of the duke himself does not appear in the procession; he was the non-performing recipient of these adulations. Following the procession, a banquet took place, in which allegorical figures and uncostumed guests (including the duke) were seated amongst each other at three tables. Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung was performed after this banquet. Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung can be seen as a kind of performed biography of August on his seventy-sixth birthday, in which he is represented and celebrated at a different stage in his life: boy, adolescent, man, and elderly man. In each scene the figure of August is accompanied by two female allegorical figures, who function in the performance context as both protectors and symbolic representatives of August’s character in different parts of his life, while the real-life duke is venerated with an instrumental sinfonia and a vocal song (Table 2). The structure of this event was based on a scheme paralleling the four ages of man with the four seasons.44 The season, the duke, and the female allegorical figures who accompany him are depicted in engravings which correspond to each scene. These images are particularly notable, as no other surviving sources of Sophie Elisabeth’s festivities contain so much or such vivid iconography. 43 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 82. 44 Smart, Doppelte Freude der Musen, 79.

Staging Power Table 2.  Structure of Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung. Scene Setting

Duke

Allegorical figures Sinfonia (Clefs)

Young child Guardian Angel, Fortuna

Song

1

Spring

Treble, Treble, Alto, S, Bc Tenor, Bass (figured)

2

Summer Adolescent

Dilligence, Virtue

Treble, Treble, Alto, Bass (figured)

A, Bc

3

Autumn

Man

Fortitude, Piety

Treble, Treble, Alto, Alto, Bass (figured)

T, Bc

4

Winter

Elderly man

Honour, Peace

Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass (figured)

B, Bc

5

Heaven

N/A

N/A

Tenor, Tenor, Bass (figured)

“Engels Lied” SSAT, Treble, Treble, Alto, Tenor, Bass (figured)

As descriptions of the set of each scene are very detailed and are reproduced exactly by the accompanying engravings, it appears that they illustrate the actual staging and decoration for each scene. The description for Winter (Figure 2), for example, reads as follows: One saw the theatre as winter, with events which had come to pass depicted on both sides. In the middle an old man was seen. To his right side stood Honour, and to the left Peace. Above the old man the heavens spread and a hand came down holding a crown, which hovered above his head. Over Honour shone three golden beams, and above Peace an intertwining chain. In the most distant heaven gold letters could be seen, that spelled out “Vivat Augustus” and with that the following music was played.45

In addition to an elaborate setting, each scene contains an instrumental sinfonia with varying instrumentation, and a song for a solo voice and continuo, 45 “Sahe das Theatrum am Winter gleich/auf beiden Seiten/was sich im selbigen Pflegt zu zutragen. In der Mitte ward vorgestellt ein alter Mann/zu dessen rechten Seiten stunde die Ehre/zur Lincken die Ruhe. Über dem Alten aber that sich der Himmel auff/und gab eine Hand hierfür mit einer Krone/die über seinem Häupte schwebete. Über die Ehre blikten drei guldene Stralen/und über die Ruhe/eine ineinander geschlossene Kette/darbey ward gleichfalls perspektiv-weiß/indem allerhintersten Himmel mit guldenen Buchstaben gesehen: Vivat Augustus, und darauff folgende Music gemacht.” Duchess Sophie Elisabeth, Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung, f. 5v.

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Figure 2.  Sophie Elisabeth, Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung, f. 5v. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Musica fol. 1.1.2. (3). Reproduced with kind permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (Creative Commons).

which appears to be the focal point of the scene. Every aspect of each scene celebrates August and his leadership at different stages in his life, describing him in the first scene as a “son of God” upon whom “heaven looks graciously” and in the final scene as a “highly gifted” leader who “governs land and people”

Staging Power

and will “live for an eternity in heaven.”46 Together with the allegorical figures who accompany the duke throughout his life, these songs serve both to glorify him and to communicate a broad moral message about the characteristics of a good leader and what is expected of them. August’s piety and his position as a divinely ordained ruler are particularly emphasised: the fifth verse of the song “Sey wilkommen Gotter Sohn,” sung in Spring, explains that it is by “the grace of god” that August is so fortunate, and alludes to his position as a leader to whom “land and people are entrusted.”47 Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung is not remarkable among panEuropean court festivities in the seventeenth century with regard to its primary purpose, to glorify the duke and promote his power. At the same time, it is significant that aside from the duke, all the players in Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung are women. Throughout the Singspiel, these women, as allegorical figures, both characterise the duke and bear responsibility for his success as a ruler. As the performance of Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung in 1655 was a repeat of the 1652 event, it is tempting to view Der Minervae Banquet and Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung as independent festivities. Due to the absence of the procession, the female allegorical figures in the first performance of Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung function as a means of emphasising the character of August. However, viewing the two festivities as intertwined, interdependent events at their 1655 performance emphasises the significance of female figures in the event and, as these figures were played by women of the court, the fact that real-life women were integral to the success of a male leader and his dynasty. The emphasis on women in the 1655 performance of Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung is due to their prominence in Der Minervae Banquet. As the Textbuch for the latter indicates, the two festivities were not separate during their 1655 performance; Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung was performed within Der Minervae Banquet. By placing one event, in which women feature primarily as symbolic characterisations of August, within another, in which they play a large role in vocally praising the duke, Sophie Elisabeth covertly constructed and highlighted the necessity of women to the duke’s reign. While the duchess does not perform in Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung herself, she highlights the agency 46 “Fürst Augustus hochbegabt/Land und Leute wohl regieret/Fürst August hocherleucht/ Land unn Leut Himmel führet: Was die Erd’ Erwünschtes hat/Fürst Augustus haben soll/ Und der Himmel hat bereit/Ihm ein Ewigs immerwol!” Ibid., f. 6r. 47 “Unser Gottes Gnaden Hand/hat dir grosses Glük gebaut/dir sol werden Leut und Land/ zugewandt und anvertraut.” Ibid., f. 3r.

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of women in and associated with the Guelph dynasty by characterising and celebrating the duke using primarily female figures, performed by these women. This agency is emphasised by Sophie Elisabeth’s role in Der Minervae Banquet, in which the duchess asserts her role in the success of her husband’s leadership as well as her own significance to Wolfenbüttel’s cultural resurgence after the Thirty Years’ War by identifying herself with the goddess Minerva. She therefore not only glorifies the duke in Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung but celebrates her own role as one half of a powerful ducal couple, albeit in an understated manner. This demonstrates how while noblewomen in the seventeenth-century German-speaking lands may appear subordinate, a closer look reveals that their cultural activities allowed them to create a space in which they could exercise power within the constraints of gender and social hierarchy at court.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aikin, Judith P. “Devotional Songs by Women of the Ruling Families in Seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany.” In Der Hof: Ort kulturellen Handelns von Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Susanne Rode-Breymann and Antjie Tumat, 335–51. Cologne: Böhlau, 2013. Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit: Frau und Literatur, 1500–1800. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987. Brandes, Ute. “Baroque Women Writers and the Public Sphere.” Women in German Yearbook 7 (1991): 43–63. Franko, Mark. “Majestic Drag: Monarchical Performativity and the King’s Body Theatrical.” The Drama Review 47, no. 2 (2003): 71–87. Friedrich, Andreas. Emblemata Nova (Francoforti: Iennis, 1617). “Emblematic Online.” Accessed July 10, 2019. http://diglib.HAB.de/wdb.php?dir=drucke/231-noviss-8f. Frei, Christina. “Gender, Pedagogy, and Literary Societies: The Education of Women in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele.” PhD diss., University of California Davis, 2002. Geck, Karl Wilhelm. Sophie Elisabeth Herzogin zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg (1613–1676) als Musikerin. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker, 1992. Gerkens, Gerhard. “Die Balletdichtungen Herzog Anton Ulrichs zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg.” Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch 14 (1964): 29–51. Hilger, Stephanie M. “She is the Moon and the Sun: Transgressive Gender Performances in the Work of Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess of Braunschweig and Lüneburg.” Colloquia Germanica 34, no. 3–4 (2001): 195–211. Johnston, Gregory S. A Heinrich Schütz Reader: Letters and Documents in Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. McManus, Clare. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–1619). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Staging Power Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Michael Simpson. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Owens, Samantha. “‘Eine liebliche/von vielen Violen bestehende Music:’ Ballet Instrumentation at German Protestant Courts 1650-1700: A Study of Libretti in Wolfenbüttel and Stuttgart Libraries.” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 41 (2008): 25–67. Rode-Breymann, Susanne, and Antjie Tumat, eds. Der Hof: Ort kulturellen Handelns von Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit. Cologne: Böhlau, 2013. Rose, Stephen. “Music in the Marketplace.” In The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, edited by Tim Carter and John Butt, 55–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ruhnke, Martin. “Wolfenbüttel.” In MGG Online, edited by Laurenz Lütteken. Kassel: Bärenreiter 1998. Accessed September 11, 2018. www-mgg-online.com.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/mgg/ stable/14244. Smart, Sara. Doppelte Freude der Musen: Court Festivities at Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 1642–1700. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1989. Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess of Braunschweig and Lüneburg. Der Minervae Banquet, welches zu sonderbaren Ehren/auff den ixxvii Geburtstag des durchläutigen hochgebohrnen Fürsten und Herrn/ Herrn August … bestimmet geworden. Wolfenbüttel: Johann und Heinrich den Sternen, 1655. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Musica. Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess of Braunschweig and Lüneburg. Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung dem hochgebornen Fürsten Herrn August. Wolfenbüttel: Johann und Heinrich den Sternen, 1655. Herzog August Bibliothek, Musica. Wade, Mara R. “Emblems and German Protestant Court Culture: Duchess Marie Elisabeth’s Ballet in Gottorf (1650).” Emblematica 9 (1995): 45–109. ——. “Princess Magdalena Sibylle (1617–1668) and Court Ballet in Denmark and Saxony.” In Der Hof: Ort kulturellen Handelns von Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Susanne Rode-Breymann and Antjie Tumat, 352–375. Cologne: Böhlau, 2013. ——. “Dorothea of Anhalt, Fürstin von Braunschweig-Lüneburg: The Emblem Book as Stammbuch.” Frauen–Bücher–Höfe: Wissen und Sammeln vor 1800, edited by Volker B ­ auer, Elizabeth Harding, Gerhild Scholz Williams, and Mara R. Wade, 297–313. Wiesbaden: ­Harrassowitz, 2018. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. “Female Rule in the Courtly States of the Early Modern World.” In ­Frauen–Bücher–Höfe: Wissen und Sammeln vor 1800, edited by Volker Bauer, Elizabeth ­Harding, Gerhild Scholz Williams, and Mara R. Wade, 175–85. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018. ——. “The Holy Roman Empire: Women and Politics beyond Liberalism, Individual Rights, and Revolutionary Theory.” In Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by Hilda L. Smith, 305–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wilson, Peter H. The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Wunder, Heide. He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany. Translated by Thomas Dunlop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

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CHAPTER 11

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage: Niccolò Piccinni’s Il regno della Luna LAWRENCE MAYS

ABSTRACT Niccolò Piccinni’s dramma giocoso Il regno della Luna (1770) represented a performance of a plausible future history for the Italian peninsula. Involving a visit to a lunar society in a future epoch, its imaginary setting allowed both a safe critique of contemporary societal norms and a suggestion of an ideal polity, seen from the vantage point of hypothetical future Europeans. It was prototypical science fiction with allusions to expansion of the known science of the period. Enlightenment thinkers had an expectation that application of the new scientific methods to social and political institutions could lead to an amelioration of society, which belief resulted in a preoccupation with imagining an ideal future state. Concurrently historicism was emerging, with its central tenet that societal changes resulted from human action conditioned by social, political, and cultural environments. The opera was forward-thinking in that it combined the Enlightenment view of a planned ideal future with the historicist notion of societal evolution. It dealt with a number of topical issues, including the political position of women, commerce, militarism, colonialism, and interaction with the Other. Supported by Piccinni’s eclectic musical setting, the libretto proffered a female-dominated lunar society as an allegory for an enlightened ideal of the Italian future.

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ASTOLFO ASTOLFO Non già con me, né col femmineo impero This realm here was not born either with Questa reggia qui nacque. me or with the feminine dominion. Degli antichi Lunicoli, It is the souvenir, the trophy Già da gran tempo soggiogati, è questa that remains of the ancient Lunicoli, La memoria, il trofeo, che ancor si resta. who were subjugated long ago. Forse tutt’altro un giorno Perhaps at one time the lunar world was Era il mondo lunar. Quando l’impero completely different. When the rule Qui passò nel bel sesso, here passed to the fair sex, Anche il mondo lunar cangiò con esso.1 the lunar world changed with it.

T

his historical background to the development of a future lunar society given by Astolfo—an Earth man who has emigrated to the Moon— hints at the social, political, and philosophical thought underpinning Niccolò Piccinni’s dramma giocoso Il regno della Luna. First performed at the Regio Ducal Teatro in Milan on April 23, 1770, its action takes place in an unspecified future epoch on the Moon, where a group of Earth people have arrived to visit Astolfo, their old friend. The visitors are a mathematician named Stellante, his sister Frasia, a trader named Mercionne, his sister Lesbina, and a soldier named Spaccone. Astolfo, they discover, has a daughter—Queen Astolfina. They encounter a technologically superior society whose political principles, social mores, cultural ideas, and religious beliefs are radically different from those in late eighteenth-century Europe. In this chapter I will argue that the imagined setting in the future allowed a safe critique of contemporary European norms and provided an avenue for proposing an ideal society. It did this by adopting the vantage point of hypothetical future Europeans comparing their society with that of “Others”—the lunar society. In so doing this comic opera represented the most forward-looking ideas of its time, garnered from late eighteenth-century Italian Enlightenment thinkers.2 I will describe how it represents a performance of the history of the period,

1 N.a., Il Regno Della Luna. Dramma Giocoso Da Rappresentarsi Nel Regio Ducal Teatro Di Milano Nella Corrente Primavera (Milan: Giovanni Battista Bianchi, 1770), 17. 2 A plot synopsis is at: Lawrence John Mays, “A Scholarly Edition with Exegesis of Niccolò Piccinni’s Dramma Giocoso: ‘Il Regno Della Luna’ (1970)” (PhD diss., The Australian National University, 2018), 5–9, accessed July 9, 2019, http://hdl.handle.net/1885/141079. See also: Niccolò Piccinni, Il regno della Luna, ed. Lawrence Mays, trans. with assistance from Grazia Miccichè (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2019).

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and provide a background of historical understanding to facilitate contemporary performance.

ALLEGORICAL MOON SETTINGS The Moon had been used as an allegorical setting to reflect on social, philosophical, and political trends in literary and theatrical works since ancient times, and specifically in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Moon was popular as a fictional world and conjecture about possible lunar inhabitants was common. Indeed, a number of operas in the period involved a fictive lunar society.3 As early as 1687, Aphra Behn had explored the narrative possibilities of a lunar setting in her musical play The Emperor of the Moon. The action was based on a deception, as decades later was Carlo Goldoni’s libretto Il mondo della Luna, upon which at least ten operas were composed between 1750 and 1792: while the setting is actually on Earth, some of the characters assume the guise of lunar inhabitants to trick others into believing that they are on the Moon. One other opera—La Luna abitata—involves a visit by an earth person to an established human society on the Moon (Paisiello/Lorenzi, 1768). This opera buffa has mythological as well as human characters, and falls within the genre of fantasy. Grounded in plausible science, Il regno della Luna is unique in the period in that it is a prototypical science fiction work with a setting genuinely intended to be the Moon. Being unreachable and outside normal human experience, fantastic and fictional worlds such as the Moon were safe places for challenging the established order. Their popularity was in part a spin-off from the philosophy of the so-called new science, which was pervasive in the thinking of the period. From the late sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries, the principle that knowledge comes solely from experience and analysis of observed phenomena (empiricism) resulted in a continual search for new information through application of the scientific method. Challenges to traditional or received knowledge led to major developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry. As a result of the extraordinary pace of discoveries, knowledge—along with its benefits for humanity—was considered infinite. Accordingly, European literati, philosophers, and scientists looked forward to an ‘open future’ in 3 On these “Moon operas,” see Lawrence Mays, “The Moon,” Histories of Emotion: From Medieval Europe to Contemporary Australia, December 22, 2015, https://historiesofemotion. com/2015/12/22/the-moon/.

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which new developments would continue to occur.4 A by-product of this was a future-directed time consciousness, and a preoccupation with imagining an ideal enlightened polity.5 Attempts to determine the nature of an ideal society were a preoccupation; a particular focus was the social position of women. Applying the new-science philosophy to societal structures almost always involved proposing a polity unlike those of the past or present. Although enlightenment intellectuals had taken on the task of planning for an ideal future, the lunar realm in Il regno della Luna offers a vision of the kind of society that might emerge in reaction to historical oppression.

HISTORICISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT A new concept of history, later termed “historicism,” arose in the mid-eighteenth century. A central tenet was that societal changes resulted from the actions of individuals and groups whose values and beliefs, rather than reflecting the universal and innate characteristics of an ‘ideal’ human nature, were relative and particular—conditioned by their social, political, and cultural environments.6 Astolfo’s assertion in the epigraph that the lunar world is an outcome of historical oppression is entirely consistent with the historicists’ idea that everything in the human world is “the product of the particular historical processes that brought it into being”—the embodiment of human values and beliefs in a specific time and place.7 Il regno della Luna was forward-thinking in the sense that its grounding in historicism allowed it to bypass the Enlightenment philosophers’ search for universal justifications for social, political, and moral values. The German historicist Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–1759) maintained that the construction of history is inherently affected by the historian’s perspective. Stressing the influence of the historian’s values and socio-cultural experience, he posited that all historical thinking is thinking at a particular time 4 Reinhart Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, ed. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 165. 5 Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), 51. 6 The main contributors to this concept of history in the eighteenth century were Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–59), Justus Möser (1720–94), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). 7 Frederick C. Beiser, “Introduction: The Concept and Context of Historicism,” in Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6.

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from a specific vantage point.8 Chladenius also proposed that the concept of historical change include not only changes that have occurred in the past but also those that will happen in the future.9 Il regno della Luna aligns with Chladenius’s thought in that the librettist uses the device of assigning the vantage point for observation of the lunar society to Earth visitors in an unknown future epoch. This emphasizes that all historical thinking is relative—­dependent on the perspective of the observer. In this sense the forward-thinking nature of the work is evident—the lunar society represents the outcome of an experiment in social change seen against the backdrop of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers’ interest in and concern with the paths history would take. The recent rapid pace of technological developments and discoveries led to their expectation that not only could the forces of nature be understood and controlled but also that application of the principles of the new science could increase understanding of humanity and of the self, resulting in improvements to the justice and morality of social institutions, perhaps even leading to an increase in human happiness.10 In this context Il regno della Luna is the librettist’s concept of a plausible future history. To elucidate this concept it is useful to consider the socio-cultural and political milieu in which the opera was written. The Italian peninsula in the late eighteenth century comprised separate states under various hegemonies. However, the publication of Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Rerum italicarum scriptores (Sources of Italian History), funded by a group of wealthy Lombard noblemen, had resulted in a new civil and patriotic spirit—a nascent national identity.11 The Duchy of Milan, under Austrian Habsburg rule since 1715, was like the other Italian states receptive to new ideas from the most advanced European countries such as France and England.12 Il regno della Luna engaged with the historicists’ imaginative projection of history and with evolving Italian identity by proffering a possible ideal future Italian state. 8 Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, 110. 9 Johann Martin Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft: Worinnen Der Grund Zu Einer Neuen Einsicht in Allen Arten Der Gelahrtheit Gelegt Wird (Leipzig: Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1752), Chapter 1, paragraphs 25–6, 114–5, and 17. 10 Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Ben-Habib, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 3–14. 11 Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores/Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Milan: ex typographia Societatis Palatinae in Regia Curia, 1723). 12 Franco Fido, “The First Half of the Settecento,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 343–4.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

The work was one of the 1770 spring and summer operas produced in Milan’s Regio Ducal Teatro by the cavalieri associati, a company of fifty-four Milanese gentlemen.13 The letter of dedication in the published libretto is addressed to Francesco Maria III d’Este, Duke of Modena and interim governor of the Duchy of Milan from 1754 to 1771 (Figure 1). Figure 2 shows approval of the libretto as given by Count Firmian, plenipotentiary minister in the government.14 Lombardy was under the rule of Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, and she was the official patron of the Regio Ducal Teatro. In eighteenth-century Milan, opera, as well as being a popular form of entertainment, was a primary mode of dissemination for the Habsburgs’ social and political values and of the monitoring of public opinion.15 The Habsburgs had long used opera to promulgate their political agendas—an early example being Bernardo Pasquini’s La caduta del regno dell’amazzoni (1690), whose political purpose appears to have been to promote to the populace the grandeur of Spain and the regal suitability of Carlos II.16 This work may also exemplify the use of operas based on Amazon warrior mythology to create a symbolic link between fabled virago queens and female Habsburg rulers in the Viennese court.17 Chen posits that two operas performed in or near Vienna—Le cinesi (Antonio Caldara, 1735) and L’eroe cinese (Giuseppe Bonno, 1752), both involving a laudatory depiction of Chinese “others”—aimed to construct an ideal enlightened Austrian persona, as embodied by Maria Theresa, to reinforce the legitimacy of her rule.18 The lunar society in Il regno della Luna has an ‘enlightened’ queen, and I will posit that the work engaged with a perceived need to encourage the 13 Pietro Verri and Alessandro Verri, Carteggio Di Pietro e Di Alessandro Verri (Dal 1766 Al 1797), vol. 3: Agosto 1769–Settembre 1770, ed. Francesco Novati and Emanuele Greppi (Milan: Casa Editrice L. F. Cogliati, 1911), 260–61. 14 N.a., Il Regno Della Luna (Milan: Batista Bianchi Regio, 1770), 9–10 and 84. 15 Alessandra Palidda, “Milan 1790–1802: Music, Society and Politics in the City of Many Regimes” (PhD diss., Cardiff University, 2017), iii. 16 Gordon Ferris Crain, Jr., “The Operas of Bernardo Pasquini,” vol. 1 (PhD diss., Yale University, 1965), 175–6. 17 Amazon warrior mythology was a preoccupation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe: the libretti of at least eight operas were based on it. Garavaglia and Kamal suggest that these works, whose libretti were derived from Spanish plays, may have arisen from a political need to legitimate Habsburg female rulers’ political power. See Andrea Garavaglia and Katherine Kamal, “Amazons From Madrid To Vienna, By Way of Italy: The Circulation of a Spanish Text and the Definition of an Imaginary,” Early Music History 31, no. 1 (2012): 232. 18 Jen-yen Chen, “Maria Theresia and the Voicing of Imperial Self: The Austrian Contexts of Metastasio’s China Operas,” Eighteenth-Century Music 13, no. 1 (2016): 10.

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MOST SERENE HIGHNESS

Nel consecrare a V. A. S. il presente Dramma Giocoso, non possiamo a meno di non rammentarle quanto ha potuto sugli animi di tutti Noi la sollecita, e benigna approvazione di cui Le piacque sin da principio onorare il nostro progetto di sostituire alle usate Commedie un Musicale Spettacolo. Supplichiamo il primo saggio, affinchè possiamo animarci sempre più a meritare, dopo l’autorevole suo Padrocinio, il pubblico gradimento, e con profondissino ossequio abbiamo l’onore di protestarci

In consecrating the present Dramma Giocoso to Your Most Serene Highness we cannot neglect to remind you how it empowered the souls of all of us to receive the prompt, kind approval with which it pleased you from the beginning to honour our plan to substitute for the usual play a musical production. We offer the first performance so that, under your most distinguished patronage, we may become ever more enlivened so as to merit the approval of the public, and with deepest respect we are honoured to declare ourselves

Di V. A. S. Umilissimi Servidori I Cavalieri Associati.

to Your Most Serene Highness. Most humble servants I Cavalieri Associati.

Figure 1.  Letter of dedication in the published libretto, addressed to Francesco Maria III d’Este, Duke of Modena and interim governor of the Duchy of Milan from 1754 to 1771

Figure 2.  Approval of the libretto as given by Count Firmian, plenipotentiary minister in the government

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c­ itizenry to endorse Maria Theresa’s ascendancy in Lombardy and her absolutist ruling style.19 The Archduchess had an ambivalent attitude to Lombardy and was apprehensive about the level of support she enjoyed there. Nevertheless, as part of her reformist policy in the 1760s, she went to considerable lengths to create a collaborative relationship with leading intellectuals in Milanese society through the mediation of the Austrian Count Firmian. Firmian, for example, invited Count Pietro Verri (1728–92) to participate in the Lombard administration. He was a founder and director of the periodical Il Caffè, a vehicle for Milanese Enlightened thought.20 For centuries a class of wealthy families in cooperation with the Church had had a stranglehold on political and economic power in Lombardy. Maria Theresa initiated various bureaucratic reforms of financial administration and political structures in the city, and while she did not completely break the hold of the patriciate and the Church, her reforms considerably weakened it.21 Knudsen maintains that “enlightened absolutism”—a monarchical style typified by Frederick the Great—was “the only force capable of breaking the power of estates and aristocratic self-interest,” in contrast with the alternative forms of government that Jean-Jacques Rousseau canvassed in On the Social Contract.22 I propose that queen Astolfina in Il regno della Luna was an allegory for Maria Theresa. Her response to the Earth women’s asking 19 Concerned that he might not produce a male heir Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, had proposed in 1713 the “Pragmatic Sanction,” which allowed a female succession. There being no male heir when he died in 1740 his eldest daughter Maria Theresa succeeded him, becoming Archduchess of Austria. She was forced to defend her crown against a coalition of Prussia, Bavaria, France, Spain, Saxony, and Poland, although these states had been signatories to the Sanction. Although she remained in power when the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) ended with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the challenge left her with a perceived need to assert her political legitimacy. 20 Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, eds., “The Enlightenment and Parini,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 371–86. Verri stated in correspondence to his brother in 1782 that Maria Theresa was hostile towards Italians in general and particularly wary of the Milanese, whom she believed to be of a dissipation inconsistent with her domination. See: Pietro Verri and Alessandro Verri, Carteggio Di Pietro e Di Alessandro Verri (Dal 1766 Al 1797), ed. Giovanni Seregni (Milano: Giuffrè, 1942), vol. 12, 369–70. 21 Rebecca Messbarger, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 202. 22 Jonathan B. Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17. On enlightened absolutism, see Frédéric II (roi de Prusse), Essai Sur Les Formes de Gouvernement et Sur Les Devoirs Des Souverains., ed. G. J. Decker (Berlin, 1777). See also: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, Ou, Principes Du Droit Politique (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1762), 121–231.

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how she maintains her power without a standing army reveals how she exercises enlightened absolutism: she represented an enlightened absolutist monarch for the opera’s ideal future society (text below). ASTOLFINA L’impero mio Niuno mai non turbò. Ma fermi, e illesi A sostenerne i dritti, altr’armi all’uopo Non v’hanno qui, che il cuor, la lingua, il volto, L’accortezza, il consiglio, E quel che in noi dal ciglio Quasi del ciel traluce ignoto raggio, Che piace, impone, e ovunque esige omaggio.

ASTOLFINA No one has ever upset my kingdom. But, to keep its sovereignty stable and unharmed, no other weapons are needed here than the heart, the voice, the countenance, wisdom, good counsel, and that which radiates out from us like a mystical ray shining through the sky, delighting, compelling and everywhere commanding respect. (act 1, scene 6)

The Regio Ducal Teatro, built in 1708, was funded jointly by the Austrian governors and Milanese aristocratic families. This mixture of private and public enterprise resulted in a strong connection between the theatre, the Habsburg monarchy, and Milanese society. The cavalieri associati, a group of aristocrats elected by the palchetti (box owners) to represent their rights and requirements as part-owners of the theatre, chose the operas to be performed. They employed a full-time poeta di teatro (theatre poet) whose responsibilities were to provide new libretti, to revise existing ones so that they conformed to the tastes of the Milanese public, and to appoint suitable composers to set the texts when necessary. Giuseppe Parini (1729–1799) had acquired considerable notoriety following the publication in 1763–1765 of his best known work, Il Giorno—a scathing yet elegant satire on the decadent behaviour of the Lombard aristocracy. This procured for him the protection of the Austrian government, and Count Firmian, realizing his potential as a poet, appointed him theatre poet in 1768, a position he held until 1771. Given Maria Theresa’s ambivalent attitude to Lombardy and apprehension about its citizens’ attitudes to her, Parini’s known support of her is particularly relevant to his recommendation of Il regno della Luna to the cavalieri. Parini’s literary works provide a comprehensive insight into Italian Enlightenment thinking. Nevertheless, his views differed in significant respects from those of his Milanese contemporaries such as Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Cesare

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Beccaria, and Carlo Sebastiano Franci. In particular, he supported Maria Theresa’s enlightened absolutism, sincerely admiring the wisdom and moderation with which she proceeded in her reform agenda.23 He opposed the view that women should only be educated to a level that facilitated their domestic role, and disagreed with the concept of commerce and the pursuit of luxury as unmitigated goods, lauding instead a hardworking prudent society reminiscent of its agrarian origins. Ascanio in Alba (set by Mozart and performed in Milan, 1771) is the only complete, original libretto firmly attributed to Parini.24 An incomplete libretto L’Amorosa incostanza reveals his comic style, with features such as rapid plot advancement, frequent use of ensembles and choruses, arias without repetition, and a variety of poetic meters in the closed forms. 25 A poetic element in the recitatives is frequent use of rhyme, both at the end of and within the verse. The source of the Il regno della Luna libretto which Parini proposed to the cavalieri is unknown, although it is clear that they approved of it, as did Firmian. Stylistic attributes and the close alignment of the libretto’s social and political themes with Parini’s thought suggest that he wrote or at least substantially contributed to Il regno della Luna. I will discuss the opera’s socio-cultural and political themes with the aim of gaining an insight into the thought underpinning the libretto, referring back to the vantage point occupied by Parini as the presumptive librettist and future historian.

WOMEN AND THE ITALIAN ENLIGHTENMENT The opera engages closely with eighteenth-century Italian discourse on the social and political position of women. At the time of its writing in 1770, there was considerable disagreement about how women could contribute to society in a way that satisfied the utilitarian principle of achieving the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people.26 Utilitarianism was a bulwark against established belief in 23 Giuseppe Petronio, Parini e l’illuminismo Lombardo (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 146. 24 His other known output as a librettist includes two fragments—l’Iside salvata (dramma serio), and l’Amorosa incostanza (dramma comico)—a reworking of Alceste by Calzabigi (performed Milan, 1768), three cantatas and various prologues (these latter compositions being strictly for a private audience). See Ilaria Bonomi, “La Lingua Dei Libretti Pariniani, Tomo Primo: Letteratura e Società,” in L’amabil Rito: Società e Cultura Nella Milano Di Parini, ed. Gennaro Barbarisi (Milano: Cisalpino, 2000), 414. 25 Giuseppe Parini, Poesie, vol. 2, ed. Egidio Bellorini (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 67–80. 26 According to Rebecca Messbarger, the controversy over women’s social roles peaked during the 1760s to 1780s. For a comprehensive discussion of Italian feminism in the eighteenth century, see Messbarger, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse.

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moral judgment as the basis for social structures, as exercised by leaders of the Italian Enlightenment. But although the illuministi recognized that women should have a central role in the dissemination of knowledge, most felt that it should be achieved by strengthening their role in the traditional family unit. The female contributions considered optimal for social utility were not in the public sphere.27 One reason for this constraint was the allegedly scientific observation that women’s mental capacities were inferior to those of men.28 Despite this belief, a broader education for women had been proposed since early in the eighteenth century.29 Italy differed from other European societies during the eighteenth century in that many women were able to partake and excel in highly intellectual environments such as academies and universities. Their fields of expertise encompassed a broad range from anatomy and mathematics to classics and modern literature. In parallel with their academic achievement, the rise of popular magazines, such as La donna galante ed erudita, signalled and promoted a more assertive role for women. Giuseppe Parini was among those who strongly supported the education of women to a level at which they could play leading roles in society. A case in point is his 1777 ode for the graduation of Maria Pellegrini Amoretti, the first woman to achieve a doctoral degree in law at the university of Pavia.30 In this work he lauds the ability of women to interpret laws, even to monarchs (Figure 3). When the Earth women seek clarification from Queen Astolfina regarding the position of women in the lunar society, she confirms their political ascendancy (Figure 4). Il regno della Luna proffers a positive if radical vision of women participating in the public sphere by representing a successful matriarchal society with female dominance of government. Women’s agency was also at issue in eighteenth-century debates about relations between the sexes, and these themes find their way into Il regno della Luna. Before proposing marriage to Astolfina, Spaccone learns that parental consent is not required on the Moon (Figure 5). He also asks Astolfo whether the custom of having a [cavalier] servente—a cicisbeo or young male companion 27 Carlo Sebastiano Franci, “Difesa Delle Donne,” in Il Caffè Ossia Brevi e Vari Discorsi Distrubuiti in Fogli Periodici Dal Giugno 1764 a Tutto Maggio 1765, vol. 1 (Brescia: Giammaria Rizzardi, 1765), 169–76. 28 Antonio Conti, Scritti Filosofici. A Cura Di Nicola Badaloni, ed. Nicola Badaloni (Naples: Fulvio Rossi, 1972), 427. 29 René Descartes, I Principi Della Fillosofia, trans. Giuseppe Eleonora Barbapiccola (Turin: Francesco Mairesse, 1722), 9. 30 Giuseppe Parini, “Canzone,” in Laurea Della Signora M. Pellegrina Amoretti Cittadina d’Oneglia (Pavia: Porro e Bianchi, 1777), 123–8.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage Oh amabil sesso ... Qual’ alma generosa è che si sdegni Del novello tuo vanto? La tirannìa virile Frema, e ti miri a gli onorati seggi Salir togato, e de le sacre leggi Interprete gentile, Or che d’Europa ai popoli soggetti Fin dall’alto dei troni anco le detti.

Oh beloved sex ... What a generous spirit it is that may judge through your new honour? Male tyranny trembles, and observes you ascending to honoured positions of magistrates, making refined interpretation of the inviolable laws, to which the people of Europe are presently subject, even right up to the level of the thrones.

Figure 3.  Giuseppe Parini: Per la laurea di Maria Pelligrini Amoretti, verses 131–140 FRASIA Dunque sono le donne, Quelle, che qui comandono le feste? Le donne hanno l’impero, Il governo, il poter, hanno ogni cosa? E i maschi non si contano per niente?

FRASIA So it’s the women, they, who run the show here? The women are dominant, have the government, power, everything? And the males don’t count for anything?

ASTOLFINA Il lunatico regno E’ tutto regno nostro, e independente.

ASTOLFINA The lunatic kingdom is completely our kingdom, and independent. (act 1, scene 6)

Figure 4.  The position of women in the lunar society, act 1, scene 6 SPACCONE Ditemi in grazia, S’usa qui dar marito alle figliuole?

SPACCONE Tell me please, is it the custom here to provide a husband to daughters?

ASTOLFO Qui ogni figlia è padrona, E il marito se’l prende quando vuole.

ASTOLFO Here every daughter is her own boss, and she takes a husband when she wishes. (act 1, scene 4)

Figure 5.  The autonomy of lunar women in choosing a husband, act 1, scene 4

to a married woman—is still practiced on the Moon (act 1, scene 2). Cicisbeism was a unique feature of eighteenth-century Italian aristocratic and bourgeois behaviour.31 The practice was considered by many to be a serious threat to the integrity of marriage, and Parini dealt with it as such in his moral satire Il mezzogiorno (Midday).32 31 Roberto Bizzocchi, “Parini, Goldoni e i Cicisbei,” in L’amabil Rito: Società e Cultura Nella Milano Di Parini, ed. Gennaro Barbarisi (Milan: Cisalpino, 2000), 177. 32 Giuseppe Parini, Opere, ed. Francesco Reina (Milan: Genio, 1801), vol. 1, 41. See also “Parini, Giuseppe,” Macmillan’s Magazine 72 (1895): 294.

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Lawrence Mays ASTOLFINA Sempre schiavo è il consorte. In ogni tempo, Se annoiata è la moglie, Il vincolo discioglie, e il manda in pace.

ASTOLFINA Always the husband is subservient. If at any time the wife is bored, the bond is dissolved, and she sends him away in peace. (act 1, scene 6)

Figure 6.  The power of lunar women to initiate divorce, act 1, scene 6

Another prominent theme in Il regno della Luna is alternative forms of marriage, including bigamy, polyandry, and marriage or divorce initiated by women. For example, should women want to dissolve marriage bonds, their husbands must always accede to their wishes (Figure 6). Astolfo’s desire for a polygamous relationship with Frasia and Lesbina is implicitly granted in the final scene when the two decide to remain on the Moon.33 While women’s freedom to choose is certainly a dominant theme here, transgressive relationships such as bigamy and polyandry should also be understood in the context of real and imagined encounters with distant cultures, as described in Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s 1771 account of the relaxed social mores of the people of Tahiti, Voyage autour du monde ( Journey around the World), and the casual informality of sexual relationships discussed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inegalite parmi les hommes (Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind, 1754). Both works suggest that in “primitive” human beings, the lack of rigidly enforced sexual relationship rules forestalls unfaithfulness and jealousy, resulting in freer, more peaceful societies. An implication in Il regno della Luna is that the lunar world has retained these simpler mores, with beneficial outcomes for society.

ENLIGHTENMENT VIEWS ON SCIENCE, COMMERCE, WAR, AND THE OTHER The Earth men in Il regno della Luna represent three pillars of European endeavour and achievement—scientific, commercial, and military—and the work deals with their relevance to European interaction with the Other in various ways. All three Earth men decide that they want to marry Queen Astolfina, making extravagant claims for the benefits they can bring to the Moon as a result of their professional skills. Commoners seeking to marry royalty, which was 33 Frasia and Lesbina express their approval of lunar customs in the duet “Bella cosa è il poter dire sono donna, e son padrona” (A beautiful thing is the power to say, I am a woman, and I am in charge) (act 1, scene 6).

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

unacceptable in eighteenth-century Europe, could be seen as a form of exploitation of the lunar Others. On the other hand, Astolfina’s formal consideration of their supplications in act 2, scene 6 implies that separation of the nobility and commoners does not strictly apply in the more advanced, less tradition-bound lunar society. Following her rejection of their proposals, the men plot to use all their Earthly skills to invade the Moon and overthrow Astolfina’s regime. However, their plans are discovered and thwarted. Ultimately the opera comments on the relevance and appropriate application of scientific, commercial and military endeavours to its ideal future society and to interactions with the Other. The technological features in the opera’s story generally involve imaginatively expanding technology based on current science to plausible future applications. For example, Stellante’s mathematically conceived spaceship boat achieves liftoff by using hot air balloons (act 1, scene 3); while hot air balloons had been used since antiquity, manned flight was not achieved until 1783 in a balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers in Paris. Similarly, the lunar world’s achievement of immortality (act 1, scenes 2 and 6) indicates giant leaps in medical science, but while life expectancy had increased in the eighteenth century and Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s work had begun to put medicine on a rigorously scientific footing, the discipline of medicine as a science was still in its infancy. Stellante makes numerous references to scientific achievements, some factual, some spurious, and some tongue-in-cheek. His description of the lunar geography is an allusion to the Selenografia, the map of the Moon made by Johannes Hevelius in 1647 (act 2, scene 11). In his proposal to marry Astolfina there is a reference, consistent with eighteenth-century philosophical thought, to the importance of magnifying instruments. The telescope and the microscope were considered to be special tools for acquiring new knowledge, allowing an extension of the senses to reveal hidden realms. However, his statements about using these instruments to show her the “indivisible points” and “all possible worlds” are clearly exaggerations. Despite Stellante’s many references to real scientific achievements the lunar “arsenal of all arsenals” trumps the Earth’s technology (act 3, scene 4). It consists of vials and vases of precious commodities lost from Earth, such as the sanity of its inhabitants, tears and sighs of lovers, time wasted in gambling, the beauty of forsaken women, the dreams of planners, dedications to great lords, and obsolete titles and honours.34 The lunar realm’s superiority derives not from eighteenth-century 34 The libretto melds classic Italian literature with science and mythology, the text being a parody of canto 34, verse 73 of Lodovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso, the definitive version

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Lawrence Mays ASTOLFINA Tornati in senno, sien lor sciolti i lacci. FRASIA Via, fratello, odorate. STELLANTE Odorar? FRASIA Sì, il cervello ch’è qui infuso, A modo di vapore, Va su pel naso, e passerà a suo loco. Presto che non esali. STELLANTE Affé è un bel giuoco! odora. LESBINA a Mercionne. Fate lo stesso, via. MERCIONNE Vediamo prima L’esempio del compagno. STELLANTE Oh bella! Chi son io? Dove mi trovo?

ASTOLFINA When they are returned to sanity, let them be untied. FRASIA Go on, brother, smell this. STELLANTE Smell? FRASIA Yes, the intellect that is infused here goes like a vapour goes through the nasal membrane and will pass to its place. Quickly, so you don’t exhale. STELLANTE Truly this is a good game! he smells. LESBINA to Mercionne. Do the same, go on. MERCIONNE Let’s see first the example of our companion. STELLANTE O lovely! Who am I? Where am I? (act 3, scene 5)

Figure 7.  The rebellious earth men’s sanity restored, act 3, scene 5

science and military prowess but from its technical ability to exploit the frailties of other societies. This is demonstrated in the tongue-in-cheek curative ceremony, in which each Earth men—whom Astolfina has declared insane because of their rebelliousness—are restored to sanity by inhaling their lost wits from vials that have been stored in the lunar arsenal (Figure 7, Example 1).35

of which was published in 1532. A variety of precious things lost from earth, as well as the sanity of its inhabitants, are transported to the Moon. 35 In canto 34 the paladin knight Astolfo travels to the Moon to retrieve the wits of the Christian knight Orlando, who had become insane owing to unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

The effects of commerce on society were the subjects of many polemics in Italy in the eighteenth century. In “Osservazioni sulla questione se il commercio corrompa i costume” (Observations on the question of whether commerce corrupts morals), a 1765 article in the Enlightenment periodical Il caffè, Milanese economist Carlo Sebastiano Franci argued that the function of the marketplace is consistent with the Enlightenment ideal of rewarding all levels of the citizenry for performing work that contributes to the general good. Commerce, he Example 1: Excerpt from the recitativo accompagnato Sì, perchè più l’insano immaginar vediate (act 3, scene 5)

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proposed, results in a more inclusive society in which the poor can be elevated from their ignoble state to be fully participatory “citizens of the world.” This was a widely held view, shared by among others Adam Smith, who asserted that commerce was regulated by natural laws not unlike those that governed physics and chemistry, and that any interference with free trade by government regulation was inimical to healthy economic development.36 When the Earth men are plotting to overthrow the lunar empire, Mercionne describes how he will establish a base on the moon for trade not only with all quarters of earth but also with the worlds of Mercury and Jupiter. This will require levelling mountains, filling valleys, and draining wetlands (act 2, scene 12). But Giuseppe Parini, in his 1759 ode La salubrità dell’aria (The Salubriousness of the Air) observed that greed and the pursuit of luxury by ignorant speculators overseen by apathetic 36 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, ed. Edwin Cannan (orig. pub. 1776; this edition London: Methuen, 1904), book IV, chap. 1, accessed April 22, 2019, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/237.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

public bodies resulted in degradation and pollution of the formerly superb city of Milan: “Ma chi i bei doni or serba fra il lusso e l’avarizia e la stolta pigrizia?” (“But who will preserve the beautiful gifts from luxury, avarice, and stupid greed?”).37 While Il regno della Luna gives tacit approval to luxury goods in the form of cosmetics and fashion—a nod to women’s agency and freedom to make choices—it implicitly deprecates unregulated environmental reorganization and destruction as required by commercial interests. On the subject of war, Enlightenment thinkers’ attitudes were similarly divided. Spaccone’s assertion that there is no peace where there is no war (act 1, scene 4) encapsulates one side of that duality: sometimes it is necessary to defend one’s state or even civilization in general. Proponents of this view believed that military practice should be governed by newly developed theories based on observation and experiment, as were science and commerce, which led to a proliferation of military academies and texts on the art of war. The other side held that war resulted from the selfish ambition of rulers and the foolishness of citizens and was never justifiable. Astolfina’s insistence that the Moon needed no standing army aligns with this view (See p. 224), which in turn resonates with the views of Samuel Adams, one of the founding fathers of American independence. In a letter to General James Warren in 1776, Adams warned that he considered an army to be an instrument of oppression in European countries: “A standing Army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People.”38 Parini revealed his own pacifist sentiments in the poem Sopra la guerra (On War), originally published in the 1750s, clearly aligning himself with the view that war is not justifiable. He lamented that brave, spirited youth were often tricked into believing that valor in armed combat was commendable, calling it l’ombra falsa d’onor (“a false sign of honor”).39 He looked back to a time before the insatiable greed for territory began, when the geographical features of seas, rivers, and mountains dictated the boundaries of kingdoms.40 With text very similar to Parini’s earlier poem, Astolfo recalls his craving for glory and honor through armed combat, noting that the lunar people are spared this “tyrannous emotion” that plagues those born on Earth (see no. 5, “Non vi piacque, ingiusti dei”). 37 Giuseppe Parini, Le Odi, Edizione Critica a Cura Di Dante Isella (Milan: Ricciardi, 1975), 9–10. 38 John K Alexander, Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 238. 39 Parini, Opere, vol. 1, 234. 40 Ibid., 232.

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Lawrence Mays ASTOLFINA L’impero mio Niuno mai non turbò. Ma fermi, e illesi A sostenerne i dritti, altr’armi all’uopo Non v’hanno qui, che il cuor, la lingua, il volto, L’accortezza, il consiglio, E quel che in noi dal ciglio Quasi del ciel traluce ignoto raggio, Che piace, impone, e ovunque esige omaggio.

ASTOLFINA No one has ever upset my kingdom. But, to keep its sovereignty stable and unharmed, no other weapons are needed here than the heart, the voice, the countenance, wisdom, good counsel, and that which radiates out from us like a mystical ray shining through the sky, delighting, compelling and everywhere commanding respect. (act 1, scene 6)

Figure 8.  Queen Astolfina’s ruling style, act 1, scene 6

The earthlings’ encounters with lunar society in Il regno della Luna can be seen as a metaphor for European confrontation with the Other, and the work serves to depict both constructive and destructive ways in which visitors may interact with new worlds. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, European interest in newly discovered societies had shifted from the Americas and Africa to the Pacific, a shift that sparked a new wave of creativity among composers and librettists.41 Places such as Tahiti, New Holland,42 and later New Zealand, which were little known and poorly understood, came to inspire fantastic or fictional non-European worlds in theatrical settings, with librettists inventing historical narratives to suit their dramatic visions. By the mid-eighteenth century, Europeans’ views on the benefits of settlement in non-European lands were becoming jaded. The process of colonialization was seen as frequently exploitative and oppressive, if not openly cruel and barbaric. Colonists themselves were sometimes seen as a particular type of Other, having forsaken the civilized behavior of their homelands. Revolutionary unrest preceding the American War of Independence showed that the process could endanger the colonizing power. In 1756 Charles de Brosses proposed a new kind of interaction with and settlement of the Pacific lands—a benign imperialism that would exchange education for trade and the eventual establishment of new nations independent of the colonizing countries. The interdependence of science, militarism, and commerce in European interaction with the Other plays out in Il regno della Luna in various ways. 41 Charles de Brosses, Histoire Des Navigations Aux Terres Australes, vol. 1 (Paris: Durand, 1756), 17. 42 New Holland was officially given the name “Australia” in 1817.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

In the men’s initial proposals to Astolfina, they offer their expertise to bring the Moon up to contemporary terrestrial standards in return for her hand in marriage—an arrangement that mirrors the early concept of colonialism as a mode of exchange. The “primitive” lunatics were to get knowledge of scientific discoveries, development of trade with Earth, or establishment of military forces in return for ascendancy to the lunar throne and its associated privileges. Implicit in this exchange was the presumed right to superimpose the more civilized culture on the primitive one. When Astolfina rejects the Earth men’s proposals, the men plan to use their military forces and scientific weapons to bring about a total destruction of lunar society followed by installation of an earth-style regime with a trading base. This alternative scheme is similar to the actions of colonizing forces in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas where civilizations were destroyed and the lands occupied. It also alludes to a reversion to primitive barbarism, as described by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in his book Nuova Scienza.43 After their final humiliation the contrite Earth men decide to proceed to new celestial worlds, rather than seek their fortunes on the Moon. Their interaction with these new Others, it is implied, might be similar to what de Brosses proposed: trade in exchange for new scientific knowledge, but without any interference with the self-determination of the peoples. Il regno della Luna creates an inverted society of Others as an allegory for the kind of social and political structure that might evolve in the open future imagined by late eighteenth-century Enlightened thinkers, in light of the ongoing scientific revolution. It subverts several tenets of European culture such as patriarchy, unregulated commerce, colonialism, militarism, and the nuclear family by presenting a lunar society that is in the end fairer, wiser, more just, and more rational than that on Earth. The repulse of the colonizers, in spite of their terrestrial scientific knowledge and military might, aligns with currents in European thought regarding the negative aspects of colonialism. At a time when European attention was turning to new lands in the Pacific, the opera draws attention to the possibility of a fairer and more mutually beneficial interaction with these unknown Others.

43 In Vico’s concept of history, the “age of men”—a period of egalitarian society in various forms—was followed by a return to primitive barbarism in which the only societal value was money. See Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated from the Third Edition (1744), trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 18 and 163.

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THE MUSIC OF IL REGNO DELLA LUNA Piccinni’s compositional focus in opera was on the portrayal of natural human behavior, including the expression of emotions. 44 In this he was typical of his generation of opera reformers who broke formal and generic conventions in search of a more flexible approach to musical drama. Significant aspects of the music of Il regno della Luna are arias of varied types and forms, a focus on ensembles, a prominent role for the chorus, frequent use of recitativo accompagnato, and the length and complexity of the acts one and two finales. Solo arias outnumber ensembles only narrowly, consistent with the trend for a steady increase in the proportion of set pieces consisting of ensembles in comic opera between 1770 and 1790.45 The dramma giocoso—the term used to describe Il regno della Luna both in the libretto and the score—was a suitable vehicle for a more flexible approach to musical drama.46 Drammi giocosi tended to feature fully formed characters with whom the audience could sympathize to varying degrees. They typically fell into three types—parti serie (serious characters), parti buffe (humorous characters), and parti di mezzo carattere (characters functioning as intermediaries between the other types). The music associated with each type was, in turn, usually drawn from specific styles: opera seria, comic genres, and a combination of these, respectively. Composers who too strictly adhered to the association between music style and character type ran the risk that the audience might not empathize with either serious or comic characters, the former becoming too lofty and the latter too ridiculous. As Mary Hunter suggests, the more skillfully a composer manipulated and combined conventional musical devices from eclectic sources, the more “natural” the depiction of a character’s humanity would seem.47 Piccinni exploited this effect, and by subverting the conventions of mid-eighteenth-century dramma giocoso, he made the fictive future world of Il regno della Luna more credible, with characters that are at once realistic and sympathetic. Some examples follow. 44 For further information on Piccinni’s compositional aims, see Pierre-Louis Ginguené, Notice Sur La Vie et Les Ouvrages de Nicolas Piccinni (Paris: Veuve Panckoucke, 1800), 118. 45 Mary Hunter, “Ensembles,” in Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 157. 46 Carlo Goldoni coined the term to describe comic operas that deal with serious, often confrontational or challenging issues. Character development was central to his conception of the genre. See: Daniel Heartz, “Goldoni, Don Giovanni and the Dramma Giocoso,” The Musical Times 120, no. 1642 (1979): 993. 47 Mary Hunter, “Arias: Some Issues,” in Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 102.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

Although the Earth men all fall into the category of parti buffe, Piccinni’s musical settings result in realistic characters that make the imagined future world accessible to the audience. Here again, however, Piccinni blurs the distinction between character types by using incongruous musical settings. This manipulation of musical expectations is particularly clear in Spaccone’s character. Although fitting the Cavaliere subtype of the Capitano stock character in the commedia dell’arte tradition, Piccinni avoids the pitfalls of rigid type-casting by incorporating seria elements to make him seem less one-dimensional.48 “Che bel piacere” (no. 4) is a bellicose parody of a seria aria (Example 2). Although the cavatina “Cadrà fra poco in cenere” (no. 22) unambiguously fits the basso buffo character type, the text is adapted from the first quatrain of Jarba’s aria of the same name in Pietro Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata. Audience members familiar with that well-known seria text and its dramatic context would have seen Spaccone in a different light. Queen Astolfina is the work’s only parte seria. While two of her four arias conform to the seria character type, Piccinni departs from dramma giocoso conventions, with a resulting emphasis on her humanity. “No, non è per noi sì poco” (no. 7) conforms with what Hunter has called the “statement of nobility aria type,”49 while “Sì, pazzi qual siete” (no. 28) is consistent with John Brown’s 1791 description of an aria agitata—or rage aria.50 Both these aria types are exclusively allocated to seria characters, and the association of musical style and character type is strictly observed. By contrast with the regal aloofness implied in her other arias, in “Meglio rifletti al trono” (no. 10) Astolfina reveals the emotion of tenderness, which imparts a warmth to her character. The setting conforms to what Brown called an aria cantabile.51 However, Piccinni set the last quatrain as an envoi in triple meter with a faster tempo—a device commonly used in buffa arias but rare in serious opera. This upbeat departure from the more serious opening implies an informal directness that further contrasts with Astolfina’s regal distance. Il regno della Luna’s focus on ensembles and prominent use of the chorus serve to involve the audience in the confrontation between the Earth and Moon cultures. Compared with the majority of the comic opera repertoire, the chorus 48 For a full description of the Cavaliere, see John Rudlin, Commedia Dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook (London: Routledge, 1994), 122. 49 Mary Hunter, “Class and Gender in Arias: Five Aria Types,” in Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa, 138–41. 50 John Brown, Letters on the Italian Opera: Addressed to The Hon. Lord Monboddo, 2nd ed. (London: T. Caddell, 1791), 38 51 Ibid., 44.

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Example 2: Che bel piacere tra armate schiere tamburi, e trombe, cannoni, e bombe sentire insieme a risonar. (What lovely Lawrence Mayspleasure to hear drums, trumpets, cannons and bombs resounding together between armed forces. (act 1, scene 4)

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f

œ. ™ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ . p f j ‰ œ œ

œ™ . œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ. p f j ‰ œ œ

œ. ™ œ p j œ

. œ œ . œ œ . œ œ

‰

.j œ œJ .j œ œJ .j œ œJ

p

f

. . . œ œ œj ‰ œ œ œ‰ J . . .j ‰ œ œ œ‰ J . . .j ‰ œ œ œ‰ J

. . . œ œ œj ‰ œ œ œ‰ J . . .j ‰ œ œ œ‰ J . . .j ‰ œ œ œ‰ J

‰ œJ

Ϫ

œ œ J J

‰ ‰

‰ œ. œ. œ. j ‰

‰ ‰

. œ œ . œ œ . œ œ

ca-no-ni_ebom-be

‰

f

. . . ‰ œ œ œJ ‰ œ J

sen - ti

œ œ™ . nœ . œ œ œ œ œ.

p

f

œ™ . bœ

.j œ‰ œJ .j œ‰ œJ .j œ‰ œJ

. ‰ œ œ . ‰ œœ . ‰ œœ

™ nœ œ œ ≈ ® œRÔ œR ÔR J J

& œ. œ œ œ œ œ . f

‰ œ. œ. œ. j

‰

p

f

? ¢ œ

‰

‰

f

° & œ. œ œ œ œ œ .

{

Vn. 2

‰

‰

œ œ™ . nœ . œ œ œ œ œ .

trom- be,

Vn. 1

‰

. . .j ‰ œœ œœ œœ J . . .j ‰ œœ œœ œœ J . . .j ‰ œœ œœ œœ J

œ™ . bœ œ. œ œ œ œ œ.

°? j ¢ ‰ œ. œ. œ.

Spac.

‰

‰ œ. œ. œ. j

‰

& œ. œ œ œ œ œ .

. œ ‰ Ob. 1, 2 & œ . ° ‰ œ Hn.1, 2 in C & œ . Tpt. 1,2 œ ‰ in C ¢& œ Timp.

‰

° œ & . œœœœœ .

{

Basso

‰

°? ‰ j œ. œ. œ. ¢

Spaccone

. . .j ‰ œœ œœ œœ J . . .j ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œJ . . .j ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œJ

‰

p

-

. . . ‰ œ œ œJ ‰

re_in - sie- me,

‰ œJ a

. œ œ . œ œ™ . œ œ . œ. ™ œ œ. œ œ . œ™ œ œ œ œ œ œ f

p

f

p

œ™ . œ . œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ. œ. ™ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ. œ™ œ™ . œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ. p f p f p f p j j œ œ œ ‰ œ ‰ J ‰ œJ œ œ

Example 2.  Excerpt from the aria “Che bel piacere” (act 1, scene 4)

3

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

. . . œ œ œj Ob. 1, 2 & ‰ œ œ œ ‰ J . . . ° Hn.1, 2 ‰ œ œ œj ‰ in C & J . . .j Tpt. 1,2 ‰ œ œ œ ‰ in C ¢& J Timp.

°? ‰ œ. œ. œ. J ‰ ¢ ? œ™

Spac.

œ J

ri

Vn. 2

B.

∑ ∑

‰ œ. œ. œ. j ‰ œ

so - nar,

. . ‰ œœ œœ . . ‰ œ œ œ œ . . ‰ œœ œœ

∑

‰ œ. œ. œ. j ‰

∑

œ ‰ J

œ

a

ri

œ -

so

. œœj ‰ J .j œ ‰ œJ .j œ ‰ œJ

‰ œJ

œ -

nar,

sen -

. œ œ™ œ œ ™ œ œ ™ œ œ™ œ œ œ™ ° œ. œ. ™ œ œ. œ ™ œ. & œ œ œ œ œ. . . œœœœœ œœœœœ

{

Vn. 1

-

. . .j ‰ œœ œœ œœJ ‰ . . .j ‰ œœ œœ œœ ‰ J . . .j ‰ œœ œœ œœ ‰ J

f

f

p

f

œ™ œ œ ™ œ œ ™ œ œ™ œ œ œ . & œ. œ œ œ œ œ. œ ™ œ œ. œ œ œ™ . œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ. f f p f ? œ ‰ œJ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ ¢ J

p

œ™ . œ j œ

p

Example 2.  (Continued)

in Il regno della Luna has an unusually prominent role—so much so that it functions as an Other character in its own right. The lunar people are foregrounded at or near the opening of every act. Their participation in the act 2 finale (no. 23), where they have five separate sections on their own, is particularly striking (Example 3). They consist of ominous utterances about the horrible and pitiful plans of the Earth men, which forebode disaster for the Moon. Like choral dancers in ancient Greek tragedies, this on-stage audience participates in community moralizing.52 This crossover with reform opera seria exemplifies the flexibility and eclecticism that made Piccinni’s work particularly naturalistic.53 52 Other opera reformists, such as Jommelli and Gluck, exploited the chorus in a similar way in opera seria, but in contemporary opera buffa it was generally confined to brief background appearances where it added to the setting while playing a minimal part in the action (in wedding scenes, for example). 53 For a discussion of eighteenth-century Italian opera seria reform, see Bruce Alan Brown and Julian Rushton, “Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Ritter von,” Grove Music Online, accessed July 9, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/ gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000011301.

239

240

Lawrence Mays

Barbare idee funeste! Ahi razza infida! Ahi teste, Che fanno orror, pietà. (Ah, violent, foreboding ideas of disasters and torment! Ah, treacherous lot! Ah, minds that conjure up horror, have mercy.)

Andante sostenuto

Soprano

° b c œ œ™ œ œ œ &b b J R

œ nœ Ó

b j r & b bc œ œ ™ œ œ œ

œ œ Ó

Ahi di scia-gu - re_e pian- to,

Alto

Bass

j r œ œ™ œ œ œ

j œ

œ œ Ó

Ahi di scia-gu - re_e pian- to,

œ œ Ó

nœ œ™ œ œ œ J R

œ œ Ó

bar - ba-re_i-dee fu - ne - ste,

bar - ba-re_i-dee fu - ne - ste,

œ nœ

œœ œ œ œ œ™ œ œ bœ

b & b bc œ œ ™ œ œ œ

œ œ

œœ nœ

Violin 2

Basso

?bc ¢ bb œ œ

œ œ

-

œ œ Ó

œ œ™ œ œ œ J R

° b œ œ™ œ œ œ Violin 1 & b b c

Andante sostenuto

œ œ ˙

bar - ba-re_i-dee fu - ne - ste,

b œ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ Ó & b bc J R ‹ Ahi di scia-gu - re_e pian- to, j r ?bc ¢ b b œ œ™ œ œ œ

j œ

bar - ba-re_i-dee fu - ne - ste, bar

Ahi di scia-gu - re_e pian- to,

Tenor

œ œ™ œ œ bœ J R

œ œ Ó

œ nœ œ ™ œ œ œ œ nœ œ

œ œ

œ œ nœj œ œ œ œ j œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

Ó

Example 3.  Excerpt from the act 2 finale “Ahi di sciagure, e pianto” (act 2, scene 12)

RECEPTION HISTORY The Milanese production of Il regno della Luna was not received enthusiastically. Pietro Verri reported that two days after its premiere it was considered già a terra (“already a flop”). Although commenting favourably on the opera, its performance and its staging, Verri condemned the performances of the entr’acte ballets, Acis and Galatea and Gli Americani. This appears to be the reason for his describing it as uno spettacolo insipido assai (“a rather insipid show”).54 54 Verri and Verri, Carteggio Di Pietro e Di Alessandro Verri (Dal 1766 Al 1797), vol. 3, 261.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

° bb œ œ™ œ œ œ œ nœ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ Œ & b J R J J J 5

S.

- ba-re_i-dee fu - ne- ste! Ahi raz-za_in - fi - da,

A.

j r b j j j & b b nœ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ Œ bar-ba-re_i-dee fu - ne- ste! Ahi raz-za_in - fi - da,

T.

B.

œ ahi

œ ahi

œ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ te- ste,

œ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ te- ste,

b œ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ nœ œ œ œ Œ nœ œ Ó &b b J R œ œ J J J ‹ bar-ba-re_i-dee fu - ne- ste! Ahi raz-za_in - fi - da, ahi te- ste, ? b #œ œ ™ œ œ œ œ ‰ œJ œJ œJ œ Œ nœ œ ¢ bb J R bar-ba-re_i-dee fu - ne- ste! Ahi raz-za_in - fi - da,

œ ahi

che fan-no_or - ror pie-

œ nœ Ó

che fan-no_or - ror pie-

Ó

Œ nœ che

Ó

te- ste,

Œ œ che

Vn. 1

° bb œ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœœ œ œ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ & b œ œ œ

Vn. 2

œ b & b b œ œ™ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ nœœ œ œ œ ™ œœ œ œ œ

B.

? b #œ œ ¢ bb

œ œ œ

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œœœ œ nœ œ nœ œ Œ Ó

Œ œ

Example 3.  (Continued)

Another explanation could be the conservative tastes of Milanese opera audiences, who generally preferred traditional works in the established style to the more natural, realistic “reform operas” of composers such as Niccolò Jommelli, Tommaso Traetta, and Christoph Willibald von Gluck.55 Another possibility is that the opera may have been considered subversive by the aristocracy or religious authorities, and that its apparent endorsement of Maria Theresa’s rule 55 Nevertheless, they occasionally gave a hearing to more modern composers like Piccinni, who had nine operas performed in the theatre in the 1760s. See: Martha Feldman, “Arias—Form, Feeling, Exchange,” in Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty—Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 42–96.

241

242

Lawrence Mays

° b ˙ &b b 10

S.

Œ

tà,

A.

che

b &b b œ ˙

Œ

tà,

T.

B.

œ

œ

fan - no_or - ror

Vn. 1

Vn. 2

B.

œ

che

b &b b œ œ œ ‹ fan - no_or - ror ?b œ ¢ bb

œ

œ pie -

œ pie -

œ œ

œ œ

œ

n˙

fan-no_or - ror pie -

œ œ

œ œ

fan-no_or - ror pie -

˙ tà,

˙ tà,

Œ œ che

Œ #œ che

Œ

tà,

œ

pie -

Œ

˙

tà,

œ

œ pie -

œ nœ œ

fan - no_or-ror

œ

œ

œ

œ

fan - no_or - ror

œ pie -

œ pie -

˙

Ó

tà,

n˙

Ó

tà,

˙

Ó

tà,

#˙

Ó

tà,

° b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ™ œ œ œ &b b

œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙

Ó

b & b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ™ œ œ œ

œœœœ ˙ œ œ œ nœ

Ó

œ

Ó

?b œ ¢ bb

œ

œ

œ

˙™

#œ

œ

œ

œ

#˙

Example 3.  (Continued)

may have been inconsistent with maintaining the uneasy relationship between her and Lombardy. The opera was subsequently performed a total of seven times—in a revised version without ballets—in Dresden at the Piccolo Teatro di S. A. S. E. di Sassonia, between 1773 and 1775.56 Saxony was an imperial state within the Holy Roman Empire, and support for the Archduchess is unlikely to have been such an issue there, resulting perhaps in a less politically charged performance environment. 56 Dates of performances were November 6 and 20, 1773; April 13 and 21, and September 10, 1774; and March 4 and 8, 1775. See Ortrun Landmann, Die Dresdener Italienische Oper Zwischen Hasse Und Weber: Ein Daten- Und Quellenverzeichnis Für Die Jahre 1765–1817 (Dresden: Sächsische Landesbibliothek, 1976), 103.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage

In a philosophical climate in which Enlightenment thinkers had expectations that experimentation with new social institutions could result in a just, moral, and happier society, Il regno della Luna represented a performance of a prospective reality which might result from evolving and concerted changes to social and political structures on the Italian peninsula. Piccinni’s flexibility and eclecticism musically supported a libretto that elaborated manifold issues prominent in European intellectual thought of the time and also projected onto the opera stage the prevailing future-directed time consciousness. Its fictive world was based on a particular interpretation of Lombard Enlightenment, conditioned by the political situation in the Duchy and closely aligned with the views of Giuseppe Parini. The temporal, locational and gendered alterity of the lunar society as represented to late eighteenth-century audiences in Milan and Dresden was consistent with the expected “Otherness” of the future.57 Supported by Piccinni’s forward-thinking musical setting, the libretto proffered a female-dominated lunar society as an allegory for an enlightened ideal of the Italian future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, John K. Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. Beiser, Frederick C. “Introduction: The Concept and Context of Historicism.” In Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 1–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Bizzocchi, Roberto. “Parini, Goldoni e i Cicisbei.” In L’amabil Rito: Società e Cultura Nella Milano Di Parini, edited by Gennaro Barbarisi, 177–85. Milano: Cisalpino, 2000. Bonomi, Ilaria. “La Lingua Dei Libretti Pariniani, Tomo Primo: Letteratura e Società.” In L’amabil Rito: Società e Cultura Nella Milano Di Parini, edited by Gennaro Barbarisi, 413–32. Milan: Cisalpino, 2000. Brand, Peter, and Lino Pertile, eds. “The Enlightenment and Parini.” In The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, 371–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Brosses, Charles de. Histoire Des Navigations Aux Terres Australes. Paris: Durand, 1756. Brown, Bruce Alan, and Julian Rushton. “Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Ritter von.” Grove Music Online.  Accessed July 9 2019. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/ 10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000011301. Brown, John. Letters on the Italian Opera: Addressed to The Hon. Lord Monboddo. 2nd ed. London: T. Caddell, 1791. Chen, Jen-Yen. “Maria Theresia and the Voicing of Imperial Self: The Austrian Contexts of Metastasio’s China Operas.” Eighteenth-Century Music 13, no. 1 (2016): 11–34. doi:10.1017/ S1478570615000408. 57 Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” 168.

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Lawrence Mays Chladenius, Johann Martin. Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft: Worinnen Der Grund Zu Einer Neuen Einsicht in Allen Arten Der Gelahrtheit Gelegt Wird. Leipzig: Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1752. Conti, Antonio. Scritti Filosofici. A Cura Di Nicola Badaloni. Edited by Nicola Badaloni. Naples: Fulvio Rossi, 1972. Crain, Jr., Gordon Ferris. “The Operas of Bernardo Pasquini,” vol. 1. PhD diss., Yale University, 1965. Decker, G. J., ed. Essai Sur Les Formes de Gouvernement et Sur Les Devoirs Des Souverains. (Berlin, 1777). Descartes, René. I Principi Della Fillosofia. Translated by Giuseppe Eleonora Barbapiccola. Turin: Francesco Mairesse, 1722. Feldman, Martha. “Arias—Form, Feeling, Exchange.” In Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty —Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy, 42–96. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Fido, Franco. “The First Half of the Settecento.” In The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, edited by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, 343–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Franci, Carlo Sebastiano. “Difesa Delle Donne.” In Il Caffè Ossia Brevi e Vari Discorsi Distrubuiti in Fogli Periodici Dal Giugno 1764 a Tutto Maggio 1765, vol. 1, 169–76. Brescia: Giammaria Rizzardi, 1765. Frédéric II (roi de Prusse). Essai Sur Les Formes de Gouvernement et Sur Les Devoirs Des Souverains. Edited by G. J. Decker. Berlin, 1777. Garavaglia, Andrea, and Katherine Kamal. “Amazons From Madrid To Vienna, By Way of Italy: The Circulation of a Spanish Text and the Definition of an Imaginary.” Early Music History 31, no. 1 (2012): 189–233. Ginguené, Pierre-Louis. Notice Sur La Vie et Les Ouvrages de Nicolas Piccinni. Paris: Veuve Panckoucke, 1800. Habermas, Jürgen, and Seyla Ben-Habib. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique 22 (1981): 3–14. Heartz, Daniel. “Goldoni, Don Giovanni and the Dramma Giocoso.” The Musical Times 120, no. 1642 (1979): 993–8. Hunter, Mary. The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Knudsen, Jonathan B. Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Koselleck, Reinhart. “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity.” In The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, edited by Todd Samuel Presner, 154–69. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Landmann, Ortrun. Die Dresdener Italienische Oper Zwischen Hasse Und Weber: Ein Daten- Und Quellenverzeichnis Für Die Jahre 1765–1817. Dresden: Sächsische Landesbibliothek, 1976. Mays, Lawrence. “The Moon.” Histories of Emotion: From Medieval Europe to Contemporary Australia, December 22, 2015. Accessed July 9, 2019. https://historiesofemotion.com/ 2015/12/22/the-moon/.

An Enlightened Future History on the Milan Opera Stage Mays, Lawrence John. “A Scholarly Edition with Exegesis of Niccolò Piccinni’s Dramma Giocoso: ‘Il Regno Della Luna’ (1970).” PhD diss., The Australian National University, 2018. Messbarger, Rebecca. The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Muratori, Lodovico Antonio. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores/Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Milan: ex typographia Societatis Palatinae in Regis Curia, 1723. N.a. Il Regno Della Luna. Dramma Giocoso Da Rappresentarsi Nel Regio Ducal Teatro Di Milano Nella Corrente Primavera. Milan: Giovanni Battista Bianchi, 1770. Palidda, Alessandra. “Milan 1790–1802: Music, Society and Politics in the City of Many Regimes.” PhD diss., Cardiff University, 2017. “Parini, Giuseppe.” Macmillan’s Magazine 72 (1895): 291–7. Parini, Giuseppe. “Canzone.” In Laurea Della Signora M. Pellegrina Amoretti Cittadina d’Oneglia, 123–8. Pavia: Porro e Bianchi, 1777. ——. Le Odi, Edizione Critica a Cura Di Dante Isella. Milan: Ricciardi, 1975. ——. Opere, vol. 1. Edited by Francesco Reina. Milan: Genio, 1801. doi:10.1016/00036870(73)90259-7. ——. Poesie, volume 2, edited by Egidio Bellorini. Bari: Laterza, 1929. Petronio, Giuseppe. Parini e l’illuminismo Lombardo. Bari: Laterza, 1972. Piccinni, Niccolò. Il Regno Della Luna. Edited by Lawrence Mays. Libretto translated with assistance from Grazia Miccichè. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2019. Reill, Peter H. The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du Contrat Social, Ou, Principes Du Droit Politique. Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey, 1762. Rudlin, John. Commedia Dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook. London: Routledge, 1994. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1. Edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904. Accessed July 9, 2019. https://oll.libertyfund.org/ titles/237. Verri, Pietro, and Alessandro Verri. Carteggio Di Pietro e Di Alessandro Verri (Dal 1766 Al 1797). Volume 3: Agosto 1769-settembre 1770. Edited by Francesco Novati and Emanuele Greppi. Milan: Casa Editrice L. F. Cogliati, 1911. ——. Carteggio Di Pietro e Di Alessandro Verri (Dal 1766 Al 1797). Edited by Giovanni Seregni. Milan: Giuffrè, 1942. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated from the Third Edition (1744). Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948.

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CHAPTER 12

“A new world is opened up to view”: Orchestral Gesture in Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette* INGE VAN RIJ

ABSTRACT Hector Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette represents a striking paradox in terms of the relationship between body, emotion, and music. Berlioz famously designated the work a symphony, thereby appearing to deprive the audience of the visual dimension that had been such a crucial part of his own experience of Shakespeare’s play. Existing approaches to Berlioz’s symphony emphasize the programmatic and formal processes at play in the music. However, this chapter explores the possibility that Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette might respond to the physical gestures that so inspired him, not only in the sonic imitations of narrative detail, but also in the gestures of the players and conductor visible on the stage. Drawing on Berlioz’s writings, accounts of the performance he witnessed, and nineteenth-century theories of gesture, the first section explores the relationship between musical performance and gesture in historical terms. In the second section, an examination of the rehearsals and performance of two movements of Berlioz’s work by Leonard Bernstein illustrates how some of the gestural parameters scripted into Berlioz’s music might be realised. In exploring these performances of history this chapter demonstrates how embodied approaches might be extended to orchestral music, and reveals new perspectives on a much-loved work.

* A preliminary version of this research was presented at the symposium “Art and Affect,” hosted by the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions in Brisbane, July 2017.

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Inge van Rij

W

hen Berlioz first saw Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on the stage, in Paris in 1827, the effect was visceral: “to witness the drama of that passion swift as thought … was more than I could bear. By the third act, scarcely able to breathe—it was as though an iron hand had gripped me by the heart—I knew that I was lost.”1 Berlioz understood very little English at the time. However, he stated in his Memoirs: “the power of the acting, especially that of Juliet herself, the rapid flow of the scenes, the play of expression and voice and gesture, told me more and gave me a far richer awareness of the ideas and passions of the original than the words of my pale and garbled translation could do.”2 Given the significance of gesture in Berlioz’s initial experience, it would appear paradoxical that when Berlioz came to set Shakespeare’s play for himself he eschewed the “acting,” “expression,” and “gesture” of opera and instead chose the medium of the symphony: while his work includes a chorus and vocal soloists, the parts of Romeo and Juliet themselves were evoked not by singers but by the orchestra alone. As Berlioz explains in the Preface to the work: there is the very sublimity of this love, whose depiction by a musician is fraught with peril; his invention should be allowed the scope which the exact sense of the sung words restrains, but which is possible in such circumstances with instrumental music, richer, more varied, less restricted, and thanks to its very indefiniteness, incomparably more powerful.3

Thus, according to Berlioz, it was the very vagueness of instrumental language that made it best suited to the depiction of “that passion swift as thought.” 1 “assister au spectacle de cet amour prompt comme la pensée … c’était trop. Aussi, dès le troisième acte, respirant à peine, et souffrant comme si une main de fer m’eût étreint le cœur, je me dis avec une entière conviction: Ah ! je suis perdu.” Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs of Berlioz, trans. David Cairns (London: Panther Arts, 1970), 112. 2 “Mais le jeu des acteurs, celui de l’actrice surtout, la succession des scènes, la pantomime et l’accent des voix, signifiaient pour moi davantage et m’imprégnaient des idées et des passions shakespeariennes mille fois plus que les mots de ma pâle et infidèle traduction.” Ibid., 112. 3 “C’est aussi parce que la sublimité même de cet amour en rendait la peinture si dangereuse pour le musicien, qu’il a dû donner à sa fantaisie une latitude que le sens positif des paroles chantées ne lui eût pas laissée, et recourir à la langue instrumentale, langue plus riche, plus variée, moins arrêtée, et, par son vague même, imcomparablement plus puissante en pareil cas.” Hector Berlioz, Preface to Roméo et Juliette; translated in Julian Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 87–8.

“A new world is opened up to view”

Musicologists have examined Berlioz’s “langue instrumentale” for programmatic and formal details that enable us better to understand its relationship to Shakespeare’s drama. While some have rejected the notion that Berlioz took any more than a general inspiration from Shakespeare,4 others have considered the possibility of direct correspondence between lines of Shakespeare’s play and Berlioz’s music, general correlation on the basis of topos, or analogous forms.5 Some go so far as to suggest that Berlioz transmuted gesture into sound, particularly in the depiction of “Roméo au tombeau des Capulets”: “some of it could accompany a mime enacted virtually in real time” Julian Rushton writes, and he proposes that the work as a whole can be interpreted as a “covert opera.”6 D. Kern Holoman similarly suggests that Roméo et Juliette “demands of the listener both a knowledge of the drama and a conscious effort to recreate it in the mind’s eye.”7 This chapter seeks to go one step further, to explore the possibility that the music does not simply accompany mime, but can enact and embody mime, and not only for the “mind’s eye” but also for the physical gaze of the audience. By scripting Shakespeare’s drama not only into the sounds but also into the bodies of his players and conductor, Berlioz’s symphony can invoke the same “play of expression and voice and gesture” that he so admired when he experienced the play for himself. Through an examination of historical sources indicative of Berlioz’s and his contemporaries’ approach to gesture in performance, I seek to open our eyes anew to the role of gesture in performance history. In the second half of this chapter I then turn to footage of Leonard Bernstein’s rehearsal and performance of two movements of the work at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in 1989. By exploring the continuity between nineteenth-century sources and contexts and Bernstein’s late twentiethcentury interpretation, I propose that historical gesture itself might become newly embodied when a sensitive conductor and orchestra together take on the task of “performing history.” 4 Jean-Pierre Bartoli, “Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Berlioz’s Scène d’amour,” in Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work, ed. Peter Bloom (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007): 138–60; Stephen Rodgers, Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5 Jacques Chailley, “Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette. Scène d’amour,” Revue de musicology 63 (1975): 115–22; Ian Kemp, “Romeo and Juliet and Roméo et Juliette,” in Berlioz Studies, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 37–79; Vera Micznik, “Of Ways of Telling: Intertextuality and Historical Evidence in Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette,” 19th-Century Music 24, no. 1 (2000): 21–61. 6 Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, 52 and 80–86. 7 D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 266.

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SEEING SOUND Berlioz’s ideas about the physical qualities suggested by instrumental music are apparent in his writings about the symphonies of Beethoven—the composer Berlioz described as “the musical Shakespeare.”8 In writing of Beethoven’s instrumental music, Berlioz draws a sharp contrast with “what one experiences in the theatre: there one is in the presence of humanity and its emotions; here [in Beethoven’s instrumental music] a new world is opened up to view.”9 Although Berlioz goes on to suggest that instrumental music occurs in “a higher ideal realm,” his reliance on visual imagery—the suggestion that we view the new world—is significant. Specific examples of this visual dimension and, indeed, physicality, can be found in Berlioz’s description of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which is replete with words suggesting the orchestral body in torment, including “convulsions” and a fainting fit (“l’évanouissement”) brought on by “blind rage” (“une rage inouïe”). “How to paint a fainting fit in music?” (“Comment peindre un évanouissement en musique?”), Berlioz writes, anticipating the question his readers might pose. “In truth I can’t give you a recipe,” he responds, before concluding significantly that Beethoven’s music “moved me musically in something of the same manner as would a dramatic representation of a scene of this nature.”10 Much emphasis was placed during this period on Beethoven’s ability to appeal to the “inner eye.” Berlioz was building on this trope when he wrote of the power of Liszt’s performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in total darkness that it enabled the audience to hear “the shade of Beethoven himself ” (“l’ombre de Beethoven”),11 and his description of the Fifth Symphony could well suggest an imagined visualization. Indeed, Berlioz contemplated hiding his orchestra behind a curtain for Lélio, the sequel to his Symphonie 8 Hector Berlioz, Revue européenne (April 1833); in Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism 1824–1837, ed. Katherine Kolb, trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 42. 9 “… ce qu’on éprouve au théâtre: là on est en presence de l’humanité avec ses passions; ici un monde nouveau s’ouvre à vos regards, on est transporté dans une sphere d’idées plus élevée.” Hector Berlioz, “Aperçu sur la musique classique et la musique romantique,” originally published in Le Correspondent, October 22, 1830; translated in Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, 90. 10 Hector Berlioz, “Sixième concert du Conservatoire,” Journal des débats (April 18, 1835): 1. “A la vérité je ne saurais ici vous donner la recette, le procédé, la règle, aux moyens desquels on obtient ce résultat.” “… m’ont impressionné musicalement, à peu près comme pourrait le faire la représentation dramatique d’une scène de cette nature.” 11 Hector Berlioz, “A few words about the Trios and Sonatas of Beethoven,” in The Art of Music, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 40.

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fantastique.12 However, for Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz left detailed instructions for the placement of the musicians upon the stage which make clear that he wanted everyone to be visible to the audience.13 Moreover, he divided the chorus into Montagues on one side of the stage and Capulets on the other, and originally desired them to be clad in different colors, which lends weight to the possibility that he wished audiences to interpret the work with their eyes as well as their ears, even though the drama was not being staged in the conventional sense.14 Indeed, in other writings about the orchestra Berlioz reveals his tendency to watch the performance, and to see in the movements of the conductor and players an embodiment of the emotion of the music. He noted that the sight of instruments such as the harp was crucial to his experience: “If I love the harp so, the look of the instrument has a great deal to do with it”;15 and he commented on the gestures of string players: “A slight movement of the arm, an imperceptible nuance of feeling which would have no visible effect in the hands of a single violinist, these can generate a magnificent and irresistible flow of feeling when multiplied by a cluster of unisons, and strike to the heart of one’s very being.”16 In scenes without singers, the conductor is the most obvious analogy for the gestural performer of drama—the one who, as Elias Canetti suggests, “literally embodies the work they [the orchestra] are playing.”17 Berlioz, a key figure in the development of the conductor’s art, saw the conductor as a crucial conduit of energy who literally charged the players’ bodies: “his inner flame will warm them, his electricity will charge them, his drive will propel them. He will radiate the vital spark of music.”18 To his father he said that the 12 For further discussion of Lélio, and also of the correspondence between music, the inner eye, and contemporaneous visual technologies, see Inge van Rij, The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13 Berlioz, “Berlioz’s Observations on Performance (From the second impression of the full score, 1847),” in Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, 88–9. 14 Ibid., 88. 15 “Et si j’aime tant la harpe, son aspect est peut-être pour quelque chose dans mon affection.” Berlioz to Liszt, February 23, 1853; quoted in Berlioz, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, ed. Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 79. 16 “Un imperceptible mouvement du bras, un sentiment inaperçu de celui qui l’éprouve, qui ne produirait rien d’apparent dans l’exécution d’un seul violon, multiplié par le nombre des unissons, donne des nuances magnifiques, d’irrésistibles élans, des accents qui pénètrent jusqu’au fond du cœur.” Ibid., 34 (emphasis added). 17 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 460. 18 “… sa flamme intérieure les échauffe, son électricité les électrise, sa force d’impulsion les entraîne, il projette autour de lui les irradiations vitales de l’art musical.” Berlioz, Orchestration Treatise, 337.

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only way to realise his Roméo et Juliette properly was to conduct it himself.19 Of course, conductors are not actors, and they do not have the freedom of actors to use gesture for realising drama or emotion. The instrumentalists are even more restricted: seated behind their music, their arms and hands must support instruments, wield bows, depress keys. However, within these limits, there is still significant scope for expressive physical gesture, on the one hand, and for the conductor to use gesture to inspire a particular type of sound and emotion on the other. Indeed, as W. Luke Windsor points out, while many instruments do not specifically require much physical movement that is visible to the audience, some players are trained to make movement part of their means of expression; 20 and scholars of music and gesture have noted the variety of “technical, expressive and communicative” gestures that constitute musical performance—and the fact that listeners/viewers will often not distinguish between the three types.21

SHAKESPEARE FOR THE EYES To establish the forms of gesture that may have inspired Berlioz in his conception of Roméo et Juliette, documentation of the 1827 performance offers an intriguing starting point. Just weeks after the performances of the English company rocked Paris, Charles-François-Jean-Baptiste Moreau de Commagny produced a volume of Souvenirs du Théâtre Anglais à Paris, with illustrations by Achille Devéria and Louis Boulanger, enabling those who had experienced the performances to contextualise their significance and monumentalise them in cultural memory.22 Moreau points to the distinctiveness of the English school of acting, and the “savage” power of Shakespeare, as new avenues for dramatic representation in France. Many of his comments point directly to the role of gesture and the visual dimension more broadly: “Shakespeare speaks no less

19 “Et il n’y a vraiment d’autre moyen que de conduire moi-même l’orchestre, pour n’être pas défiguré plus ou moins.” Berlioz, letter to his father Louis Berlioz, May 11, 1839, vol. 2 of Correspondence Générale ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 555. 20 W. Luke Windsor, “Gestures in Music-making: Action, Information and Perception,” in New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 46. 21 Elaine King and Jane Ginsborg, “Gestures and Glances: Interactions in Ensemble Rehearsal,” in Gritten and King, New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, 179. 22 M. Moreau [Charles-François-Jean-Baptiste Moreau de Commagny], Souvenirs du Théâtre Anglais à Paris, dessinés par MM. Déveria et Boulanger (Paris: Gaugain, 1827).

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to the eyes than to the mind,” he notes, while observing that the “pantomime” of the English actors “is in general more animated, more expressive,” involving “the faithful imitation of naïve nature.”23 When discussing the actors who took the roles of Romeo and Juliet, Moreau perceives a close correlation between body, gesture, and emotional impact. Charles Kemble, for example, is “perhaps lacking a little in fire, and the muscles of his noble and regular figure lack sufficient mobility to paint all the feelings that stir his soul. But his height is majestic, his poses are tragic, all his movements have grace.”24 And Harriet Smithson’s profound impact on French audiences was due to “the natural perfection of her diction and the truthful energy of her pantomime.” Moreau suggests that her “silent movements, so important and so difficult in the theatrical arts, are as true they are moving. Her poses, in the scenes that most surprised French prudishness … are always elegant without ever ceasing to be natural.”25 Moreau’s praise for naturalness is reinforced elsewhere when he commends Smithson for vanishing behind the characters she plays: “The actress has disappeared.”26 Moreau’s points about Kemble and Smithson are enhanced by the illustrations supplied by Devéria and Boulanger. The image of Juliet on her balcony (Fig. 1), captioned Act 3 Scene 3 but surely depicting the earlier balcony scene Act 2 scene 2 (whose text is reproduced in the guide on the pages around the image), suggests a dynamic Juliet, gazing intently on Romeo but simultaneously gesturing towards her chamber, poised in a moment of tension between immersing herself in Romeo’s love and acknowledging the realities of nurse and family that may intrude at any moment. Shortly after Smithson’s death, Berlioz’s friend and journalistic colleague Jules Janin recalled her in this scene listening, “trembling with rapture” (“enivrée et tremblante.”) Moved by nostalgia for this experience of his youth, Janin reflects how “A whole society stirred to the magic of this woman.”27 23 “… mais Shakespeare ne parle pas moins aux yeux qu’à l’intelligence.” “Leur pantomime est en general plus animée, plus expressive.” “la fidèle imitation de la nature naïve. Ibid., 7. 24 “Kemble manqué peut-être un peu de flame, et les muscles de sa figure noble et régulière n’ont point assez de mobilité pour peindre tous les sentimens qui agitent son âme. Mais sa taille est élevée, ses poses sont tragiques, tous ses mouvemens ont de la grâce.” Ibid., 11. 25 “Son jeu muet, cette partie si importante et si difficile de l’art théâtral, est aussi vrai que pathétique. Ses poses, dans les situations qui étonnent le plus la pruderie française ... sont toujours élégantes sans cesser d’être naturelles.” Ibid., 32. 26 “L’actrice a disparu.” Ibid., 32. 27 “… un monde entier était attentif à … l’enchantement de cette femme.” Jules Janin, Journal des débats (March 20, 1854); quoted by Berlioz in Memoirs, ed. Cairns, 570–1.

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Figure 1. Harriet Smithson as Juliet. Illustrated by Déveria and Boulanger, in Moreau, Souvenirs du Théâtre Anglais à Paris (1827). Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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In the Souvenir image, as for Janin, Juliet is the object of our gaze as well as that of Romeo. Indeed, the image appears in the section on Smithson, not Kemble. Romeo’s body faces forwards, as if to address the audience, but his head twists longingly back towards Juliet with a hint of strain, belying the apparent relaxation of his limbs, and echoing her attitude of being pulled in two directions at once, as befits the scene: Juliet: ‘Tis almost morning. I would have thee gone. And yet no further than a wanton’s bird, Who lets it hop a little from her hand. And with a silk thread plucks it back again, So loving-jealous of his liberty.28

GESTURE AND DRAMATIC MEANING While Moreau’s Souvenir gives us fleeting traces of the gestures of the Shakespearean actors Berlioz witnessed, we can also look to the way gestures and postures were codified in the treatises of the period to establish some basic principles governing the way emotion might have been captured by and released through the orchestral body. Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia of 1806 contains one of the most detailed and influential accounts of theatrical movement pertaining to the early nineteenth century. Austin suggests that gestures are a “universal language”—a claim that was similarly being made for music.29 Similarly, Austin suggests that whereas words can communicate “science,” it is gesture that signifies the “passions.”30 Austin describes how joy and “elevated” emotions such as admiration literally elevate the body, while melancholy and veneration “depress” the body.31 The difference is visible in a comparison of the illustrations depicting the “elevated” quality of “Admiration” and the “depressed” quality of “Melancholy” (Figs. 2 and 3 respectively). Indeed, when the speaker uses gesture effectively to communicate his or her passions, the “affections, are, by means of these external

28 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, act II scene 2, as printed in Moreau, Souvenirs, 36. 29 Gilbert Austin, Chironomia; Or, A Treatise On Rhetorical Delivery (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1806), 469. 30 Ibid., 472. 31 Ibid. (quoting Henry Home Lord Kame’s Elements of Criticism), 470–1.

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Figure 2.  “Admiration” (Figure 104) from Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806)

Figure 3.  “Melancholy” (Figure 113) from Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806)

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signs, not only perceived but felt.”32 In other words, those watching the speaker are inspired by the same sentiments. This belief in the act of transmitting emotion through gesture is particularly significant regarding the conductor, as we shall see. The other key figure in the development of rhetorical gesture in the nineteenth century, and one known personally to Berlioz, was François Delsarte, a contemporary at the Paris Conservatoire. Although best known today for his posthumous influence on American dance, Delsarte was a musician, and his theories of gesture and movement arose out of dissatisfaction with the exaggerated poses taught at the Paris Conservatoire when he was a voice student. Delsarte did not produce a treatise, but followers of his methods documented his approach to gesture, which was widely influential by the late nineteenth century. The body itself Delsarte saw as divided into multiples of three (or trinities), such as the head (mental or intellectual), torso (moral or volitional) and limbs (vital or physical), with each of these further subdivided into three, each with their own signification.33 Thus the shoulders, one of three “articular centres of the arm,” were the “thermometer of the sensitive and passionate life.”34 Elements of Christian mysticism inflected Delsarte’s views on the body; it is significant that Delsarte saw unity between the spiritual and terrestrial worlds, and unity between body and soul.35 Edward Barratt Warman proposes that, to Delsarte, “every expression of the face, every gesture, every posture of the body corresponds to, or is but the outward expression of, an inner emotion or condition of the mind.”36 The positioning of the parts of the body, and the movement from one position to another signified various emotional states. To take just one example, the rejection of an idea involves horizontal movement (described as being like knocking down an upright object or stick), with the presentation of the palm (which represents the vital force); by contrast, ignoring an idea does not require the same kind of strength and thus involves the back of the

32 Ibid., 473. 33 Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression (Albany, NY: E. S. Warner, 1894; repr. 2010), 41–2. 34 M. L’Abbe Delaumosne and Angélique Arnaud, The Art of Oratory: System of Delsarte (Albany, NY: E. S. Warner, 1884; repr. 2010), 85. 35 Amelia Spallone-Poussin, “François Delsarte. Une esthétique du mouvement,” in François Delsarte, une recherche sans fin, ed. Franck Waille and Christophe Damour (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015), 63–77. 36 Edward Barrett Warman, Gestures and Attitudes: An Exposition of the Delsarte Philosophy of Expression: Practical and Theoretical (Boston: John Wilson & Son, 1891), 23.

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Figure 4.  “Rejecting” (Figure 64) from Edward Barrett Warman, Gestures and Attitudes (1891)

hand (or “emotive” force).37 The conclusion of the gesture is represented in an illustration accompanying Warman’s text (Fig. 4). Reexamining the image of Smithson’s performance of the balcony scene (Fig. 1), we see how Juliet’s pose, in particular, might draw on this “universal language of gesture”: her left arm and tension in both shoulders suggest elements of Austin’s “listening fear” (Fig. 5): “The hand and arm are held vertical extended. If the sound proceed from different quarters at the same time, both arms are held up, and the head alternately changes from one side to the other, with a rapidity governed by the nature of the sound; if it be alarming, with 37 Warman, Gestures and Attitudes, 139.

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Figure 5.  “Listening fear” (Figure 103) from Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806)

trepidation; if pleasing, with gentle motion.”38 Juliet’s right hand, raised slightly and with palm facing down, also reflects Delsarte’s “rejecting” (Fig. 4). Warman explains “it requires strength to cast down heavy obstructions”39—and, indeed, to turn away a beloved suitor.

BERNSTEIN IN SALZAU: “IF THIS ORCHESTRA CAN’T UNDERSTAND TEENAGERS, I DON’T KNOW WHO CAN. …” In the summer of 1989 Leonard Bernstein rehearsed and performed two movements of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette with the youth orchestra of the SchleswigHolstein Music Festival in Salzau. Clearly there are significant differences in 38 Austin, Chironomia, 488. 39 Warman, Gestures and Attitudes, 147.

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orchestral and conducting practice between Berlioz’s period and that of Bernstein. I offer four defenses for nevertheless indulging in the anachronism of examining this particular event in relation to Berlioz’s Shakespearean epiphany. First, there is obviously insufficient iconographic or written evidence to reconstruct Berlioz’s own conducting gestures in anything approaching equivalent detail. Second, I am interested in how principles of movement might be scripted into Berlioz’s music. They are capable of realisation by any sensitive conductor and orchestra, but Bernstein, described by Harold Schoenberg as “the most choreographic of all contemporary conductors,” is particularly well placed to realize this potential.40 Third, there is continuity between nineteenth-century theories of oratorical gesture and Bernstein, which positions Bernstein as “performing history” through his gestures. Bernstein’s conducting mentor Serge Koussevitzky encouraged him to study what he referred to as “die Plastik” with Erick Hawkins, a choreographer of modern American dance who was married to Martha Graham and similarly involved in reimagining dance through Delsartean principles;41 and Bernstein studied at the Curtis Institute during the period that Placido de Montoliu was teaching Eurythmics, integrating gesture with song and speech and drawing on the approach of Émile-Jacques Dalcroze (1865–1950), who had in turn studied Delsarte’s method. Finally, the filming of the rehearsals as well as the performance by Bernstein with the youth orchestra affords a particularly useful opportunity to see how Shakespeare’s drama was introduced to the players, and how spoken word became musical gesture. Penny Boyes Braem and Thüring Bräm refer to this film to support their claim that Bernstein used similar gestures “in quantity and quality” to accompany his speech and to conduct.42 Bernstein reads aloud to the orchestra extracts from the relevant scenes, accompanying the vocal inflections with physical gestures and providing the viewer with an opportunity to examine how gesture can then be choreographed into the conductor and players’ interpretation of the music. Moreover, this particular performance is interesting in relation to gesture and 40 Harold Schoenberg, The Great Conductors (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1967), quoted in Elliot W. Galkin, A History of Orchestral Conducting in Theory and Practice (New York: Pendragon Press, 1988), 757. 41 Leonard Bernstein, “Teachers and Teaching: An Autobiographic Essay by Leonard Bernstein,” directed by Humphrey Burton (Unitel, 1988), https://www.medici.tv/en/documentaries/ leonard-bernstein-teachers-and-teaching/; Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 76. 42 Penny Boyes Braem and Thüring Bräm, “A Pilot Study of the Expressive Gestures Used by Classical Orchestra Conductors,” in The Signs of Language Revisited, ed. Karen Emmorey and Harlan Lane (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000), 165.

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emotion because of the affinity Bernstein himself proposes between the performers and the characters whose music they are embodying: “if this orchestra can’t understand teenagers, I don’t know who can … ,” Bernstein tells them.43 When Bernstein contextualizes the work for the young orchestra, relaying select facts about its history, he implies that, in performing Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette they, too, are performing history. Bernstein rehearses and performs two movements of Berlioz’s work, each of which depicts Romeo and Juliet through orchestra alone. The first is “Roméo seul” (Romeo alone), which opens with melancholy and uncertainty that most likely depicts what Romeo’s father describes as his “black and portentous humour.”44 Berlioz knew Romeo’s mood to have been inspired by his unrequited love for Rosaline,45 though references to Rosaline were cut from the Garrick/Kemble production that Berlioz saw.46 The harmonically searching line suggests Romeo’s introspection; and gesturally, these qualities are emphasised by exposed writing for first-violin section, marked pianississimo and with the instruction to play in a melancholy style (Andante malinconico sostenuto). The slow bows imply the only movement is that of the breath, while the exposed nature of the line, when realized by a whole section (“at least 15” violins must play the line) attempting to coordinate their sound, adds a level of anxiety that requires each player to monitor and check their physical movement (Ex. 1). Bernstein’s interpretation encourages this quality of introspection: his shoulders are hunched, his hands mostly close to his chest, and his baton pointing down to the ground; there is a clear “depression” of the body, in Austin’s terms (Compare Figs. 6 and 7 as well as Fig. 3). Delsarte suggested that “Every sensitive, agreeable or painful form is expressed by an elevation of the shoulders”—Delsarte’s “thermometer of emotion and of love.”47 Bernstein’s position

43 Horant H. Hohlfeld (director), Leonard Bernstein with the Schleswig-Holstein Musikfest orchestra, Leonard Bernstein in Salzau, part 1, “Romeo Alone” and part 2, “Love Scene” (Berlioz, Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet—Rehearsal and Concert) (Unitel A05501890 and A05501892, 1989). All subsequent references to the film, including images, refer to this source. 44 William Shakespeare, David Garrick, J. P. Kemble, Romeo and Juliet, A Tragedy; Adapted to the Stage by David Garrick, Revised by J. P. Kemble (London: Covent Garden, 1811), 8. 45 Hector Berlioz, The Art of Music (A Travers Chants) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 220. 46 Shakespeare, Garrick, Kemble, Romeo and Juliet; John R. Elliot, Jr., “The Shakespeare Berlioz Saw,” Music and Letters 57, no. 3 (1976): 292–308. 47 Delaumosne and Arnaud, The Art of Oratory, 85.

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Inge van Rij Roméo seul Andante malinconico e sostenuto

Violons I (au moins 15)

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Example 1.  Hector Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, “Roméo seul,” bars 1–9, cello part

is also suggestive of Delsarte/Warman’s “Anguish”48 (Fig. 8), or what Genevieve Stebbins describes as “vital concentration, suppressed passion, [a] reflective form of excitement or vitality,” characterized by “Arms folded tightly on chest; forearms nearly level with shoulders.”49 The first violins who carry the opening melody alone cannot replicate Bernstein’s stance literally—the right arm must move outwards to bow the long line of the melody. But Bernstein’s gestures and direction to them suggest a hunching of the shoulders, and a sense of reining in physical movement so that everything is, as for Romeo, inwardly focused: “all left hand, and almost no bow. You know, just hhhhaaa [he breathes, gestures]; breathe on the string; and what comes out isn’t like strings, it’s not violins. It’s just some sound from Heaven.” Particularly interesting later in this movement is the beautiful solo oboe melody that might be taken to represent Romeo’s romantic love and, perhaps, his sighting of Juliet at the ball.50 Bernstein asks that the oboist (Christoph Hartmann) not interrupt the impossibly long line with a breath, and he demonstrates by singing the difficulty of what Berlioz is asking of his idealized lovers: [Orchestra rehearses bars 81–93; CH takes a breath between 92 and 93, marked [a] in Ex. 2, below] LB: Ah. You do have to breathe there, huh? CH: No. LB: No? You swear? CH: [Nods.] 48 Warman, Gestures and Attitudes, 203. 49 Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 112. 50 Bernstein himself suggests this interpretation in “The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity,” Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 225.

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Figure 7.  Bernstein conducting the opening of “Roméo seul” in performance

Figure 6.  “Veneration” (Figure 105) from Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806)

Figure 8.  “Anguish” (Figure 91) from Edward Barrett Warman, Gestures and Attitudes (1891)

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Inge van Rij LB: It would be so wonderful if you didn’t have to. I know it’s impossible. And the next phrase is going to be even more impossible. CH: [indistinguishable.] LB: After the high e. [sings bars 98–100] “mi re do si la…” CH: I won’t breathe until “19.” [bar 91] LB: What’s “19?” [looks at score; sings bar 91–2, breathing at [b]] “mi mi re re do…” You have to breathe? CH: After the E. LB: You shouldn’t breathe there. If possible, [sings bars 84–5] “la si do so fa…” That should all be one breath. CH: Yeah; I want to do that. LB: Please. CH: Yeah, I do. LB: Is that a bet? [Extends his hand as if to shake.] I’ll pay you extra! CH: OK. [Extends his hand. General laughter.] LB: Then, the next phrase, after “mi re do si la … mi mi re” [sings bars 98–9, taking a breath at [c]] then take a big one [demonstrates, breathing in holding his ribcage]; tank up! “so…” [sings] Very quietly… And I will move a little in your favour “so fa mi re la da do si do re mi mi fa re si do [sings bars 101–7, his voice becoming strained as he almost runs out of breath at the end; general laughter and applause]. Can you do that? CH: Of course. LB: If I can do it, you can do it! [Coughs] bah! But that is very important to have no breath. That’s almost more important than this one. OK.

The exchange reveals a certain tension between idealized and physical, sensual love in Romeo’s experience. That tension arises directly from Berlioz’s music (Ex. 2), with a line that soars then descends into an extended sigh to leave the oboist quite literally breathless. Although we do not see the oboist as a literal stand-in for either Romeo or Juliet, in the Schleswig-Holstein Festival orchestra performance our eye is drawn to Hartmann in the midst of the orchestra, much as Romeo spots Juliet across the crowded ballroom, as he readies himself for his solo, swaying in his chair, and inflating his lungs. For audience members able to see the oboist’s face in the performance—or viewers of the film, which inevitably offers a close-up at this moment—Hartmann appears almost in tears as he reaches the end of the passage (Fig. 9), before he is finally free to gasp for air and the emotion is released in the stirring sweeping gestures of the body of strings.

“A new world is opened up to view”

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Example 2.  Hector Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, “Roméo seul,” bars 81–107, oboe solo

Figure 9.  Christoph Hartmann performing the conclusion of the oboe solo in “Roméo seul”

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In rehearsing the music of the ballroom, Bernstein employs gesture self-consciously to demonstrate what he describes as a Renaissance Estampie: “and everything will begin to dance,” he tells his orchestra, as he sings the rhythm, stamping the ground and raising his shoulders in time. The movement then comes to a climax when Berlioz combines the oboist’s “Juliet” theme with the music of the ball, and we might imagine the young lovers similarly united in dance. Now the “Juliet” theme is given to a number of woodwind and brass instruments. The physical tension of eking out the breath thus removed, the theme can sway and dance like the woman it represents (Ex. 3). Leading into the climactic restatement of the combined themes with the addition of bass drum, cymbals and triangles, the bodies of the flute and oboe players who are elsewhere so closely associated with Juliet bob and rise, visible across the coordinated swirling bows of the strings. Bernstein employs the same dancing movements of the shoulders and feet that he had used in the rehearsal to describe the Estampie (Fig. 10). His position is also suggestive of Austin’s “Admiration” (Fig. 2), enabling Bernstein to meld the roles of conductor and active participant in Shakespeare’s drama.51 If “Roméo seul” suggests a number of ways in which the performers’ bodies might respond to the emotional trajectory of the story, it is in the “Scène d’amour” (the balcony scene) that we see the most literal correspondence between play and music in Bernstein’s use of gesture. Indeed, Bernstein tells the orchestra that Berlioz has set Shakespeare “almost line-by-line.” Moreover, Berlioz writes “recitative” for the cello section at the moment where Romeo first speaks. Instead of the orchestra following a singer’s cues, in such cases it is, as Berlioz puts it in his essay on conducting, “the conductor who has the recitative, giving each beat of the bar the duration he feels he wants. … [I]n sum he outlines the melodic shape of the recitative with his baton.”52 In this way, Berlioz permits the conductor to step into Romeo’s role quite explicitly, and Bernstein points out to the orchestra how performing the music is “exactly like opera.” For Bernstein, however, I would argue it is not only the cello recitative that is suggestive of opera, for he impersonates Shakespeare’s characters on a number 51 Some critics have decried this treatment of the theme: Ernest Newman complains that the theme is “no longer the same thing” when bellowed by the trombones. Tovey, on the other hand, points out that the combination of themes reveals the ball to have been suspended, static all along—it “seems both to whirl forward and remain in the same place.” See Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, 76–7. 52 “… c’est alors le chef d’orchestre qui est le vrai récitant et qui donne à chaque temps de la mesure la durée qu’il juge convenable. … enfin il dessine avec son bâton la forme mélodique du récitatif.” Berlioz, Orchestration Treatise, 352.

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Example 3.  Hector Berlioz, Roméo et Juliett,e “Roméo seul,” bars 226–233; “Réunion des deux thèmes”

‰

“A new world is opened up to view”

Figure 10.  Bernstein conducts the combined themes in “Roméo seul”

of occasions, and his commentary elsewhere reveals how he transforms spoken emotion into conducted music. Noting that the love scene is “almost line by line written symphonically by Berlioz,” Bernstein reads to the orchestra extended passages from Shakespeare’s text, switching between reciting and commenting on the verse. His gestures and reflections upon Juliet’s initial words from the balcony are particularly interesting, demonstrating how verse becomes music. At the line “be but sworn my love,” Bernstein holds his hands near his chest (Fig. 11), but at the line “and I’ll no longer be a Capulet” he opens them outwards (Fig. 12) in a gesture suggestive both of Delsarte’s “rejection” and “presenting or receiving” (Figs. 4 and 13.) Bernstein then repeats the same line, admiring its rhythm—its musicality (“how’s that for iambic pentameter?”) This time, the line is accompanied by snapping of the fingers, but the accompanying movement of the arm is a similar opening out. In this moment we glimpse how drama become music, how actorly gesture becomes conducting. Elsewhere, when Bernstein explains how the different instruments suggest the characters of Romeo and Juliet, he alters his movements so as to imitate both the instruments and the characters they embody. To solicit the desired sound from the horns in the syncopated accompaniment to Romeo’s impassioned melody (bb. 172 and 174 of Ex. 4) Bernstein gestures a throbbing motion with his arms, remarking “you’re all teenagers, or just barely out of it

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Figures 11 and 12.  Bernstein gestures “And I’ll no longer be a Capulet”

“A new world is opened up to view”

Figure 13.  “Presenting or receiving” (Figure 70) from Edward Barrett Warman, Gestures and Attitudes (1891)

aren’t you? You all know what that feels like.” Describing the scene to the cellos, who most directly embody Romeo’s sentiments, Bernstein suggests both the sweeping movement of the cello bow and Romeo’s bold, impassioned gestures of love: his left hand is cupped towards his face and shaking in a manner to suggest vibrato and intense emotion. (Fig. 14) When we see the players performing this section, Bernstein uses similar gestures (Fig. 15), and the players take on the emotions in their bodies. First, the bending in and releasing out, with intense vibrato from the cellos, whose upper bodies sway with their

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Example 4.  Hector Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, “Scène d’amour,” bars 172–181

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Inge van Rij

Figure 14.  Bernstein describes Romeo’s part in the balcony scene (“Scène d’amour”)

Figure 15.  Bernstein conducts the music he associates with Romeo

“A new world is opened up to view”

impassioned theme. The bows reach the heel—causing the body to be most intensely contracted in upon itself—at notes of greatest yearning, opening out again on the notes of resolution (Ex. 5). Romeo’s music is gesturally contrasted by Bernstein with the more confined, lighter, agitated movements in the woodwinds that represent Juliet’s anxiety as she realizes her monologue has been overheard and as she listens anxiously for signs that her family inside may awaken and disturb the rendezvous (Fig. 16). In the rehearsal of this section we see the flautist using her body to beat the awkward syncopated melody Berlioz has given her—as if choreographing her agitation (Ex. 5). The player’s movement—which arises naturally from the music Berlioz has given her—is not dissimilar to those suggested by Austin’s “listening fear” (Fig. 5), the image in Moreau’s Souvenir (Fig. 1), and Janin’s description of Juliet “bewitched and trembling, listening.” Berlioz’s Shakespearean experience is thus relived through a play of “expression, voice [or melody] and gesture.”

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“A new world is opened up to view”

Figure 16.  Bernstein describes Juliet’s agitation in the balcony scene

Figure 17.  Rehearsing the music Bernstein associates with Juliet’s anxiety

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This example of how the emotional drama of gesture can be scripted into music points to ways in which recent approaches to musical embodiment might be extended from solo to orchestral music, which still largely remains a stronghold of more abstract score-centered approaches.54 At the very least, if offers a new lens through which we might appreciate the exceptional nature both of Berlioz’s dramatic symphony and of this particular performance, which presents such a vivid example of the process of transferral from Shakespearean drama to composer’s work to conductor to individual players within the orchestral body—a multifaceted performance of history for orchestra and conductor. Berlioz declared that his Roméo et Juliette is “enormously difficult to perform. It poses problems of every kind, problems inherent in the form and in the style, and only to be solved by long and patient rehearsal, impeccably directed. To be well done, it needs first-rate performers—players, singers, conductor—intent on preparing it with as much care as a new opera is prepared in a good opera house, in fact almost as if it were to be performed by heart.”55 This captures the special nature of Roméo et Juliette, its position between symphony and opera on multiple levels. Performed “by heart” (“par Coeur”) means more than simply memorizing the work. Just as Delsarte suggested that “every gesture, every posture of the body corresponds to, or is but the outward expression of, an inner emotion or condition of the mind,” for performers of Berlioz’s symphony, taking this work into their hearts enables the players to move it from page to stage, text to body, to be animated by and in turn to animate Berlioz’s symphony 54 Most texts on embodiment or gesture in musical performance focus on music for singers or instrumental soloists and/or chamber music. See Jane Davidson, “Visual Perception of Performance Manner in the Movements of Solo Musicians,” Psychology of Music 21 (1993): 103–13; “Understanding the Expressive Movements of a Solo Pianist,” in Musikpsychologie 16 (2002): 9–31; Peter Brooks, “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera,” in Siren Songs, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000): 118–34; Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Samuel Breene, “Mozart’s Violin Sonatas and the Gestures of Embodiment” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2007); James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014). When the orchestra is considered as suggesting body or gesture, it is usually the sonic experience rather than the visual effect that is referred to. See, for example, Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 55 “Elle présente des difficultés immenses d’exécution, difficultés de toute espèce, inhérentes à la forme et au style, et qu’on ne peut vaincre qu’au moyen de longues études faites patiemment et parfaitement dirigées. Il faut, pour la bien rendre, des artistes du premier ordre, chef d’orchestre, instrumentistes et chanteurs, et décidés à l’étudier comme on étudie dans les bons théâtres lyriques un opéra nouveau, c’est-à-dire à peu près comme si on devait l’exécuter par cœur.” Berlioz, Memoirs, 305.

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through their sympathy with its emotion. In this way, both Berlioz and his interpreters in Bernstein’s performance demonstrate how what Berlioz described as “the play of expression and voice and gesture” in his original Shakespearean experience might be reconciled with the ideal world of instrumental music, and how, in the performing of history, “a new world is opened up to view.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Austin, Gilbert. Chironomia; Or, A Treatise On Rhetorical Delivery. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1806. Bartoli, Jean-Pierre. “Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Berlioz’s Scène d’amour.” In Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work, edited by Peter Bloom, 138–160. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Berlioz, Hector “Sixième concert du Conservatoire.” Journal des débats (April 18, 1835): 1. ——. The Memoirs of Berlioz. Translated by David Cairns. London: Panther Arts, 1970. ——. Correspondence Générale. Edited by Pierre Citron. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. ——. The Art of Music (A Travers Chants). Translated and edited by Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ——. Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise. Edited and translated by Hugh Macdonald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ——. Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism 1824–1837. Edited by Katherine Kolb. Translated by Samuel N. Rosenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Bernstein, Leonard. The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. ——. “Teachers and Teaching: An Autobiographic Essay by Leonard Bernstein.” Directed by Humphrey Burton. Unitel, 1988. https://www.medici.tv/en/documentaries/leonardbernstein-teachers-and-teaching/. Braem, Penny Boyes, and Thüring Bräm. “A Pilot Study of the Expressive Gestures Used by Classical Orchestra Conductors.” In The Signs of Language Revisited, edited by Karen Emmorey and Harlan Lane, 143–67. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000. Breene, Samuel. “Mozart’s Violin Sonatas and the Gestures of Embodiment.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2007. Brooks, Peter. “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera.” In Siren Songs, edited by Mary Ann Smart, 118–34. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Burton, Humphrey. Leonard Bernstein. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Translated by Carol Stewart. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Chailley, Jacques. “Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette. Scène d’amour.” Revue de musicology 63 (1975): 115–22. Davidson, Jane. “Visual Perception of Performance Manner in the Movements of Solo Musicians.” Psychology of Music 21 (1993): 103–13

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Inge van Rij ——. “Understanding the Expressive Movements of a Solo Pianist.” Musikpsychologie 16 (2002): 9–31. Davies, James Q. Romantic Anatomies of Performance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014. Delaumosne, M. L’Abbe, and Angélique Arnaud. The Art of Oratory: System of Delsarte. Albany, NY: E. S. Warner, 1884; repr. 2010. Elliot, John R. Jr., “The Shakespeare Berlioz Saw.” Music and Letters 57, no. 3 (1976): 292–308. Galkin, Elliot W. A History of Orchestral Conducting in Theory and Practice. New York: Pendragon, 1988. Hohlfeld, Horant H. (director). Leonard Bernstein in Salzau. Unitel A05501890 and A05501892, 1989. Holoman, D. Kern. Berlioz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Kemp, Ian. “Romeo and Juliet and Roméo et Juliette.” In Berlioz Studies, edited by Peter Bloom, 37–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. King, Elaine, and Jane Ginsborg, “Gestures and Glances: Interactions in Ensemble Rehearsal.” In New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, edited by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, 177–202. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Le Guin, Elizabeth. Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Micznik, Vera. “Of Ways of Telling: Intertextuality and Historical Evidence in Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette.” 19th-Century Music 24, no. 1 (2000): 21–61. Moreau, M. [Charles-François-Jean-Baptiste Moreau de Commagny]. Souvenirs du Théâtre Anglais à Paris, dessinés par MM. Déveria et Boulanger. Paris: Gaugain, 1827. Rodgers, Stephen. Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rushton, Julian. Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Shakespeare, William, David Garrick, and J. P. Kemble, Romeo and Juliet, A Tragedy; Adapted to the Stage by David Garrick, Revised by J. P. Kemble. London: Covent Garden, 1811. Smart, Mary Ann. Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Spallone-Poussin, Amelia. “François Delsarte. Une esthétique du movement.” In François Delsarte, une recherche sans fin, edited by Franck Waille and Christophe Damour, 63–77. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015. Stebbins, Genevieve. Delsarte System of Expression. Albany, NY: E. S. Warner, 1894. Repr. 2010. van Rij, Inge. The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Warman, Edward Barrett. Gestures and Attitudes: An Exposition of the Delsarte Philosophy of Expression: Practical and Theoretical. Boston: John Wilson & Son, 1891. Windsor, W. Luke. “Gestures in Music-making: Action, Information and Perception.” In New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, edited by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, 45–66. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

CHAPTER 13

Italian Futurism: Music and the Senses in the Modern Age JENNIFER RUMBELL

ABSTRACT This paper examines how for the Italian Futurist movement, listening to (and in many cases, also performing) music went beyond just the ear; indeed, music was thought of as an intermedial art form and a multisensory experience. To show this, I draw on an array of sources ranging from theoretical texts to performances and even Futurist venues, in which music was treated as not only an auditory, but also a highly visual, somatic, and sometimes participatory encounter. Throughout this examination, I demonstrate that these multisensory concepts of music were underpinned by the Futurists’ fascination with new forms of technology, media, and entertainment. In concentrating on this connection between music, the senses, and eminently modern phenomena, this study brings to the fore how the Italian Futurists imagined the act of listening in the modern world. Thus, it situates this renovation of the musical experience within the Futurist agenda of bridging the art-life divide, and furthermore, within a broader historical moment where music was shifted out of the concert hall and into everyday life.

T

he Italian Futurist movement, which began with the publication of F. T. Marinetti’s founding manifesto in 1909 and lasted (in various forms) up until his death in 1944, saw Italian life and culture as steeped in an archaic and outmoded past. The Futurists abhorred tradition and convention and sought to radically modernise all aspects of life for the Italian citizen. This meant revolutionising the political, social, and artistic realms, and also breaking down the divide between art and life. For this reason, many of the Futurists’ modes of artistic production (especially those concerning music) operated outside of conventional paradigms. They valued interdisciplinary cross-pollination and new

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media, emphasized process over product, did not always use traditional venues for performance, and contested the kind of hierarchical approach towards production and performance that was characteristic of high-art culture. One important aspect of musical Futurism, which this paper proposes was fundamentally tied to the movement’s goal of uniting art and life, was the concept of musical performance and listening as multisensory events. I demonstrate this through an examination of Futurist artistic experiments, theoretical texts, and performances, in which music was not only treated as an auditory phenomenon, but as a means to stimulate, intensify or complement the visual, somatic and even gustatory senses. I reveal that these multisensory understandings of sound and music were shaped by the Futurists’ attraction to increasingly popular forms of technology, entertainment, and new media—such as the cinema, radio, and cabaret—that were characteristic of modern, urban life and the emerging mass culture. Focusing on this intersection between music, the senses, and objects and spaces of modern culture, I show that Futurism sought to revolutionize the very acts of performing and listening. For this reason, Futurism’s multisensory concepts of music can be viewed as part of a historical turning point in which music was transitioning out of passive high art contexts, such as the concert hall, and aligning more closely with everyday experiences. This paper begins by exploring how the Futurists conceptualised listening to music not only as an auditory but also as a visual experience in their experiments and theories, which drew upon cinema technology and stage lighting. I propose that since these experiments and theories relied upon the appropriation and re-performance of pre-existing (and sometimes anachronistic) musical works, the Futurists used new technologies not only to expand the listening experience, but also to reimagine musical history in the modern age. The next section examines how music was also a highly somatic art form for the Futurists in two contexts: radio, and popular formats of entertainment such as cabaret. Whilst in the former context the Futurists theorised upon music’s influence over the body’s behaviours and its ability to shape an ideal Italian citizen, this notion of music as a fundamentally corporeal art filtered into their practises in the latter context. In the final section, I investigate how particular Futurist venues, such as nightclubs, facilitated something close to a Futurist ideal of multisensory experiences of music, because they simultaneously integrated many of the ideas thus far discussed. Thus, I demonstrate how, through quintessentially modern formats and technologies, the Futurists contributed towards changing the historical trajectory of the musical experience.

Italian Futurism: Music and the Senses in the Modern Age

CINEMA TECHNOLOGY AND THE INCREASING VISUALITY OF MUSIC The fact that most Futurist musical performances involved a corresponding visual spectacle suggests that the movement did not consider music a solely self-sufficient experience, but one that required supplementation with other visually engaging stimuli. Whilst the pairing of the auditory and visual was, of course, in no terms unprecedented, several aspects of Futurism’s approach differentiated it from other traditional multi-modal formats, such as opera. Indeed, a number of scholars including Strauven and Berghaus have pointed out the synesthetic nature of Futurism’s visual concepts of sound and music.1 Berghaus in particular has noted some parallels between the Futurists and Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract, synesthetic theories, which specifically influenced the Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini.2 Like Kandinsky, the Futurists believed that sounds and colours shared an intrinsic kind of relationship, as indicated by several of their experiments and texts where musical works—even those hailing from a historical period—were interpreted through abstract elements of lighting, shape and colour. However, one significant factor set these examples apart from Kandinsky’s work. Rather than being esoteric and spiritual in orientation,3 they were shaped by the growing presence of new technological media in everyday life, most notably cinema. Thus, the Futurists’ desire to expand the musical experience into the visual realm was related to their interest in the multi-modal possibilities offered by new technological forms of entertainment. Moreover, their use of pre-existing musical works in these experiments suggest a reimagining of musical history in the modern age. The early experiments of Arnaldo Gina and Bruno Corra (the “Corradini brothers”), described in their text “Abstract Cinema-Chromatic Music” of 1912, are often considered the first of the Futurists’ explorations of a 1 Wanda Strauven, “Futurist Images for Your Ear: Or, How to Listen to Visual Poetry, Painting, and Silent Cinema,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): 276–7. 2 Günter Berghaus, “The Futurist Conception of Gesamtkunstwerk and Marinetti’s Total Theatre,” Italogramma 4 (2012): 285, accessed July 11, 2019, http://italogramma.elte.hu/ wp-content/files/Italogramma_Sul_fil_283-302_Berghaus.pdf. 3 For Kandinsky, the artistic elements were oriented towards a spiritual, psychological expression rather than one which depicted the literal, material world. One example of this is his notion of an “inner appeal” possessed by each colour and its corresponding musical equivalent. See Günter Berghaus and Mario Verdone, “Vita Futurista and Early Futurist Cinema,” in International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 400; For Kandinsky’s own discussion on this, see the section titled “VI. The Language of Form and Colour,” in Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadleir (New York: Dover, 1977), 27–45.

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colour-sound relationship. These experiments involved the construction of a “chromatic piano” of twenty-eight keys attached to twenty-eight coloured light bulbs, which were themselves divided into seven groups of colours, and within each group there existed four gradations of each colour.4 With this “chromatic piano,” the brothers aimed to translate sound into colour, but technical difficulties with the lightbulbs soon prompted them to turn their attention to a different medium—film. They then attempted to transpose the sensory properties of music and sound onto film through the application of coloured paint, as demonstrated in their common use of musical terminology such as “harmony” and “chromaticism” to describe the visual effects of their experiments.5 It is significant that throughout their sound-colour explorations, the Corradinis frequently employed pre-existing musical repertoire. In the case of the “chromatic piano,” they state that they “translated, with a few necessary modifications, a Venetian barcarolle by Mendelssohn, a rondo by Chopin, a Mozart sonata,”6 whilst Mendelssohn’s Frühlingslied served as inspiration for their film experiments (in addition to a painting by Giovanni Segantini and Mallarmé’s poem Les Fleurs).7 Their appropriating these works suggests that the Corradinis believed that the “essence” of all music, even more conventional or anachronistic music, possessed an innately visual dimension that could be brought to life using new technological media. As Chessa notes, although the Corradinis were not officially a part of Futurism when they conducted these experiments, a number of Futurists were in fact familiar with their early writings.8 This fact may partly explain why re-performing and thus reimagining historical works of music through new visual media then remained a popular and important practice amongst the movement’s other members. In 1924, the Futurist composer Franco Casavola, along with the artist Anton Giulio Bragaglia and film theorist Sebastiano Arturo Luciani, put forth a concept of “visual music” in their manifesto “Le Sintesi Visive della Musica”(The Visual Synthesis of Music). The ideas in this text have many parallels with the Corradini’s experiments of more than a decade earlier. Like the Corradinis, the authors of “Le Sintesi Visive” were not as concerned with the creation of 4 Bruno Corra, “Abstract Cinema—Chromatic Music 1912,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain et al. (New York: Viking, 1973), 66–7. 5 Bruno Corra, “Abstract Cinema,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 67. 6 Ibid. 7 Strauven, “Futurist Images for Your Ear,” 285. 8 Luciano Chessa, Luigi Russolo, Futurist Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 50.

Italian Futurism: Music and the Senses in the Modern Age

new musical works as with re-performing historical works with new visual accompaniments. In particular, their text implies that they, too, believed that works of music possessed intrinsic visual counterparts. Indeed, they state that “certain music not only determines gestures, but also suggests in an equally precise way (at least in half of listeners), landscapes and images.”9 Also like the Corradinis, they looked to film as an ideal mode through which to express and experience these “landscapes and images.” Although “Le Sintesi Visive” does not explicitly mention film, it is likely that it was inspired by this new form of entertainment for several reasons. By the end of the 1910s, Luciani was one of the foremost cinema theorists in Italy10 and Bragaglia was heavily involved in Futurist experiments with photography and film, having directed the 1917 Futurist silent film, Thaïs. Furthermore, the text articulates several of the same concepts found in another of Casavola’s manifestos from 1924 that does deal directly with film, “Le Versioni Scenico-Plastiche della Musica.”11 Taking into account the authors’ interest in the new art of cinema, many of the ideas in “Le Sintesi Visive” seem to refer to the contemporary problem of audio-visual synchronization, which had not yet been implemented on a commercial scale. The authors’ theories are distinguished from mainstream ideas on synchronization, however, in that they suggest music play an equal, rather than accompanying, role to the on-screen action. For example, they explain that the visual element need “not be synchronised to music, nor does it need to follow the musical development” but rather, must “visually synthesize through form, lights, and colours, the state of mind that the music has already elicited in the listener.”12 In this sense, “Le Sintesi Visive” proposes overturning the hierarchy of sound and vision normally at play in film, by positioning sound as an element that drives, rather than accompanies, the visual expression. 9 “Nè certe musiche determinano soltanto dei gesti, ma suggeriscono anche, in modo quasi altrettanto preciso [almeno nella metà degli ascoltatori], paesaggi e immagini.” Franco Casavola, Arturo Sebastiano Luciani and Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “Le Sintesi Visive della Musica,” Noi 2, nos. 6–9 (1924): 12. 10 Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei, “The Aesthetic Side,” in Early Film Theories in Italy 1896–1922, ed. Francesco Casetti, Silvio Alovisio, and Luca Mazzei (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 309. 11 For a reproduction of this text, see Pierfranco Moliterni, Franco Casavola: Il Futurismo e Lo ‘Spettacolo’ della Musica (Bari: Mario Adda Editore, 2000), 165–8. 12 “La visione scenica non deve essere sincrona alla musica, non deve cercare di seguire lo sviluppo musicale, ma deve sintetizzare, mediante forme, luci, colori, lo stato d’animo che la musica ha già determinato nell’ascoltatore.” Casavola et al., “Le Sintesi Visive,” 12.

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The kind of spectacle that Casavola, Bragaglia, and Luciani were describing was fundamentally a musical rather than visual one, despite its functioning within the context of film. Indeed, it is music, particularly pre-existing music, that is at the core of their text. To exemplify their theories, the authors turn to Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, Op. 28 No. 20. The constant diminuendo and repetitive phrasing of the prelude are interpreted as “a run of powerful arches” and the “echo effect” at the end of the prelude is described as a “reflection or mirage.”13 The form of the piece is envisioned as a pyramidal shape, “elevated in light.”14 This description once again betrays the belief that musical works are intrinsically visual, as well as auditory. If Casavola, Luciani and Bragaglia did indeed write their manifesto with film in mind, as I have suggested, then they saw this new medium as an opportunity to reinterpret historical works of music in a modern key by revealing their visual elements. The indisputably abstract interpretation of Chopin’s prelude in “Le Sintesi Visive” foreshadows more popular and commercial instances where cinema was used to visually translate anachronistic, pre-existing music—one example being the 1940 Walt Disney animation, Fantasia. Indeed, in the first segment of the film, J. S. Bach’s iconic Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is represented in an incredibly similar way to the description of Chopin’s prelude in “Le Sintesi Visive.” In both cases, it is the sound and rhythm of the work that dictates a visual sequence consisting of abstract elements of line, shape, colour and shadow. Thus, just as “Le Sintesi Visive” prescribes, the musical work remains central, and its performance is enriched and complemented by the incorporation of specifically modern forms of visual stimuli. Whilst the Corradinis’ experiments and the text “Le Sintesi Visive” were purely theoretical, the Futurists did implement similar ideas in practice. Chronologically taking place between the Corradinis’ work and the publication of “Le Sintesi Visive” was the 1917 collaboration in Rome between the Futurist artist and designer Giacomo Balla, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The performance involved an interpretation of Stravinsky’s 1908 orchestral work Feu d’artifice (in Italian Fuochi d’artificio), not by the Ballets Russes dancers themselves, but by way of an elaborate lighting display designed by Balla. This comprised several abstract, three-dimensional geometric shapes covered with coloured 13 “La sintesi visiva di questo pezzo potrebbe essere una fuga di arcate potenti viste in una luce tragica. … Si può considerare l’effetto della eco che è nell’ultima parte del preludio, e sintetizzarlo con una visione analoga, di riflesso o di miraggio.” Ibid. 14 “In fine, il procedere del pezzo, dalla regione bassa ad una più alta, può suggerire una forma piramidale elevantesi nella luce.” Ibid.

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and patterned materials and illuminated from the inside. To control the lighting apparatus in real time as the orchestra performed Fuochi d’artificio, Balla also built a special lighting “keyboard” that incorporated forty-nine different lighting options and approximately one alteration in lighting every five seconds.15 With this new technology, Stravinsky’s work (which was composed nine years earlier), was reimagined in the Futurists’ own aesthetic image. The largely tonal and conventionally scored works appropriated by the Corradinis, by the authors of “Le Sintesi Visive,” and by Balla may seem to contradict Futurism’s quest for artistic rejuvenation. However, this (re)performance of pre-existing works alongside new media such as film, or in the case of Balla, avant-garde lighting, tells us much about how the Futurists’ conceptualised the sensory experience of music in the modern age. It indicates that they did not consider musical renovation exclusively in stylistic terms, but in terms of the experiences of performance and listening, which could be updated by using new visual media. But this visual component represented only one corollary of Futurism’s expansion of music beyond the ear. In the modern technological world, the movement understood the musical experience as also occupying a somatic and kinaesthetic dimension.

RADIO, CABARET AND THE SOMATIC POWER OF MUSIC The 1920s marked a turning point in Futurism’s general artistic experimentation with the senses, beginning with the publication of F. T. Marinetti’s 1921 manifesto, “Tattilismo” (Tactilism).16 In his text, Marinetti proposed the theory that the sensation of touch could provide a conduit for a new kind of communication for humans, transcending that already achieved with the mouth and eyes.17 Marinetti’s theories led to the development of his tavole tattile (tactile tables or boards) and later, the 1932 book Parole in liberta: olfattive, tattili, termiche. This unconventional “publication” comprised a collection of poems lithographed onto tin sheets. The book’s combination of typography, unusual texture, changes in temperature, sounds produced by the tin and, if performed, the poetry’s spoken onomatopoeia, all pushed the literary product to its sensory extremes. The fact that Marinetti’s multisensory book was centred upon the genre of parole 15 Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: Dutton, 1971), 83–4. 16 Francesca Bacci, “In your face: The Futurists’ Assault on the Public’s Senses,” in Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, ed. Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 91. 17 Ibid.

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in liberta—which was, predominantly, a performed and therefore sonic art— suggests an interest in the intersection between the sense of touch and that of hearing. Indeed, Marinetti’s decade of tactile exploration coincided with (and was likely linked to) a generally increased interest among the Futurists in the relationship between music and the body on a somatic and kinaesthetic level. This time, however, forms of mass media and entertainment characteristic of modern life—specifically, the radio and music-hall—were not used to reimagine historically anachronistic musical works, but to change the historical trajectory of music by bringing it out of the contemplative environment of the concert hall and into a corporeal, and at times even participatory realm. It is no surprise that the Futurists were drawn to radio, considering its technological nature and connection with life in the modern era. In 1933, Marinetti and Pino Masnata published the Futurist radio manifesto, “La Radia,” and in 1935 Masnata wrote a subsequent gloss on this text, titled “Il Nome Radia.”18 In the latter, Masnata proposed the use of music as a kind of auditory tool for enriching or augmenting various physical activities: “music deliberately written to be listened to during meals. Love music, population stimulant. Exercise music that promotes the practice of rhythmic gymnastic exercises. And so on.”19 Although Fisher asserts that these proposals refer to “the vibrational properties of music that interact with the bodily senses and organs,”20 it is likely that they were deeply connected to the Futurists’ understandings of radio technology. There are several reasons to believe that Masnata truly thought that when carried via the radio’s electromagnetic waves, music could exercise a new kind of power over the human body in the course of its physical activities. Masnata was a surgeon and had an extensive knowledge of physiology, and he “stayed current on the latest research in cell biology, chemistry and, as his gloss makes evident, sub-atomic physics.”21 He also exercised a keen interest in the physics of sound, wave theory and the vibration of matter, and thus it is no surprise that he was drawn to radio technology. Whilst such interests were often entangled with occultist beliefs as both Chessa and Fisher have noted,22 I would add that in combination with Masnata’s background in surgery and interest in the human 18 Margaret Fisher, “‘The Art of Radia’ Pino Masnata’s Unpublished Gloss to the Futurist Radio Manifesto Introduction,” Modernism/Modernity 19, no. 1 (2012): 160. 19 Pino Masnata, Radia: A Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto, trans. and ed. Margaret Fisher (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2012), 113. 20 Ibid., n. 61. 21 Margaret Fisher, Introduction to Radia by Masnata, 43. 22 Chessa, Luigi Russolo, 27; Fisher, Introduction to Radia by Masnata, 41.

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body, they played into the Futurist anthropological project of a man-machine hybrid that would eventually evolve from humans’ increasing closeness with their surrounding technological landscape. Indeed, radio itself had ties to this vision for a “mechanical man,” as Fisher has asserted.23 Given this eclectic intersection between scientific thought, technology, and the body, it is not unreasonable to take seriously Masnata’s suggestion that when broadcast through the radio apparatus, music could elicit or enhance certain physically orientated human behaviours. In addition to this scientific dimension, it is also possible that Masnata saw a new potential in music for bodily and behavioural control in radio’s rather omnipresent and pervasive character. Indeed, several statements from “La Radia” indicate that Marinetti and Masnata were both acutely aware of radio’s ability to transcend the kinds of spatial and temporal constraints that had historically limited conventional experiences of listening. They write that radio abolishes: “(1) space or any required scenery in the theatre … (2) time (3) unity of action.”24 It can achieve “an art without time or space without yesterday and tomorrow” and a “synthesis of infinite simultaneous actions.”25 Such statements display a degree of understanding that radio created listening experiences that are in a sense inescapable; having no venue, they can exist in a variety of spaces, both public and private. It is this precise outlook that drove many of Masnata’s contemporaries to also consider how music might exert a pervasively controlling influence over the body when broadcast via radio. In 1933 a group of Veronese Futurists released the text “Manifesto Futurista per la Città Musicale.”26 This manifesto proposed the use of Guglielmo Marconi’s new technologies to publicly broadcast music throughout the streets of Verona in a rather dystopian and undeniably fascistic attempt to augment the productivity and regulate the activities of citizens. Their daily routine would begin with “inspirational music for starting the day ahead” which would be broadcast from six until ten in the morning. From midday until four in the 23 Fisher, Introduction to Radia by Masnata, 38. 24 Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti and Pino Masnata, “The Radia: Futurist Manifesto,” in Futurism an Anthology, ed. Laurence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (Connecticut, NH: Yale University Press, 2009), 293. 25 Ibid., 294. 26 The group comprised Alberto Manca, Bruno Aschieri (poet, writer, artist), Tullio Aschieri (an architect), Renato di Bossi and Alfredo Ambrosi (artists), Ignazio Scurto (poet and writer), Luigi Pesenti (filmmaker and writer), and Ernesto Tomba (designer and architect). See Willard Bohn, The Other Futurism: Futurist activity in Venice, Padua and Verona (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 115–6.

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afternoon, “optimistic and invigorating” music would reenergize their movements, whilst from seven until midnight, “joyful restful” music would facilitate the evening’s relaxation. 27 The suggestion that music could invade the body of the listener and affect their behaviours and actions when broadcast seems, admittedly, somewhat fanciful, but it was also in tune with a particular historical moment in which music’s course was shifting. The use of musical broadcasting for mass manipulation and control was not unprecedented during this period, its most obvious manifestation being the case of Muzak. The difference between this development and Masnata, Marinetti and the Veronese group’s theories is that the latter were very obviously oriented towards authoritarian Fascist ideals of social order, regulation and the idealised, productive citizen. However, Futurism’s transformation of music into a very bodily, somatic art was not always driven by such ideological and political objectives. Prior to the 1930s, the movement experimented with music as a powerfully corporeal art form by embracing the early jazz dances that were increasingly popular in nightclubs and cabarets throughout Italy. Like the radio, the Futurists appreciated jazz for its associations with modern, urban life; and more specifically, they were attracted to its early dance forms such as the cakewalk and foxtrot, which were inseparable from its performance during this period in Europe.28 The mechanical movements of these dances aligned well with Futurism’s love of technology and the machine because they subverted conventional standards of aesthetic beauty and, in some ways, even mimicked the machine with their immediate and spontaneous movements. Indeed, in his 1917 “Manifesto of Dance,” Marinetti declared: We Futurists prefer Loie Fuller and the African American “cakewalk” (utilization of electric lights and mechanical movements). One must go 27 “La città musicale sarà dotata di potenti amplificatori radiofonici posti agli imbocchi ed agli sbocchi delle vie principali che trasmetteranno durante tre periodi della giornata … adattata alle esigenze dei tre periodi. 6–10: musica incitatrice per la conquista della giornata; 12–16: musica ottimistica—tonificante per il superamento delle ultime ore di lavoro più snervante; 19–24: musica allegra—riposante per la conquista della notte—per la gioia della notte—per il riposo della notte.” Daniele Lombardi, s.v. “Manifesti,” Nuova Enciclopedia del Futurismo Musicale (Milan: Mudima, 2009), 26. 28 Luca Cerchiari, “How to Make a Career by Writing against Jazz: Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Jazz Band (1929),” Forum Italicum 49, no. 2 (August 2015): 468, accessed July 9, 2019, https:// doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1177/0014585815583265.

Italian Futurism: Music and the Senses in the Modern Age beyond muscular possibilities and aim in the dance for that ideal multiplied body of the motor that we have so long dreamed of.29

This statement implies that the bodily, systematic rhythmic movement that jazz evoked was, for the Futurists, simultaneously organic and imminently modern, encompassing the man-machine synthesis that they idolised in much of their artistic output. This corporeal reading of rhythm was put into practice by the composer Franco Casavola in his interwar Futurist works. In Casavola’s text “La Musica Futurista (Manifesto Futurista),” he declared that “music is, above all, movement,”30 and accordingly, his Futurist output during the 1920s was mostly composed of staged dances, many of which displayed rhythmic idioms common in jazz. Two works that exemplify this tendency were Tango Viola and La Danza delle Scimmie (Dance of the Monkeys), both of which have been recorded by Daniele Lombardi.31 The first, a piano composition, served as an accompaniment to Marinetti’s stage work Cabaret Epilettico, and exhibits all the quintessential characteristics of a tango, with sectional changes from minor to major and a typical left-hand habanera ostinato. La Danza delle Scimmie was written for a ballet titled Hop-Frog, which was originally commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev and based on the eponymous play by Edgar Allan Poe.32 It uses extensive syncopation, and sudden sectional disruptions that recall the “break” of a jazz soloist. Since Casavola’s compositions were so heavily oriented around rhythm, and since they were written for staged dancing, they epitomized, in both form and function, the notion that music was fundamentally a kinaesthetic and somatic medium. Despite this, they remained limited in that only the performer (or specifically, the dancer) could truly experience music in a physical, rather than a passive, capacity. By contrast, in Futurist cabarets and nightclubs, jazz played a central role in incorporating audiences as physical collaborators into the musical performance. During the 1920s, a number of Futurist nightclubs and cabarets such as Giacomo Balla’s Bal Tic Tac and Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Teatro degli Indipendenti were established in Rome, and were influential in popularizing jazz

29 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurist Dance,” in Rainey, Poggi, and Wittman, Futurism an Anthology, 236. 30 “La musica è soprattutto movimento.” Quoted in Moliterni, Franco Casavola, 162. 31 See Daniele Lombardi, Franco Casavola: Futurlieder, LTM Recordings LTMCD2454, 2007, compact disc. 32 Moliterni, Franco Casavola, 89.

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in Italy.33 For the Futurists, the performance of jazz dancing in these spaces was an ideal way to undermine the mannerly and cultured kinds of audience behaviour typical of the nineteenth-century concert hall by transforming the musical performance into an active, bodily, participatory event. Indeed, in his description of the kind of aristocratic audiences who visited the Bal Tic Tac, the jazz bandleader Ugo Filippini attested to the performance of music as a very somatic and kinaesthetic affair. He stated that the patrons “came to dance and dance. It was madness! The early American dances, the fox-trot, the one-step, the shimmy. … They danced three, four hours straight.34 Berghaus reports that Bragaglia’s Cabaret degli Indipendenti provided a similar environment where audiences danced feverishly into the small hours of the morning.35 By involving jazz dancing as a main form of entertainment, Futurist clubs and cabarets lessened the traditional distinctions between performer and listener, and thus transformed the musical experience from something historically thought of as a “performance” to something closer to an “event” comprising only participants. Furthermore, since these spaces subsumed musical performance into all manner of activities and artistic expressions, they were sites where musical listening became a comprehensively multisensory affair.

LISTENING IN TO FUTURISM’S MULTISENSORY “WORLDS”: MUSIC AT FUTURIST NIGHTCLUBS For the Futurists, variety theatre and cabaret were formats that encapsulated the dynamic and chaotic essence of modern, urban life. Marinetti evoked this sentiment in the opening of his manifesto The Variety Theater, stating that “the Variety Theater, born as we are from electricity, is fortunate in having no traditions, no guiding lights, no dogmas, and in being nurtured by the swift pace of contemporary events.”36 He went on to describe variety theatre as a “crucible in which the elements of a new emerging sensibility are seething,” praising the “dynamism of its forms and colors,” its use of audience collaboration37 and its 33 Anna Harwell Celenza, Jazz Italian Style: from Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 53–8. 34 Quoted in Celenza, Jazz Italian Style, 54. 35 Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1919–1944 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998), 386–8. 36 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Variety Theater,” in Rainey, Poggi, and Wittman, Futurism an Anthology, 159. 37 Ibid., 160.

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“naturally anti-academic, primitive, and ingeneous [sic.]” qualities.38 Considering these lively descriptions, it is not surprising that the atmosphere curated by Futurist nightclubs, cabarets and festivals was geared towards the kind of dynamic, participatory, multisensory musical experience that the Futurists equated with modern life. As Berghaus describes, these venues were “Total Works of Art,”39 and their use of elaborate décor, lighting, dance, cuisine, and cocktails meant that within their walls, the acts of musical listening and performance were set upon a new historical course. No longer taking place within the staid paradigm of the concert hall, they were experienced amidst a barrage of visual, kinaesthetic, and even gustatory stimuli. The artists who ran these events and venues designed them to express specific themes in their interior adornments and decorations. Balla meticulously designed his Bal Tic Tac, painting the walls in large-scale colourful murals, as a recent discovery has revealed.40 Depero’s Veglia Futurista, a Futurist arts festival held at his Casa d’Arte in his home town of Rovereto in 1923, involved “galloping knights and illuminated phosphorescent stalactites” whilst an “artificial garden” acted as a cloakroom and an “African pagoda” housed a buffet.41 Perhaps most famously, Depero’s Cabaret Diavolo was spread over three levels representing Paradise, Purgatory, and the Inferno. It incorporated elaborate themed furniture designed by Depero himself, as well as coloured lighting, murals, and marionettes.42 Due to this bombardment of visual stimuli from all directions, musical performance in these venues was not orientated to the kind of individual, isolated, and concentrated listening expected in traditional spaces such as the concert hall—something further demonstrated by the inclusion of jazz. The performance of jazz at nightclubs such as the Bal Tic Tac and Depero’s Veglia Futurista meant that the music occupied a bodily and therefore also visual dimension. The Futurists were clearly attracted to this interaction between music, the body and the visual sense; it was not uncommon for venues to dictate specific dress codes, which would have heightened the visual spectacle of the zealous dancing. Berghaus refers to two instances at the Bal Tic Tac when the patrons

38 Ibid., 162. 39 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 385. 40 Jessica Phelan, “Lost murals by Italian Futurist rediscovered in Rome,” The Local, October 19, 2018, https://www.thelocal.it/20181019/bal-tic-tac-giacomo-balla-lost-futurist-muralrediscovered-rome. 41 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 391. 42 Ibid., 388–9.

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were required to come dressed in beach wear or pyjamas,43 whilst at Depero’s Veglia Futurista they came prepared in colourful garments to provide a visual accompaniment to the jazz dancing.44 The combination of all these elements (in addition to others, such as the serving of food and drinks), transported the musical experience into a realm where the auditory, visual, and somatic senses were equally engaged to a heightened degree. The Futurists’ ambition to bring art out from what they perceived to be stale and outmoded contexts is demonstrated by the fact that not only avantgarde music nor jazz was performed in their venues; their musical programming was eclectic and, in some ways, surprising. For example, at the Cabaret Diavolo, modernist high-art compositions by Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero were heard alongside the Futurist works of Luigi Russolo, in addition to ethnic songs and dances from Italy and abroad.45 At Depero’s Veglia Futurista, “rumorist choirs”46 and spontaneous musical improvisations were programmed in addition to works of a more high-art flavour by composers such as Stravinsky.47 Transporting these otherwise disparate genres and styles of music outside of the contexts in which they would usually be expected to occur and thrusting them into the sensorially stimulating surroundings of Futurist nightclubs reflects the movement’s desire to alter the historical trajectory of the musical experience—rather than the music itself. Throughout their musical writings and performances, the Italian Futurists referred to and used a wide variety of music that cannot be definitively ascribed to a particular genre or style. These instances by no means followed an exclusively Futurist “repertoire,” and furthermore, did not always exhibit the stylistic innovation that might normally be associated with the avantgarde. In a way, this heterogeneity precludes the formulation of a “definition” of Futurist music, and suggests the need to look past the musical “product” in isolation and consider its modes and circumstances of performance; after all, a characteristic aspect of the historical avant-gardes was their emphasis on 43 Ibid., 385–6. 44 Ibid., 391. 45 Ibid., 389. 46 “Tra danza e danza s’improvviseranno dei cortei plastici e cori rumoristi.” See the ticket “Il gruppo futurista Trentino invita la S. V. Alla Veglia Futurista privata che avverrà la notte del 10-1-1923 alla Casa d’Arte Depero,” January 10, 1923, Fondo Fortunato Depero, Dep. 8.1.1.57. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy. 47 “Musica di Strawinski, sorprese esilarantissime, declamazioni rumoriste, improvvisazioni musicali, ecc.ecc.” “Grande Veglione Futurista,” Fondo Fortunato Depero, Dep. 8.1.2.120. Museo di Arte Moderna, Rovereto, Italy.

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process as much as product. And indeed the Futurists’ approaches to performance were eminently modern. These approaches overturned the dominant high-art contexts that had previously set a historical standard for the majority of musical experiences, at least throughout the previous century. They disrupted the type of refined bourgeois behaviour and the passive, isolated, individual, detached mode of listening that took place in the concert hall or opera house, instead immersing the listener in musical events that freely involved the visual, kinaesthetic, tactile, and, in the case of Futurist nightclubs, gustatory senses. In many cases, such as jazz dancing in Futurist venues, this also meant that the roles of performer and listener in the traditional conception were exchanged for something that more closely resembled those of participants or co-creators. As I have demonstrated, this sensory transformation of music was deeply intertwined with, and in many instances can be directly attributed to, Futurism’s interest in new forms of modern technology, entertainment, and mass media such as film, the radio, and cabaret. These were phenomena that not only symbolised modern, urban existence at this time, but also altered peoples’ lived experiences in radical, material ways. As such, Futurism’s sensory renovation of musical listening and performance can be seen as a part of the cultural and artistic Zeitgeist—a moment in history where technological advancements, the merging of high and low art and the arrival of mass culture shifted music into the fabric of everyday life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alovisio, Silvio and Luca Mazzei. “The Aesthetic Side.” In Early Film Theories in Italy 1896–1922, edited by Francesco Casetti, Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei, 307–17. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Bacci, Francesca. “In your face: The Futurists’ Assault on the Public’s Senses.” In Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, edited by Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, 83–96. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Berghaus, Günter. “The Futurist Conception of Gesamtkunstwerk and Marinetti’s Total Theatre.” Italogramma 4 (2012): 283–302. Accessed July 11, 2019. http://italogramma.elte.hu/ wp-content/files/Italogramma_Sul_fil_283-302_Berghaus.pdf. ——. Italian Futurist Theatre, 1919–1944. New York: Clarendon Press, 1998. Berghaus, Günter, and Mario Verdone. “Vita Futurista and Early Futurist Cinema.” In International Futurism in Arts and Literature, edited by Günter Berghaus, 398–421. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000. Bohn, Willard. The Other Futurism: Futurist activity in Venice, Padua and Verona. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Jennifer Rumbell Casavola, Franco. “Le versioni scenico-plastiche della musica (Manifesto futurista).” In Pierfranco Moliterni, Franco Casavola: Il Futurismo e lo ‘Spettacolo’ della Musica, 165–168. Bari: Mario Adda Editore, 2000. Casavola, Franco, Arturo Sebastiano Luciani, and Anton Giulio Bragaglia. “Le Sintesi Visive della Musica.” Noi 2, nos. 6–9 (1924): 12. Celenza, Anna Harwell. Jazz Italian Style: From Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Cerchiari, Luca. “How to Make a Career by Writing against Jazz: Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Jazz Band (1929).” Forum Italicum 49, no. 2 (2015): 462–73. Accessed July 9, 2019, https://doiorg.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1177/0014585815583265. Chessa, Luciano. Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Corra, Bruno. “Abstract Cinema—Chromatic Music 1912.” In Futurist Manifestos, edited by Umbro Apollonio, 66–70. Translated by Robert Brain, R. W. Flint, J. C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall. New York: Viking, 1973. Fisher, Margaret. “‘The Art of Radia’ Pino Masnata’s Unpublished Gloss to the Futurist Radio Manifesto Introduction.” Modernism/Modernity 19, no.1 (2012): 155–75. Fisher, Margaret. Introduction to Radia: A Gloss to the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto, by Pino Masnata, 1–68. Translated by Margaret Fisher. Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2012. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by M. T. H. Sadleir. New York: Dover, 1977. Kirby, Michael. Futurist Performance. New York: Dutton, 1971. Lombardi, Daniele. Franco Casavola: Futurlieder. LTM Recordings LTMCD2454, 2007, compact disc. Lombardi, Daniele. “Manifesti.” In Nuova Enciclopedia del Futurismo Musicale. Milan: Mudima, 2009. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “Manifesto of Futurist Dance.” In Futurism an Anthology, edited by Laurence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 234–9. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009. ——. “The Variety Theater.” In Futurism an Anthology. Edited by Laurence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 159–164. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009. ——. and Pino Masnata. “The Radia: Futurist Manifesto.” In Futurism an Anthology, edited by Laurence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 292–295. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009. Masnata, Pino. Radia: A Gloss to the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto. Edited and translated by Margaret Fisher. Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2012. Moliterni, Pierfranco. Franco Casavola: Il Futurismo e Lo ‘Spettacolo’ della Musica. Bari: Mario Adda Editore, 2000. Phelan, Jessica. “Lost murals by Italian Futurist rediscovered in Rome.” The Local, October 19, 2018. https://www.thelocal.it/20181019/bal-tic-tac-giacomo-balla-lost-futurist-muralrediscovered-rome. Strauven, Wanda. “Futurist Images for Your Ear: Or, How to Listen to Visual Poetry, Painting, and Silent Cinema.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): 275–92.

CHAPTER 14

“Saxophones Sobbed Out Jazz”: New Zealand’s First Jazz Recording ALEISHA WARD

ABSTRACT In December 1930 New Zealand’s first jazz recording was made: a one-minute musical featurette film of Epi Shalfoon and His Melody Boys, performing a jazzed arrangement of a popular Māori song “E Pūritai Tama E” (also known as “He Pūru Taitama”). Although the local music industry and public of the time knew about this film (because of a court case surrounding it), it was not until the film was digitized by the New Zealand Film Archive (now Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision) that it was widely recognized as a part of New Zealand’s popular music culture and history. This chapter examines the making of this film, its music, the production issues, and the resultant court case. As the first acknowledged locally produced jazz recording in New Zealand the film is significant. Not just because it was the first jazz recording, but because it can tell us a great deal about the developing jazz culture and music industry in New Zealand, and the conceptualization and recontextualization of jazz locally circa 1930.

I

n December 1930 what is regarded as New Zealand’s first jazz recording was made: a short publicity film of Epi Shalfoon and His Melody Boys performing a jazz arrangement of the popular Māori song “E Pūrutai Tama E,” commonly known as “He Pūru Taitama.” This was an important event in New Zealand music and film history as it is one of the earliest examples of a musical featurette made with sound-on-film technology. While there are amateur recordings and bootlegs of radio broadcasts from the late 1930s, virtually nothing remains extant that gives any aural, let alone visual, insight into early jazz in New Zealand pre-1935.

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Most of the very few extant examples of New Zealand jazz recorded locally pre1947 were performances captured on film rather than records, because New Zealand’s commercial recording industry did not begin until the 1940s.1 This film has long been acknowledged by jazz historians and fans as New Zealand’s first jazz recording. However, it was not until the film was digitized and made available on the internet that it became widely known as a part of New Zealand’s popular music culture and history. I first encountered the film during the first year of my PhD, when I met Denis Huggard, then New Zealand’s foremost jazz collector, discographer, and historian, who gave me some of the discographies he had compiled. In the front of his (A Discographical Listing Of) Jazz Recordings of New Zealand 1930–1980 was this note:

Figure 1.  Page 5 from Dennis Huggard, (A Discographical Listing of) Jazz Recordings of New Zealand 1930–1980) 1 This excludes recordings made for radio, as they were never distributed outside of the radio network, private recordings where less than a hundred copies were printed and distributed, or records made by New Zealanders in Australia.

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As a neophyte jazz historian, my initial reaction was “wow!” However, as my PhD research progressed it became apparent to me that Huggard had conflated two separate films. Looking at the sources in his archive (mostly clippings and photocopies of news articles from the period), I could see that this type of mistake was easy to make.2 The confirmation of this conflation came with the publication of Chris Bourke’s book Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964, in which he devotes a section to two separate but related films: a Tourism Board travelogue and the Melody Boys publicity film.3 The more I investigated the Melody Boys film, the more I realized that this seemingly small historical incident had much larger implications for New Zealand’s music, film, and entertainment histories, and how we perceive, interpret, and reinterpret the past (the performance of history, if you will). This essay examines the making of the publicity film, the production issues and problems that arose, the resultant court case, and the music. As the first jazz recording in New Zealand, and one of the earliest locally produced musical featurettes, this film is a significant performance of history. However, a brief overview of early sound-on-film technology and the concept of musical featurettes is necessary to establish the technological and popular cultural background that the Melody Boys film was reflecting.

OPTICAL SOUND AND MUSICAL FEATURETTES The development of sound-on-film technologies, which we now call optical sound or synchronized sound technologies, and musical featurettes go hand in hand. Experiments in sound-with-film began as early as 1902, and of these early experiments Thomas Edison’s 1913 Kinetophone was possibly the most successful.4 However, as film historians have noted, synchronization of audio to visual elements were problematic since the sound was usually on a separate disc and the system was complicated.5 The developments in both electrical 2 Dennis Huggard Jazz Archive (DHJA) MS-Papers-9018 Archive of New Zealand Music, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. 3 Chris Bourke, Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010), 61–2. 4 The Kinetophone was a modification on the kinetoscope (a moving picture box), which included a phonograph cylinder that synchronized sound with the film. See “Kinetoscope,” Wikipedia, accessed July 9, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetoscope. 5 Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith,  Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 150–1, accessed July 9, 2019, http:// www.jstor.org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r28dt; Douglas Gomery, “The

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microphones and film technology over the next decade rapidly enhanced the possibilities of sound-on-film technology, and by 1926 there were several viable systems for marrying sound and film.6 True sound-on-film (optical synchronized sound) only became possible with the development of electric microphones. Electric microphones were essential equipment, since they could convert the captured sound waves into electrical impulses that could be imprinted on film.7 The process for creating sound-on-film differed between systems: each was highly individual.8 We do not know the exact system used for the film discussed here, but generally, the microphone was attached to the camera, which contained a wire loop to inscribe sound onto either the same film that was being used to film the visual action or a separate reel that moved at the same time. As filming took place, sound was transmitted through the microphone to the magnetized wire loop, which would vibrate in response to the electrical soundwave form, and would inscribe the sound information onto the unexposed film.9 Once developed, the sound information would show up as clear and grey lines or waves against a black background (as shown below in figure 2). What this would look like depended on the system used, but when the film was exposed to light (as it would be during screening), the image would generate a DC current that was then pre-amplified to provide an input great enough to be picked up by a sound system.10 Musical shorts or musical featurettes were one of the first film genres to exploit the new sound-on-film technology.11 A musical featurette was essentially the forerunner of the modern music video. It was usually less than ten minutes long, frequently used only one or two reels of film, and featured a performance by a band or solo artist showcasing a particular piece of music. Musical featurettes were usually used as advertising for the artist in some way— Coming of Sound: Technological Change in the American Film Industry,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press), 6–13. 6 Gomery, “The Coming of Sound,” 6–13. 7 John Eargle, The Microphone Book: From Mono to Stereo to Surround a Guide to Microphone Design and Application (Oxford: Focal Press, 2005), 4–5. 8 It is a measure of how proprietary these systems were that even in histories of film that deal specifically with the technology of film-making there is little specific detail on individual systems. 9 Edward Kellogg, “History of Sound Motion Pictures,” SMPTE Journal 64, no. 6 (1955): 291–302. 10 Ibid. 11 There is an apocryphal story that the only way that Sam Warner (of Warner Brothers) could get his brother Harry to attend a demonstration of the new sound-on-film technology was to include a filmed performance of a jazz band in the test films, thus starting the fad for musical featurettes.

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Figure 2.  Optical sound waves, via Wikimedia Commons

promoting a performance, appearance, or recording—and they were a favorite medium of vaudeville stars, especially those who were transitioning from stage to film. In the latter half of the 1920s, studios such as Warner Brothers and First National produced thousands of these shorts, and they were often a way for studios to springboard new artists such as Judy Garland and Ginger Rogers; and for jazz and blues artists such as Bessie Smith, and duo Sissle Noble and Eubie Blake, to expand their audience.12 Musical featurettes were used as pre-, mid-, and post-feature entertainment in cinemas around the world including New Zealand. It is no surprise then that this medium fired the imagination of local musicians such as Epi Shalfoon, who could see the potential in advertising his band and making sure more New Zealanders heard and saw his particular version of jazz. 12 Gomery “The Coming of Sound,” 12–14; Scott Yanow, Jazz On Film: The Complete Story of the Music and Musicians Onscreen (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2004), 1–2. Musical featurettes differ from musical shorts in that they generally much shorter, have limited camera work/editing, and usually feature only one or two songs, as opposed to, say, Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy (1929), which is nineteen minutes in length and features multiple camera shots, special effects, and postediting (although the film is built around one piece of music, “Black and Tan Fantasy”).

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EARLY JAZZ AND JAZZ ON FILM In the 1920s, jazz styles were split between stage and dance. Stage jazz is the style we most associate with 1920s jazz arising from the vaudevillian stage. Stage jazz was about spectacle, humor and novelty, the aim being to impress the audience with comedy and sonic and visual virtuosity, with comedy and virtuosity holding equal importance for the aesthetic.13 The instrumentation and repertoire of early jazz bands were flexible, and did not necessarily include instruments that we now consider standard. Bands created jazz simply by “jazzing” any piece of music. This meant they would apply a danceable tempo, and use swing rhythms, so-called jazz effects (the noises and instrumental special effects associated with jazz bands such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band), obbligato flourishes and contrapuntal elements in the upper horn lines, and, of course, improvisation.14 Jazzing also applied to the physical movements that the musicians made during the performance of jazz. Musicians capered comically around the stage: playing instruments in unusual ways, dancing, lying on the floor, and more. Musicians’ movements were exaggerated to emphasize both comedy and virtuosity, and these movements became identified with jazz in the audiences’ eyes, and typified how a “real” jazz band should look. The visual elements of stage performance practices translated well to silent film and became immediate visual signifiers of jazz for the film audience. In silent film, the movements needed to be wildly exaggerated to convey the idea of a jazz band to the audience, and to fit with the audience’s perception of what a jazz band should look like. Jazz bands began appearing in films around 1916/1917. One of the earliest mentions of jazz in New Zealand newspapers related to a film, An Even Break, which was noted to include “the big jazz bands of a pretentious Broadway café.”15 While “jazz bands” (portrayed by actors) appeared in feature films and narrative shorts as part of the story, actual jazz bands appeared in documentary-style footage for news reports and musical featurettes. ­Documentary-style footage and musical featurettes showed the film audience a highly visual version of jazz, which was strongly influenced by stage 13 See, for example, Brian Harker, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Nicolas Pillai, Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image (London: I. B. Taurus, 2017). 14 Aleisha Ward, “‘Any Rags, Any Jazz, Any Boppers Today?’: Jazz in New Zealand 1920–1955” (PhD diss., University of Auckland, 2012), 19. 15 “An Even Break, Featuring Olive Thomas,” Auckland Star (November 17, 1917): 16, col. 6.

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(vaudeville) jazz.16 The movements of stage jazz allowed even the most casual viewer to identify a group on film as a jazz band.17 Even with the advent of sound-on-film movement would have remained an important aspect of identifying a jazz band to a film audience, because they were used to seeing jazz performed in a particular way.

SOUND-ON-FILM IN NEW ZEALAND Sound-on-film technology was first used in New Zealand in January 1926.18 New Zealand filmmakers had two choices in the early years: to import systems from the United States (costing thousands of pounds sterling), or to make the equipment themselves.19 Very few filmmakers had the former option (one of the few that did was the company central to this essay, Filmcraft Ltd., based in Miramar, Wellington). Most had to try to make a system themselves. It was not until 1929, however, with Ted Coubray’s sound-on-film technique (named Coubray-Tone) that talkies became a viable option for local filmmakers.20 It would be a further five years before the technology would be advanced enough for feature-length films. In the meantime, the only New Zealand-made films with integrated sound were of the short-film genre. The New Zealand Government Publicity Office was one of the first entities to understand the value of sound-on-film (and had, in fact, been making good use of silent films to advertise New Zealand to the world). Working with Filmcraft Ltd., the Publicity Office made one-reel short films on a variety of topics at a rate of one per week from 1926 for release by MGM, which were shown both in New Zealand and overseas.21 When sound-on-film became viable local technology, 16 Pillai, Jazz As Visual Language, 73–5; see also films such as: “The Jazz Drummer of the Senora Jazz Band (1926),” YouTube video, posted by “British Pathé” April 13, 2014, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=lT6MFuKAFVg. 17 Nicolas Pillai, “Rhythms of the Everyday: An Alternative History of the British Jazz Film” in Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack, eds. Emilio Audissino and Emile Wenneckes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 100–101. Very little research has been done on jazz and silent film, and no analysis exists of musicians’ jazz movements. 18 Geoffrey Churchman, Celluloid Dreams: A Century of Film in New Zealand (Wellington: IPL Books, 1997), 12–13. 19 Clive Sowry, “Non-Fiction Films: Between the Wars,” in New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History, ed. Diane Pivac, Frank Stark, and Lawrence McDonald in association with The Film Archive (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011), 94–7. 20 Clive Sowry, Film Making in New Zealand: A Brief Historical Survey (Wellington: New Zealand Film Archive, 1984), 8. 21 Sowry, Film Making in New Zealand, 9.

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they began to incorporate live sound into these film shorts, sometimes in the form of a musical group performing in the background of the action.22

EPI SHALFOON AND HIS MELODY BOYS Māori-Syrian musician and bandleader Gareeb (Karepi) Stephen “Epi” Shalfoon was born in Ōpōtiki on the East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand in 1904.23 He discovered ragtime and blues while at boarding school in Auckland, and was an early fan of jazz when it arrived in New Zealand in 1917. He began playing in dance bands as a teenager, and formed his own band, the Melody Boys, in 1924.24 By 1925 they had expanded from their base in Ōpōtiki to performing around the Bay of Plenty, and they were an immediate hit with the dancing crowd as they eschewed the trend of raucous noise that was popular in New Zealand jazz at the time (and did not work well for dancing), and focused instead on melody and perfect dance rhythm.25 This decision made them stand out from other bands, and their approach would influence New Zealanders’ concepts of the jazz sound into the 1940s. By late 1928 Shalfoon and the Melody Boys had relocated to Rotorua. Shalfoon thought Rotorua was a better base for their activities, as it gave him wider scope for his entrepreneurial impulses. Within a year they were playing gigs as far south as Wellington and as far north as Auckland, and were one of the best-known jazz bands in the North Island.26 With a steadily growing audience and public profile, they were in an excellent position to be contracted to appear in Government Publicity Office films. In October 1930 Epi Shalfoon and his Melody Boys were contracted by the Tourist Department to provide onscreen music for a new scenic film, using sound that they were filming in Rotorua. As part of their payment, the Melody Boys were also given the opportunity to make a short film with Filmcraft Ltd. at a reduced cost.27 This was appealing to Shalfoon, since the band had a busy 22 Clive Sowry, “Non-Fiction Films: Between the Wars,” 79–102. 23 A good short biography of Shalfoon by Chris Bourke can be found at Te Ara The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4s22/shalfoon-gareeb-stephen. 24 Epi Shalfoon File MS-Papers-9018-41, Dennis Huggard Jazz Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library. 25 Chris Bourke, Blue Smoke, 62. 26 Reo Sheirtcliff (née Shalfoon), “Dancing in the Dark: A Memoir of Epi Shalfoon,” Music in New Zealand 10 (1990): 40–5. 27 “All Talkie and No Picture: Epi Shalfoon Wasn’t Shook On It, Saxophones Sobbed Out Jazz, but Rotorua Syncopators were a Blur,” New Zealand Truth (August 20, 1931): 4.

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Figure 3.  Epi Shalfoon and His Melody Boys: Leader/saxophone Epi Shalfoon; second saxophone Tony Shalfoon; trumpet Eustace ‘Hughie’ Tregilgas; Eric Munsen piano; Ron Knowles banjo; Colin Castleton tuba; Walter Burton drums. Author’s Collection

schedule performing across the entirety of the North Island. Making a musical featurette would mean that the Melody Boys could efficiently advertise their appearance in a given town without having to rely solely on expensive newspaper advertising, which was especially useful if they had to change their schedule at short notice. A film was also something novel that set them apart from their competitors, with the potential to widen their audience.28 The filming for both the Tourist Department and the Melody Boys films took place in late November– early December 1930. The final product lasted just under one minute.

THE FIRST JAZZ RECORDING: THE MELODY BOYS SHORT FILM29 In the film, the band appears in casual white shirts and black trousers, and is arranged in front of the entrance to Whakarewarewa village in Rotorua .30 In the 28 Epi Shalfoon File MS-Papers-9018-41, DHJA. 29 “Epi Shalfoon and his Melody Boys,” YouTube video, posted by “nzjazzhistory” February 26, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-wTQaKNdw. 30 This is in stark contrast to the “Arawa Braves” costumes and blackface they had to endure for the Tourist Department film, photos of which can be seen in Chris Bourke’s Blue Smoke, 61.

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film (link in footnote 29), Shalfoon introduces the film—“I’d like to introduce to you Rotorua’s famous jazz band”—and then the band launches into a jazzed version of “He Pūru Taitama,” a local popular song that had been made famous by the vocal group The Tahiwis just a few months before the making of the film. Jazzing was an essential element of jazz in New Zealand in the 1920s and 1930s. New Zealand musicians during this period could make any piece of music into jazz by “jazzing” it as described earlier. Any improvisation applied in a jazz situation in New Zealand followed from the idea that jazz was a dance music, and would be constrained by the needs of the dancing audience, so improvisational sections were usually of short duration (8–16 measures), and remained within a certain range of tempos, without any use of rubato.31 For New Zealand jazz bands such as the Melody Boys, influences from the vaudeville stage and film were important in the development of their identities as jazz musicians, since these were what they saw and heard performed most often. Even though the majority of local jazz gigs were for dances, where the sonic and visual spectacle elements of stage jazz would be disruptive, these elements remained vital to New Zealand jazz performance practice, and were used in establishing bands as real and authentic jazz bands. The Melody Boys play the melody of “He Pūru Taitama” three times, highlighting different elements of jazz (both musical and physical), before finishing with a flourish, and with a cut to Shalfoon, who urges: “Watch the newspapers, this band will be playing real dance music in your town soon!”

“HE PŪ ŪRU TAITAMA”32 The music the Melody Boys perform in the film is very significant. Rather than choosing an internationally recognized jazz song, Shalfoon chose a local song, “He Pūru Taitama,” which had become well known and been made popular in the months before the making of the film, by local vocal group The T ­ ahiwis.33 “He Pūru Taitama” was written in 1909 by Kingi Tahiwi, the older brother of the Tahiwi siblings who formed the vocal group. Tahiwi wrote this simple sixteen-measure melody with a I-IV-I-V7-I-(IV)-I harmonic structure (see figure 4), in a bid to win the heart of a young woman, Jane Armstrong, who would 31 Aleisha Ward, “Any Rags, Any Jazz, Any Boppers Today?,” 117–21. 32 The Tahiwis Historic 1930s Recordings, Wellington: National Library of New Zealand, distributed by Atoll Records, 1998. A (slightly faster) version by the New Zealand Māori Theatre Trust is available on Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/7eBBrnh7ClFPFJ7s3XSnKP?si=gbukbOQ3SQew6iBtbNxb1w. 33 While the family name is Tahiwi, as a group they added an “s” to become The Tahiwis.

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Figure 4.  He Pūru Taitama melody transcription by the author, from the recording The Tahiwis Historic 1930s Recordings

later become his wife. It remained a private family song until Tahiwi’s brother and sisters, Henare, Weno, and Hinehou, who had formed a vocal group, needed material for recordings they were making in Sydney in May and June 1930. English translation of lyrics:34 Verse 1 (I’m) a strong young man! A real young bull! A vigorous lad! A rampaging bull! A husky young man! Verse 2 You and I are going, Way beyond Ōtaki. And there we, Can arrange, A conclusion.

The song is frankly sexual, an advertisement of Tahiwi’s physical prowess.35 He was competing with strong farmers for Armstrong’s attention, and as a law clerk 34 Lyrics and translation from “He Puru Taitama,” http://www.folksong.org.nz/he_puru/index. html. 35 As this was a originally a private song, not intended for commercial publication, it cannot be seen as representative of a New Zealand songwriting style.

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he did not have such large muscles as they did. This song serves as a challenge to both Armstrong and the farmers who were courting her, and as a declaration of Tahiwi’s sexual prowess and his intentions.36

THE JAZZING OF “HE PŪ ŪRU TAITAMA” Comparing the film and the sample audio recording (see footnotes 29 and 32 for links), one hears that this is not a radical re-treatment or reinterpretation of the song; rather, in the style of jazz in New Zealand during the 1920s, this is a jazzed version. The Melody Boys increased the tempo from the Tahiwis’ recording of 140 bpm to approximately 160 bpm.37 They added a bouncy syncopation that is closer to ragtime than the jazz of 1930, but this bounciness suits the melody and the lyrics of the original. So while this film might be a wholly instrumental presentation it is still possible to sing along. Shalfoon and the Melody Boys saw jazz as dance music (at the end of the film Shalfoon states that the band played “real dance music”), so their arrangement of “He Pūru Taitama” adds syncopation and an increase in tempo to put the song into the realm of dance music. The one-step, two-step, jazz foxtrot, and Charleston are dances that work well with this song. Finally, the Melody Boys added what was known in New Zealand as “jazz effects.” In this case “jazz effects” meant that they used 1920s-style jazz contrapuntal lines between the first saxophone and trumpet, and New Orleans-style clarinet obbligato flourishes in the trumpet line (particularly noticeable between repeats of the melody). They wrap up the song with a two-measure early jazz outro (coda) inspired by songs such as Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers’ Black Bottom Stomp that rely on the supposed chaos of collective improvisation.38 Given the nature of the recording (an advertisement), and its brevity, there was no space for individual solos. Instead the Melody Boys use the contrapuntal lines and traditional New Orleans-style banjo and tuba lines to emphasize the jazziness of the arrangement. Further, Shalfoon, his drummer Walter Burton, 36 There is some debate linguistically about whether the “conclusion”—whakaoti—implies sexual intercourse or marriage. My personal opinion is that, narratively speaking, whakaoti refers to both. 37 The skips in the audio track make it difficult to be definitive. 38 Vic Hobson, Creating Jazz Counterpoint: New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony and the Blues ( Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2014). Collective improvisation was in fact carefully planned out adhering to the rules of New Orleans four-part vocal improvisation and rehearsed to the point that musicians were not “tripping over” each other.

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and to a lesser extent the rest of the band, use their physical movements to indicate the jazzy character of their band and the type of repertoire they played (more on this below). The choice of song in this musical featurette signifies two critical factors for New Zealand jazz of this period. First, there was not yet a solidified Americanoriented jazz repertoire in New Zealand. Second, for the Melody Boys, locally written material, and importantly Māori material, was a normal part of their jazz repertoire. The use of local music was important because this musical featurette was an advertisement, so Shalfoon would have wanted to hook the audience with something that was immediately recognizable as part of the Melody Boys oeuvre and brand. Recontextualization of jazz into a New Zealand context was important to many New Zealand jazz musicians before World War Two.39 Briefly, in 1920s New Zealand the origins of jazz were mysterious, misunderstood, and almost entirely separated from its cultural origins.40 New Zealanders heard jazz from many cultural contexts and sources, and local jazz musicians felt that cultural recontextualization was an important part of jazz because they heard non-American jazz bands recontextualize jazz for their own local contexts. This recontextualization allowed Shalfoon to emphasize that the jazz that he played was just as much a New Zealand and Māori music as it was American, British, Australian, Asian, or European. As well as creating an advertisement, Shalfoon would likely have been aware that they were creating a snapshot in time not only of their band, but of New Zealand jazz, which had yet to be captured on record. In this way, the film is also a performance of history. Additionally, this film would have been a very effective way of projecting a very specific, localized, version of jazz to the New Zealand audience; thus it also had the potential to shape New Zealand jazz in very specific ways. 39 See, for example, my thesis, “Any Rags, Any Jazz”; also Aleisha Ward, “‘ANZAC, Hollywood, and Home’: Constructing a New Zealand Jazz Culture,” in Many Voices: Music and National Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. Henry Johnson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 93–102. 40 Jazz in New Zealand was almost entirely disconnected from the American sources. For example, jazz bands on the vaudeville circuits came from all over the world and while New Zealanders could hear broadcasts from the United States, it was also possible to hear jazz from Asia (particularly the British enclaves, including Shanghai), and parts of Europe. These, combined with wire newspaper articles that were frequently misinformed to some degree, led to confusion in New Zealand about where jazz came from in the 1920s and 1930s.

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The film was located in front of Whakarewarewa, specifically at the entrance to the kāenga (village), a well-known tourist spot that purported to be a slice of traditional Māori life. This had the effect of visually locating the band as both New Zealand and Māori, before the band even started playing. Given Shalfoon’s business acumen, I believe that he likely chose this song as a way of localizing jazz in New Zealand. The principle of whakamāori potentially applies here, whereby non-traditional objects and traditions can be made Māori through the adoption and adaptation of an object (in this case jazz music) into Māori culture (tikanga-māori). The combination of song and setting in the film implies both a generalized New Zealandness and a specific Māoriness of jazz. Shalfoon’s exhortation at the end of the film—“Watch the newspapers, this band will be playing real dance music in your town soon”—implies that the Melody Boys were an authentic jazz band. The projection of authenticity would have been an important aspect of Shalfoon’s advertising, giving the band an edge over the competition. To be seen as an authentic jazz band in New Zealand would have meant several things to the Melody Boys: most importantly that they were hip and exciting, playing in the latest and most fashionable style, which was how authentic jazz bands (whether from the United States or elsewhere) were portrayed during this time. By branding themselves as an “authentic” jazz band, they presented themselves as more specialized than the average dance band, and this indicated that they could play both the established styles and the latest crazes in an appropriate jazz manner. Finally, by staking a claim to authenticity, they could also claim a level of musical sophistication at least on a par with Australian and British jazz bands, if not American jazz bands as well. These were all-important factors in the Melody Boys’ advertising, and helped them to become extremely successful. The movements the musicians use in the Melody Boys film play on an idea of how an authentic jazz band should look. The types of movements used are similar to those seen in silent films of jazz bands in the 1920s. Although the movements of the Melody Boys are rather more understated, the difference is partly down to the difference between silent film and sound. However, the need to be visually identified as a jazz band by the audience remained. In the medium of film, the use of “jazz” movements would have been an important advertising point: the Melody Boys needed to be seen as an authentic jazz band, one that could be visually recognized as such by anyone in the cinema. Additionally, by performing in the manner of jazz bands on film the Melody Boys were situating themselves visually within the global jazz world.

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FILMCRAFT LTD VERSUS MR GAREEB STEPHEN “EPI” SHALFOON ESQ When the film print came back from processing Shalfoon and the band were shocked at the quality. Shalfoon approached the managers of the local cinemas who confirmed his belief that it was bad; in fact the quality of the film was so poor the cinema managers were unable to use it.41 Shalfoon refused to pay Filmcraft’s bill of twenty-eight New Zealand pounds, and a court case for nonpayment by Filmcraft Ltd. against Shalfoon ensued in 1931.42 The court case was extensively and excitedly reported in New Zealand Truth, and by a number of other papers (Figure 5) although with less obvious enthusiasm. The case was heard in August 1931, and began with the prosecution outlining the production and why Shalfoon wanted to make a film of the band. The prosecution then described the filming, down to where the cameraman stood under a tree. One can just see the shadows from the branches in the foreground of the still shown

Figure 5.  New Zealand Truth Headline, August 20, 1931, 4

41 The quality of the film as seen in the link in note 29 is, according to preservationists at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, is actually very little worse than the original. 42 Twenty-eight New Zealand pounds roughly equates to $6000 NZD in 2019; “All Talkie and No Picture,” 4.

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Figure 6.  Still image from the Melody Boys film captured from the upload to YouTube (see link in footnote 29)

in figure 6. The prosecution also examined the process of developing the film, assuring the court that no mistakes had been made in the process, and that the final product was, in the opinion of Filmcraft Ltd., perfectly fine. The defense rebutted by calling Archibald MacDermott, the manager of Rotorua’s Majestic Theatre, who was asked if the film was of useable quality. In MacDermott’s opinion it was of very poor quality. The sound was just useable: one noticed skips in the audio track. Visually, however, the film was useless because one could not see the faces properly, or, the band’s name on the bass drum (Figure 6). Shalfoon states at the beginning of the film: “I wish to introduce to you Rotorua’s famous jazz band,” but he does not actually give the name of the band. In fact, because of the audio skips Shalfoon actually only says “I wish to introduce to you Rotorua’s famous ja …,” so the viewer does not even (technically) know that they are a jazz band. The magistrate and court officers eventually viewed the film, and had the Melody Boys perform “He Pūru Taitama” exactly as they had done in the film for the court.43 On consideration, the magistrate agreed with the defense: the 43 Possibly marking the first time a jazz band had performed in a judicial court.

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film was of extremely poor quality and useless for promotional purposes, so he found in Shalfoon’s favor. This was the end of the case, and, unfortunately, the end of the first jazz recording in New Zealand. However, the film quickly became legend in the jazz community. Very few people knew what exactly was on the film, but because of the publicity that Shalfoon had organized in advance of the filming, many musicians, fans, and Rotorua locals knew about it.44 There had been a private screening when it came back from being printed, and there was a glowing report about it in the Rotorua Chronicle from December 6, 1930. Shalfoon and the Melody Boys participated in other film shorts in the early 1930s, including other Tourist Department films, and at least one by Fox Movietone News (where they were required again to wear blackface as they had been for the Tourism board film short—see footnote 30). They also made at least one other musical featurette publicizing the band in early 1931.45 All of this added to the legend of this first jazz recording.

CONCLUSIONS: LEGEND TO REALITY This film became a tantalizing mystery for jazz fans, collectors, and historians until the early twenty-first century, when the Film Archive, now Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, acquired a copy and digitized it. The film suddenly went from near urban legend to provable fact, and within a few years at least one of the other extant copies was digitized privately and made its way onto YouTube. This film is an extremely important document for jazz historians (and New Zealand music historians more broadly) because we can begin to extrapolate some of the aural and visual conceptualizations of jazz in New Zealand: how jazz was performed historically in the pre–commercial recording era, that is, pre-1947. With the rediscovery and digitization of the Melody Boys film, jazz, and popular music historians were able to see and hear a small example of what the Melody Boys played, and importantly discover some things about their performance practices, repertoire, and conceptualization of jazz. As an advertisement, the film makes it clear that it was important to Shalfoon and the Melody Boys that their jazz be seen as both authentic and local. They wanted to make jazz as much a New Zealand music as it was American, British, European, Australian, or Asian. While the experiment of the film did not help the Melody Boys further this aim, they continued to go from strength to strength and remained 44 Epi Shalfoon File MS-Papers-9018-41, DHJA. 45 Ibid.

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one of the North Island’s most popular jazz bands for the next twenty years until Shalfoon’s sudden death in 1953. From this film, the second film the Melody Boys recorded in early 1931, and the few other extant films and recordings, we can start to paint a picture of what jazz sounded like to New Zealanders in the interwar period. These early ventures in recording jazz locally help us begin to perceive how New Zealand jazz musicians conceptualized jazz during the 1920s and 1930s, how they performed, and what influenced their jazz. Further, by bringing to light these early examples of New Zealand jazz and placing them within the wider context of New Zealand music and cultural history, and global jazz history, we are performing a part of our own music history that has frequently been dismissed or ignored. This is a part of New Zealand music history that has had far-reaching influences on other parts of the local music industry, film industry, and entertainment industry more broadly. This important snapshot of jazz history also enables us to begin to understand how jazz was recontextualized in New Zealand culture during this period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY “All Talkie and No Picture: Epi Shalfoon Wasn’t Shook On It, Saxophones Sobbed Out Jazz, but Rotorua Syncopators were a Blur.” New Zealand Truth (August 20, 1931): 4. “An Even Break, Featuring Olive Thomas.” Auckland Star (17 November 1917): 16, col. 6. Bourke, Chris. Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010. ——. “Shalfoon, Gareeb Stephan.” In Te Ara The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. https://teara. govt.nz/en/biographies/4s22/shalfoon-gareeb-stephen. Churchman, Geoffrey. Celluloid Dreams: A Century of Film in New Zealand. Wellington: IPL Books, 1997. Dennis Huggard Jazz Archive MS-Papers-9018 Archive of New Zealand Music, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Eargle, John. The Microphone Book: From Mono to Stereo to Surround a Guide to Microphone Design and Application. Oxford: Focal Press, 2005. “Epi Shalfoon and his Melody Boys.” YouTube video, posted by “nzjazzhistory” February 26, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-wTQaKNdw. Gomery, Douglas “The Coming of Sound: Technological Change in the American Film Industry.” In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 5–24. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Grainge, Paul, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith. Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Accessed July 9, 2019. http://www.jstor.org. ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r28dt.

“Saxophones Sobbed Out Jazz” Harker, Brian. Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. “He Pūru Taitama.” http://www.folksong.org.nz/he_puru/index.html. Hobson, Vic. Creating Jazz Counterpoint: New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony and the Blues. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2014. Huggard, Dennis O. (A Discographical Listing Of) Jazz Recordings of New Zealand 1930–1980. Self-published, 2009. Kellogg, Edward. “History of Sound Motion Pictures.” SMPTE Journal 64, no. 6 (1955): 291–302. Pillai, Nicolas. Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image. London: I. B. Taurus, 2017. ——. “Rhythms of the Everyday: An Alternative History of the British Jazz Film.” In Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack, edited by Emilio Audissino and Emile Wenneckes, 99–114. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019. Sheirtcliff (née Shalfoon), Reo. “Dancing in the Dark: A Memoir of Epi Shalfoon.” Music in New Zealand 10 (1990), 40–5. Sowry, Clive. Film Making in New Zealand: A Brief Historical Survey. Wellington: New Zealand Film Archive, 1984. ——. “Non–Fiction Films: Between the Wars.” In New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History, edited by Diane Pivac, Frank Stark, and Lawrence McDonald in association with The Film Archive, 79–102. Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011. “The Jazz Drummer of the Senora Jazz Band (1926).” YouTube video, posted by “British Pathé” April 13, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT6MFuKAFVg. The Tahiwis Historic 1930s Recordings. Wellington: National Library of New Zealand, distributed by Atoll Records, 1998. Ward, Aleisha. “‘ANZAC, Hollywood, and Home’: Constructing a New Zealand Jazz Culture” in Many Voices: Music and National Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, edited by Henry Johnson, 93-102. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. ——. “‘Any Rags, Any Jazz, Any Boppers Today?’: Jazz in New Zealand 1920–1955.” PhD diss.; University of Auckland, 2012. Yanow, Scott. Jazz On Film: The Complete Story of the Music and Musicians Onscreen. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2004.

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CHAPTER 15

“To Display Her Chief Accomplishment”: Domestic Manuscript Music Collections in Colonial Australia ROSEMARY RICHARDS

ABSTRACT Australian colonial domestic manuscript music collections aided music-making and were also forms of life writing and artistic expression. They facilitated “performing history,” by copying, collecting, collating, binding, preserving, contemplating, annotating, and memorialising the contents, including dates, signatures, poetry, quotations, indices, and drawings as well as musical repertoire. Women often compiled such collections, which reflected musical and collecting fashions in Britain and the westernised world. This chapter considers musical references in the works of Ada Cambridge and discusses manuscript music collections owned by Mrs. Samuel Smith, Georgiana McCrae, Sarah Little, and Annie Baxter Dawbin. Nineteenth-century colonial domestic manuscript music collections are artefacts that reflect the privileged lives of musically literate individuals and social groups. Some collections may contain original compositions or pieces of music unavailable elsewhere. Study of these albums together with other musical, visual, and written sources may expand our knowledge of individual biographies and aid our understanding of the role of women and music in Australian colonial history.

I

n colonial Australia, manuscript music collections aided the display of musical accomplishments in the home. These collections represent forms of life writing and artistic expression, providing tools for silent pleasure, memory, genteel musical education, and social interchange. While literary and visual

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sources including novels, diaries, newspapers, art works, and photographs are investigated frequently by historians, musical sources including manuscript music collections could be employed as evidence more often, to broaden our understanding of Australian cultural history. Exploration of colonial music-collecting and music-making also can help answer Suzanne Cusick’s “seemingly innocent” question: “where are the women in music, in music’s history?”1 My interest in women’s roles in Australian colonial musical history was sparked when a manuscript music collection previously owned by Georgiana McCrae née Gordon (1804–90) inspired a piece of music theatre that I developed with colleagues. I discovered subsequently that other colonial women were among the musically-literate nineteenth-century musicians who compiled this type of collection. As a historian, my study of these collections complements and enhances the biographies of collectors, viewed as individuals and as representatives of genteel British musicians of their era. I draw on my own “performing history” as a musician, researcher, and author in this chapter when considering issues associated with manuscript music collections and interpreting references to music-making and manuscript music by author Ada Cambridge (1844–1926; “A. C.,” “Mrs. Cross”). I discuss examples of nineteenth-century music collections belonging to Mrs. Samuel Smith, Georgiana McCrae, and Sarah Cross Little née Bingle (1832–1909), followed by a more detailed exploration of the journals and surviving manuscript music collection belonging to Annie Baxter Dawbin née Hadden (1816–1905).2 These women performed their own history by making their personal selections from available repertoire, by transcribing, collecting, and interpreting pieces of music that interested them. They and their scribal communities created history for others by enshrining aspects of their tastes and memorializing friends, family, and travels in handwritten music notation, poetry, and annotations, and by adding printed materials. These records of their lives were employed in musical performance and private contemplation and could be passed on to their heirs. I draw on work by scholars such as Thérèse Radic, Graeme Skinner, and Jeanice Brooks to help position Australian colonial music within practices in 1 Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 482. 2 Rosemary Richards, “Georgiana McCrae’s Manuscript Music Collections: A Life in Music” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2017), 15–18, 54–64.

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the British Empire and other parts of the world. I uncover and interpret insights into the musical biographies of selected women for readers of this chapter, who will then perform their own history through thoughts, critiques, and retellings of my work.3

COLLECTING MUSIC IN MANUSCRIPT FORM In the nineteenth century, music was copied into preformed manuscript music books or onto miscellaneous sheets of paper that were gathered into collections. Such collections were often bound and stamped with marks of ownership, providing opportunities for the display of gentility, wealth, and musicianship, whether the collections were a passive part of parlor décor or employed in active musical performance. Manuscript music collections could include works copied by both professional and amateur scribes. Members of wider scribal communities of family, friends, and acquaintances over a number of generations could add music and annotations indicating events, emotions, and feelings, revealed, for example, by lyrics and comments in various handwriting. Manuscript music collections consolidated an owner’s musical repertoire into manageable books, which could sit on a piano’s music stand. They have physical structural elements in common with commonplace books, scrapbooks, and sketch albums, and show the musical choices, knowledge, and performance practices of copyists and collectors.4 Many nineteenth-century manuscript music collections reflect the miscellaneous nature of genteel musical performance. Parlor songs and instrumental pieces were frequently derived from opera, music theatre and national genres, with lyrics modified to suit refined tastes. Choices of instrument and repertoire often followed gendered preferences for the piano, harp, or guitar by women and for the flute or violin by men. Printed music became increasingly available in the nineteenth century, but colonial musicians, like their counterparts elsewhere, still employed handwritten music notation, which carried the cachet of elite private privilege. While printed music was the source material for some items in manuscript music collections, 3 Terry [Thérèse] Radic, “Australian Women in Music,” LIP (1978/79): 97–110; Graeme Skinner, “Australharmony (An Online Resource toward the History of Music in Colonial and Early Federation Australia),” accessed February 3, 2019, http://sydney.edu.au/ paradisec/australharmony/; Jeanice Brooks, “Musical Monuments for the Country House,” Music and Letters 91, no. 4 (2010): 513–35. 4 Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 179–80.

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music also could be shared by being copied from one person’s manuscript to another’s. Original compositions by collectors or their family and friends occur infrequently in manuscript music collections.5 Copyright protection was not as stringent as today. Collective authorship sometimes occurred, and identifying particular works can be difficult. Surviving manuscript music collections may preserve particular pieces of music that today would otherwise be unknown. Many collections and their individual items remain uncatalogued. Despite the internet’s enormous contributions, studying actual artefacts is invaluable, to appreciate size, shape, materials, textures, stitching, covers, bindings, pencil, ink, watermarks, staves, annotations, scratched-out erasures, illustrations, and other features which otherwise might not catch attention. These features promote a more thorough understanding of the personal input required to assemble manuscript music collections than can be gained from seeing scanned images focusing on musical works.

MUSICAL REFERENCES BY ADA CAMBRIDGE The use of manuscript music in music-making is mentioned by colonial authors such as Ada Cambridge. When investigating Cambridge’s influences, I found that her attitudes to music’s role in genteel society were shaped by her younger years in Britain, where she expressed her religious convictions in poetry. A musical setting of her hymn “In All Time of Our Tribulation,” with the first line “Saviour, by Thy deep compassion,” was published in 1865 with music by Claribel (Charlotte Alington Pye Barnard, 1830–69).6 As with other writers in this period, Cambridge’s musical references in her novels suggest incidental music and soundscapes or provide keys to nuances of character and plot. Cambridge preferred “serious” music to lighter “popular” forms including parlor music, and used this distinction to distinguish her characters’ moral worth and social class. Descriptions of church choirs, public concerts, music at country fairs and balls, and singing and playing in domestic settings are found in Cambridge’s novels such as A Woman’s Friendship (1889), Not All in Vain (1892), A Marriage Ceremony (1894), Fidelis (1895), A 5 Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 50; Peter MacFie, Steve Gadd, and Marjorie Gadd, On the Fiddle from Scotland to Tasmania 1815–1863, 3rd ed. (Dulcot, Tas.: Peter MacFie, 2018), 1–5. 6 Claribel (music), Ada Cambridge (words), “In All Time of Our Tribulation,” in Sacred Songs and Hymns (London: Boosey & Co., c. 1865), 18–19; Ada Cambridge, “In All Time of Our Tribulation”/“When We Falter in the Battle”; “Saviour, by Thy Sweet Compassion,” in Hymns on the Litany, by A. C. (Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1865), 25–9, 52–4.

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Humble Enterprise (1896), Materfamilias (1898), Sisters (1904), and also in her memoirs Thirty Years in Australia (1903) and The Retrospect (1910).7 Manuscript music and its performance are important to plot and character development in Cambridge’s novel The Three Miss Kings (1883, 1891). The cultured and educated mother of Patty King and her sisters brought her manuscript copies of music from Britain when she moved to married life and isolation in Australia. Her manuscript music collections subsequently form the backbone of her daughters’ musical education. Manuscript music is perceived by the King family as intrinsically valuable and a marker of class. Patty and her sisters expect all pieces of manuscript music to look as though they have been notated in their mother’s handwriting. In The Three Miss Kings, Cambridge shows how performance demonstrating musical talent was considered a significant social act. Patty is praised for her prowess in piano playing soon after she and her sisters arrive in Melbourne, when she is asked to accompany a guest artist at a social gathering at short notice: “Patty was able to display her chief accomplishment to the very best advantage, and the sisters were thereby promoted to honour.” Patty’s ease of reading her mother’s handwritten copies of music is an advantage as “long familiarity had made [handwritten music] as easy to her to read as print.” Cambridge suggests that manuscript music held both social and musical value in judgements about performance of female accomplishment in colonial Melbourne, as it had in other parts of the Western world.8 Research into handwritten transcriptions of music such as those described in Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings often focuses on collections compiled by well-known British collectors such as Jane Austen. This is relevant to “performing history,” as historians may privilege some voices over others, potentially affecting our understanding of wider issues.9 In Australian history writing about the colonial era, attempts to recapture indigenous peoples’ oral traditions and responses to the invasion of their 7 Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, eds., The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), xiv; Jennifer Hill, “Aspects of Australian Published Song, 1890–1914” (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2002), 51–89. 8 Ada Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings by Mrs. Cross (Melbourne: Melville, Mullen & Slade, 1891), 66. 9 Jeanice Brooks, “About,” The Austen Family Music Books, University of Southampton, archive. org, 2015, https://archive.org/details/austenfamilymusicbooks&tab=about; Gillian Dooley, Kirstine Moffat, and John Wiltshire, “Music and Class in Jane Austen,” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 38, no. 3 (2018), accessed February 28, 2019, http://www. jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/volume-38-no-3/doolley-moffat-wiltshire/.

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country may rely on the preservation of written records made by their colonial oppressors.10 In British colonial musical history written from a settler point of view, printed material may be privileged over manuscript copies. The voices of professionals often predominate over those of domestic amateurs and men’s voices over women’s. The availability and value of material previously owned by lesser-known individuals is worth examination, to help develop a more balanced view. Investigations in this chapter of manuscript music collections of particular colonial women may go some way towards redressing this balance.

MRS. SAMUEL SMITH One of many little-studied nineteenth-century women’s artefacts is a manuscript music collection from the 1820s, with two indexes, which includes songs and piano pieces by popular composers such as Rossini, Weber, and Bishop. The inscription on the front cover, “E C Smith,” may correspond to the book’s ownership by “Mrs. Samuel Smith, Malta,” whose name appears on the first piece of music, or may refer to another family member. Paucity of information about Mrs. Smith adds to difficulties in making judgements. Her manuscript music collection is not accompanied by identifying biographical sources, leaving many questions about Mrs. Smith’s identity and the dating and purpose of her album. The album contains a piano piece, “German Passo Doppio Arranged for the Piano Forte & humbly dedicated to Mrs. S: Smith By J. C. Pyne Musician: 80th Regiment.” The British Army’s 80th Regiment was stationed in Malta from 1821to 1828 and contributed to the spread of British music as it moved around the globe, to postings including New South Wales and New Zealand. The title “German Passo Doppio” may refer to the “Quick Step” march used in military music. Sources about military music in this period are scarce, as are contextual details about this piece, its arranger J. C. Pyne, or the dedicatee Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith’s album is located among nearly nine thousand mainly European books and scores bought from American collector Dr. Everett Helm from 1975 to 1989. Manuscript music collections in the Helm Collection were not compiled in the Australian colonies, but have similarities of format, instrumentation, and content to collections more closely related to Australia. My study of collections produced both within and outside the Australian colonies has 10 Graeme Skinner and Jim Wafer, “A Checklist of Colonial Era Musical Transcriptions of Australian Indigenous Songs,” in “Australharmony,” accessed February 28, 2019, http:// sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/checklist-indigenous-music-1.php.

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revealed why a restricted nationalistic view can distort an understanding of a widespread global phenomenon.11

GEORGIANA MCCRAE AND SARAH LITTLE Research into the legacies of two collectors who lived in the Australian colonies, Georgiana McCrae and Sarah Little, has benefitted from the preservation of biographical material.12 While domestic music-making is often portrayed as the preserve of genteel young people involved in education or the marriage market, study of manuscript music collections owned by these two collectors shows that youthful interest in music could continue into adult life. Both of these women copied music for more than thirty years. Georgiana McCrae produced four manuscript music collections with more than 760 items with annotations dated from around 1817 to 1856, while Sarah Little compiled five music albums between 1849 and 1884. Historians should take this significant performance of labor and dedication of time and resources into account when commenting on the lives of these two women. Georgiana’s artworks and journals have been used as sources by historians, particularly in relation to colonial Melbourne. Her music collections also reflect her problematic national and class identity due to her illegitimacy, her aspirations to the gentility and status of her aristocratic Scottish Gordon relations, and her resentment of her colonial Australian exile.13 11 Owner bound manuscript collection of early nineteenth century vocal and piano music, [1827], [E C Smith, Mrs. Samuel Smith], Helm Collection, MUS Helm I/723, National Library of Australia, Canberra, accessed March 11, 2019, http://nla.gov.au/nla. obj-828397850; Graeme Skinner, “A Chronological Register of British Military Bands and Bandsmen in Australia, 1788–1870,” in “Australharmony,”  accessed February 28, 2019, http:// sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/register-british-military-bands-in-australia. php; Thomas Bunbury, Reminiscences of a Veteran, vol. 3 (London: Skeet, 1861), 86–9; “Regiments of the Malta Garrison: 80th (Staffordshire Volunteers),” accessed March 4, 2019, http://maltaramc.com/regmltgar/80th.html; Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow, Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11; Helm Collection, National Library of Australia, accessed February 28, 2019, http:// www.nla.gov.au/selected-library-collections/helm-collection. 12 Georgiana McCrae: McCrae, National Trust of Australia (Victoria), MC405; McCrae Family Papers, Manuscripts Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne, MS 12018/2516/3 and MS 12018/2519/4; McCrae Papers, Harry F. Chaplin Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Sydney, Sydney, RB 1164.9. Sarah Cross Little née Bingle: State Library New South Wales, Sydney, MLMSS 7115/1–3. 13 Almut Boehme, “An Initial Investigation,” Fontes Artis Musicae 55, no. 2 (2008): 274–96; Jennifer Gall, “Redefining the Tradition: The Role of Women in the Evolution and Transmission

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Georgiana’s first three manuscript music collections, largely transcribed in Britain, reflect her interactions with friends and family, with repertoire such as versions of “Cauld Kail in Aberdeen” and “Keith More” by her grandfather Alexander, Fourth Duke of Gordon. Her love of opera and music theatre, her acquaintance with changes in musical style in the continuum of baroque to romantic music are evident, together with a desire to capture her memories in musical form. In 1841 Georgiana brought many possessions including her music collections with her when she followed her husband from Britain to Melbourne, where her fourth collection was bound in 1856. Its musical contents, when read in conjunction with her journals and reminiscences, demonstrate Georgiana’s interest in her children’s musical education, her role in providing musical entertainment for her family and for her husband’s business colleagues, her musical and artistic friendships with members of the colonial elite including the Bunbury and La Trobe families, and her emotional links to Britain. Not much identifies Georgiana’s fourth manuscript music collection as “Australian,” other than annotations of dates, places, and copyists. Unlike her journals and artwork, this collection does not refer to her interactions with indigenous people. An example of Georgiana’s use of her collections as a form of personal diary can be glimpsed at the end of her fourth collection, with her inclusion of the words of the song “Woo’d & Married &c–/by Joanna Baillie.” This could be read as a comment on women’s unrealistic expectations of marriage in light of social and legal debates regarding the rights of women. Georgiana’s husband struggled to provide a secure income or home and Georgiana shocked family and friends when she sought a marriage separation: Woo’d & married and a’ Married & carried awa’ She thinks herself very weel off To be woo’d and married and a’.14 of Australian Folk Music” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2008), 89–148; Brenda Niall, Georgiana: A Biography of Georgiana McCrae, Painter, Diarist, Pioneer; with a Catalogue of Plates by Caroline Clemente (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 53–71; Rosemary Richards, “Frae the friends and Land I love”: The “McCrae Homestead Music Book” (Box Hill North, Vic: R. Richards, 2005), 21–6; Thérèse Weber, “Port Phillip Papers: The Australian Journal of Georgiana McCrae” (PhD diss., University of NSW, 2000), vol. 1, 1–7. 14 Rosemary Richards, “John Wilson and Scottish Song,” in Re-Visions: Proceedings of the New Zealand Musicological Society and Musicological Society of Australia Joint Conference, ed. Marian Poole (Dunedin, NZ: New Zealand Music Industry Centre, University of Otago, 2013), 171–85, accessed February 17, 2019, http://msa.org.au/edit/conference_pdfs/ Proceedings%20re-Visions%202010%20Conference.pdf.

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As in the case of Georgiana, the skills of “musician” and “musical copyist” can be added to the description of Sarah Little’s accomplishments as a “botanical artist, craftworker, and family historian.”15 Sarah lived in New South Wales and belonged to a later generation than Mrs. Smith or Georgiana McCrae, but their collections all include their individual selections of songs for voice and piano, plus solo piano music including dance items. Sarah’s music collections show the continuing influence of overseas musical trends on colonial Australian music. For example, Sarah began her transcriptions in her fourth collection in Newcastle on January 19, 1872 with an unattributed version of the popular moralistic song “Pulling Hard against the Stream” by the British singer Harry Clifton (1832–72): Do your best for one another, Making life a pleasant dream,  Help a worn and weary brother, Pulling hard against the stream.16

Three days later Sarah copied a piano solo “‘Love among the Roses’ Schottische,” arranged by local musician Walter J. Rice and based on a song by Edward N. Catlin. This may be the only surviving copy of Rice’s adaptation of Catlin’s music.17 The relationship between the contents of Sarah Little’s five manuscript music collections and her inner personal life and interactions with her family and friends could be explored further, along with considering whether it was coincidental that both Sarah and Georgiana McCrae stopped their assiduous collecting of music in their fifties. They and their families continued to value and preserve their collections before their mementoes became historical relics in public collections.

ANNIE BAXTER DAWBIN Historians, including myself, who are interested in the life and works of Annie Baxter Dawbin have gained public access recently to her manuscript music 15 “Sarah Cross Little b. 1832,” Design & Art Australia Online, accessed February 28, 2019, https://www.daao.org.au/bio/sarah-cross-little/. 16 Harry Clifton, “Pulling Hard against the Stream” (New York: Benjamin W. Hitchcock, 1869). 17 Graeme Skinner, “Rice, Walter John (W. J. Rice; ‘Watty’ Rice),” in “A Biographical Register of Australian Colonial Musical Personnel–R,” “Australharmony,” accessed February 28, 2019, http://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/register-R.php; Edward N. Catlin (music), W. H. Delehanty (words), “E. N. Catlin’s Songs. No. 4. ‘Love Among the Roses’” (Boston: Russell & Co., 1869).

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collection, inscribed “Annie Maria Baxter/Plymouth_ July/52” on the flyleaf. Study of this collection adds to knowledge of Annie’s life and musical activities, previously derived largely from her journals. From the time Annie moved with her first husband Andrew Baxter from Britain to the Australian colonies in 1835 until the late 1860s, she wrote over 800,000 words in her handwritten diaries, some of which she rewrote for publication.18 Like Georgiana McCrae and Sarah Little, Annie maintained her genteel musical interests from her youth into her middle age. A comment in Annie’s 1838 journal written when she was in Van Diemen’s Land suggests that she owned an earlier music collection that has since been lost. In 1844, she questioned why she was copying waltzes, since she would lose her piano when her husband’s financial difficulties caused them to move from New South Wales to Victoria.19 Annie’s 1852 diary, which corresponds with the inscription date of her surviving manuscript music collection, contains observations she made in England in Devonport, London, Portsmouth, and Plymouth, where she acted as housekeeper for her widowed brother and cared for his children.20 On Sunday, May 30, 1852 an acquaintance sang Italian songs during childbirth. Two days later Annie complained about grimaces her niece made while singing. Her two nephews created a racket when one played “The Girl I Left behind Me” while the other played “Elephant Polka.” After hearing two sisters playing the violin and ’cello, Annie objected that these instruments should only be played by men. In June 1852 Annie copied a piece of music, “Why Chime the Bells So Merrily.” As this song is not included in Annie’s 1852 manuscript music collection, it is unclear what she used as a source or what became of her copy.21 18 Annie Maria Baxter [Dawbin], Manuscript Music Album, State Library New South Wales, MLMSS 9902; Annie Maria Dawbin MSS diaries, 1834–69, State Library New South Wales, DLMSQ 181–3; Annie Baxter Dawbin, Diary and sketchbook, c. 1840–4, National Library of Australia, MS 3276; Annie Baxter Dawbin, Diary, 1834–68, State Library Victoria, MS MSM 35–8; Annie Baxter Dawbin, Memories of the Past: By A Lady in Australia (Melbourne: W. H. Williams, 1873). 19 Annie Baxter, August 26, 1838, September 1, 1838, cited in Toni-Anne Sherwood, “Annie Baxter in Van Diemen’s Land” (PhD diss., University of Tasmania, Hobart, 2010), 124; and Annie Baxter, Saturday, January13, 1844, cited in Lucy Frost, No Place for a Nervous Lady: Voices from the Australian Bush (Melbourne, Vic.: McPhee Gribble/ Penguin, 1984), 138. 20 Annie Baxter [Dawbin], Journal v. 16 (December 1851–August 1852), State Library New South Wales, DLMSQ 182; State Library Victoria, MSM 36 (add. 470). 21 Annie Baxter, Journal 16, 157 (May 30, 1852), 159 ( June 1, 1852), 162 ( June 3, 1852) and 165 and 164 ( June 4, 1852); Lesley Nelson-Burns, “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” accessed February 28, 2019, http://www.contemplator.com/england/girl.html; Louis Antoine

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Following Andrew Baxter’s death, Annie returned to Melbourne to claim his estate. Annie’s second husband Robert Dawbin also was unsuccessful at farming, and in 1861 Annie’s livelihood, as well as her ownership of a piano, was threatened again.22 In the 1860s Annie “performed history” by recording in her journals how she used music to promote her social standing and romantic life. Annie sang in soirees and acquired or transcribed notated versions of musical pieces that she had heard performed so she could perform them herself. For example, in 1864 in Melbourne Annie boarded with a family who held musical parties: “We have had some pleasant soirees, in a small way.” She reported, “I got a beautiful song, ‘A voice from the waves’, & Mr Neild sings it with me, to my delight.” Impressed by hearing one of her friends’ daughters sing “Alice, Where Art Thou,” Annie unsuccessfully searched Melbourne music shops for it. Later that year, Annie copied music in between flirtations. Annie’s diaries stopped abruptly during her travels to New Zealand, leaving biographers with unanswered questions about her later musical experiences.23 The worn covers and loose leaves in Annie’s 1852 manuscript music book suggest that she used it in her practical music-making. Her album also reveals hints of personal significance regarding her troubled personal life, including her many migrations. Above her signature and date, the flyleaf reveals an embossed stamp, “Bookseller. Printer/Jas. Sellick/Plymouth,” identifying the firm that sold her preformed manuscript music book. The album includes a printed memento of Annie’s previous domicile in Van Diemen’s Land, “The Campbell-Town Waltzes,” which have been attributed to Francis Hartwell Henslowe (1849).24 A separate manuscript section added at the back of Annie’s music book is made from fancier paper.

Jullien (1812–60), “Elephant Polka” (New York: Wm. Hall & Son, c. 1848–58); Joseph Philip Knight (music) and Jonas B. Phillips (words), “The New Year’s Come” (New York: Horn, 1839); “Why Chime the Bells So Merrily, or The Old and the New Year” (Liverpool: Sutton & Haywood, c. 1840). 22 Annie Dawbin, [December 1, 1861], in Lucy Frost, ed., The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin: July 1858–May 1868 (St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 238. 23 Annie Dawbin, ibid., 386 (February 28, 1864), 397 (April 2, 1864) and 459 (October 27, 1864); Stephen Glover (music), Richard Ryan (words), “A Voice from the Waves” (1848) (St. Louis, MI: Endres & Compton, c.1864–5); Joseph Ascher (music), Wellington Guernsey (words), “Alice, Where Art Thou: Romance” (London: A. Hammond & Co., c. 1859–65). 24 Francis Hartwell Henslowe, “The Campbell-Town Waltzes” (Tasmania: Browne, 1849); Graeme Skinner, “Henslowe, Francis Hartwell,” in “A Biographical Register of Australian Colonial Musical Personnel–H (Ha–He),” “Australharmony,” accessed February 28, 2019, http://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/register-H-1.php.

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The album contains over seventy manuscript pieces including songs, vocal duets and piano works, in more than two hundred mostly unnumbered pages, but does not include many annotations or an index. Annie’s national identity is displayed on the copy of Linley’s song “Marion May,” which is decorated above the title by a small hand-drawn colored illustration of a waving British flag. A page of “Guitar Notes” indicates interest in that instrument, reflected in the popular and widely-published song “Juanita/Written & arranged by the Honble. Mrs. Norton,” where the piano part echoes the Spanish guitar. As in similar albums, works by women seldom appear in Annie’s collection, reflecting male domination of the creation and publication of original compositions. Two piano pieces, “Le Crépuscule: Rêverie pour Piano” and “La Retraite militaire,” are in a different hand, suggesting that Annie obtained these items from friends or family, or from a professional scribe.25 While some music in Annie’s music book was composed earlier than the inscription date of 1852, other pieces were added later, as they were composed or published in the 1860s. In 1863 after Annie Dawbin moved to Melbourne without her second husband, she noted in her diary that she borrowed “Ellen Adair” by “Mr. Rutter” and “Sweet Spirit, Hear My Prayer” by Wallace. Both of these pieces can be found copied into her manuscript music book. Compositions by William Vincent Wallace (1812–65) were popular in the Australian colonies, where Wallace had lived in the 1830s before his later successes in London. “Sweet Spirit, Hear My Prayer” is a parlor ballad from Wallace’s opera Lurline, composed in 1847–8 and first performed in 1860. Wallace’s newsworthy career and compositional output also is represented in Annie’s album with one of Wallace’s earlier works, “In Happy Moments Day by Day” from Maritana (1845).26 “Mr. Rutter” can be identified as Annie’s friend George Oswald Rutter (1822–84), an English lawyer and amateur composer active in Melbourne and Ballarat c. 1856–69. Rutter’s song “Ellen Adair,” based on Tennyson’s poem

25 George Linley (music), H. Howard Paul (words), “Marion May” (London: Chappell, 1853); The Honble. Mrs. Norton [Caroline], “Juanita” (London: Chappell, 1853); Eugéne Moniot, Le Crépuscule: Rêverie pour Piano (London: Brewer & Co., c. 1849); Louis Lefébure-Wély, La Retraite militaire, Caprice de Genre pour Piano par Lefébure-Wély, Op. 65 (London: Chappell, c. 1852). 26 W. Vincent Wallace (music), Edward Fitzball (words), “Sweet Spirit, Hear My Prayer: Ballad … in the Opera Lurline” (London: Cramer, Beale & Chappell, c. 1861); idem., “In Happy Moments” (Baltimore: Henry McCaffrey, c. 1860); Andrew Lamb, William Vincent Wallace (West Byfleet: Fullers Wood Press, 2012), 216–9.

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Edward Gray, tells of a young woman who died from unrequited love. Annie’s music book also includes Rutter’s choral setting of Tennyson’s mournful poem Claribel. Annie’s album appears to be the sole surviving repository of these two pieces by Rutter.27 My investigation into Annie Baxter Dawbin’s surviving manuscript music collection has been aided by other historians’ research into Annie’s journals, which contain many observations about music-copying and music-making. Georgiana McCrae’s extensive compilations of handwritten musical material similarly can be contextualized by her journals and other memorabilia. My retelling of Georgiana’s and Annie’s musical biographies has led me to scrutinize other nineteenth-century manuscript music collections such as those belonging to Mrs. Samuel Smith and Sarah Little, to help to illuminate the role of musical copying and practical music-making in the lives of individuals, their social circles and wider society, in colonial Australia and elsewhere. Historians of the Australian colonies could enhance their performance if they explored evidence from artefacts such as manuscript music collections more frequently. These collections were owned by colonists who benefitted from musical education in their youth and often continued to practice music into their later years. The time and resources needed to transcribe and assemble a collection demonstrates the value placed on the “performance” involved in copying as well as in playing music, whether it was aimed at personal musical pleasure and reflection, entertainment of family and friends, or the preservation of cultural links to Britain. Wealth and status could be shown by access to copies of music made by professional scribes employed by publishers or by private patrons. Amateur music copyists may have perceived some nonfinancial advantage to themselves or others. Manuscript music collections discussed in this chapter indicate that swapping pieces of hand-copied music reinforced family bonds, friendships, privilege, elitism, and norms of gendered behavior. Mrs. Samuel Smith included music from the British Army in Malta in her collection. The youthful Georgiana McCrae, despite her illegitimacy, used her music education in London to claim the status of a genteel female related to the aristocracy. She brought her collections, including her ducal grandfather’s compositions, with her to Melbourne, 27 Annie Dawbin, (March 8, 1863), in Frost, Journal, 310; Graeme Skinner, “George Oswald Rutter,” “Australharmony,” accessed February 28, 2019, http://sydney.edu.au/ paradisec/australharmony/rutter-george.php; Alfred Tennyson, The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, accessed February 28, 2019, http://www. gutenberg.org/files/8601/8601-h/8601-h.htm#introduction.

“To Display Her Chief Accomplishment”

and included music associated with the colonial upper class in her final musical album. Sarah Little, who was born and died in New South Wales, copied music until she was aged in her fifties. Annie Baxter Dawbin continued to copy music during many of her migrations. My study of domestic manuscript music collections has affected my own performance of history by increasing women’s prominence in the telling and retelling of colonial Australian musical history. This investigation can be extended by considering similar collections from Australia and other parts of the world. Women in this era were encouraged to copy works, usually by men, that received the cachet of public acceptance. Original music or poetry written by women or by collectors and their scribal communities in these collections are uncommon. Even so, such musical sources show the thoughts, feelings, preferences, locations, and life events that affected individuals and communities. Musical items not preserved elsewhere can be exposed and popular trends as well as personal preferences can be revealed. Further research could build on my focus on individuals’ artefacts and life stories to study how music-related practices, including the production and use of manuscript music collections, contributed to the wider transmission of culture between colonial Australia, the British Empire and other international arenas. More Australian colonial manuscript music collections may be discovered and analyzed, to increase our appreciation of the role of music-collecting and music-making in colonial life. Historians and their audiences could use such evidence in their “performing history” more frequently, to help bring music to the forefront of our knowledge and understanding of the Australian colonial period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscript Sources Baxter Dawbin, Annie Maria. Annie Maria Baxter Manuscript Music Album, inscribed July 1852, Plymouth. State Library New South Wales, MLMSS 9902. ——. Diary, 1834–68. State Library Victoria, MS MSM 35–8 ——. MSS Diaries, 1834–69. State Library New South Wales, DLMSQ 181–3. ——. Diary and Sketchbook, c. 1840–4. National Library of Australia, MS 3276. Helm Collection. National Library of Australia. http://www.nla.gov.au/selected-library-collections/helm-collection. Little, Sarah Cross née Bingle (1832–1909). Manuscript Music Books. State Library New South Wales, Sydney, MLMSS 7115/1–3.

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Rosemary Richards McCrae, Georgiana. National Trust of Australia (Victoria), McCrae, MC405. McCrae Family Papers, Manuscripts Collection, State Library Victoria, MS 12018/2516/3 and MS 12018/2519/4. McCrae Papers, Harry F. Chaplin Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Sydney, RB 1164.9. Owner bound manuscript collection of early nineteenth century vocal and piano music. [1827]. [E C Smith, Mrs. Samuel Smith]. National Library of Australia, Canberra, Everett Helm Collection, MUS Helm I/723. Accessed 11 March 2019. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-828397850.

Printed Music Ascher, Joseph (music), Wellington Guernsey (words). “Alice, Where Art Thou: Romance.” London: A. Hammond & Co., c. 1859–65. [Barnard, Charlotte Alington Pye, “Claribel”] (music), Ada Cambridge (words). “In All Time of Our Tribulation,” first line: “Saviour, by Thy deep compassion.” In Sacred Songs and Hymns: The Words by Dr. H. Bonar, The Rev. F. Whitfield, Claribel, &c. The Music Composed by Claribel, 18–19. London: Boosey & Co., c. 1865. Catlin, Edward N. (music), W. H. Delehanty (words). “E. N. Catlin’s Songs. No. 4. ‘Love Among the Roses.’” Boston: G. D. Russell & Co., 1869. Clifton, Harry. “Pulling Hard against the Stream.” New York: Hitchcock, 1869. Glover, Stephen (music), Richard Ryan (words). “A Voice from the Waves.” (1848). St. Louis: Endres & Compton, c. 1864–5. Henslowe, Francis Hartwell. “The Campbell-Town Waltzes.” Tasmania: Browne, lithographic printer, 1849. Knight, Joseph Philip (music), Jonas B. Phillips (words). “The New Year’s Come.” New York: Horn, 1839. ——. “Why Chime the Bells So Merrily, or The Old and the New Year.” Liverpool: Sutton & Haywood, c. 1840. Jullien, Louis Antoine. “Elephant Polka.” New York: Hall & Son, c. 1848–58. Lefébure-Wély, Louis. La Retraite militaire, Caprice de Genre pour Piano par Lefébure-Wély, Op. 65. London: Chappell, c. 1852. Linley, George (music), H. Howard Paul (words). “Marion May.” London: Chappell, c.1853. Moniot, Eugéne. Le Crépuscule: Rêverie pour Piano. London: Brewer & Co., c. 1849. Norton, Caroline. “Juanita.” London: Chappell, 1853. Wallace, William Vincent. “In Happy Moments: From the Opera Maritana.” Baltimore: Henry McCaffrey, c. 1860. Wallace, W. Vincent (music), Edward Fitzball (words). “Sweet Spirit, Hear My Prayer: Ballad … in the Opera Lurline.” London: Cramer, Beale & Chappell, c. 1861.

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REFERENCES Boehme, Almut. “An Initial Investigation into the Early Dissemination of Scottish Music in Australia.” Fontes Artis Musicae 55, no. 2 (2008): 274–96. Brooks, Jeanice. “Musical Monuments for the Country House: Music, Collection and Display at Tatton Park.” Music and Letters 91, no. 4 (2010): 513–35. ——. “About.” The Austen Family Music Books. 2015. University of Southampton, archive.org. https://archive.org/details/austenfamilymusicbooks&tab=about. Bunbury, Thomas. Reminiscences of a Veteran. 3 vols. London: Skeet, 1861. Cambridge, Ada. “In All Time of Our Tribulation”/“When We Falter in the Battle”; “Saviour, by Thy Sweet Compassion.” In Hymns on the Litany, by A.C., 25–9, 52–4. Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1865. ——. The Three Miss Kings by Mrs. Cross. Melbourne: Melville, Mullen & Slade, 1891. Cusick, Suzanne G. “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 471–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dawbin, Annie Marie Baxter. Memories of the Past: By A Lady in Australia. Melbourne: Williams, 1873. Dooley, Gillian, Kirstine Moffat, and John Wiltshire. “Music and Class in Jane Austen.” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 38, no. 3 (Summer 2018). Accessed February 28, 2019. http://www.jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/volume-38-no-3/doolleymoffat-wiltshire/. Frost, Lucy. No Place for a Nervous Lady: Voices from the Australian Bush. Melbourne, Vic.: McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1984. ——, ed. The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin July 1858–May 1868. St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1998. Fuller, Sophie, and Nicky Losseff, eds. The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Gall, Jennifer. “Redefining the Tradition: The Role of Women in the Evolution and Transmission of Australian Folk Music.” PhD diss., Australian National University, 2008. Herbert, Trevor, and Helen Barlow. Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hill, Jennifer. “Aspects of Australian Published Song, 1890–1914.” PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2002. Lamb, Andrew. William Vincent Wallace: Composer, Virtuoso and Adventurer. West Byfleet: Fullers Wood Press, 2012. Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. MacFie, Peter, Steve Gadd, and Marjorie Gadd. On the Fiddle from Scotland to Tasmania, 1815–1863: The Life and Music of Alexander Laing (1792–1868), Convict, Constable, Fiddler and Composer. 3rd ed. Dulcot, Tas.: Peter MacFie, 2018.

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Rosemary Richards Nelson-Burns, Lesley. “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Accessed February 28, 2019. http://www. contemplator.com/england/girl.html. Niall, Brenda. Georgiana: A Biography of Georgiana McCrae, Painter, Diarist, Pioneer; with a Catalogue of Plates by Caroline Clemente. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 1994. Radic, Thérèse [Terry]. “Australian Women in Music.” LIP (1978/79), 97–110. “Regiments of the Malta Garrison: 80th (Staffordshire Volunteers).” Accessed March 4, 2019. http://maltaramc.com/regmltgar/80th.html. Richards, Rosemary. “Frae the friends and Land I love”: The “McCrae Homestead Music Book.” Box Hill North, Vic.: R. Richards, 2005. ——. “John Wilson and Scottish Song.” In Re-Visions: Proceedings of the New Zealand Musicological Society and the Musicological Society of Australia Joint Conference Hosted by the University of Otago, Dunedin New Zealand, edited by Marian Poole, 171–85. Dunedin, NZ: New Zealand Music Industry Centre, University of Otago 2013. Accessed February 17, 2019. http://msa. org.au/edit/conference_pdfs/Proceedings%20re-Visions%202010%20Conference.pdf. ——. “Georgiana McCrae’s Manuscript Music Collections: A Life in Music.” PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2017. “Sarah Cross Little b. 1832.” Design & Art Australia Online. Accessed February 28, 2019. https:// www.daao.org.au/bio/sarah-cross-little/. Scott, Derek B. The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing-Room and Parlour. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Sherwood, Toni-Anne. “Annie Baxter in Van Diemen’s Land: An Abridged and Annotated Version of Her Journal, 1834–1851.” PhD diss., University of Tasmania, 2010. Skinner, Graeme. “Australharmony (An Online Resource toward the History of Music and Musicians in Colonial and Early Federation Australia).” Accessed February 28, 2019. http:// sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/index.php. Tennyson, Alfred. The Project Gutenberg EBook of the Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Accessed February 28, 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8601/8601-h/8601-h.htm# introduction. Weber, Thérèse. “Port Phillip Papers: The Australian Journal of Georgiana McCrae.” PhD diss., School of Language, Literature and Communication, University College, University of New South Wales, 2000.

Author Biographies Allan Badley is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. A specialist in late eighteenth-century Viennese music, Badley’s publications include several hundred scholarly editions of works by major contemporaries of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Badley co-founded the HongKong based publishing house Artaria Editions in 1995, one of the leading specialist publishers of eighteenth-century music. His own editions have featured in over fifty critically acclaimed recordings on the Naxos label. Mary Hunter is A. Leroy Greason Professor of Music Emerita at Bowdoin College. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century music, especially opera and chamber music, and is currently engaged in a project about the ways classical performers’ discourse reflects and resists its ideological framework. Daniela Kaleva is a performing arts educator and scholar. She specializes in vocal and theatrical genres and is an expert in gesture. Daniela uses interdisciplinary methods in her research and pedagogy of vocal performance practice. She has published articles in scholarly journals and research monographs on mélodrame and historically informed performance of recitative as well as on the cultural output of Melbourne-born music publisher and patron Louise Hanson-Dyer. Sterling Lambert teaches music history and theory at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His particular area of interest lies in text-music relationships and ­issues of intertextuality in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A book on Franz Schubert’s multiple settings of Goethe’s poetry was published in 2009, and he has recently completed a book on Benjamin Britten and the influence of four composers (Purcell, Bach, Mozart, and Schubert) on his composition and performance activities.

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Lawrence Mays graduated with a PhD in musicology (2018) from the Australian National University. He recently published a scholarly edition of Niccolò Piccinni’s Il regno della luna (A-R Editions, 2019). His main area of interest is eighteenth-century Italian comic opera, particularly its engagement with topical social and political issues. Recorder player Imogen Morris is artist-teacher (recorder) at the University of Auckland, where she is completing doctoral study. She is active both as a soloist and in a variety of ensemble settings, and has performed in Germany, Austria, and South Korea, as well as her homeland New Zealand. Imogen completed a Master of Music in Recorder at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg in 2017 under the tutelage of Professor Peter Holtslag. Richard Moyle is best known for his work on the music of Samoa and Tonga and his trilogy on the Aboriginal music of Central Australia. More recent are his four volumes on the music, oral tradition, language, and belief system of the Polynesian outlier of Takū. Now retired, he holds honorary positions at both Auckland and Griffith Universities. Mia Palencia is an Associate Lecturer and Researcher in Songwriting at the Conservatorium of Music, University of Tasmania. Her current PhD research focuses on creative process in songwriting and tertiary songwriting pedagogy. Mia also has a special interest in cross-collaborative research and creative outputs inspired by traditional Malaysian music forms, with a particular focus on the music of her home state of Sabah. Rosemary Richards completed a PhD in Musicology at the University of Melbourne, with a thesis entitled “Georgiana McCrae’s Manuscript Music Collections: A Life in Music” (2017). Her publications include “Frae the friends and Land I Love”: The “McCrae Homestead Music Book” (2005). Dr. Richards has presented papers at conferences in Australia and internationally. Anthony Ritchie is currently Professor of Music at The University of Otago and a leading New Zealand composer whose many commissioned works include concertos for violin, viola, flute and guitar; five symphonies; chamber music; and six operas. His work has been performed by renowned ensembles such as The Takacs Quartet, and soloists such as Bella Hristhova. His writings include the recently published “Voices from Afar: The Influence of Minimalism

Author Biographies

on New Zealand Music,” in Searches for Tradition: Essays on New Zealand Music, Past & Present (2017). Jennifer Rumbell received her PhD in musicology at the University of Queensland, where she presently enjoys teaching a variety of topics on music history. Her thesis focused on the role and function of music within the aesthetic program of the Italian Futurist movement. Her research interests include avant-garde and twentieth-century music, the interaction between music and other artistic disciplines, and the intersection between music, culture, and politics. Hannah Spracklan-Holl is a third-year PhD candidate in Musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Her doctoral research examines the musical and cultural practices of Duchess Sophie Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1613–1676), with a particular focus on the relationship between gender and politics at north German courts in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Hannah has been the recipient of a number of prestigious scholarships and awards, including an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Most recently, she was a 2018 Norman Macgeorge Scholar, and a 2018 doctoral research fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, for which she was generously supported by the Dr. Günther Findel Foundation. Polly Sussex studied cello and piano in Prague and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She completed her PhD on the Cello Sonatas of Luigi Boccherini at the University of Otago, New Zealand. In 2007–2009, Polly undertook studies in Viola da Gamba at the Hochschule für Künste, Bremen, North Germany; and in Basel, Switzerland. Polly Sussex performs, teaches, and researches baroque/classical cello and viola da gamba music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Inge van Rij is Associate Professor of musicology at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on nineteenthcentury European art music viewed from historical, critical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, as manifested in her two books for Cambridge University Press (Brahms’s Song Collections, 2006, and The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz, 2015) and articles for 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Music and Letters. She has been awarded a Marsden Grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand for a project investigating women and orchestras in the nineteenth century.

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Aleisha Ward is an award-winning writer, and is a freelance jazz historian, researcher, editor and lecturer in music history. She was the 2017 Douglas Lilburn Research Fellow and a recipient of the 2018 Ministry of Culture and Heritage New Zealand History Research Trust award for her work on the Jazz Age in New Zealand. She was one of the first graduates of the Bachelor of Music ( Jazz Performance) at the University of Auckland, holds a Masters of Arts degree in Jazz History and Research from Rutgers University, and a PhD in Music from the University of Auckland where she researched jazz in New Zealand 1920–1955.

EDITOR Nancy November is Associate Professor in musicology at the University of Auckland. Recent publications include Beethoven’s Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74, and 95 (2013); a three-volume set of fifteen string quartets by Beethoven’s contemporary Emmanuel Aloys Förster (2016); and Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven’s Vienna (Boydell Press, 2017). She is the recipient of a Humboldt Fellowship (2010–12) and two Marsden Grants from the New Zealand Royal Society.

Index 80th Regiment, British Army, 325–326, 336 absolutism, enlightened, 223–224, 225 accomplishment, 320, 324, 328 acting, 90–93, 201, 250, 254–255 Adams, Samuel, 233 advertisement, 30–31, 32, 142, 144, 146, 149, 153–154, 309, 312–313, 317 Aldeburgh Festival, 189 allegory, 216, 223, 235, 243 Allemande, 32, 52, 57, 67–69 alterity, 234–235, 243 Aitken, Alexander, 160, 164, 165, 166, 167–169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176 ancestor spirits, 101, 108–110 Anker, Lorna Stavely, 165, 174 anthropology in music theory, 118, 291 Anzac Day, 161 artistic representation of war, 160–163, see also war and music Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 165, 174 Austin, Gilbert, 257–258, 260–261, 263, 265, 268, 277 Australia as fantastic setting, 234 as space of isolation, 324, 326 early music performers, 73, 91 jazz, 313–314, 317 records of indigenous music, 324–325

records of New Zealand music, 302 settlers’ history, 324–325, 331, 332 University of Tasmania’s Conservatorium of Music, 116 women’s domestic music in, 320 ff., 324–325, 327, 328, 331, 332–333 authenticity, 53, 70n22, 122, 133, 178, 310, 314, 317 autoethnography, 83–84, 115 ff., 122–123 Avertissement, in works of Marais, 58n10 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 18, 20–21, 188–189 St. John Passion, BWV 245, 3, 181, 189–192 St. Matthew Passion, 10, 25 Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, 288 Baillie, Joanna, 327 “Woo’d & Married and a’,” 327 Baird, Julianne, 14 Balla, Giacomo, 288–289 Bal Tic Tac, 293, 295 Feu d’artifice/Fuochi di artificio, 288–289 Ballets Russes, 288 Baxter Dawbin, Annie, 320, 321, 328–333 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 19n16, 188, 251n4, 52

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Index Fifth Symphony, 252 “Moonlight” Sonata, 252 Wellington’s Victory, 163 Berlin, Johan Daniel, 42 Berlioz, Hector, 4, 249ff Lélio Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17 “Roméo au tombeau des Capulets,” 251 “Roméo seul,” 263–264, 265, 267, 268, 270 “Scène d’amour,” 251n4, 268, 275, 276, 278 Symphonie fantastique, 252–253 Bernstein, Leonard, 249, 251, 261–266, 268, 271–273, 276–281 Bigaglia, Diogenio, 45 XII Sonate, Op. 1, 45 Bilson, Malcolm, 13–15, 23 Biss, Rod, 178 body, 12, 19, 74–78, 79, 84–85, 87, 91, 92, 104, 122–123, 167, 208–209, 210, 251–281, 284, 290–295 Boosey and Hawkes, 188 bowing techniques in French viol playing, 19, 54–57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 63–67, 67–69 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, 286–287, 288, 293 Cabaret degli Indipendenti, 294 Thaïs, 287 Brahms, Johannes, 188, 339 Britain as metropolis, 320, 323, 324, 327, 329, 332 Dieupart in, 30–34, 48 flute-playing, 2, 34–38, 43–44 in Napoleonic War, 139ff. in World War I, 161–162, 166, 167, 181ff. in World War II, 184

influence on Italy, 220 orchestras, 165, 167 queens of, 202n17 theater, 254–255 viol playing, 53, 58, 67 British Broadcasting Company, 188 Britten, Barbara Britten, Benjamin, 181ff. Billy Budd, Op. 50, 184 Curlew River, Op. 71, 187 Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20, 185–188, 191 The Rape of Lucretia, Op. 37, 188 War Requiem, Op. 66, 167, 168, 182–186, 188, 189–192 Bukit Garam, 124–125, 133 Butt, John, 15, 200n9 Bylsma, Anner, 18 Cabaret 284, 289, 292–297 Caix d’Hervelois, Louis de, 52, 54, 63–64 cakewalk, 292–293 Cambodia, 183 Cambridge, Ada, 321, 323–325 “In All Time of Our Tribulation,” 323 The Three Miss Kings, 324 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 191 Cappus, Jean-Baptiste, 54, 64–65 Casavola, Franco, 286, 288, 293 Casella, Alfredo, 296 La Musica Futurista (Manifesto Futurista), 293 La Danza delle Scimmie, 293 Le Sintesi Visive della Musica, 286–287 Le Versioni Scenico-Plastiche della Musica, 287 Tango Viola, 293 China, 186

Index Chladenius, Johann Martin, 219–220 Chopin, Frédéric, 286, 288 Christie, William, 18 cinema, 192, 284, 285–288, 305, 314, 315 Clifton, Harry “Pulling Hard against the Stream,” 328 collecting artefacts, 105 as artistic expression, 320–321, 332–333 by women, 203, 321 collectors Ada Cambridge, 323–325 Annie Baxter Dawbin, 328–332 Georgiana McCrae, 326–327 Mrs. Samuel Smith, 325–326, 332 Sarah Little, 328 Sophie Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 203 folk music, 102, 122–123 jazz, 302 manuscripts, 322–323, 325 reinforcing social norms, 332–333 colonialism, 234–235, 320–321, 324– 325, 326–327, 328, 332–333 commerce, 225, 231–235 community hall, 121 concert hall, 14, 70, 163, 179, 284, 290, 294, 295, 297 conductor, 171, 249, 251, 253, 254, 259 Benjamin Britten, 181, 189 Hector Berlioz, 253–254, 280 Leonard Bernstein, 261–268, 271–273, 276–277, 279 Ton Koopman, 8 confraternities, 80–81 contemporary performance, see modern, performance, differences of

contextual mindset, 2–4, 9, 18–23, 26, 48, 73–74, 79, 80, 84, 85–90, 91, 93, 104, 106, 116, 120–121, 122–123, 127, 163–164, 166–167, 174, 237, 254, 263, 313, 322 commemoration, 102, 104–107 of war, 160–163, 168, 174, 179, 182 Corradini brothers, 285–289 “Abstract Cinema-Chromatic ­Music,” 285–285 Corra, Bruno, see Corradini brothers Cottrell, Stephen, 25 court case, 315–317 court festivities, 198–201, 208 and women, 203–205, 207, 213, 221 courtly music, 38, 54, 58, 69, 78, 80–81 Coventry Cathedral, 181–182, 184 creative practice, 26, 84, 104–105, 110, 111, 126–128, 179, 182, 192, 204, 286–287, 297, 306, 331 creativity, 2–3, 10–11, 14–15, 16, 26, 128, 140, 175, 234 cross-cultural music, 116 Crucifixion, 76, 81, 88, 91 Cuban Missile Crisis, 191 Cunningham, Sarah, 67 dance adding bodily dimension to opera, 268 American dance, 259, 262 among Sabahan people, 119, 121, 126–127 and Futurism, 288–289, 292–294, 295, 296 community-forming, 163n12, 239, 268 in hierarchy of European music genres, 156

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344

Index in private collections, 328 in Takū community, 103–104, 108–111 jazz dance, 292, 306, 308, 310, 312, 314 viol melodies for, 54, 57 Dalcroze, Émile-Jacques, 262 Danoville, le Sieur de, 53, 56–59 Dart, William, 178–179 Dawbin, Annie, see Baxter Dawbin, Annie death and coming of age, 79 in Takū community, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109–111 in war, 153, 156–158, 168, 174, 176, 187 of Christ, 80, 82, 90 De Brosses, Charles, 234–235 Delsarte, François, 259–264, 271, 280 Depero, Fortunato Cabaret Diavolo, 295 Veglia Futurista, 295–296 Derwent Valley Concert Band, 123 Dieupart, [François] Charles knowledge of wind recorder, 35, 38–39, 40, 44 life, 30–31, 48 Six Suittes history of publication, 32–34 use of recorder, 35–37, 47–48 Dieupart, Nicolas, 38–39 Disney, Walter Fantasia, 288 Dove, Jonathan For an Unknown Soldier (1914), 167 dramma giocoso, 236 Dresden, 242–243 Dumestre, Vincent, 9–11 Duncan, Roger, 187 Duncan, Ronald, 188 Mea Culpa, 188

Dunedin Symphony Orchestra, 161, 165n13 Eisel, Johann Philipp, 41–43 embodiment, 12, 26, 72, 74n3, 84–85, 91, 92, 122–123, 167, 208, 210, 219, 221, 251, 253, 271–273, 278ff. emotion, 12, 18, 73–74, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88–92, 107, 123, 178, 189, 236– 237, 252, 253–254, 255, 257, 259, 268, 322 emotional practices, 78, 81, 93 emotional states, 259–260, 263, 273, 280 enculturation, 118, 122 England, see Britain Enlightenment, 21, 217–225, 226, 229, 231–233, 235, 243 Eniccelius, Tobias, 39, 43 epistemology, 13–14, 16, 26 Epi Shalfoon and his Melody Boys, 301, 305, 308–310, 312–313, 314 court trial, 315–317 factuality, 14 feminism see women, political position of and women’s agency Fenton, Peter, 165 Filippini, Ugo, 294 film, 92, 262–263, 266, 278, 288, 301ff. and depiction of war, 161n3, 168n20, 182, 184 silent, 287, 306–307, 314 sound, 285, 286–287, 307ff. Filmcraft Ltd., 307–308, 315–317 First World War, 160–162, 165, 167– 170, 172, 174–175, 181, 189–190 For You but not for Me (The Bells of Hell), anonymous song, 164, 168, 172 Foulds, John A World Requiem (1923), 163

Index France, 18, 220, 254 recorder in, 37–40, 47, 48 viol music in, 55ff., see also bowing techniques in French viol playing dots, 58, 60 left-hand techniques, 55, 57 ornaments, 59–60 resonance, 57–59 Franci, Carlo Sebastiano, 225–226, 231 Fuller, Loie, 292 Futurism, 283–284, 290, 296, 297 music as multisensory encounter, 283–288, 290, 296 music as stimulant, 284, 291–293, 295, 296 gabang, 124–125, 129 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 24 Gallipoli, 161, 165, 168, 169, 176 gaze, 251, 257 genius, 24–25 gesture, 9, 55–56, 82, 84–85, 91, 249ff., 287 Gina, Arnaldo, 285 Gonzaga, Eleonora (Holy Roman Empress, German Queen, Queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia), 73, 80–81 Gonzaga, Francesco IV (Duke of Mantua), 79 Gordon, Alexander, fourth duke, 327 “Cauld Kail in Aberdeen,” 327 “Keith More,” 327 Gordon, Georgiana, see McCrae, Georgiana Great War, see First World War grief allegory of, 76 and memories of war, 161, 163n11 of the Virgin, 78, 80, 82, 84, 87, 90 tukumai ritual, 104, 106, 107–108 gustatory senses, 284, 295, 297

Hanani, Yehuda, 20 Handel, George Frederick, 20, 164, 171–172 The Dead March from Saul (HWV53), 171 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus, 10, 25 Harris, Ross Requiem for the Fallen, 2014 Hawkes, Ralph, 186, 188 Helm, Everett, 325 Herreweghe, Philippe, 16 high art, 284 HIP (Historically Informed Performance), 2, 9ff., 85, 92–93 freedom in, 2, 9, 10, 13ff., 21–22, 26 Hiroshima, 3, 181, 192 history, 1–4, 133, 172, 235n43, see also historicism; music based on historical events; transhistoricity contextual, 9, 18–23, 72ff., 123 interpreted, 104, 105–106, 110, 284–285 performed, 3–4, 11, 48, 166, 181–182, 192, 262, 263, 303, 321–322, 324–325, 330, 333 sonic, 9, 13–18 historical accuracy, 101, 106 historically informed performance, see HIP historicism, 219ff. Holst, Imogen 189, 190 humanism, 17–18, 20, 24, 160, 161, 163, 172, 176, 179, 202, 219–220, 236–237 Illuministi, 226, see also Enlightenment immediacy, 162, 167, 172, 179 improvisation, 11, 296 in jazz, 306, 310, 312 in titikas, 125–126, 128, 129

345

346

Index instrumental music, 9, 31, 33–35, 47, 84, 89, 121–123, 156, 167, 179, 210, 211, 322, 325 and gender, 322, 329, 331 Berlioz’s understanding of, 250–253, 271, 281 historical instruments, 10, 12, 13–15, 17, 22, 25, 36–37, 44, 53, 58ff., 70, 116, 118 jazz, 306, 312 titikas, 124, 127ff. intermedial art form, 283, see also Futurism; kinaesthetic dimension of music; multisensory approach to music; somatic dimension of music Italy classification and use of recorders, 40–46 Enlightenment in, 217, 223–227, 231, 235 ethnic song and dance, 296 high Baroque, 14, 79 Marian music, 72, 73–74, 81, 85, 89 national identity, 220, 226 notation, 54 opera, 9, 31, 56n6, 237, 239n53, 241n55 Piccinni’s ideas about the future of, 216, 243 viol and violin tradition, 53, 55, 58, 65, 69, 70 Italian Futurism, 283ff., see also Futurism irony, 168, 171, 172, 178, 179 Janin, Jules, 255, 277 Janowka, Thomas Balthasar, 41 Japan and Benjamin Britten, 181, 186–187, 188, 191, 192

Jarman, Derek, 182, 184, 188, 192 jazz movement in Italy, 292–297 in New Zealand, 301–303, 304n11, 306–307, 308, 310, 313–314 jazzing, 310, 312–313 Kadazandusun, 119–121 Kandinsky, Wassily, 285 Kemble, Charles, 255, 257, 263 Kildea, Paul, 181, 184 Kinabatangan, 124, 128, 133 kinaesthetic dimension of music, 289–290, 293–295, 297 Koopman, Ton, 18, 20 Kota Kinabalu, 116, 120, 123 Lazar, Benjamin, 9–11 Le Blanc, Hubert, 55–56 Liszt, Franz, 252–253 Little (Bingle), Sarah, 326, 328 Long Melford, 189 low art, 297 Luciani, Sebastiano Arturo, 286–288 Loulié, Étienne, 52, 53, 56, 63 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 38 lyrics, 3, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 123, 322 exaggerated, 102, 107–108, 110, 111 MacKay, Helen, 164, 172 Mahler, Gustav, 185–186 Symphony no. 6, 185 Malaysia, 116, 117, 119, 133 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 296 Mallarmé, Stéphane Les Fleurs, 286 Malta, 325–326, 332 man-machine, 291 manifesto, 283, 286–289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294

Index Manifesto Futurista per la Città Musicale, 291 Mantel, Hilary, 22 manuscript music collections, 4, 33, 45–46, 320–321, 322–323, 324, 325 Marais, Marin, 52ff. life, 54 Marais, Roland, 54, 58n11, 65, 66, 67 Marconi, Guglielmo, 291 Maria Theresa, 202, 221, 223, 224, 225, 241 Marinetti, F. T., 283, 289–290, 291, 292 Cabaret Epilettico, 293 Il Tattilismo, 289 La Radia, 290 Manifesto of Futurist Dance, 292, 293 Parole in liberta: olfattive, tattili, termiche, 289 The Variety Theater, 294 Masnata, Pino, 290–291, 292 Il Nome Radia, 290 mass culture, 284, 296–297 Mary, Marian piety, 72, 80, 81, 82, 86, 89 Mother of Jesus, 82, 87–88, 90 portrayal, 73–75, 76, 84–85, 90, 91–92 McCrae, Georgiana, 321, 326–328 McGegan, Nicholas, 20 media, 102, 167, 168, 174, 175, 283–284, 285, 286, 289, 290, 297 memory, 101, 126, 133, 320 communal, 106, 110, 111 embodied, 278 family, 116, 324 formalized, 105, 162, 174, 254 personalized, 116 selective, 101, 105, 106, 111 Mendelssohn, Felix Frühlingslied, 286

Milan, 217, 220, 221, 223, 224, 231, 233, 240–241, 243 militarism, 216, 234, 235 mimesis, 81, 90, 92 mixed methods of performance research, 72, 82, 92 modern, 26, 74, 163n12, 283, 284, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 304 changes in lifestyle, 121 performance, differences of, 3, 13– 15, 18, 19, 30, 53, 57, 58, 59, 69 70, 73, 111, 116, 122, 123, 128, 129, 133, 161–162, 218 terms, translation of historical context in, 21, 22, 23, 88 warfare, 184 modernity, 217–220 modernization, 115, 117, 127, 288 Monteverdi, Claudio Giovanni Antonio, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81 Il pianto della Madonna, 72 Morel, Jacques, 54, 63 Moreau de Commagny, CharlesFrançois-Jean-Baptiste, 254–256, 257, 277 Souvenirs du Théâtre Anglais à Paris, 254, 256, 257, 277 Morton, H. V., 172 multisensory approach to music, 283–284, 285, 288, 296, see also Futurism; intermedial art form; kinaesthetic dimension of music; somatic dimension of music music and propaganda, 168 music and truth, 17–18, 22, 111, 160, 162, 164, 168, 175–176, 255 music based on historical events, 110–112, 140–142, 162, 174, 181, 191, see also commemoration music-hall, 290

347

348

Index musical featurette, 301, 303–306, 309, 313, 317 Muzak, 292 Nagasaki, 181, 192 Ngata, Sir Apirana, 102, 164 new science, 218, 220 New York, 187 New Zealand, 160–161, 165, 166, 167, 174, 175, 178, 234, 301ff., 325, 330 New Zealand Truth, 315 Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, 301, 317 Noh Theatre, 187 nuclear warfare, 182, 184, 188, 191 Oh What a Lovely War!, musical (1963), 168 Oh! What a Lovely War, film (1969), 168n20 opera buffa see dramma giocoso optical sound, 303ff. Orang Sungai, 122, 124–126 “other,” 4, 217, 221, 228–229, 234–235, 239, 243 Owen, Wilfred, 161, 181, 182, 189 “At a Calvary near Ancre,” 190 pantomime, 250n2, 255, see also acting Parini, Giuseppe, 223n20, 224–225, 226, 227, 232–233, 243 Paris Conservatoire, 259 Parliament Choir (Britain), 162, 178 Parrott, Andrew, 10 participation, 122, 203, 232, 268, 283, 290, 294, 295, 297 passions, 73, 76–78, 79, 88–89 Grief, 76ff. Passion, 82n31 patriarchy, 201, 235 Pears, Peter, 190

performance, 3, 9, 19, 23, 36, 48, 82–84, 89, 92, 93, 123, 126–127, 161, 182, 189, 192, 204–205, 253, 254, 262– 263, 284, 289, 292, 293–294, 295– 297, see also modern, performance, differences of performance practice, 4, 14, 15, 33–34, 47, 53–54, 67n19, 74, 104, 106–107, 110, 111, 112, 122, 199–201, 306, 310, 317, 322, 324 performance style, 25, 57, 69, 73, 79, 81, 84 performative research, 74n3, 82n33, 84, 92 Piccinni, Niccolò, 216ff. Il regno della Luna, 236–239, 243 physiology, 290 Pièces, see Marais Pièces en concert, 33 Plainte (by Marais), 52, 59–63 genre, 63–64 ornament, 59 Poe, Edgar Allan Hop-Frog, 293 Poème Harmonique, 9–10, 15 Polynesia, 101–103 singing in, 103 Psathas, John No Man’s Land, 2016, 160–161, 162 practice-as-research, 161 practice-based research, 116, 122 Praetorius, Michael, 39 Prampolini, Enrico, 285 programming, 140, 151, 153, 155, 251, 296 Pyne, J. C., Musician, 80th Regiment, 325 “German Passo Doppio” (arr.) Quintilian Insitutio Oratoria, 86 quotation, 178–179

Index radio, 187, 284, 289–292, 297, 301, 302n1 Radio Sabah, 120–121 recorder, 29ff. consort, 34, 39, 47 transposing instrument, 35–36, 38, 46 voice flute, 29, 30, 35–36, 48 recording, 10, 14–17, 19n16, 20, 25, 33, 69, 83, 102, 118, 121, 122, 124, 133, 161n3, 189, 192, 301ff. industry, 302 reform operas, 241 rehearsal, 19, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 133, 262, 268, 277, 278, 280 rhetoric, 21, 23, 73–74, 84, 85, 87, 89 rhetorical visuality, 86, 93, 259 Rice, Walter J. “‘Love among the Roses’ Schottische” (arr.), 328 Ritchie, Anthony Gallipoli to the Somme, 2016, 161ff. ritual music, 74, 79, 84, 198 in Sabah, 115, 117–121, 133 on Takū, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111 Roger, Estienne, 32–34, 36, 40, 44, 47 Rosenberg, Isaac, 164 Rotorua, 308–309, 310, 316, 317 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 223, 228 Russolo, Luigi, 286n8, 296 Rutter, George Oswald, 331–332 “Claribel,” 332 “Ellen Adair,” 331 Sabah, 117 identity, 121 rituals, 117–118 traditional music in, 116–120, 122, 133–134 sau dances, 109, 111

Sauveur, Joseph, 38 Schleswig-Holstein music festival, 251, 263n43, 266 Schubert, Franz “Der Wegweiser” from Die Winterreise (D.795), 172 science, 24, 218, 226, 228–230, 233–235, 291, see also new science science fiction, 216 scientific method, 218 Second World War, 181–182, 184, 188, 191 Segantini, Giovanni, 286 Selhof, Nicolas, 44 senses, 2, 74, 229, 284, 289–290, 295–296 of freedom, 16, 17, 20–22 of history, 11–13, 15, 18 sensory experience, 284, 286, 289, 294, 295, 297 Shakespeare, William, 252, 254–255, 281 Romeo and Juliet, 249, 250–251, 255–257, 263 Shalfoon, Gareeb “Epi,” 308 Sherman, Bernard, 10–15, 18, 20, 23 Sibley Music Library, 52n, 67–68 sight, see gaze Small, Christopher, 104 Smith, Adam, 232 Smith, Mrs. Samuel, see collecting, collectors Smithson, Harriet, 255–257, 260, 278 somatic dimension of music, 284, 289–290, 292, 293–294, 296, see also Futurism; intermedial art form; kinaesthetic dimension of music; multisensory approach to music Somme, 164, 165–166, 171, 178 sonic mindset, 92 Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 164 sound-on-film, 301, 303–304, 307–308

349

350

Index Southbank Sinfonia, 167 Spears, Edward, 164 Speer, Georg Daniel, 40–41, 43 spirits, 101, 105, 108, 119 spirit-composed songs, 105, 108–109, 110–111 Stanesby, Thomas, Jr., 35–36 Stramm, August, 164, 176 Stravinsky, Igor Feu d’artifice (Fuochi di artificio), 288–289 style galant, 19, 67 style, musical, 163–164, 167 sumazau, 119–121 synchronized sound, 303, 304, see also sound-on-film synesthesia in Futurism’s conception of music, 285 tactile exploration, 289–290, 297, see also Futurism tactus, 85, 87, 89 Tahiwi, Kingi “He Pūru Taitama,” 310–312 Tahiwis, 310 Talbot, James, 34, 36 Takū, 103–106, 108–112 Tans’ur, William, Sr., 35, 36 Taruskin, Richard, 25 Tasmania, 116, 133–134 TCHIP (Transforming NineteenthCentury Historically Informed Performance), 11, see also HIP Tear, Robert, 189 Teatro degli Indipendenti, 293 technology and Enlightenment, 220 and Futurism, 284, 289, 291–292, 297 and social change, 118, 122

and trauma, 176 and vision, 253, 285ff. cinema, 284ff., see also sound-on-film in Piccinni’s lunar society, 217, 229 radio, 290 Telemann, Georg Philipp, 46 Aesopus bei Hofe, TWV 21:26, 47 Der getreue Music-Meister, 47 Thomas, Edward, 172 Thomas, Helen, 164, 172 titikas, 115, 122–123, 124–129 Tokyo, 187 transhistoricity, 23–26 trauma, artistic representation of, 174–176, 178, 179 tuki songs, 105–107, 110–111 Uhland, Ludwig, 164 USA, 307 Britten in, 184 utilitarianism, 225–226 verbunkos, 163 Verona, 291 Verri, Pietro, 221n13, 223, 224, 240 Versailles, 59, 69, 70 viol playing, see bowing techniques in French viol playing; France, viol music in; dance, viol melodies for; Italy, viol and violin tradition viole, basse de, 32, 33, 59n12 visualization, 72, 85, 89, 90, 252 visual music, 286 Vive la compagnie, 164, 171, 172, 178 Wallace, William Vincent “In Happy Moments Day by Day” (Maritana), 331 “Sweet Spirit, Hear My Prayer” (Lurline), 331 Walther, Johann Gottfried

Index war and music, 3, 139–140, 141, 160–163, 166–167, 172, 174–175, 178–179, 184–185, 186, 189–190, 198, 200, 203, 214 Watson-White, Helen, 178 Whakarewarewa, 309, 314 Wilderer, Johann Hugo von, 46 Giocasta, 46–47 Nino overó La Monarchia Stabilita, 46 Winter, Dennis, 176 Winter, Jay, 168 women, 5, 197, 216, 322, 325, see also collecting, collectors agency, 204–206, 208–209, 213–214, 226, 233, 320, 321

marriage, 228 political position of, 4, 201–210, 223–224 sau dances, 109, 111 social position and education, 219, 225–226 word-painting in Gallipoli to the Somme, 167, 171–172, 176 in War Requiem, 167 World War I, see First World War World War II, see Second World War Zeitgeist, 297

351