The Stylus Phantasticus and Free Keyboard Music of the North German Baroque

Paul Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351540216
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

The concept of stylus phantasticus (orfantastic style ) as it was expressed in free keyboard music of the north German Baroque forms the focus of this book. Exploring both the theoretical background to the style and its application by composers and performers, Paul Collins surveys the development of Athanasius Kircher's original concept and its influence on music theorists such as Brossard, Janovka, Mattheson, and Walther. Turning specifically to fantasist composers of keyboard works, the book examines the keyboard toccatas of Merulo, Fresobaldi, Rossi and Froberger and their influence on north German organists Tunder, Weckmann, Reincken, Buxtehude, Bruhns, Lubeck, Bohm, and Leyding. The free keyboard music of this distinguished group highlights the intriguing relationship at this time between composition and performance, the concept of fantasy, and the understanding of originality and individuality in seventeenth-century culture.

Chapter 1

Classifications of musical style during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

Introduction

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, musicians became increasingly conscious of the labyrinthine nature of musical style, a consciousness reflected in the ever-greater complexity of theorists’ treatment of the concept during the period.¹ This chapter investigates the various classification systems advocated by leading music theorists and lexicographers to 1740, thus providing a context for the subsequent discussion of the stylus phantasticus, or ‘fantastical’ style, from a theoretical perspective in the following two chapters.² The sources reviewed include the theoretical contributions of Marco Scacchi (c1600-between 1681 and 1687), Christoph Bernhard (1628–92), Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), and Johann Mattheson (1681–1764), as well as the first works of modem music lexicography, namely the dictionaries of Tomáš Baltazar Janovka (1669–1741), Sébastien de Brossard (1655–1730), and the encyclopedia by Johann Gottfried Walther (1684–1748). All of these sources offer critical insights into the concept of musical style as it was perceived during the Baroque. A discussion of the voluminous Musurgia universalis treatise of 1650 by Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, a celebrated tome that endeavoured to embrace the fullest possible spectrum of musical learning and which made a seminal contribution to the codification of musical styles, rightly forms the centrepiece of the chapter, as later writers on music were to rely heavily upon the Jesuit’s erudite compendium as a key source. Prior to considering Kircher’s rambling system of style classification and its ‘descendants’, however, the more succinct classifications of Scacchi and Bernhard are examined, as is style consciousness in Italy before Scacchi. The chapter concludes with a brief look at the musical styles elucidated by the English dictionary compiler James Grassineau (d/1767), long considered to be little more than a translator of Brossard’s work.

Style consciousness in Italy before Scacchi

Much of the history of musical style theory was fashioned from controversy. Theories were articulated and refined in the heat of polemics, as in the dispute between Giovanni Maria Artusi (c1540–1613) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), the controversy between Scacchi and Danzig organist Paul Siefert (1586–1666), and Mattheson’s polemic with composer and theorist Johann Heinrich Buttstett (1666–1727) early in the eighteenth century These exchanges amounted to a confrontation between the conservative and the progressive, between what was considered an immutable body of inherited theory and contemporary practice, and also, on a philosophical level, between reason (ratio) and the senses (sensus).³

At the outset of the Baroque, Claudio Monteverdi and his brother, Giulio Cesare (1573–1630/31), codified the seconda prattica, a new musical aesthetic that was pivotal in emancipating composers of a younger generation from the strictures of Renaissance polyphony and that also proved one of the early seeds from which a plethora of later baroque styles would spring.⁴ The Monteverdi brothers’ manifestos of 1605⁵ and 1607,⁶ in which they enunciated this ‘second’ practice, was prompted by the appearance in 1600 of L’Artusi, overo delle imperfettioni della moderna musica by Bolognese cleric and theorist Artusi.⁷ The second ragionamento, or discourse, of Artusi’s dialogue work had criticized what its author alleged was unorthodox and improper treatment of dissonance in as yet unpublished madrigals by Monteverdi, who remained unnamed throughout the discourse.⁸ A student of the most important contrapuntal theorist of the sixteenth century, Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–90), Artusi believed the edifice of counterpoint to be under threat and had sought to defend the prima prattica, in which maintaining the perfection of the harmony prevailed over a concern for a composition’s affective power. Monteverdi’s seconda prattica, which was established by the composer Cipriano de Rore (c1515–65) according to Giulio Cesare’s gloss of 1607, focused, however, on expressive force, the vehicle for which was a work’s text.⁹ In the theoretically-driven, rule-dominated ‘first practice’, formulated by Zarlino, ‘the harmony’, writes Giulio Cesare, was ‘not the servant, but the mistress of the words.’¹⁰ The newly titled ‘second’ practice or ‘second practical usage’, hinging on a freer use of dissonance and ‘the perfection of the “melody”’, sought to reverse this subjugation of the text and aimed at forging music and text into an expressive whole.¹¹

The dispute between Artusi and Monteverdi, which continued until 1608, may be seen as a paradigm of what was to follow in later controversies, most notably the Scacchi-Siefert polemic of forty years later and that between Mattheson and Buttstett early in the following century. Aspects of the original Italian altercation would be re-enacted, but on battlegrounds further north. The coexistence of two mutually exclusive musical practices or styles was acknowledged by Scacchi, who would build his own stylistic complex on Monteverdi’s foundations. Like Monteverdi, Scacchi revered both practices, but tired of musical anachronists who viewed sixteenth-century contrapuntal theory as an unsurpassable peak of achievement and for whom change and progress were anathema. Mattheson, the most important theorist and polemicist of the German Baroque, would, as we shall see, go one step further and seek to disengage from his own German music theory tradition. His ‘opponent’, Erfurt organist Buttstett, believed, like Artusi, that degeneration would result from such a rejection of musical tradition and that ‘only in the past could musical truth be found.’¹²

The Monteverdi-Artusi dispute also raised a philosophical issue that became a hallmark of later controversies and which was explored most fully in the writings of Mattheson: the opposition of reason and the senses, that is, whether musicians should accede to reason or the ear in making musical judgements. The rationalist Artusi, like the polymath Kircher, asserts the primacy of the intellect and criticizes modernist composers for their reliance on the ear alone. Ironically, however, it is through the comments of the more open-minded of the fictitious interlocutors in his 1600 treatise, Luca, that Artusi slights such composers. The Bolognese theorist’s stance is captured in Luca’s remark that the modernists ‘think only of satisfying the sense, caring little that reason should enter here to judge their compositions.’¹³ It is also, paradoxically, the more conservative of the interlocutors, Vario, who recalls the empiricist battle cry that there is ‘nothing in the intellect that has not first been perceived by the senses.’¹⁴ Artusi, by writing his second discourse of 1600 in dialogue form, wished to comment impartially upon Monteverdi’s stylistic improprieties, but it is clear that the theorist shares the opinions of his learned but imaginary interlocutor, Vario.

In addition to the prefaces of 1605 and 1607, Monteverdi’s introduction to his eighth book of madrigals in 1638 was to impact on the future development of musical style classification. The diverse musical styles found in this volume, the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, reflects the very proliferation and multiplicity of styles characteristic of the first half of the seventeenth century itself.¹⁵ Monteverdi’s reflections on oratory and expressiveness in music now yielded a new genere or stile concitato (‘agitated’) that complimented what he regarded as music’s two existing genera or styles: molle (‘soft’) and temperato (‘moderate’). Music could now offer equivalents to all three of man’s ‘principal passions or affections ... namely, anger, moderation, and humility or supplication.’¹⁶ Of particular importance is the closing part of the 1638 preface, which reveals a nascent classification system in which Monteverdi juxtaposes performance method, style, and madrigal category.¹⁷ Palisca has schematized the composer’s thinking in the following table.¹⁸

Table 1.1 Palisca’s suggested ‘scheme of coordinates’ based on the preface to Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, libro ottavo (1638)

Manner of Performance	oratorical	harmonic	rhythmic
Genre of Composition	theatre	chamber	da bailo
Category of Madrigal	guerriero (warlike)	amoroso (amorous)	rappresentativo (representational)

This tidy system of correspondences has its limitations, however, as some of the pieces in Monteverdi’s collection can only be described by permutations of the scheme. For example, the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which forms part of the first half of the composer’s madrigal book (the Madrigali guerrieri) is described as being ‘in genere rappresentativo’, as is the Ballo delle ingrate, from the second half (the Madrigali amorosi).

While the L’Artusi treatise and the Monteverdi prefaces of 1605, 1607, and 1638 contributed significantly to the development of style awareness during the early Baroque, the period of flux in contrapuntal theory that lasted for about fifty years from the 1580s also witnessed important contributions from such theorists as Pontio, Diruta, and Banchieri, in which two kinds of counterpoint were generally acknowledged. The first, formulated by Zarlino, was osservato or strict, while the other, governed by no clear set of rules, was more ‘empirical’ in its focus on delighting the listener. As early as 1588, in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Classifications of musical, style during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
• 2 Kir eher’s Musurgia universalis (1650) and the stylus phantasticus
• 3 The stylus phantasticus in eighteenth-century writings: Janovka, Brossard, Mattheson, Walther, and Grassineau
• 4 The origins of the stylus phantasticus and the style’s relationship to rhetoric
• 5 The free keyboard works of the north German organ school and the stylus phantasticus
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index