Keyboard Music Before 1700
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Keyboard Music Before 1700

Alexander Silbiger, Alexander Silbiger

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eBook - ePub

Keyboard Music Before 1700

Alexander Silbiger, Alexander Silbiger

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Keyboard Music Before 1700 begins with an overview of the development of keyboard music in Europe. Then, individual chapters by noted authorities in the field cover the key composers and repertory before 1700 in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain and Portugal. The book concludes with a chapter on performance practice, which addresses current issues in the interpretation and revival of this music.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781135924225

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: THE FIRST CENTURIES
OF EUROPEAN KEYBOARD MUSIC

Alexander Silbiger
With the introduction of a keyboard, musicians lost direct contact with the source of their music. A mechanism, sometimes elementary, sometimes formidably complex, was interposed between vibrating strings or air columns and their own bodies. Yet this device proved to be a tool of unprecedented power, allowing a single individual to harness music's full harmony, whether for private solace or for the spiritual uplift of a multitude. Few of the instrument's qualities were as consequential as the ability of each of the player's hands to produce music by itself. The two hands could be like two players, both emerging from one, and easily merged back into one. This effect determined much of keyboard music's special character as well as the forms of notation; the early history of keyboard music can be seen as a history of the exploration and exploitation of this two-handed potential.
Simultaneous negotiation of both hands was, and continues to be, a chief challenge to those seeking to master the keyboard; whereas players of a single line can channel their musicality into realizing the line's expressive content, players of multiple lines must also manage the interplay and balance among several voices. It is no wonder that keyboard playing would become a nearly indispensable auxiliary skill for all musicians attempting to grasp and manipulate the complex textures of music of later centuries, and that so many composers would come from the ranks of masters of that skill. The addition of a pedal board would eventually enhance the instrument's power further, without changing its fundamental nature. Finally, the arrangement of the keys according to ascending pitches almost naturally led to polarized roles for the hands, with a division of labor between treble and bass, or melody and accompaniment, and may very well have facilitated the rise of those conceptions so crucial to music's further development.
Although an instrument functioning in principle like an organ was already known in ancient Greece and Rome (ancient texts credit its invention to an Alexandrian engineer, Ctesibius, in the third century B.C.), we have no evidence of instruments with keyboards sufficiently similar to their modern counterparts to permit real polyphonic playing much before the late fourteenth century (which is not to say that such instruments could not have existed somewhat earlier). From that period survive concrete reports on organs and their use, parts of actual instruments, and clear depictions of organists with both hands on the keyboard. The harpsichord and clavichord also seem to have entered the musical world around this time; a document from 1397 credits the invention of the former to a Viennese physician, Hermann Poll, who called his device a clavicembalum.
It probably is no coincidence that the first samples of notated keyboard music date from this period.1 More surprising is the wide geographic distribution of these early specimens, which come from England, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany; the urge to record keyboard solos on parchment or paper evidently was not confined to any one part of Europe. On the other hand, the varieties of notational forms, which laid the foundations for long-lived regional traditions, suggest that these forms did not emanate from a central source but represent local solutions to the problem of capturing keyboard music on the page. How to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by these new, or newly improved, instruments, and how to notate the results, would by no means have been obvious, and the surviving evidence provides no more than occasional hints of the story of its accomplishment.

Notation

Musical culture had been solidly based on musicians performing single lines, and polyphony was created by the collaboration of several such performers. Coordination of their parts had become much facilitated by the comparatively recent system of mensural notation. This system primarily served singers, who had been the main practitioners of polyphony; pitch notation relied on solmization practice, and thus was relative. When it was realized that on a keyboard more than one voice could be performed, the obvious thing to try would have been the simultaneous rendition of two independent voices, one by each hand, although there also may have been experimentation with drones and parallel organum.2 Thus it comes as no surprise that the earliest surviving keyboard pieces have mostly two-voice textures, with each voice notated quite distinctly. Even adaptations of three-part songs tend to retain only two of the voices, usually cantus and tenor (or sometimes cantus and a composite of the two lower voices). At most an occasional sustained sonority is filled in with a third note. Elaborate diminutions in the upper voice suggest a well-developed right-hand technique, but no such demands were yet made of the left hand. Because of the two-part texture and the slow-moving lower voice, some of these pieces may sound a bit thin and static to modern ears, although one cannot help admiring the dazzling diminutions, particularly those of the Faenza Codex.3 During the second half of the fifteenth century a third voice finally makes its entry in Germany, with partial reliance on the pedal; however, judging by the surviving examples, the playing of full-voiced polyphonic or chordal textures had to wait for the next century.
The surviving specimens of keyboard music from before c. 1500 are few. A rough count nets some 25 manuscripts ranging from fragments preserved in book bindings to the quite substantial Faenza and Buxheim Codices.4 It is a minor miracle that these manuscripts exist at all, since solo keyboard playing during this period, and indeed, for much of the time covered by this book, largely proceeded without the aid of written music. (Pianists still tend to perform in public without scores.) Some awareness of how the music was notated should be of interest even to players who approach this repertory mostly through modern editions, and might in fact help them interpret what they see.
Two fundamentally different approaches are encountered in the early sources. The first is called old German organ (or keyboard) tablature because it was used mostly in the Germanic regions, although it may not have originated there, since early examples exist from England (Robertsbridge fragment, c. 1360) and Italy (Bologna fragment, c. 1480; see Ill. 1.1).5 In principle it consists of a single staff on which the upper line for the right hand is notated more or less as if it were a vocal part; the pitches of the lower lines for the left hand are placed immediately below, and are represented by letters with, in the later sources, the addition of rhythmic symbols (usually in the form of little strokes and flags); see also Illustrations 4.1 and 4.2. The origin of this curious but longlived practice (until c. 1570) can be imagined as follows. In fourteenthcentury polyphonic songs each voice was notated by itself on a different part of the same page (so-called “choirbook” format). Someone trying out a song on a keyboard would need to look simultaneously at two different parts of the page or, more realistically, to memorize part of one voice while reading another. The tablature notation may have started when, as a memory aid, people began indicating with letters a lower part underneath the highest part.
The second method, called Italian keyboard tablature or intavolatura (although variants of the same idea were used in France, England, and eventually even in Germany), employs two parallel staves that indicate the lines for the right and left hand with (again, more or less) vocal notation. Thus, it closely resembles modern keyboard notation, although we will note a few differences of which one should be aware when preparing editions or performing from a facsimile. The assignment of each of the two staves to a different hand was to remain part of the Italian tablature tradition through the seventeenth century. Illustration 1.2 shows one of the earliest examples, stemming from the northern Netherlands, with the typically active right hand and slowly moving left hand.6 Each hand is occasionally asked to play two keys simultaneously (e.g., penultimate measure of the second system). Characteristic of Italian tablature and contributing to its modern appearance are the bar lines, not usually seen in vocal notation of the time. In fact, the staff notations used in both the early German tablatures for the right hand and the early Italian tablatures for both hands differed in several respects from the contemporary mensural notation; we shall come back to these differences, which concern especially the notation of time values and accidentals and usually can be related to the different orientations of singers and keyboard players.
art
ILLUSTRATION 1.1. “Tabula et intavolature del canto de organo,” Bologna fragment, late fifteenth century (I-Bu MS 596.HH. 24, f. 2). Reproduced by courtesy of the Biblioteca universitaria di Bologna.
In Germany the asymmetric, right-hand-privileging tablature was abandoned in the late sixteenth century, not, as had happened elsewhere, by giving the left hand its own staff, but by extending the letter notation to the right hand. The resulting so-called new German organ tablature remained in common use throughout the seventeenth century, with occasional competition from the partitura system and, increasingly, from staff notation. The tablature's layout tended to be polyphonic, with each voice represented by a row of letters above which were placed the durational signs; see Illustration 4.4. Although this system does not provide a suggestive graphic representation of musical events comparable to that of staff notation, it does offer several advantages that may account for its long survival. Writing staff notation has always been a laborious process, requiring a special skill and wasteful of precious paper; to print a complex keyboard score in a manner that really does it justice called for the even rarer skill of engraving it on a copper plate (for examples, see Ills. 5.10 and 5.12). Copying a score in new German tablature was quick and used up relatively little paper; it could be printed quite economically by combining a limited number of set type pieces (see Ill. 4.4). This tablature also was probably easier to learn to play from (provided one knew one's alphabet), since there was a direct connection between each letter and each key, and no clefs to worry about. On the other hand, a player had to take in two distinct symbols for the pitch and duration of each note, or eight symbols altogether for a four-part chord, which does seem rather cumbersome.
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries Italian tablature developed more or less smoothly to modern notational practice. To avoid ledger lines staves often had more than five lines—commonly six for the treble staff and seven or eight for the bass staff. A more important difference, often still noticeable in modern editions of the tablatures, is that the original notation indicates what should be played, but makes no effort to show the underlying voice leading by rests, direction of stems, double stems, or division between staves.
art
ILLUSTRATION 1.2. “Empris domoyrs,” Groningen fragment, late fourteenth century (NL-G Inc. 70v). Reproduced by courtesy of the University Library, Groningen.
When contrapuntal voicing was of prime concern in keyboard compositions, Italian composers could avail themselves of partitura notation or open score, usually in four voices. It was especially favored for pieces in the polyphonic style like ricercars and fantasies, but also was sometimes used—at least in Naples—for other types of works, such as toccatas, dances, and variations. A fringe benefit that may account for some instances of its use was that printers had a much easier time printing the individual voice staves than the complex textures represented on the staves of tablature notation, particularly when printing from movable type. Thus, both pedagogical benefits and economy may be responsible for the occasional use of partitura almost everywhere in Europe (see, e.g., Ills. 4.7, 4.9, and 6.4).
Outside Italy and Germany we have no evidence of a continuous tradition of notating keyboard music before the sixteenth century. In England and France a two-stave system similar to Italy's came into use, although the approaches were different in each country. The English seemed to have looked on their keyboard scores as an attempt to accommodate several voices on two staves rather than as a tablature, and they carried over several elements of mensural notation, although until the later seventeenth century they did prefer six-line staves. When there are more than two voices, an attempt is made to preserve each voice's horizontal integrity (sometimes a middle voice is written entirely with black notes to distinguish it from the other voices; see Ill. 2.2), whereas there is little concern with the vertical alignment of simultaneous pitches (Ills. 2.2 to 2.5 provide various other samples of English notation).
There are so few French keyboard sources from before the seventeenth century that it would be dangerous to regard their idiosyncracies as representative of a French tradition. Like the later French sources they possess one characteristic that would be universally adopted in keyboard notation from the eighteenth century onward: the use of two fiveline staves. In fact, except for the frequent use of soprano clef in the upper staff and baritone clef in the lower one (and in some cases the heavy overgrowth of ornament signs), most early French keyboard scores can be read with little difficulty by present-day players (see Ills. 3.2 and 3.3, the latter showing the peculiarly French nonmetric notation of the préludes non-mensurés, discussed in chapter 3).
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish sources show notational systems similar in principle to new German tablature, except that numbers were used rather than letters (see Ill. 6.5), and we have already noted instances of the use of partitura. Eventually, however, two-staff notation gained the upper ha...

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