Style and Performance for Bowed String Instruments in French Baroque Music

Mary Cyr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317048817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikgeschichte & -kritik

Mary Cyr addresses the needs of researchers, performers, and informed listeners who wish to apply knowledge about historically informed performance to specific pieces. Special emphasis is placed upon the period 1680 to 1760, when the viol, violin, and violoncello grew to prominence as solo instruments in France. Part I deals with the historical background to the debate between the French and Italian styles and the features that defined French style. Part II summarizes the present state of research on bowed string instruments (violin, viola, cello, contrebasse, pardessus de viole, and viol) in France, including such topics as the size and distribution of parts in ensembles and the role of the contrebasse. Part III addresses issues and conventions of interpretation such as articulation, tempo and character, inequality, ornamentation, the basse continue, pitch, temperament, and "special effects" such as tremolo and harmonics. Part IV introduces four composer profiles that examine performance issues in the music of Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Marin Marais, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, and the Forquerays (father and son). The diversity of compositional styles among this group of composers, and the virtuosity they incorporated in their music, generate a broad field for discussing issues of performance practice and offer opportunities to explore controversial themes within the context of specific pieces.

PART I
Sources and Style in French Baroque Music

Chapter 1
Historical Context, Musical Works, and Performance

Introduction

Music of the past occupies a central place in today’s classical concert repertoire. With so many recordings and concert performances of early music on offer today, listeners may find it surprising to learn that the quest to discover how early music was performed at the time it was written is a relatively recent phenomenon. Such investigations form the core of the field of performance practice, whose origins can be traced to the early years of the twentieth century. Early efforts at reviving music of the past concentrated on investigations into the construction and use of early instruments, as well as editing and publishing early music. Significant interest on the part of scholars, performers, and listeners in music of the past has contributed in a very positive way to the expansion of the field of performance practice since the middle of the twentieth century. Today the study of performance practice encompasses a variety of different approaches, all of which are primarily concerned with the application of historically informed ways of performing music of the past.1 Such investigations have as their goal a desire to bring performers and listeners closer to understanding and interpreting music of the past and to applying our instinct and musical judgment in ways that help us to discover how early composers intended their music to sound. Interest in performing on early instruments has fostered closer relationships between scholars and performers, leading to an exchange of research results that benefit both groups. Areas that have seen fruitful collaboration include, for example, iconography (the study of visual depictions of music-making and musical instruments), instrument construction and restoration, and the study of specific techniques associated with playing and singing early music.

The objectives for the study of performance practice have changed significantly since the mid-twentieth century. A particularly controversial discussion took place around the notion of authenticity and the extent to which it ought to be seen as a goal for studying performance practice. The 1980s mark a turning point in some ways, a time when objectives and methods were re-examined with a view to reevaluating the importance of authenticity and whether pursuing it as a goal might actually obscure rather than enhance the objectives of studying music of the past.2 Looking back on the authenticity debate, Stanley Sadie argued for a measured approach, one by which performers would seek authenticity not because they wish to be purists, but because they find that historically informed research and methods bring us closer to understanding a work (as a larger entity than the music itself).3 Looked at from the music as a starting point, one might find Richard Taruskin’s observation useful, that performing early music is an attempt to “re-imagine” something old, not necessarily to create it anew.4

One result of the authenticity debate was a recognition that artistic judgment and musicality remain core values in the study of performance practice. Since the early 1990s, the phrase “historically informed performance” (often abbreviated HIP) has gained acceptance as a term that embraces both artistic endeavor and historical research. Seeking a historically informed performance encourages scholarly investigation but recognizes the importance of combining early techniques with artistic judgment. Historically informed performance thus becomes a useful way of describing the objectives of performance practice, which are continually shifting to take into account the ongoing collaborations between scholars and performers and the ways that new research informs musical performance.

A parallel shift in objectives has taken place in the editing of musical editions. Related to the performer’s quest for authenticity was the concept of an Urtext edition whose objective was to present a work with its “original” or intended meaning. Some performers looked to an Urtext for a musical score that is free of editorial intervention and therefore (theoretically, at least) as the composer may have wished to present it. This view brought the value of an editor into question, and with the arrival of facsimile editions (photographic reproductions of original sources), the argument became stronger that the editor’s work had become superfluous, since increasingly performers could consult “original” sources themselves.5 Today, scholars and performers usually support a more moderate view that would encourage performers to engage with multiple sources, both original ones and modern scholarly editions, while stipulating that no edition can be (or even should be) entirely devoid of editorial intervention, and even facsimiles have inherent pitfalls that hinder their usefulness.

Playing from Facsimiles

Playing from facsimiles has certain advantages for early music performers, the most obvious being the opportunity to make one’s own decisions about ornamentation, figured-bass realization, and other musical features not always fully indicated by composers. Facsimiles also usually offer fewer page-turns than modern editions, and they give performers the opportunity to experience the “look and feel” of an original source. However, players need to be cautious in choosing facsimiles, for they do not always represent a faithful copy of an original text. Despite being a photo-mechanical reproduction, facsimiles have often (in fact, usually) been altered by in-house cleaning up, which publishers feel obliged to do given the difficulty of reading music that may have spots, ink smudges, and bleed-through of ink from the reverse side of certain pages. Unfortunately, if the “cleaning up” is not done with extreme care, it may also destroy information that was essential to the music. There are examples of clefs, time signatures, and other information being changed or deleted in-house in the name of producing a cleaner score. That publishers have in many cases not indicated what has been altered in their facsimiles can make the choice a difficult one for players. Facsimiles have allowed players to explore a much broader range of early music than is available in scholarly editions, but they are not necessarily dependable documents for scholarly research, and for performance they may also be misleading in certain ways.6

Nicholas Temperley has argued that facsimiles have limited value for performers, since one of their disadvantages is that to understand fully the meaning of the symbols in their totality requires the intervention of an editor. Writing in 1985, Temperley spoke of a time not yet experienced when performers would have “re-educated themselves in the idiosyncrasies of early music notation (C clefs, continuo realizations, ornament signs and the rest) to be able to use unedited facsimiles with confidence.”7 Temperley’s wish for a time when performers would be able to cope with the conventions of the past has come much closer to being a reality today. Many Baroque violinists take not only C clefs but also French violin clef (treble clef on the first line) in stride, and many keyboard players realize basse continue parts fluently, but with this change has come the realization that many notational conventions and practices still need to be explained and assimilated.

French scores of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were produced at a time when several different printing methods were in use, and the musical symbols and conventions that govern them changed, sometimes numerous times. Moreover, some French scores represent only a schematic outline of the full instrumentation that was intended to be used in performance. Often they were published in an abbreviated format called a short score (partition réduite) in which certain parts (usually the inner parts, or parties de remplissage) were omitted.8 Consulting a facsimile edition of such a score may not necessarily bring performers closer to realizing the composer’s intentions, and the need for a scholarly edition is obvious in such a case.

Even when a facsimile accurately represents an early printed edition, it is worth remembering that copies of eighteenth-century prints of a given musical work were not necessarily identical. Corrections and other alterations were made during and after production, and such changes are usually not apparent when consulting a single facsimile edition today. Another type of facsimile has emerged within the past few years that presents a more authoritative text for performers while still preserving the look and feel of an eighteenth-century print. The edited facsimile lies somewhere between a scholarly edition and a facsimile in that it presents an ideal copy of the printed source with errors corrected, with the composer’s or printer’s emendations also incorporated, and with a set of critical notes compiled by the modern editor, making it possible to study the derivation of the changes.9 Such edited facsimiles, of which a few are now available for French Baroque music,10 offer many advantages over other facsimile editions. However, they do require considerably more effort to produce and, thus far at least, edited facsimiles exist for only a few works.

The Text and What It Represents

Questions about the nature of a musical work as represented in a given source, and the relationship of a notated work to the way it may have sounded are central to the study of performance practice. Such questions help to broaden our understanding of what is represented in a notated version of a musical composition. Stanley Boorman cautions against trusting a modern edition (or even a single original source), since even a composer’s holograph represents the composition in one version that cannot be considered equivalent to the work itself.11 A similar observation can be made when one attempts to discover a composer’s intentions by comparing different sources of the same work. Such investigations give rise to the question of the “authority” of a source and how each source may convey some portion of the composer’s “intentions.”12 As Walter Emery candidly observed more than a half-century ago, editors and performers must deal with the inevitable circumstance that “the notes a composer wrote are not always those he meant to write.”13 Another way of looking at the same issue is that even when the composer indicated in some detail how he expected his music to be played, that text represented only a single performance. As Ronald Broude argues, a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century composer who allowed his music to circulate in print or in manuscript knew that it would be viewed as “communal property” and that it would be elaborated upon by performers in their own individual manners.14 Each time a work is performed, a version is created from the notated symbols, so that the “work” as realized in performance is always changing. A version of the work is created anew, and each performance will therefore represent the work slightly differently.15 Certain decisions and elements of a performance are omitted from a composer’s score by convention or by preference, and it is the player, in undertaking a sort of collaboration with the composer, who realizes the “work,” or at least a version of that work.

Faced with the possibility of consulting more than one—and sometimes several—sources of a given work, players will have many choices and decisions to make based on differences between those sources. David Fuller applies the term “heterotextuality” to the multiplicity of available sources and suggests that it is the performer’s responsibility to act as editor, drawing comparisons from the surviving versions, being open to recognizing the composer’s style from them, and accepting any one of them as representing a particular performance, not the piece itself.16 Ronald Broude addresses this issue with regard to the study of French keyboard music, where the number of surviving sources is especially large.17 John Butt makes a similar point when he observes that different versions often exist because the composers were themselves outstanding performers. He sees the opportunity of studying many texts of a given piece as a way for modern players to observe a “performing persona” from the past,18 which helps us to go beyond the direct meaning of the notation to an interpretat...