Melodic ornamentation from Muffat to Telemann

<p>Writers on 18th-century musical ornamentation have traditionally focused on the execution of notated ornaments, and on certain disputes arising from ambiguous and contradictory primary sources. Less attention has been given to the addition of ornaments where not prescribed by the composer. Such ornaments can be short, defined, patterns such as trills, turns, and mordents, or larger measured or unmeasured additions known as diminutions, divisions, or passaggi. Additions of this nature are only in the rarest of cases compulsory. However, the practice of more or less spontaneous embellishment by the performer was so integral to pre-19th-century musical culture that this must have had a significant effect on composition. The scope of this thesis is loosely defined by its titular composers, covering the period between Georg Muffat‟s later publications in the last years of the 17th century and G.P. Telemann‟s death in 1767. Both lived and worked in the German states, a region which had traditionally looked to Italian models of composition and performance. This period saw a flowering of German composition into its own unique and diverse genre which integrated aspects of various styles, most prominently Italian and French music. This thesis centres on stringed instruments, but is directly relevant to woodwind players. Many aspects are also transferrable to the keyboard and to vocal music; however, these musicians will find a large volume of more targeted research elsewhere.</p>

Melodic ornamentation from Muffat to Telemann

<p>Writers on 18th-century musical ornamentation have traditionally focused on the execution of notated ornaments, and on certain disputes arising from ambiguous and contradictory primary sources. Less attention has been given to the addition of ornaments where not prescribed by the composer. Such ornaments can be short, defined, patterns such as trills, turns, and mordents, or larger measured or unmeasured additions known as diminutions, divisions, or passaggi. Additions of this nature are only in the rarest of cases compulsory. However, the practice of more or less spontaneous embellishment by the performer was so integral to pre-19th-century musical culture that this must have had a significant effect on composition. The scope of this thesis is loosely defined by its titular composers, covering the period between Georg Muffat‟s later publications in the last years of the 17th century and G.P. Telemann‟s death in 1767. Both lived and worked in the German states, a region which had traditionally looked to Italian models of composition and performance. This period saw a flowering of German composition into its own unique and diverse genre which integrated aspects of various styles, most prominently Italian and French music. This thesis centres on stringed instruments, but is directly relevant to woodwind players. Many aspects are also transferrable to the keyboard and to vocal music; however, these musicians will find a large volume of more targeted research elsewhere.</p>

The Music of Rene Drouard de Bousset (1703-1760): a Source Study and Stylistic Survey, with Emphasis on His Sacred Output

<p>Rene Drouard de Bousset (1703-1760) was an admired composer and an organist of renown. This thesis examines this musician's life and work, and attempts to bring Bousset's music, hitherto largely unknown, to the attention of musicologists and performers today. Primarily a source study, the thesis makes a survey of all known copies of Bousset's published works, addressing questions of dates, reprints and corrections. Historical context and musical style are also discussed. Particular emphasis is given to Bousset's sacred music in the French language two volumes of sacred cantatas and eight settings of Odes sacrees by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau - and its place within the French tradition of Psalm paraphrase settings. The figure of J.B. Rousseau is also examined, as the librettist of Bousset's Odes, and as an important literary contributor to French music at the turn of the eighteenth century. The source study is supplemented by a catalogue in the style of the PhilidorOeuvres database produced by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, containing all Bousset's known works, extant and lost. This exposition of Bousset's compositional output is prefaced by a biographical overview assembled principally from eighteenth century publications and archival documents. Volume II of this thesis comprises a critical performing edition of Bousset's first volume of Cantates spirituelles (1739).</p>

The Catholic Church in Republican Musical Aesthetics

Debates concerning the appropriate nature of sacred music in France persisted throughout the nineteenth century. While many figures within the Catholic Church took the more traditional stance in their proclamation of plainchant as the genre of sacred music par excellence, other priests and church musicians insisted that more modern styles of composition were not only appropriate but necessary for French Catholics. This debate was not limited to the confines of the Church: Republican composers, for their part, also contributed their views on the matter, which largely stated that the realms of sacred and secular were not mutually exclusive. This chapter outlines the debate on both sides in order to reveal how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music into their secular constructions of French music. It also reveals the discursive slippages between Catholic denigrations of “modern” religious music and “secular” compositional styles: more often than not, modern religious music was strikingly close to the Catholic ideal, even when it was written by a decidedly secular composer for non-liturgical use. A study of Contes mystiques, a collection of twelve mélodies written by such composers as Gabriel Fauré, Théodore Dubois, Henri Maréchal, and Pauline Viardot, reveals how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music and how this modern music was strikingly similar to the Catholic ideal, even when written by “secular” composers for non-liturgical use.

French Musical Life

This book is a study of French musical centralization and its discontents during the period leading up to and beyond the “provincial awakening” of the Belle Époque. The book explains how different kinds of artistic decentralization and regionalism were hard won (or not) across a politically turbulent century from the 1830s to World War II. In doing so, it redraws the historical map of musical power relations in France. Based on work in more than seventy archives, chapters on conservatoires, concert life, stage music, folk music, and composition reveal how tensions of state and locality played out differently depending on the structures and funding mechanisms in place, the musical priorities of different town councils, and the presence or absence of galvanizing musicians. Progressively, the book shifts from musical contexts to musical content, exploring the pressure point of folk music and its translation into “local color” for officials who perpetually feared national division. Controlling composition, on the one hand, and the emotional intensity of folk-based musical experience, on the other, emerges as a matter of consistent official praxis. In terms of “French music” and its compositional styles, what results is a surprising new historiography of French neoclassicism, bound into and growing out of a study of diversity and its limits in daily musical life.

Composition

Despite its “regional” label, the 1937 Exposition offered meagre support for folk-related art music written by regionalists, suggesting that the tempering of folk music’s power was just as important here as in its popular sung and danced forms. Consistently across the century from the 1830s, provincial career paths for composers offered many more opportunities for decentralized or centralist activity (secular or as a maître de chapelle) than for regionalist expression, and the Schola Cantorum was not the catalyst for change to the extent that has hitherto been assumed. Discussion of the influence of the “Russian Five” on French music, and the contrasting ways regions (native and adoptive) are presented in new music, leads to case studies of operas by Bruneau, Séverac, Ropartz, Canteloube, and Leroux to show how French local and regionalist content played out in Paris during periods of changing nationalist intensity, including during World War I. The allegorical tactics of creative anachronism (Ropartz) prompt a broader discussion about the folk-historical nexus in French music from Chabrier to Poulenc, underpinned via modality. This nexus is what explains why France emerges with one of the few European modernisms to eschew folk sources except as folded into an upper-class patrimoine—the balletic dance that underpins much French neoclassicism.

Introduction

A folk-music competition of 1895 sets the scene for an exploration of the problem of French music historiography in relation to the provinces between the 1830s and World War II. Key terms (“decentralization,” “deconcentration,” “regionalism”) are defined and explained in relation to Republican concepts of cultural unity that long discouraged regional difference in music and reinforced the soft and hard power of the capital as the nation’s cultural boiler house: power relations turned the provinces into an “internal exotic,” but the “colonies” of mainland France had their own often distinctive local dynamics relating to professional and amateur music-making. The narrative arc of the book is sketched out: from the dynamics of provincial musical life to the challenges of musical regionalism as it manifests in new composition. Finally, methodological reflections are offered on the project’s archival source-base, on the problematic ephemerality of musical life as a subject of diachronic musicological study, on music as an object of local memorialization, and on the geographical patterns of both decentralist and regionalist French musical life as showing particular density at the edges at the expense of the center.

Musical perception and teaching-learning of French language-culture: Some acoustic and neuroscientific elements for the French music teacher

The musical nature of the sounds of a modern language emitted in the spoken mode, as well as their rhythmic and melodic combinations, exert a considerable "power" on teaching-learning: they provoke, in the learner, decisive auditory reactions, the variables of which are difficult to control, lead to more or less pleasant sensations, (in) understanding, interpretation, produce meaning. Musical perception is at the heart of successful teaching-learning. A language teacher is first and foremost a language music teacher. A French language-culture teacher is above all and always a French music teacher. Among the multidisciplinary relations of the discipline in which it is located, namely Didactology-didactics of the music of the French language-culture, are acoustics and cognitive neurosciences. Despite the extreme complexity of perceptual and neurological processes, turning to musical acoustics at first and then to musical neurosciences secondly makes it possible to recall and discover essential elements and data likely to be of interest to teaching practices.

Entwicklung des Air mit Da capo von Lully bis Rameau und seinen französischen Zeitgenossen

The starting-point is the rudimentary Italian aria with da capo, respectively with a frame, which surrounds a much longer central part. This type widely spread in the 17th century gets the main form of Quinault’s and Lully’s monologue (the other one is through-composed). It remains present in the Italian opera in a small quantity when the classical aria da capo has already been the main type of aria, whereas in France its number decreases much slower and gets rare in the 1750th. The French cantata imported from Italy blazes the trail for the classical da capo aria firstly in the opera-ballet, then in the divertissements of the tragédie lyrique in Italian, soon also in French and slowly also in arias with dramatic content and expression in all types of French music theatre. The aria with da capo and the classical da capo aria are examined in detail in operas of Rameau and his contemporaries, especially their individual solutions of text, musical forms and expression. Finally J.-J. Rousseau’s typology of the da capo aria is examined, verified and criticized. (Autor)