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183 - Psychotropic Drugs and Medication
- from Section 3 - Treatment and Care
- Edited by Carrie D. Llewellyn, University of Sussex, Susan Ayers, City, University of London, Chris McManus, University College London, Stanton Newman, City, University of London, Keith J. Petrie, University of Auckland, Tracey A. Revenson, City University of New York, John Weinman, King's College London
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- Cambridge Handbook of Psychology, Health and Medicine
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- 05 June 2019
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- 16 May 2019, pp 653-655
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10 - How Many Singers?
- Andrew Parrott
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- Composers' Intentions?
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- 08 May 2021
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- 16 July 2015, pp 287-289
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MASSED voices will always be a potent musical medium. But performances [of J. S. Bach's ‘choral’ works] by 16 or so singers have now become commonplace (and some of us use fewer), reminding us that Bach's music can speak equally powerfully in many ways. So, with choir size, is personal taste all there is to it?
At the heart of Bach's incomparable output of church music stands the choir. And, just as we rightly expect Abbado, Rattle et al. to know a thing or two about Mahler's orchestra, so ought we to be able to assume that our Bach experts know their Bach choir. Yet, for all the recent advances in Baroque instrumental practice, this central vocal medium has rarely received serious attention. Conventional thinking rests content with the idea that a small choir of 12 or 16 fits the historical facts adequately. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
A century before Bach, composers such as Praetorius and Schütz knew two quite distinct types of vocal choir. The capella sang mostly chorales and straightforward types of motet and, like our ‘chamber’ choirs, might vary in size but would generally have several voices per part. The other type might not look like a choir at all to us, yet this Favoritchor – a select group of solo voices – was the ‘favoured’ medium of the new Italianate concerted music, and the music it sang was technically much more demanding. When in large-scale concerted works these two types of choir appeared side by side, it was always the ‘solo’ choir (a one-to-a-part ‘consort’, as we might call it) that was the main protagonist; the larger choir generally functioned as a wholly subsidiary ripieno group, ‘filling out’ the texture from time to time.
Bach, together with most of his contemporaries, was a direct heir to these 17th-century traditions. Of course much had changed, but the underlying principles remained constant; elaborate concerted music was essentially for soloists, simpler and more conservative idioms were choral (in the modern sense). At Leipzig, where Bach spent the last 27 years of his life, the larger groups sang the old motets on an almost daily basis but played little or no part in concerted music-making. (Clearly, by Mendelssohn's day, another 100 years on, things had changed substantially.)
13 - J. S. Bach’s Trauer-Music for Prince Leopold: Clarification and Reconstruction
- Andrew Parrott
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- Composers' Intentions?
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- 16 July 2015, pp 347-360
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There remained for him in Leipzig the melancholy satisfaction of providing the funeral music for his so dearly beloved Prince, and of performing it in person in Cöthen …
(obituary of J. S. Bach)WITH the unexpected death of the 33-year-old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in November 1728 it fell to J. S. Bach as the Prince's honorary (or ‘non-resident’) Capellmeister and erstwhile employee to supply and supervise music for the ensuing funeral ceremonies. These were set for the following spring, doubtless to allow the fullest possible attendance from around the principality and further afield, while over the winter months the Prince's body (duly embalmed, one must presume) lay in Cöthen's small court chapel. At the centre of elaborate funeral proceedings, painstakingly documented in court records, were
a Burial Service (Beysetzung), held late at night on 23 March (1729) and lasting until about two in the morning, and
a Memorial Service (Gedächtniß Predigt), following just a few hours later on the morning of 24 March.
Both services were held in the town's Calvinist Jacobikirche, and each included ‘Trauer Musique’ (music of mourning). No musical source survives, however, and the only real clue to Bach's music comes instead in the form of a libretto, headed in its earliest printed version ‘Trauer-Music … most humbly performed at the Memorial Service held on 24 March 1729’ (see Illus. 13.1). This may have been intended for use by those attending the ceremonies but is perhaps more likely to be a commemorative publication. Its text is known to be by ‘Picander’ (Christian Friedrich Henrici, the young Leipzig-based poet also responsible for the libretto of the St Matthew Passion) and is a substantial one in four parts (with a total of 24 movements), constituting the lost work catalogued today as Klagt, Kinder, klagt es aller Welt, bwv244a (‘Let your lamentations, children, be heard by all the world’). No additional text is known, yet today's scholarly literature, taking its lead from Friedrich Smend (to whom we owe much of the documentation on which this article is based), tells of not one but ‘two large-scale works’ by Bach – one for each service.
18 - ‘Hail! bright Cecilia’ (Purcell at 350)
- Andrew Parrott
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- Composers' Intentions?
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- 16 July 2015, pp 391-396
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IN November 1692 it was once again Henry Purcell's turn to provide music for his fellow ‘Masters and Lovers of Musick’ as they honoured their ‘great Patroness’ St Cecilia with a feast that evidently ranked as ‘one of the genteelest in the world’. And the 33-year-old composer certainly excelled himself: Hail! bright Cecilia, an ode ‘admirably set to Music by Mr. Henry Purcell ‘, evidently went down so well with the musical assembly that it was performed twice ‘with universal applause’.
It is indisputably an exceptionally fine composition, a shining example of a distinctively English genre – the choral and orchestral ode. But what also draws me to it is the very particular way in which this one work seems to open a window on Purcell's musical world – the environment which shaped him as a composer, and which he in turn helped to shape. The distinctive nature of the St Cecilia's Day celebrations, combined with specific clues found in the composer's autograph score, can, I believe, take us to very the heart of Restoration London's vibrant musical life, to the closely knit musical community which Purcell inhabited and which in many ways he dominated. Moreover, this can all feed into the way we perform the music and, ultimately, bring it more vividly to life.
ST CECILIA'S DAY ODES
THE first time we hear of the St Cecilia's Day meetings in London is in 1683, when Purcell produced his Welcome to all the pleasures for ‘the Gentlemen of the Musical Society’. That was possibly the first time a new work had been specially commissioned for the occasion. Four stewards for the ensuing year are named: two gentlemen amateurs and two professional musicians, one of them the violinist and composer Dr Nicholas Staggins, Master of the King's Musick. This interesting social mix is also mentioned in the new monthly The Gentleman's Journal, which notes that of those who attend ‘many are persons of the first Rank’ but also that ‘there are no formalities nor gatherings’ as at other feasts. The occasion brought together not only professionals and amateurs but also court musicians and freelances, singers from church and theatre, virtuoso performers and musical tradesmen, Englishmen and foreigners, Protestants and Catholics – in short, a unique cross-section of musical London, gathered together solely ‘to propagate the advancement of that divine Science’.
Preface
- Andrew Parrott
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- 16 July 2015, pp ix-xiv
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TO what extent can the performance intentions of long-dead composers be reliably known, and how integral to their compositions might such intentions have been? The experience of planning and directing musical performances has never ceased to confront me with awkward musical questions of this kind, from my earliest efforts (as a first-year undergraduate in 1967) to my present work. And, since vocal music was central to most earlier periods of music-making, it is natural that many of those difficult questions should concern vocal practices. Do we even fully understand what a ‘choir’ might have been? Has falsetto singing really been around since the Middle Ages, and what exactly was the French haute-contre? What does high-clef notation imply, not least in the case of Monteverdi's 1610 Magnificat (a7)? Were Purcell's countertenors ‘countertenors’ in today's sense? If much of Bach's choral writing was designed for one voice per part, how was this supposed to work in practice? Complex issues of this nature, issues directly affecting perceptions of music we may think we know well, form the common thread running through these collected essays.
For the most part my researches have been driven by a performer's simple aspiration: to understand as fully as possible how composers of the more distant past intended their written works to function in performance. The intimate workings of those contemporary performances are, of course, lost for all time. Of certain underlying principles, however, there is plenty to be learned: not so much matters of style – the often barely definable characteristics of musical delivery – but rather those fundamental pre-performance factors that determine not only a composition's intended medium (the performing body) but also the multifarious conventions by which that composition is tacitly expected to operate.
THE essays that together form this book were written over many years: some are from as long ago as 1977, others as recent as the present decade. After a brief introductory essay, they are arranged here in six thematic groups.
INTRODUCTION
The short article that forms Chapter 1, and from which the present book derives its title, was written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Early Music in 2013, and is now supplied with fuller notes.
Selected Recordings
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Frontmatter
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Further Writings
- Andrew Parrott
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7 - Monteverdi: Onwards and Downwards
- Andrew Parrott
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- 16 July 2015, pp 205-227
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FRESH from directing a performance of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers in New York, I was a little surprised to read in Roger Bowers's article in last November's Early Music that downward transposition by a 4th of its high-clef movements was supposedly no more than ‘theoretically’ possible. While Bowers argues that ‘the properties of the music itself deny its applicability’, my own recent experience (with both Lauda Jerusalem and the Magnificat a7 down a 4th) had been of an ease and naturalness that seemed to render further theoretical justification wholly unnecessary. Bowers wholeheartedly accepts the need for downward transposition; it is the appropriate interval of transposition that he calls into question. Where I have long advocated downward transposition of a 4th (↓4th), Bowers now proposes a whole tone (↓2nd).
This turn of events – somewhat unexpected after two decades – has had the entirely healthy effect of sending me back to my original Early Music article, as well as to a pile of notes on subsequent findings. Rather than delay in order to accumulate yet more material (while readers mislay their copies of Bowers's article, forget the details of its contents or simply lose interest), I have chosen to respond swiftly and as succinctly as the subject permits, focusing on the Magnificat a7. The present contribution therefore reiterates very little of my previous article and should be regarded as supplementary to it. New material is marked with an asterisk (*).
Revisiting the subject in this way and with the benefit of others’ more recent research into related matters of mode has left me with a much clearer understanding of certain critical points. As a consequence I am now distinctly more confident than before that the only plausible transposition for these high-clef movements really is ↓4th. Attractive though Bowers's suggestion may appear, I can discern no basis for it in the practice of Monteverdi's time. Even though I argue for its rejection, my hope is that the reasons for doing so will help clarify an issue which has ramifications far beyond this one publication and its composer.
12 - Bach’s Chorus: The Leipzig Line
- Andrew Parrott
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When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
(John Maynard Keynes)READERS who might have preferred the so-called debate on Bach's choir to have concluded long ago – myself included – may nevertheless be curious to understand why it has dragged on for almost 30 years. The foregoing article by Andreas Glöckner may help to supply an explanation. It illustrates how a handful of highly influential German scholars have responded to the challenge of reassessing old certainties, while its studied scepticism invites doubt: is it shaped more by scholarly thinking, or by a simple desire to bury the subject as far beyond the reach of scrutiny as possible?
This response will not restate the detailed case for single-voice choirs, which can readily be found elsewhere, but will merely explore the opposing line of thinking, represented here by Glöckner. A preliminary reminder of the divergent conclusions may not come amiss. At Leipzig the bulk of the élite Choir I's duties consisted of chant, chorales and a fairly undemanding repertoire of traditional motets, all handled not by Bach himself but by the choir's Prefect. In addition, Choir I also sang Bach's own music, ‘incomparably harder and more intricate’ even than other concerted music allocated to Choir II. This belonged to a higher order of music-making, featuring a substantial and independent instrumental ensemble and also providing a vehicle for select singers – a concerto for vocal concertists. One argument is that these singers were responsible not only for solos and duets but also – as Joshua Rifkin has reminded us – for all choruses (as in much Italian oratorio and opera of the period), whether with or without an occasional vocal ripieno group to ‘fill out’ certain types of choral writing. Traditional thinking, by contrast, holds it as self-evident that Bach would always have wanted his own choral music to be sung by all available singers, and at Leipzig preferably by 16 or so.
As we shall see, much of the effort invested in defending the conventional choir can only throw light on the following question:
What vocal forces did Bach consider necessary in order to meet the various musical requirements of the Leipzig churches for which the Thomasschule's four choirs were responsible?
6 - Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 Revisited
- Andrew Parrott
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- Composers' Intentions?
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- 16 July 2015, pp 194-204
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IN this short anniversary paper I wish to offer some observations on three aspects of the Vespers music contained in Monteverdi's great 1610 publication. All have received much less scholarly attention than they merit for the simple reason, certainly in two cases, that they are seen as belonging primarily to the world of the performer rather than to that of the scholar/editor. And because both scholars in general and editors in particular usually feel at liberty to side-step such questions, performers (who may or may not possess musicological skills) are themselves tempted to follow suit, tacitly encouraged in believing the matters to be of only peripheral importance, or at least unsusceptible to historical clarification. The three subjects under discussion here are (1) implied transpositions, (2) historical pitch standards and (3) contemporary liturgical practice (specifically, the function of the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria).
TRANSPOSITION PRACTICE
IT is now over a decade since I published a lengthy and detailed argument for the downward transposition (by a 4th) of certain movements in Monteverdi's 1610 collection – the Mass, Lauda Jerusalem and both Magnificats – and the best part of two decades since I first put forward the same ideas in performance.
Yet, despite my use of a sledge-hammer to crack a nut (as one friend put it), and despite subsequent endorsement from many scholars (Fallows, Kurtzman, Roche) and specialist performers (Dickey, Holloway, Wistreich), the issue is still considered controversial and opinion is divided. Several noted directors (Gardiner, Harnoncourt, Savall) have chosen to persist in presenting the Lauda Jerusalem and the Magnificat a7 untransposed – a course of action happily condoned by all but a few critics – even though there has apparently been no written critique of the arguments by any of the rumoured dissenting scholars.
A partial exception, misleadingly described as having ‘significant ramifications for … spurious notions of transposition’, is a still unpublished paper given in 19926 by the American scholar Stephen Bonta. This valuable study of ‘Clef, Mode, and Instruments in Italy, 1540–1650’ mainly explores the theoretical background to Monteverdi's use of high clefs for mode-1 pieces such as the two Magnificats, and thus addresses what is perhaps a central question for us today: why might a composer choose to notate music at one particular pitch level even if instrumentalists are required to realize it at another?
List of Illustrations
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MISSING MUSIC
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MONTEVERDI
- Andrew Parrott
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9 - Performing Purcell
- Andrew Parrott
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Musick (… after all the learned Encomions that words can contrive) commends it Self best by the performance of a skilful hand, and an angelical voice.
(Henry Purcell)THE anniversary in 1959 of Purcell's birth was also that of Handel's death, and for any assessment of the current state of our knowledge of Purcellian performance practice Handelian scholarship provides a useful yardstick. As a result particularly of further Handelian celebrations in 1985, a great deal of detailed research was undertaken that can now assist the performer and thereby illuminate in performance the music of England's great adopted son, while even with plans for 1995 firmly in place, it is clear that the pace of equivalent research into our Orpheus Britannicus has been decidedly slower. It may be argued, though, that substantial advances in understanding, while perhaps not yet reflected in musicological literature, are evident in live performances and recordings, especially in those involving period instruments. Yet it is not long since, in a prestigious London concert of Purcell's church music, given by an all-male choir and a period-instrument band, that oboes were unapologetically added to Purcell's strings and several pieces tacitly transposed. More disturbingly, these and other questionable decisions seem to have passed entirely without comment. The example – by no means isolated – serves to illustrate two general points. First, that in the absence of any sophisticated appreciation of Purcellian conventions, performers will tend to fall back on more familiar Handelian practices. Second, that details of performance practice can rarely be viewed in isolation: dubious instrumentation, for instance, may lead to the adoption of an inappropriate pitch standard, and in turn to wholesale transpositions, both of which will influence intonation, colour and balance.
In short, much work lies ahead if full justice is to be done in performance to Purcell's rich legacy, and in this chapter I can only hope to take the process a few steps further. A straightforward summary of published research would achieve little; instead I have chosen to concentrate on issues that seem to me to be of critical importance and to demand particular attention, ignoring other broad areas of performance practice (notably rhythm and tempo) and many very specific ones, too. I have also aimed to draw together as much of the available evidence as possible and to allow it to speak for itself.
8 - High Clefs and Down-to-Earth Transposition: A Brief Defence of Monteverdi
- Andrew Parrott
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‘SOME favour a perfect 4th; I a major 2nd.’ Thus Roger Bowers, embarking on a recent second attempt to promote a rather idiosyncratic hypothesis of downward transposition for Monteverdi's highclef writing, notably in the 1610 Magnificat a7 (see Bowers, ‘“The high and lowe keyes come both to one pitch”: Reconciling Inconsistent Clef- Systems in Monteverdi's Vocal Music for Mantua’, Early Music 39/4 (2011), 531–46). Undeterred by the fact that in similar contexts the composer's contemporaries appear invariably to have avoided the smaller interval of transposition (↓2nd), Bowers elaborates a theory manifestly born of a strong personal aversion to the conventional larger interval (↓4th) when applied to these particular works: ‘the entire tessitura is dragged bodily downwards … and the overall sound is effectively decapitated’, all of which ‘traduces the music without appearing to make any compensatory rational sense’.
Readers who may not wish to revisit the byways of opposing thinking on this issue1 will perhaps do well to rest content with the testimony of a man who knew more about early 17th-century Italian music and its workings than most of us today: Monteverdi's contemporary, the eminent and versatile German composer, theorist, organist and Capellmeister, Michael Praetorius (1571–1621):
Every vocal piece in high clefs, i.e. where the bass is written in C4 or C3, or F3, must be transposed when it is put into tablature or score for players of the organ, lute and all other foundation instruments, as follows: if it has a flat, down a 4th … but if it has no flat, down a 5th.
This is neither second-hand dogma nor casual oversimplification. Unanimous confirmation of these clear principles comes from copious Italian sources, emphatically answering Bowers's question: ‘what did north Italian musicians of c. 1600–10 expect to be told by the clefs of the music they were performing?’ As a sample, Table 8.1 lists almost 100 documented cases of the explicit link between high-clef notation and transposition ↓4th (and ↓5th). By contrast, not a single contemporary example of downward transposition by as little as a tone (↓2nd) has thus far been identified in association with high clefs. Arguing nevertheless for a ‘fluidity’ of transposition practice that would allow this smaller interval, Bowers cites the organ book of a motet collection by Giovanni Croce, where a variety of options is given.
5 - Transposition in Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610
- Andrew Parrott
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OURS is an essentially conservative musical climate, and attempts to reproduce historical styles of performance still tend to be viewed with suspicion. It is therefore not surprising that to transpose parts of a recognized masterpiece should be regarded by some almost as an act of heresy. I first directed a performance of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers in 1977, and on that occasion, as on subsequent ones, the psalm Lauda Jerusalem and the Magnificat a7 were given a 4th below their written pitch. (The discussion that follows is quite independent of absolute pitch standards appropriate to Monteverdi's music: the issue is that of the relative pitch levels of the various Vespers movements.) Reactions to the idea of the transpositions have been predictably mixed: one of our bestknown Monteverdi conductors has described them as an ‘aberration’, while others find the results revelatory. But if the very familiarity of the work makes objective assessment difficult, it has also the advantage of focusing attention on a vital but neglected area of historical performance practice, one of direct relevance to a host of less well-known pieces. With the release of my recording of the 1610 Vespers, the time is obviously ripe for a detailed defence of the practice.
Monteverdi has had the misfortune to be labelled a Baroque composer and a Venetian composer, despite the facts that he published six collections before the 17th century even began and that he worked in Mantua until he was 45. Consequently his music has often been viewed in a false light. Instrumental writing of the kind illustrated in Ex. 5.1 would perhaps have seemed unexceptional in its technical demands to a musician of the early 18th century; in 1610 it would undoubtedly have seemed revolutionary in its high tessitura. And there lies the crux of the matter. Do the high vocal and instrumental ranges of the Magnificat a7 serve a new dramatic function through an (as it were) Beethovenian stretching of existing conventions? Or is this all an illusion, caused by a trick of notation that would have ruffled none of Monteverdi's contemporaries?
Lauda Jerusalem and the Magnificat a7 lie consistently at a higher written pitch level than the other Vespers movements, a fact which is reflected in (or caused by) the choice of a different set of clefs.
11 - Vocal Ripienists and J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor
- Andrew Parrott
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… it is the present aim once again to demonstrate emphatically that today's universal custom of performing Bach's cantata choruses with choral scoring throughout … sacrifices a multitude of fine and considered details to a craving for monumentality at any price.
NOT my words but those of the eminent Bach scholar Arnold Schering, written some 90 years ago. While ‘monumentality’ may be less prevalent today, the ‘continuously choral scoring’ to which Schering objected is still routinely promoted as Bach's own preferred practice. In this, the Mass in B minor differs not at all from the composer's other church works. Yet, in common with an overwhelming majority of those works, early sources for the Mass contain no suggestion whatsoever of any requirement for ripieno singers. (A brief reminder: the ripienist's role was to reinforce – not to replace – the concertist in choral movements.) Both in the composer's autograph score of the complete Mass and in the set of parts of the Missa prepared for Dresden, vocal tutti indications are entirely absent; moreover, neither this set nor that associated with C. P. E. Bach's 1786 Hamburg performance of the Credo – both apparently complete (with 21 and 20 parts respectively) – includes any copies for ripienists. This conspicuous absence of direct evidence for vocal ripienists necessarily forms the starting-point for the present investigation.
DESPITE its unique (if problematic) status within Bach's output, the Mass in B minor has proved fertile ground for previous exploration of the composer's choral writing and its implied mode(s) of performance. Indeed, Joshua Rifkin's searching reassessment of the nature of Bach's choir was for some time widely perceived to relate almost exclusively to the Mass through his recording of the work, even though his original 1981 paper had barely made any mention of it. In the same year, however, the Austrian-born American conductor Erich Leinsdorf specifically challenged (albeit in a much broader context) ‘the customary division of Bach's B minor Mass into sections for full chorus and for soloists’:
For well over 200 years it has been taken for granted that the solo voices sing only the arias and duets. Yet there is no indication whatever in the original score to justify the arbitrary divisions that have become almost universally accepted. … To anyone reading the score without preconceptions it appears quite clear that Bach assigned a considerably larger portion of the Mass to soloists.
3 - Falsetto Beliefs: The ‘Countertenor’ Cross-Examined
- Andrew Parrott
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Contratenorista est ille qui contratenorem canit.
(Johannes Tinctoris)TODAY'S ‘countertenor’ – a man whose singing is exclusively or predominantly in falsetto – is widely seen as the very emblem of early vocal music. Once confined to the Anglican choir-stall, he is now accepted in all manner of vocal ensembles and has achieved international status as a soloist, not least on the world's great operatic stages. Naturally enough, the rise of this new/old voice-type has attracted plenty of comment and speculation en route. Yet for the most part the modern countertenor's historical credentials have simply been taken on trust. Indeed, the undoubted complexity of establishing a reliable history for the voice, combined with its unassailable place as a linchpin of the Anglican choir and its evident allure for audiences, have ensured that scholars and performers alike have generally been content not to probe too deeply.
Irrespective of possible conclusions, a root and branch reappraisal of key evidence and of familiar thinking is badly needed. My aim here is therefore to clarify where, when, how and why falsetto singing may have been practised in previous eras. Or more specifically, to dare to ask whether any such voice-type was actually cultivated before the 16th century. Although much of the inquiry is necessarily concerned with church vocal ensembles and with early and sparsely documented periods, its consequences for an accurate understanding of 17th- and 18th-century practices, solo as well as choral, are considerable. For if falsetto singing is simply believed to have been an endemic feature of medieval life (as our film-makers evidently suppose), it is all too easy to assume its continued cultivation thereafter.
The issues to be addressed are both numerous and disparate, encompassing familiar and unfamiliar concepts and drawing on a broad range of sources (archival, theoretical, literary and musical). This crossexamination is therefore presented not as a single narrative but as a series of discrete critical case studies. (In order to keep the main text as plain as possible in what is inevitably a complex investigation, useful subsidiary material has been confined to footnotes and Appendices.)
LINES OF REASONING
IT may be as well to start in relatively familiar territory. In recent decades two related accounts of the 16th- and early 17th-century English ‘countertenor’ have held sway.
2 - A Brief Anatomy of Choirs
- Andrew Parrott
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Summary
JOSQUIN des Prez, Tallis, Victoria, Monteverdi, Charpentier, Bach – the great choral composers of the past may be presumed to have understood the inner workings of their choirs comprehensively well; most had received a choirboy's education and virtually all spent a lifetime amongst their chosen singers. But to what extent do we share their understanding? Was Dufay's body of singers little different from that which Handel knew some 300 years later? Has ‘the choir’ somehow managed to remain essentially one and the same thing through the ages to our own time? Though much transcribed, discussed and performed, music written for choirs in earlier centuries generally reaches us through a filter of more recent choral expectations, with unfamiliar features disregarded, overlooked, or misconstrued. Thus, while close attention is routinely paid to specific works and their composers, and to compositional genres and choral institutions, the focus here will instead be on the very nature of those diverse musical bodies we call choirs.
Since for much of the period under consideration choral performance was nurtured almost single-handedly by the Church, it will suffice to define a ‘choir’ provisionally as ‘An organized body of singers performing or leading in the musical parts of a church service.’ This has the merit of making no attempt to prescribe how such a body is musically organized (whether for unison singing, or for music requiring just three solo voices or a multiplicity of voices intermixed with instruments), and it therefore encourages us not to concentrate unduly on familiar aspects of ‘choral’ performance as we now understand it.
IMPROVISED POLYPHONY
THE bedrock of the Church's music-making was plainchant, much of it sung from memory, and an evolutionary link between solo or unison chant and later composed choral polyphony lies in the hidden (and little explored) world of extempore chant-based singing. This could take many forms (variously named), from simple note-against-note affairs to the intricate counterpoint of highly skilled singers; by the mid-15th century English clerical singers were practising at least three such techniques – faburden, descant and ‘counter’. Different techniques tended to attach themselves to different portions of the liturgy: at the Church of Our Lady in Antwerp (1506), the Alleluia and Sequence were to be performed in discant, the Communion with contrapuncte, and the Introit ‘without singing upon the book’.