Choral Music in Italy and the Germanic Lands (part III)

Performance practices such as those mentioned above are discussed mainly for large-scale works. Small-scale works, like sacred concertos and secular madrigals, lieder, and the like, would seem to require only one singer to a part, especially in light of the choir of favoriti as the most universal ensemble, even in larger works. The use of solo ensembles was probably standard as late as the madrigals of Alessandro Scarlatti. Solo performance is certainly indicated where a singer represents a particular character, for example, a shepherd in a pastoral drama or one of the characters in a biblical representation, like Schütz’s Christmas Story or the cantatas performed for papal Christmas entertainments, in which closing choruses were probably sung by the collected characters, as in opera seria.

Even beyond such clearly dramatic works, the quest for a historical performance practice should also take into consideration other possible liturgical or dramatic contexts. In Catholic sacred works, this includes the place of Gregorian chant, or organ versets in appropriate alternation with liturgical polyphony. In Lutheran works, it suggests the alternation of chorale verses between organ and choir, and perhaps with a large congregation singing the tune monophonically. In some cases, reconstruction of an entire liturgical service or secular festival offers a thrilling performance montage. Research can uncover equivalent contexts for secular works, as well, for interpolation of musical numbers in dramas as intermedii, set pieces, or melodramas. Such an expanded performance context can be further enriched by architectural investigation in order to locate musical forces as they might have been in a period performance for the best aural effect.

Choral Music in Italy and the Germanic Lands (part II)

This distinction also obtained in Germany. Praetorius (1619) said that the numbers following the title of a piece indicate the most essential voices first (favoriti) and that the remaining numbers indicate ripieno choirs, which can be omitted. He also described a wide variety of alternative performance arrangements.18 Aside from his own works, music like his most opulent prescriptions was also heard at the cathedral of Salzburg and the Habsburg court. At the former, the episcopal court supported over forty singers and thirty to forty musicians, who performed concerted music with as many as ten different spatially separated groups or as many as thirty-two separate parts. The imperial court’s musical establishment was of comparable size and supported performance of the grandest post-Venetian works, as well as more intimate motets and Masses in the stile antico. Such grand works cannot be discussed individually, but their rich textural variety displayed the usual contrast between favoriti and ripieno, with rich flourishes of contrasting vocal and instrumental timbres in every choir. Nevertheless, in the Germanic countries, as in Italy, such grandiosity represents only the most elaborate manifestation of a part-singing performance tradition that, in a simpler medium, was widespread in households, cities, and churches.

Choral Music in Italy and the Germanic Lands (part I)

Music was constantly changing in the seventeenth century. Yet even those who acknowledge this evolutionary condition often overlook the sources and inspirations for Baroque musical style. There is little that is unprecedented: practically every feature of the style evolved directly from some sixteenth-century musical practice. The stile antico did not expire operatically with the development of monody, continuo playing, and the highly figured Baroque style; rather, all lived on side by side, and composers of the seventeenth century, Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz, and others, wrote music in both styles with equal fluency.1 The opposition of the two styles in larger works enriched the new aesthetic of contrasting affects, and these contrasts contributed further stylistic freedom to already well-defined national and regional styles. Baroque innovations particularly reinforced traditional bonds of musical influence between Italy and Germany.

Geographical proximity, ancient political ties, and continuing intellectual exchange had always bestowed common features upon music in Italy and the German-speaking countries. In the seventeenth century, expanding cities, exhibitionistic churches, profligate nobility, and burgeoning numbers of middle-class amateurs supported a rich profusion of new musical styles in both sacred and secular music. The stabilization of Protestantism in the north added further diversity. These groups demanded a rich menu of vocal ensemble works to display their standing. Such works ranged from large-scale festival works for major churches and the ruling class to smaller works for private gatherings, school choirs, and the day-to-day celebrations of city churches throughout Italy and the north. The rich variety of genres and styles obliges a modern performer to investigate a work’s musical construction in its original context.

Disposition, or the Execution of Rapid Passagework

Bacilly says that the art of good singing depends on three gifts of nature, each distinct from the others: the voice, the disposition, and the ear or the intelligence. Presentday teachers will readily recognize the first and third of these gifts, and they might assume that the second refers to the singer’s emotional health. But that is not what Bacilly had in mind, nor did Galliard, when he counseled the would-be teacher to listen “with a disinterested Ear, whether the Person desirous to learn hath a Voice, and a Disposition.”

Dispositione di voce in fact refers quite specifically to a particular method of performing rapid passagework, and despite Bacilly’s opinion that it is a gift of nature, earlier writers on vocal technique describe it as a skill that can be learned. It is a skill that choral singers and solo singers alike need to master; and because the technique used in the seventeenth century differs from that taught today, a few references to this topic follow. Galiver (“Cantare”) explored late sixteenth-century descriptions of modo di cantare con la gorga (the method of singing with the throat). Robert Greenlee (“Dispositione”) gathered descriptive references from nearly a dozen writers, from Maffei (1562) to Mersenne (1636), indicating that buona dispositione refers to the proficient use of some kind of throat articulation to produce extremely rapid diminutions or passaggi without any sacrifice of pitch accuracy.

Ornamentation in Baroque singing

Ornamentation has two functions in Baroque singing: to enhance the affect of the text, and to display the accomplishments—the good taste and the virtuosity — of the singer. Bacilly, Playford, and Galliard all devote considerable attention to ornamentation. The myriad embellishments (Bacilly spends nearly eighteen pages on ports de voix alone) and the conflicting nomenclature in different traditions can be overwhelming at first; it is a good idea to use ornaments sparingly until you have spent some time familiarizing yourself with the examples and practicing them. Ornaments should be used in ensemble singing, especially in an opera scene or dialogue where distinct characters join in song. But if your singers do not yet have the technique — if they cannot handily deliver an extended trill or rapid diminutions—do not require it. The result will be the opposite of stylish Baroque ornamentation, labored instead of apparently effortless, planned instead of extemporized, worrisome instead of joyful.

In time, with good models to emulate (recordings, if not you yourself), those singers with an improvisatory bent will emerge as leaders in the game and others will be emboldened to follow them.

Where there are several singers on the same part, added embellishment is rarely appropriate — excepting routine cadential ornaments that lend themselves to group execution (appoggiaturas, for example, are easier than trills to coordinate). Galliard goes so far as to say, “All Compositions for more than one Voice ought to be sung strictly as they are written; nor do they require any other Art but a noble Simplicity.”

Importance of Text

Good singing is also an artistic pursuit. The technical skills of the singer need to be brought to bear on the expression of the text (“the soul of the vocal art”) in ways that complement and enhance the mere notes on the page.

Vocal and choral music in the seventeenth century are text centered. This may seem obvious, but it bears repeating. The ensemble director should understand the literal meaning of every word of text in the program, as well as any metaphoric or symbolic baggage carried by the text. The singers should learn the meaning of every word they are singing from the very start. The director should know the correct pronunciation of every word, so that rehearsal time is not wasted. And he or she should provide the audience with both the original text and the translation in parallel.

Beyond good pronunciation, all subtleties of expressive singing—dynamic contrast, phrasing, variety of articulation, added embellishment—should be rooted in the performers’ comprehension of the text. Thomas Morley grumbled that “Most of our churchmen, so they can cry louder in the choir than their fellows, care for no more; whereas by the contrary they ought to study how to vowel and sing clean, expressing their words with devotion and passion.”

Healthy Singing

Good singing is an athletic pursuit. Just as with sports, aerobics, or jogging, the muscles that support the activity need to be methodically conditioned; once good condition is reached, it needs to be maintained. Then as now, the fit or well-conditioned singer can control pitch, manage the breath on long phrases, support a diminuendo as well as a crescendo, control vibrato, deliver rapid passagework articulately — in short, can handle the purely technical skills that Baroque music demands.

Bacilly, Playford, and Galliard all agree on the fundamentals: good posture, good breathing, and plenty of hours of practice, beginning with simple exercises and progressing to more challenging ones. You, as the director of a choir or vocal ensemble, need to know enough about vocal fitness to spot unhealthy singing and suggest ways to correct it, as well as to teach the fundamentals of good singing right along with the notes and the pronunciation. The best way to learn about good singing is to study with a good teacher. The collegium director who comes to his or her position from an instrumental background should take very seriously the obligation to handle young singers’ voices intelligently. Often you only need one or two lessons yourself from a sympathetic colleague to get you started on a visceral — as opposed to a merely aural — understanding of good singing. Or you might have a “guest coach” for one or two rehearsals with your singers, concentrating on basic technique, with you singing right along with your students.

Principal Seventeenth-Century English and French Singing Treatises

Bénigne de Bacilly’s Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter (1668) provides a window on singing and vocal pedagogy in seventeenth-century France. Though the author’s expressed main purpose was to deal with the esoterica of applying quantitative rhythm to French poetry, over half the book is devoted to general principles of good singing.

John Playford’s An Introduction to the Skill of Musick contains, in editions of 1664 and later, a “Brief Discourse of the Italian Manner of Singing,” much of it lifted from Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1602). Playford’s handbook went through nineteen editions, many thoroughly revised, spanning the years 1654 to 1730, so we may surmise that Caccini’s advice on singing — attributed by Playford to “an English Gentleman who had lived long in Italy” — remained pertinent as the decades and the editions passed.

Pier Francesco Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori (1723) distilled a lifetime of experience as a successful professional singer and teacher. It was translated into several languages; the English translation, John Galliard’s Observations on the Florid Song (1743), adds explanatory annotations and examples. Though Galliard was German, both his translation and his footnotes are in clearer English than Playford’s.

Ensemble Size and Vocal Types in France

The king’s musicians consisted of three distinct entities. The Musique de la Chambre was made up of soloists: singers, lutenists, and players of other soft instruments, responsible for music for the entertainment of the court. The famous 24 Violons du Roi evolved from the Chambre but became virtually autonomous because of their prestige.

The Musique de la Grande Écurie employed players of sackbuts, oboes, cornetts, fifes, drums, and trumpets, who provided music for the battlefield, the hunt, and the public processional. In 1645 the Musique de la Chapelle Royale consisted of a maître (an honorary appointment given to a highly placed ecclesiastic rather than a musician), two sous-maîtres (one was Compositeur de la Chapelle, responsible for training the choir as well as choosing and composing music for the king’s Mass), two cornettists, twenty-six singers, eight chaplains, four clerks, and two grammar instructors for the children. In 1682 a new royal chapel was inaugurated at Versailles; by 1708 it listed ninety singers: eleven sopranos, eighteen haute-contres, twenty-three tenors, twenty-four baritones, and fourteen basses. In grands motets the normal texture was five voices, the added part usually a baritone, hence the large number of low voices. There was a mixed ensemble of instrumentalists attached to the chapel, including strings, woodwinds (including a bass cromorne), and a theorbo.

Ensemble Size and Vocal Types in England

Cathedral and chapel choirs in England used men and boys only. The English Chapel Royal of the earlier Stuart period typically included approximately twelve boys and twenty men, augmented by a variable number of unpaid “extraordinary” members. For quotidian purposes they sang in smaller numbers on a rotating basis, accompanied by a wind consort (cornetts and sackbuts) and organ. In the period immediately following the Restoration, cornetts substituted for boy trebles: “Above a Year after the Opening of His Majesties Chappel, the Orderers of the Musick there, were necessitated to supply the superiour Parts of their Musick with Cornets and Mens feigned Voices, there being not one Lad, for all that time, capable of singing his Part readily.”

The countertenor (male alto) enjoyed a great vogue in secular as well as sacred music in the later seventeenth century, and its role as the uppermost voice type of a male trio or chorus survived until the nineteenth century in innumerable anthems and glees. However, there can be no justification for trying to make women sound like boys or falsettists, in the name of historically informed performance. A lean choral tone with a minimum of vibrato and meticulous attention to intonation will serve the music admirably and has excellent precedent in the work of such historically oriented ensembles as Les Arts Florissants and the Tallis Scholars, where women sing soprano and both men and women sing alto.

Choral Music in France and England

The primary focus of this topic is the performance of sung ensemble music, that is, music with several texted parts. Today the term “choral music” commonly implies that there is more than one performer on each part, while “ensemble music” commonly implies only one performer to a part. However, as we shall see, music of
the seventeenth century that we customarily consider choral—polyphonic Masses, motets, anthems, and the like—was very often performed as ensemble music. France and England are grouped together in this chapter, partly for convenience, and partly because there are similarities in the uses to which choral music was put, and indeed in the kinds of choral music preferred, despite the obvious difference that one was a Catholic country and the other Protestant.

Choirs or choruses were to be found in churches, opera houses, and public theaters — places where both the sheer size of the venue and the desire for impressive pageantry mandated larger numbers of singers. On both sides of the Channel (or La Manche), the most up-to-date, stylish music made dramatic use of the contrasting sounds of choral singing, solo singing, and obbligato instruments.

The Appearance of the Singer and the Bocca Ridente

Tosi’s directions regarding the singer’s presence continue and refine the tradition expressed earlier in the seventeenth century by Italian writers and commentators on the subject. These include Francesco Durante, Marco da Gagliano, Girolamo Diruta, Pietro Cerone, Orazio Scaletta, Giovanni Battista Doni, and Ignazio Donati, whose caveats were directed largely against bodily and facial contortions and mannerisms that would detract from the singing. Tosi advocates a noble bearing (graceful posture) and an agreeable appearance; he insists on the standing position because it permits a freer use of the voice; further, he warns against bodily contortions and facial grimaces, which may be eliminated, he says, by periodic practice in front of a mirror. He recommends that if the sense of the words permit, the mouth should incline “more toward the sweetness of a smile than toward grave seriousness.” In short Tosi recommends the bocca ridente, which requires not only a “smiling mouth,” but also a positioning of the vocal apparatus critical to the bel canto style.

The Bel Canto Singing Style (IV)

Vibrato

There are several mechanisms in the human voice for producing vibrato. One of these occurs in the same manner as the trill, that is, by the up-and-down movement of the larynx in a manner less exaggerated than the trill. Vibrato was considered an inseparable feature of the human voice in the seventeenth century. It is very difficult, for example, for a singer to execute a messa di voce or crescendo totally without vibrato. An important clue regarding this phenomenon is the vox humana stop in Spanish and Italian organs, which was always a trembling stop, as early as the 1500s. Yet this does not necessarily mean that vibrato was constant. In the twentieth century a concept of singing as a string of “beautiful pearls” developed. This is very different from the seventeenth-century aesthetic, in which the finest singers could alter their technique and their sound in order to adapt to the musical or dramatic context.

Singers today modify their technique so that the placement, color, and timbre of a note matches exactly the note before and after it, the textual or dramatic context notwithstanding. There are certain situations in which a seventeenth-century singer would have sung without vibrato—perhaps on a dissonance, a leading tone, in a
messa di voce crescente (a glissando within a half step), or on a particularly expressive interval such as a tritone. While consistent vibrato can homogenize the sound on all notes of the singers range, it does not allow for a demonstration of harmonic intelligence and expressivity that a seventeenth-century singer would have demanded. The disposizione della voce—the ability to sing fast notes in a glottal fashion—was a highly admired and necessary skill for the professional singer. This light, almost giggling technique, audible in the more intimate performing spaces of the seventeenth century, surely contributed to a softer volume and to a faster vibrato, since coloratura speed and vibrato speed are interrelated.

The Bel Canto Singing Style (III)

The Appoggiatura

Tosi devotes an entire chapter to the appoggiatura and recommends practicing this ornament in scalar passages, with an appoggiatura on each step of the scale. Agricola, strongly favoring on-beat execution of the appoggiatura, is careful to stress that the location of the syllable or word of the text underlay should occur on the appoggiatura itself rather than on the main note under which it is habitually written: “when a syllable falls on a main note, which itself is notated with an appoggiatura or any other ornament, then it [the syllable] must be pronounced on the appoggiatura.” Agricola’s rule referring to the on-beat performance of the appoggiatura must be understood in the context of earlier Baroque practice, in which the phrase anticipatione della syllaba referred to a situation in which an appoggiatura or a onenote grace similar to it actually preceded the beat and bore the syllable.

The Bel Canto Singing Style (II)

Diction

Tosi has a great deal to say about diction, and much of it pertains to the singing of divisions:

Every teacher knows that the divisions sound unpleasant on the third and the fifth vowels (the i or the u).10 But not everyone knows that, in good schools, they are not permitted even on the e and o if these two  vowels are pronounced closed. . . Even more ridiculous is when a singer articulates too loudly and with such forceful aspiration that, for example, when we should hear a division on the a, he seems to be saying ga ga ga. This applies also to the other vowels.

Some earlier Italian writers, such as Camillo Maffei, said that the u vowel sounded like howling, especially since the Italian word for howling is ululando. The i was rejected because it was thought to produce the sounds made by small animals. Agricola is critical of basses who, when singing divisions, “put an h in front of every note, which they then aspirate with such force that, besides producing an unpleasant sound, it causes them unnecessarily to expend so much air that they are forced to breathe almost every half measure.