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.

The Bel Canto Singing Style (I)

Of the various national styles of singing in the Baroque era, the Italian style was the mainstream. There has been a more or less unbroken tradition of bel canto singing ever since Giulio Caccini wrote about it in his Le nuove musiche (1602). The classical bel canto style crystallized in the late seventeenth century, when musical considerations triumphed over the text-dominated style of the early part of the century. By that time Italian opera had become something of a commodity, and Italian signers were in demand throughout Europe. Unfortunately, for about the last three quarters of the century there are essentially no Italian treatises on singing. There are, to be sure, numerous treatises from German writers of this period, but while they were enthusiastic admirers of the Italian style, few of them had direct association with bel canto singers. Pier Francesco Tosi, a castrato singer and actor of some note, was, however, thoroughly conversant with the bel canto style. His Opinioni de’ cantori antichi, e moderni was published in 1723, chronologically beyond the limits of this guide, but by that time Tosi was well into his seventies. His ideas about singing were formed during the closing decades of the seventeenth century, when he was at the height of his career. Moreover, the title of the book clearly indicates Tosi’s awareness of the “ancient”—by which he means the style of his own heyday as a singer—and the “modern” styles of singing, and it is clearly the former that he prefers. Tosi’s treatise was translated into English by J. E. Galliard (1743) and into German by J. F. Agricola (1757). The latter’s copious annotations are often quite illuminating, even for seventeenth-century practice, in spite of their late date.

National Singing Styles - Spain

Spanish contributions to musical developments in Italy were significant: the Spanish may have given Italy the castrato voice. Many elements from Spanish spoken theater (such as buffo parts, the character of the servant-confidant, and the mixture of different elements of social class) were incorporated into Italian opera. While these elements sparked many musical developments in Italy, they did not lead to the same degree of innovation in Spain, where the Baroque arrived much later than elsewhere in Europe. The court of Philip IV was conservative, the musical life of the chapel heavily steeped in the Renaissance Flemish tradition. Foreign influences on Spanish musical life in the second half of the century were also limited, though this was not
for lack of exposure.

The principal treatise we have for Spanish singing is Domenico Pietro Cerone’s El melopeo, published in Naples in 1613 and written in Spanish (not Cerone’s native language), possibly in order to curry favor with Philip III and the Spanish viceroy in Naples. A very conservative work, El melopeo nonetheless exerted a profound influence in Spain that lasted into the late eighteenth century. An enormous volume, it is the earliest music treatise still surviving that was brought to the New World.

Book VIII of El melopeo deals with glosas, which we might call in English “running divisions,” and with garganta technique, the throat articulation technique that singers used to execute them. One can view this section as Cerone’s diminution manual in the sixteenth-century tradition of Diego Ortiz, and of Tómas de Santa Maria, from whom Cerone borrowed some examples.

National Singing Styles - England (II)

Butler’s description of the countertenor voice also is puzzling: “The Countertenor or Contratenor, is so called, becaus it answeret the Tenor; thowgh commonly in higher keyz: and therefore is fittest for a man of a sweete shril voice.” What Butler meant by “shril” is unclear; it may simply be an indication of falsetto. Edward Huws Jones has argued that the English countertenor voice is equivalent to the modern tenor, the English “tenor” to the modern baritone.99 René Jacobs regards the low Purcellian countertenor and the French haute-contre as having “very much in common.” By the time of Purcell, the countertenor voice used both natural and falsetto registers.

John Playford’s translation of Caccini’s preface to Le nuove musiche (1602) was not published until the 1664 edition of A Breefe Introduction. Playford’s glosses on Caccini are of considerable interest, particularly with respect to the trillo. Playford indicated that one can approximate the sound of the trillo by shaking the finger upon the throat, and also that it could be done by imitating the “breaking of a sound in the throat which men use when they lure their hawks.”

National Singing Styles - England (I)

We have few English sources on singing from the seventeenth century, though there is a considerable body of material on oratory, rhetoric, and acting. The evolution from the lute songs of John Dowland to the continuo songs of the Lawes family (Henry and William) to the late songs of Henry Purcell shows remarkable developments in both declamatory style and vocal technique. Part of this evolution, of course, involved a synthesis of an indigenous English style with Italian and, to a lesser extent, French influences, in addition to the gradual development of professional singing. The migration of Italian music and musicians to England in the early decades of the century involved the madrigal more than monody.

Before about 1625, English solo singing largely perpetuated sixteenth-century practice. Only two court musicians arrived from Italy in the years between 1603 and 1618. A very few English musicians, notably Dowland, Nicholas Lanier, and possibly John Coprario, traveled to Italy. Robert Dowland published a lute-song version of Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia bella” in 1610, and other versions of this song (some quite florid) were circulated in manuscripts, but relatively few Italian monodies were exported to England.

National Singing Styles - Germany (II)

Praetorius, Wolfgang Caspar Printz, and Falck all used the term zittern in connection with what we would call a trill today, but which they called tremolo. Mylius also used zittern to refer to the two-note trill, while Printz and Falck used it in conjunction with the single-note trillo. Zittern thus seems to refer to vocal agility, implying throat articulation, akin to the Italian term dispositione. Printz used the term Bebung to describe the trilletto, probably an intensity vibrato: “Trilletto is only a vibrating [Bebung] of the voice so much gentler than the trillo that it is almost not struck [with the throat].” Intensity vibrato or “shimmer” gives vitality to a tone while keeping the pitch steady. Printz’s description of his trilletto seems to have been the basis for Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann’s tremoletto, which he described in terms not unlike Printz’s: “Tremoletto is a vibrating [Bebung] of the voice, almost not struck at all, and happens on one note or in one Clave, as is best to show on the violin, when one lets the finger remain on the string and as with the shake, slightly moves and makes the tone shimmer [schwebend].”84 Furhmann also gave a musical example, shown in Example 1.2. This further clarifies Praetorius’s use of the term bebende. The evidence in the German sources clearly supports the use of intensity vibrato and strongly suggests very limited use of pitch-fluctuation vibrato as a fundamental
aspect of the German vocal aesthetic throughout the seventeenth century.

National Singing Styles - Germany (I)

German sources on singing from the seventeenth century outnumber both Italian and French. As the chart in Figure 1.1 indicates, there are strong links among the German sources. The model established by Michael Praetorius in Syntagma Musicum III (1619) was imitated throughout the century by writers who tried to convey what they understood of the Italian style of ornamented singing. Though there was increasing impact of Italian musical developments in Germany as the century progressed, the vocal aesthetic that emerges from German treatises changed relatively little, except in its attitude toward falsetto.

Praetorius called attention to the close connection between singing and oratory. It was important for a singer to have not only a good voice, but also an understanding and knowledge of music, skill in ornamentation (which required throat articulation), good diction, and proper pronunciation. We can establish from Praetorius that the Germans ca.1620, like the Italians ca. 1600, used throat articulation, prized the development of good breath control, and did not favor using falsetto. Praetorius’s description of the requisites of a good singing voice has been quoted frequently, in modern times often as a defense for using continuous vibrato:

The requisites are these: that a Singer first have a beautiful, lovely, agile [zittern] and vibrating [bebende] voice . . . and a smooth [glatten], round throat for diminutions; secondly, the ability to hold a continuous long breath without many inhalations; thirdly, in addition, a voice . . . which he can hold with a full and bright [hellem] sound without Falsetto (which is a half and forced voice).

National Singing Styles - France (II)

The French found a way of compensating for most singers’ tendency to spend less time on consonants in singing than in speaking. They intuitively understood what we now know scientifically, that to reach a threshold of intelligibility, a brief acoustic event such as a consonant needs to be higher in amplitude or longer in time. They also understood the expressive parameters in amplitude and duration to convey meaning and feeling. With consonants voiced on a precise pitch, we can be virtually certain that subvocal “scooping” was not a general feature of French singing at this time.

Both Mersenne and Bacilly describe a quality of the ideal singing voice that is related to harmonie, a certain quality of body or focus in the sound that was independent of the overall size of the voice. Mersenne describes this quality as being like “a canal which is always full of water” as opposed to a “thin trickle,” while Bacilly describes it as the “amount of tone or harmonie present in the voice” that “nourishes the ear.”

National Singing Styles - France (I)

We are fortunate in having several detailed sources on French singing from the seventeenth century, the most important of which are Bénigne de Bacilly’s Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter (1668) and Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636). French singing did not undergo the radical changes seen in the Italian school at the turn of the seventeenth century, though the French were certainly aware of developments in Italy. Mersenne, for example, mentions Caccini, who performed at court in 1604/1605. There were notable champions of the Italian style of singing in France, as demonstrated by various efforts (ultimately unsuccessful) to establish Italian opera there. One of Louis XIII’s favorite singers, Pierre de Nyert, the teacher of Bacilly and Michel Lambert, studied briefly in Rome, and a handful of castratos sang at the court of Louis XIV prior to 1700.50 Although Italianisms became increasingly present in French music toward the end of the century, in the main the style and technique of French singers differed considerably from those of their Italian counterparts.

Early seventeenth-century French singing retained many aspects of sixteenthcentury technique, particularly with respect to breathing. I have described the French approach to breathing as a “steady-state” system, where air pressure, speed, and volume remain virtually constant. Such a system is perfectly suited to the quantitative nature of the seventeenth-century French language and to the chanson mesurée and air de cour. Throat articulation, known in France as disposition de la gorge or simply disposition, was also used in the elaborate doubles, ornamented second verses of airs, as well as for agréments.

National Singing Styles - Italy, ca. 1600–1680 (III)

In the absence of a mid-century Italian source on singing as comprehensive as Tosi’s Opinioni of 1723, the music itself can provide clues to the evolution of vocal technique. In order to accommodate the wider ranges, singers likely used more than one vocal register. Falsetto and head voice would have been necessary to achieve the upper extension of the range. For female singers, head voice alone may have sufficed, though there is nothing from a laryngeal point of view to have precluded the use of falsetto at any point in the range.41 Tosi is the first source to discuss this issue, though it is unclear whether his equation of voce di testa with falsetto extends to all voice types.42 We can only surmise how smoothly blended was the transition between registers before the end of the seventeenth century. It was certainly of the utmost importance to Tosi, who preferred head voice for executing passaggi and other ornaments. A blended register transition still did not mean that the Italians preferred a unified color to the voice; composers exploited the contrasts between the top and bottom. Like pop singers today, Italian Baroque singers were adept at switching between different registers, laying the foundation for the cantar di sbalzo techniques so essential
for singers in the eighteenth century.

National Singing Styles - Italy, ca. 1600–1680 (II)

Modern singers, trained to sing with absolute rhythmic precision, need time to become comfortable with the concept of sprezzatura. The easiest way to incorporate it into singing is by first declaiming the text in an impassioned way as an orator or actor might. When I am not singing from memory, I often use a small prompt book with the texts set out according to the poetic lines, so that I can see the text as poetry freed from the musical notation. Sprezzatura can be equally daunting to a continuo player used to counting measures. In Ensemble Chanterelle, a group with which I perform regularly, theorbist Catherine Liddell has developed a notation system for works in stile recitativo, shown in Example 1.1, which reproduces only the singer’s text and the bass pitches corresponding to the correct syllables, without any durational values (plus any necessary figures and some shorthand reminders about chord arpeggiation). This allows me total rhythmic freedom, frees her from unnecessary visual information, and enables both of us to make each performance responsive to the inspiration of the moment.

Perhaps the overriding characteristic of Italian singing in the first part of the century was the passionate engagement of the singer with the music, which in turn engaged the audience. Marco da Gagliano described hearing Jacopo Peri:

National Singing Styles - Italy, ca. 1600–1680 (I)

During the 1580s and 1590s, florid singing in Italy reached a zenith with singers who excelled in the gorgia style of embellishments. These singers included women, boys, castratos, high and low natural male voices, and falsettists. The term gorgia (= throat) identified the locus of this technique, involving an intricate neuromuscular coordination of the glottis, which rapidly opens and closes while changing pitch or reiterating a single pitch, an action that is apparently innate to the human voice. A basic threshold of speed is required in order for throat articulation to work easily. The glottal action can be harder or softer depending on the degree of clarity and the emotional expression desired; the Italians apparently used a harder articulation than the French. In 1639 André Maugars observed that the Italians “perform their passages with more roughness, but today they are beginning to correct that.” Throat articulation works best when the vocal tract is relaxed and there is not excessive breath pressure.

Lodovico Zacconi described gorgia singers as follows:

These persons, who have such quickness and ability to deliver a quantity of figures in tempo with such velocity, have so enhanced and made beautiful the songs that now whosoever does not sing like those singers gives little pleasure to his hearer, and few of such singers are held in esteem. This manner of singing, and these ornaments are called by the common people gorgia; this is nothing other than an aggregation or collection of many eighths and sixteenths gathered in any one measure. And it is of such nature that, because of the velocity into which so many notes are compressed, it is much better to learn by hearing it than by written examples.