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.
In Italy, throat-articulation technique was often referred to as dispositione. There is ample evidence that it was carried over with the advent of monody and the new, more declamatory styles of singing, in spite of changes in ornamentation style and vocal technique. We find ornaments, such as the ribattuta di gola (“rebeating of the throat”), for example, whose very name suggests its performance technique. Giulio Caccini described the trillo, a repercussion on one pitch, as a “beating in the throat.”
Learning a repercussion ornament was recognized as a good way to master throat articulation. Caccini remarks that the trillo and gruppo are “a step necessary unto many things.” It is in this context that we should understand Zacconi’s remark that “the tremolo, that is, the trembling voice, is the true gate to enter the passages [passaggi] and to become proficient in the gorgia.” Equating Zacconi’s tremolo with pitch-fluctuation vibrato, as some scholars have done, contradicts the nature of throat-articulation technique. I understand his reference to the continuous motion of the voice to refer to the rapid opening and closing of the glottis, which in the trillo is done continuously on one note. Learning this glottal action independent of changing pitch is enormously helpful as a first step, before advancing to passaggi and other ornaments involving rapid changes of pitch. As Zacconi says, it indeed “wonderfully facilitates the undertaking of passaggi.” It is impossible to use throat articulation and continuous vibrato simultaneously, because the two vocal mechanisms are in laryngeal conflict with each other. Because Zacconi’s remarks so clearly refer to the
gorgia style, it is highly unlikely that his tremolo signifies either pitch-fluctuation vibrato or intensity vibrato.
The decision to use throat-articulation technique has a direct bearing on other stylistic decisions beyond the issue of vibrato. Because of the innate neuromuscular speed involved, the technical choice of throat articulation is directly linked to decisions regarding tempo. Given the fairly narrow physiological range of possible speeds, we can gauge the tempo range for pieces using throat articulated passaggi reasonably accurately.
The declamatory style of singing developed by singer-composers such as Jacopo Peri and Caccini extended speech into song. It most likely involved a laryngeal setup known today as “speech mode,” in which the larynx is in a neutral position, with a relaxed vocal tract and without support from extrinsic muscles. Speech mode would have easily accommodated the continued use of throat articulation. What was new, compared to Renaissance practice, was the role (and style) of ornamentation in expressing the text and the use of a more flexible breath stream to reflect the increasing exploitation of the qualitative nature of the Italian language. This flexible breath stream would have ebbed and flowed with the accentuation of the text.
The increased interest in the qualitative nature of Italian is tied to the development of the stile rappresentativo. Musical rhythms evolved from the characteristic rhythms associated with different poetic line lengths and poetic feet. Singers were highly sensitive to the different dynamic stresses for the verso piano, verso tronco, and verso sdrucciolo.20 As Ottavio Durante says in the preface to his Arie devote (1608), “You must pay attention to observe the feet of the verses; that is to stay on the long syllables and to get off the short ones; for otherwise you will create barbarisms.”
Giovanni Battista Doni, in his Trattato della musica scenica (1633–35), defined three levels of speech in the stile recitativo: narrative, expressive recitative, and special recitative (a style in between the other two), each of which had its own subtly different characteristic style of speech, compositional style, and manner of singing.
Consistent with the extension of speech into singing was the relatively narrow vocal compass of much of the music in the new style in the early decades of the century and the general preference for “natural” register rather than falsetto. Caccini was quite explicit: “From a feigned voice can come no noble manner of singing, which only proceeds from a natural voice.”22 Bellerofonte Castaldi, in his preface to Primo mazzetto di fiori (1623), wrote:
And because they treat either love or the scorn which a lover has for his beloved, they are represented in the tenor clef, whose intervals are proper and natural for masculine speech; it seems laughable to the Author that a man should declare himself to his beloved with a feminine voice and demand pity from her in falsetto.
Falsettists certainly were common in church choirs24 and were preferred to less skilled boys for solo parts. The overriding conclusion to make from Caccini’s comment is not to switch registers within the same piece but to transpose, if necessary, to avoid doing so. This is basically a one-register concept. For the new style of the early seventeenth century, the falsettist was not yet the operatic voce mezzana.
Different voice registers had been recognized as early as the Middle Ages. In the Lucidarium (1318), for example, Marchettus of Padua mentions three registers: vox pulminis, vox gutturus, and vox capitis. Jerome of Moravia, in the Tractatus de musica (after 1272), identifies vox pectoris, vox gutturis, and vox capitis. Yet many questions persist regarding the concept of register in the seventeenth century, namely:
(1) Were different voice registers used or mixed within the same piece? (2) If so, how many registers were recognized? (3) What was the nature of the transition from one register to another? (4) What was the quality of each register? and (5) How do these early terms relate to modern concepts of register?
Most seventeenth-century writers discuss only two registers, natural and falsetto; Zacconi, however, discusses three: voce di testa, voce di petto, and a mixture of the two, called voce obtuse. He generally prefers the voce di petto to the voce di testa. The need to develop a smooth passage between registers is not addressed in Italian sources before Pier Francesco Tosi’s Opinioni (1723). Of primary importance to early seventeenth-century Italians was the distinction between “natural” register and “falsetto.”
Another aspect of the new style of Italian singing involved greater attention to subtle dynamic shadings and colorings of the voice to express the text. The new flexible airstream facilitated the greater use of dynamics, especially in ornaments such as the messa di voce (a gradual crescendo and diminuendo) and esclamatione (the inverse). The crescendo was not necessarily correlated with pitch-fluctuation vibrato, as is often the case today. Durante tells us to make a crescendo on the dot and in ascending chromatic progressions.
In the absence of dynamic indications in the music, the rhetorical structure of the text and the qualitative ebb and flow of the Italian language provide a dynamic chiaroscuro from which one can shape a flexible dynamic plan. However, it is important to bear in mind the underlying dynamic shape of the voice, which I call the “vocal pyramid,” a concept for multiple voices that dates back as far as Conrad von Zabern (De modo bene cantandi, 1474). In this “pyramid” the lowest voices are fuller and heavier, the highest voices softer and finer. This is a balance somewhat different from what we often hear today, when choirs are somewhat “topheavy.”
Hermann Finck articulated this concept in a polyphonic context in his Practica musica (1556): “A discant singer sings with a tender and soothing voice, but a bass with a sharper and heavier one; the middle voices sing their melody with a uniform sound and pleasantly and skillfully strive to adapt themselves to the outer voices.”
As solo singing developed, Italian singers incorporated this choral-sound concept into the individual voice. Singers today are generally taught to phrase to the highest point of the musical line, whereas in text-centered music of the early Baroque, the rhetorical stress customarily takes advantage of the greater strength of the lower range. This became more fully developed later in the century as compositional practice utilized a more expanded vocal range. The “pyramid” has enormous implications both for dynamics in general and for the dynamic shape and direction of each phrase.
Another important characteristic of the new style was a certain rhythmic freedom, called sprezzatura. The singer was relatively free to depart from a regular tempo and from the notated musical rhythms in order to inflect the text. Rodolfo Celletti describes sprezzatura quite aptly:
It signifies a kind of singing liberated from the rhythmic inflexibility of polyphonic performance and allowing the interpreter, by slowing down or speeding up the tempo to “adjust the value of the note to fit the concept of the words” and hence to make the phrasing more expressive.
to be continued
(by A Performer's Guide to Seveteenth-Century Music)
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