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.


Lionel Sawkins (1987) points out exceptional instances of women singing in the Chapelle Royale: There is a “Mlle. Delalande” mentioned on motet scores from around 1689, and Delalande’s two daughters are known to have sung in the chapel after 1703. The dessus (soprano) part was more typically sung by boys (pages or petits clercs), falsettists (faussets), or castratos. Cardinal Mazarin imported castratos from Italy around 1660. There were eleven dessus italiens (sopranistes, castrats, châtres) active in the late 1600s in chapel choirs and operas.

Members of the Chambre, the Écurie, and the Chapelle passed freely from one group to another, and performances by combined groups were common, especially for such ceremonies as coronations, royal births and deaths, and the celebrations surrounding royal marriages.

The Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame Cathedral were two of the largest and most prestigious musical establishments in Paris outside the royal purview. In the late seventeenth century, the choir school of the Sainte-Chapelle numbered five to eight chaplains, six to twelve clerics, and eight choirboys. Extra singers and instrumentalists were engaged for exceptional occasions; the musicians were grouped on two opposite sides of the upper chapel, on platforms specially erected.

The French opera chorus from Jean-Baptiste Lully to Jean-Philippe Rameau divided into a petit choeur, composed only of solo voices, and a grand choeur of many voices. Women sang soprano; men sang haute-contre, tenor, and bass. In the 1670s, the earliest days of the Académie d’Opéra, the chorus numbered fifteen; by 1713 the chorus of the Académie Royale de Musique included twenty-two men and twelve women.13 The French haute-contre was not a falsetto voice, but a high, light tenor. If even one of your tenors is comfortable at the high end of the range, you can have him sing haute-contre with your female altos and his voice will add a bit of “ping” to the sound of the section.

Part music for domestic use and simple music for private devotions, such as Huguenot metrical psalms, might be sung or played by any family members on a variety of soft chamber instruments. (Jean Calvin’s proscription of musical instruments in public worship did not apply to music in the home; as early as 1554, Louis Bourgeois, Calvin’s own choirmaster, published settings of Genevan psalms “bien consonante
aux instrumentz musicaulx.”

Conducting

It was exceptional for the leader of a seventeenth-century musical ensemble to do nothing but beat time, because it was exceptional to deploy such large numbers of performers that a centrally placed, highly visible conductor was necessary. (On the infamous occasion when Lully dealt himself a fatal wound while beating time, he was conducting more than 150 musicians in his Te Deum.) For ordinary purposes, keeping the ensemble together could readily be accomplished by any reliable and experienced member whose vocal or instrumental role positioned him so that all could see him. A duple division of the pulse was signaled by a simple down and up; for a triple division, the downstroke occupied twice as much time as the upstroke. A singer used his hand, or a stick (token of the ancient precentor’s staff) or a roll of paper or parchment. Instrumental players used the same body language they do today: the player of a bowed stringed instrument used the bow; a theorbo or archlute player moved the neck of the instrument down and up; continuo keyboard players could free one hand when needed or use eyebrows, shoulders, or torso to emphasize the pulse. Whether the choirmaster performed the task himself or delegated it undoubtedly varied with the familiarity of the music, the day of the week, the expected presence of important guests in the audience or congregation, and a host of other imponderables. The present-day early-music director is ideally situated to delegate the leading (while retaining the artistic direction) of some ensembles, which will tend to raise  everyone’s commitment to the artistic success of the performance.