A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music, Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION Stewart Carter It is trite, but nonetheless accurate, to say that the seventeenth century was an age of transition between the High Renaissance and the High Baroque. This era was in fact long ignored by music historians. An earlier age, which liked to think of musical periods as dominated by great men, dubbed the “Renaissance” the Age of Palestrina and Lasso, and the “Baroque” the Age of Bach and Handel. Even the Early Music Movement, in its “earlier” stages, regarded the seventeenth century as an awkward stepchild; the music was either overripe Lasso or incipient Bach. Until fairly recently, the term “Baroque performance practice” was understood to refer primarily to the period of 1680 to 1750. But recent research and recent performers have begun to change all that. There are now ensembles and individual performers who specialize in this repertory, and performances of the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers are ubiquitous. There is also a scholarly organization, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, devoted to this era. Yet just a few years ago, one could not find a period-instrument recording of Corelli’s trio sonatas listed in the Schwann Catalogue. When this series of performer’s guides was launched a few years ago, it was initially planned that there would be just one Baroque volume. Subsequent discussions made it clear that the subject matter was too vast to handle in a single volume, and so the seventeenth century was separated from the late Baroque. But apart from mere convenience, is there a compelling reason to treat the seventeenth century separately? Are there qualities that set the seventeenth century apart and make it unique? Historical watersheds rarely oblige us by falling neatly into years with round numbers, but at the beginning of the seventeenth century, this nearly happened in music. In Italy, the rise of monody and opera and the cataclysmic changes in texture did take place very close to 1600, thereby making that year a convenient dividing line on the early end of our spectrum. The latter end of our period is well defined chronologically, but considerably less so stylistically. Some would argue that the Baroque style reached full maturity around 1680. All of the published works of Corelli—arguably one of the first masters of the mature Baroque and one who exerted immeasurable influence on musical style throughout Europe—appeared after this date. The last works of Lully, who xvi Preface to the First Edition almost single-handedly created the French Baroque style, similarly appeared after 1680, as did the mature works of Purcell, the giant of the English Baroque. So our century includes both the dawn of the Baroque and the beginnings of its maturity. But what holds it together stylistically? The characteristics of the Baroque that distinguish it from the Renaissance and mark it as a unique—even revolutionary —period are well known: the new texture of the “firm bass and florid treble,” supplanting the old equal-voiced style; the rise of harmony and consequent downgrading though not the disappearance of counterpoint; the rise of instrumental music; the rise of solo music; the concertato style; the basso continuo; a new attitude toward the relationship between words and music; a new attitude toward emotional content in music; and the birth of new genres such as opera, oratorio, and sonata. The changes that were wrought in Italy in the early seventeenth century were unusual in many respects. First, the rapidity and profundity of the changes were unparalleled in the history of music up to that time. Never before had music changed so radically so quickly, and never before had theorists led the way, at least in part, toward stylistic change. Theorists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance described and explained music as they knew it; rarely did they advocate stylistic change. The members of the Florentine Camerata, most of them musical amateurs, probably just did not share the reverence for the received tradition of music that is evident in the writings of most earlier theorists. Thoughts and ideas, then, led the way. This was a philosophical revolution as much as a musical one; or perhaps more accurately, the philosophical revolution precipitated the musical one. And it is probably safe to say that no one can fully understand the performance practices of the seventeenth century without some knowledge at least of its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings. Prominent among these is the widely cited but imperfectly understood Doctrine of Affections. The idea that music had the power...