Paganini's Quest: The Twenty-four Capricci per violino solo, Op. 1 (original) (raw)
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Carlo Ambrogio Lonati (c.1645-post 1701), known as ‘Il gobbo della Regina’ (the hunchback of Queen Christine of Sweden) was a multifaced figure. He was a violinist, composer, and singer operating in Italy and elsewhere in Europe in the late seventeenth century, whose virtuoso violin music is considered among the most outstanding of the period. So far however, research has been limited to the study of only one collection of twelve sonatas, and lacks insight into his other violin pieces. Scholarship on Lonati’s violin music is thus in great need of a new integrated study of its stylistic features in relationship to performance practices. In this paper I will focus on newly discovered sources of Lonati’s violin music and demonstrate what performers can learn from it in terms of performance practice. The requirement of an enigmatic five-string instrument and the dazzling basso continuo writing, the extensive use of scordatura, chordal and polyphonic passages in double and triple stops, a fascination with arpeggios, bow vibratos, the appearance of pasticcio-sonatas are just some of the aspects I will take into consideration. Furthermore, my investigation — which will not be limited to the violin itself but also to other string and continuo instruments — will illustrate a wider approach to performance practices utilized in northern Italian areas, particularly in Bologna, Modena, Venice, and Milan at the turn of the eighteenth century. The methodological core of the paper lies in a strict relationship between (mainly manuscript) source study and performance practices with the purpose of showing how texts were handed down and how musical practice changed in time.
The Voice of the Composer: Theory and Practice in the Works of Pietro Pontio, Volume 1
1989
The life, music, and theoretical writings of Pietro Pontio (1532-1596) yield considerable insight into questions of theory and practice in the late sixteenth century. The dissertation places Pontio within his musical and cultural milieu, and assesses his role as both theorist and composer. The first two chapters present an expanded biography based on new archival evidence. The course of Pontio's career is detailed, and corrections such as his exact date of death and his location and employment for the years 1569-1574 are presented. The documents also uniquely detail the working conditions and pedagogical methods and concerns of the sixteenth-century maestro di cappella. Chapter Three surveys Pontio's two treatises, the Ragionamento (1588) and the Dialogo (1595), outlining important issues addressed by Pontio. Chapter Four presents a brief survey of Pontio's music, hitherto unstudied, showing his work to be of consistent quality and inventiveness. Chapter Five discusses issues from the Ragionamento. Pontio's important discussion of the use of mode and psalm tone in polyphony suggests a hierarchical approach to cadential structure based on pitch, text relationship, and cadential type, and the author presents a system of cadential classification based on these constructs. The result is a clearer understanding of modal structure and distinctions of genre. Chapter Six examines the second section of Pontio's Dialogo as an early attempt at critical writing, similar in scope to that presented by Lodovico Zacconi in the second part of his Prattica di musica (1622). In both chapters, Pontio's theoretical writings are amplified by reference to his own musical works and those of his contemporaries. Chapter Seven assesses Pontio's influences on contemporary and later writers, and details the degree of influence Pontio's treatise had on Valerio Bona's Regole del contraponto (1595) and Pietro Cerone's El Melopeo y maestro (1613). Both are shown to be heavily dependent on many of the most original aspects of Pontio's work. A summary assesses the important role of Pontio in sharpening our understanding of critical aspects of theory and practice in the period. Volume Two presents an annotated works list for Pontio's compositions, transcriptions of archival documents used in the study, and transcriptions of representative musical compositions.
The “War of the Romantics”: An Aesthetical Overview of Early and Late Romantic Music
The essay addresses the complexity of Romanticism in music as a single movement: while history tends to establish Romantic music as an artistic current with its specific features and its inner developments, the paper aims to show and explain how the aesthetical grounds of this current are diverse, at times rather opposite. The main musical/philosophical positions are treated: from Schumann to Berlioz, from Liszt to Wagner, from Debussy to Hanslick. Although the approach used is historical, particular attention is given to the aesthetical purposes of each discussed composer or philosopher.
The Voice of the Composer: Theory and Practice in the Works of Pietro Pontio
1989
The life, music, and theoretical writings of Pietro Pontio (1532-1596) yield considerable insight into questions of theory and practice in the late sixteenth century. The dissertation places Pontio within his musical and cultural milieu, and assesses his role as both theorist and composer. The first two chapters present an expanded biography based on new archival evidence. The course of Pontio's career is detailed, and corrections such as his exact date of death and his location and employment for the years 1569-1574 are presented. The documents also uniquely detail the working conditions and pedagogical methods and concerns of the sixteenth-century maestro di cappella. Chapter Three surveys Pontio's two treatises, the Ragionamento (1588) and the Dialogo (1595), outlining important issues addressed by Pontio. Chapter Four presents a brief survey of Pontio's music, hitherto unstudied, showing his work to be of consistent quality and inventiveness. Chapter Five discusses issues from the Ragionamento. Pontio's important discussion of the use of mode and psalm tone in polyphony suggests a hierarchical approach to cadential structure based on pitch, text relationship, and cadential type, and the author presents a system of cadential classification based on these constructs. The result is a clearer understanding of modal structure and distinctions of genre. Chapter Six examines the second section of Pontio's Dialogo as an early attempt at critical writing, similar in scope to that presented by Lodovico Zacconi in the second part of his Prattica di musica (1622). In both chapters, Pontio's theoretical writings are amplified by reference to his own musical works and those of his contemporaries. Chapter Seven assesses Pontio's influences on contemporary and later writers, and details the degree of influence Pontio's treatise had on Valerio Bona's Regole del contraponto (1595) and Pietro Cerone's El Melopeo y maestro (1613). Both are shown to be heavily dependent on many of the most original aspects of Pontio's work. A summary assesses the important role of Pontio in sharpening our understanding of critical aspects of theory and practice in the period. Volume Two presents an annotated works list for Pontio's compositions, transcriptions of archival documents used in the study, and transcriptions of representative musical compositions.
More than any other qualities of Rossini's operas, it was orchestration and melodic idiom that determined their success at the time of the first performances, and for us today they remain among the most significant aspects of the composer's art. While his orchestration displays distinctly novel tendencies, Rossini's melodic language is based on consolidation: an extreme refinement of two typically Italian traditions, the school of the castratos and the concertante aesthetic applied to the voice, coinciding historically with the disappearance ofthe first and the dwindling of the second. Rossini integrated into his writing for voices a system of expression perfectly suited to the training of the singers of his time. This conti'nuity between Rossini's vocal grammar and that of his interpreters was crucial to the success of this art, and yet also precipitated its obsolescence when the performers, as time went on, lost the technical capacity to execute the proper diminutions and to ornament their own parts. But by that time Rossini's melodic language, directly as much as through singers, had already impregnated the music of numerous composers contemporary with, or immediately after, its progenitor. Even the most original among them -Donizetti, Bellini, Pacini, Mercadante, the young Verdi -had recourse to his style. It follows, then, that detailed knowledge of this style is a valuable tool in the study of all Italian opera in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Paganini’s Body and Projection of Genius
Paganini complained to his lawyer in 1832, “Now no one ever asks if one has heard Paganini, but if one has seen him. To tell you the truth, I regret that there is a general opinion among all classes that I’m in collusion with the Devil. The papers talk too much about my outward appearance, which arouses incredible curiosity.” Paganini’s appearance was a point of intense focus for the crowds who flocked to see him perform. It was the image he projected, perhaps as much as the music he played, that captured their attention and stimulated their imaginations to concoct stories about a life devilish enough to match his bizarre and wasted form. I demonstrate the extent to which Paganini’s physicality was intertwined with his success. It is well known that he battled ill health and had a rare physical condition that made his joints unusually flexible and suited him perfectly to the violin. Adding to this information, I present firsthand accounts and portraits of Paganini which show how his physical form was exploited for publicity and, moreover, lionized as it was interpreted by his contemporaries as displaying the outward signs of inner genius. Finally, I pull from Joseph Roach’s book It, which explores the nearly indefinable qualities which distinguish “abnormally interesting people” from the rest of us. Paganini’s body contained an extraordinary combination of contradictory attributes—tragic and comic, good nature and diablerie—making him irresistible to the public’s fantasies. His body drew crowds, enabled him as a performer on the violin, and in the mind of the public, made him a vehicle of Romantic genius.
Climbing Monte Romanesca: Eighteenth-Century Composers in Search of the Sublime
The voice-leading schema that Robert Gjerdingen calls the Monte Romanesca served composers for more than a hundred years as the framework for passages that move and delight listeners still today. After differentiating the Monte Romanesca from the rising-fifths sequence (the larger category to which it belongs), this paper presents a history of the schema from Corelli to Mozart and Haydn. It shows that composers tended to save it for special effect, using it late in movements (or sections of movements) where it serves a climactic, pre-cadential function. Inspired by the work of Vasili Byros on the Le-Sol-Fi-Sol and Olga Sanchez on the Romanesca/Hymn topic, the paper reconstructs a network of meanings that composers might have wanted to convey with their use of the schema. Especially common in sacred music, the Monte Romanesca (like the Le-Sol-Fi-Sol and the Romanesca/Hymn) carried a sacred aura when used in secular music. I will present a brief overview of the sublime as an aesthetic category, arguing that composers of music both sacred and secular, both instrumental and vocal, used the Monte Romanesca as a signifier of the sublime.