The Spread Of “Tonal Form” : Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteent... http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195... Oxford History of Western Music: Richard Taruskin See also from Grove Music Online Alessandro Marcello Antonio Vivaldi Ritornello Henry Purcell THE SPREAD OF “TONAL FORM” Chapter: CHAPTER 5 The Italian Concerto Style and the Rise of Tonality-driven Form Source: MUSIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Author(s): Richard Taruskin Having characterized the sequence-and-cadence model as a norm that would usher in an era of “common practice,” we need to justify that remark by demonstrating its chronological and geographical spread. The chronological demonstration will emerge naturally enough in the course of the following chapters, but just to show how pervasive the model became within the sphere of Italian instrumental music, and how quickly it spread, we can sneak a peek at a concerto by a member of the generation immediately following Corelli’s. Alessandro Marcello (1669–1747) was a Venetian nobleman who practiced music as a dilettante —a “delighter” in the art—rather than one who pursued it for a living. His work was on a fully professional level, however, and achieved wide circulation in print. (His younger brother Benedetto, even more famous and accomplished as a composer, was also more prominent as a Venetian citizen, occupying high positions in government and diplomacy.) Marcello, like Corelli before him, was a member of the Arcadian Academy, and maintained a famous salon, a weekly gathering of artist-dilettantes where he had his music performed for his own and his company’s enjoyment. It was for such a gathering that he composed his Concerto a cinque (“concerto scored for five parts”) in D minor, which was published in Amsterdam in 1717 or 1718 and attracted the attention of J. S. Bach, who made it famous in an embellished transcription for harpsichord. Although published only three or four years later than Corelli’s Concerti Grossi , op. 6, Marcello’s concerto belongs to a different type—one that much more closely resembles the type of concerto we know from the modern concert repertoire. Where Corelli’s concerti were in essence amplified trio sonatas (and while such concerti continued to be written by many composers, particularly George Frideric Handel and his English imitators, long into the eighteenth century), Marcello’s is modeled on the format of the contemporary opera seria aria, such as we encountered in the previous chapter. It is scored for a single solo instrument (replacing Corelli’s “concertino”), in this case the oboe, accompanied by an orchestra (or ripieno , “full band”) of string instruments that chiefly supplies ritornellos. Concertos of this type usually dispensed with the opening “Preludio” of the Corellian model and consisted of three movements: fast ritornello movements at the ends, with a slow “ cantabile ” (lyrical accompanied solo) in between. This new genre of “solo concerto” seems to have originated in Bologna, at the Cathedral of San Petronio. Its earliest exponent was the violinist Giuseppe Torelli (1658–1709), a contemporary and rival of Corelli’s, who led the Cathedral orchestra. Its “classic” exponent was Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), the outstanding Venetian composer of the early eighteenth century, to whom we will of course return. Doubtless Marcello picked up the three movement concerto form from fellow-Venetian Vivaldi. The first movement of his oboe concerto is in a straightforward ritornello form akin to the opening section of a da capo aria. The last movement crossbreeds the ritornello framework with the binary dance form familiar to us from the Corelli “da camera” style. (Marcello, recall, wrote not for the church service but for his own aristocratic salon.) Of particular interest is the structure of the main ritornello theme (Ex. 5-9a). It begins with a four-measure “head motive” over a bass that is clearly derived from the old “descending tetrachord” of chaconne and passacaglia fame. It ends, accordingly, on a half cadence. Ground basses remained popular in the Italian string repertory. The last sonata da camera in Corelli’s opus 2, published in 1685, consisted of a single showy ciaccona over a descending tetrachord, and the most famous solo sonata in Corelli’s opus 5, published in 1700, was a magnif icent set of variations over the 1 / 7 2011.01.27. 14:39 The Spread Of “Tonal Form” : Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteent... http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195... eight-bar folia ground, one of the old dance “tenors” that went back to the sixteenth century. Corelli’s “La Folia” has remained a virtuoso warhorse—usually in modernized and “violinistically enhanced” transcriptions—to the present day. fig. 5-4 Antonio Vivaldi, caricature by Pier Loene Ghezzi (the only authenticated life drawing of the composer). All resemblance to the ground bass, however, ends with the fifth measure of Marcello ’s ritornello. Instead of another four-bar phrase over the same bass, we now get a nine-bar monster consisting of four sequential repetitions of an angular scale-plus-arpeggio idea that unfolds over a single exact and complete circumnavigation of the circle of fifths, finally hooking up with a cadence formula that adds the “extra” ninth measure to its length. The ensuing oboe solo, a variation on the ritornello, reproduces and embellishes its harmonic structure: a four-bar approach to a half cadence followed by a full circle of fifths accompanying a series of melodic sequences (reduced this time to four measures by doubling the harmonic rhythm) and a concluding set of ascending sequences that reaches a cadence on III, the relative major. A set of rising sequences, unlike the falling type that arises more or less straight -forwardly out of the circle of fifths, requires a different sort of harmonic support. The implied root movement is made explicit in the next oboe solo 2 / 7 2011.01.27. 14:39 The Spread Of “Tonal Form” : Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteent... http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195... (mm. 36–52), a fascinating interplay of melodic and harmonic contours (Ex. 5-9b). It begins with the usual four-bar “head,” followed by a sequential elaboration. The sequences in this case begin (mm. 36–41) by rising. The harmonies change bar by bar in a root progression that ascends by fourths and falls by thirds: F (III)–B ♭ (VI)–G (IV)–C (VII)–A (V)–D (I). Immediately on reaching the original tonic, the circle of fifths kicks in and the sequences come tumbling down in double time (mm. 41–46), as if to remind us that rising is always more laborious than falling. ex. 5-9a Alessandro Marcello, Oboe Concerto in D minor, III, beginning But notice that the rising progression is presented in such a way that if the “functional bass” notes were sampled at the bar lines beginning at m. 36, they would create a rising chromatic line that exactly reversed the old passus duriusculus , the chromatically descending groundbass tetrachord of old: (A)–B ♭–B–C–C ♯–D. In effect we have a series of interpolated leading tones (again familiar from longstanding practice, in this case the downright ancient principles of musica ficta ); and if we now interpret those leading tones within the nascent system of harmonic functions (i.e., as the thirds of dominant triads), we have a new principle—the “applied dominant”—that will emerge over the years as the primary means of harmonic and formal expansion within the tonal practice that is just now reaching full elaboration. We are witnessing a truly momentous juncture in the history of harmony: the birth of harmonically controlled and elaborated form. In the Italian instrumental music of a rough quarter-century enclosing the year 1700, we may witness in their earliest, “avant-garde” phase the tonal relations we have long been taught to take for granted. And yet from the very beginning this avant-garde style of harmony was easily and eagerly assimilated, both by composers and by listeners. For composers it made the planning and control of ever larger formal structures virtually effortless. To listeners it vouchsafed an unprecedentedly exciting and involving sense of high-powered, directed momentum, and promised under certain conditions a practically visceral emotional payoff. The tonal system at once gave 3 / 7 2011.01.27. 14:39 The Spread Of “Tonal Form” : Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteent... http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195... composers access to a much more explicit and internal musical “logic” than they had ever known before, and also gave them the means for administering an altogether new kind of pleasurable shock to their audiences. ex. 5-9b Alessandro Marcello, Concerto in D minor, III, mm. 36–52, analyzed to show basse fondamentale These new powers and thrills made the new style virtually irresistible and assured its rapid spread. Our geographical witness to that spread can be Henry Purcell. Up to now we have viewed Purcell chiefly through a French-tinted lens, as befits a composer for the Restoration stage. He was equally receptive to the new winds blowing from Italy, however, and equally reflective of them, provided one looks for the reflection in the right place. That place, of course, would be string ensemble music, an area in which Purcell’s art underwent an astoundingly quick and thorough transformation at very nearly the beginning of his career. Rarely can one trace so sudden a change of style, or be so sure about its cause. Purcell was heir to the rich and insularly English tradition of gentlemanly ensemble music for viols that we visited briefly in chapter 3. His first important body of compositions, in fact, was a set of consort “fantazias” that he wrote in the summer of 1680, the year he turned twenty-one.