Pièce de caractère: a short instrumental piece with an anecdotic title, intended to imitate a character or an ‘affection’. In the sixteenth century the imitation of character emerged from dance music, the expression par excellence of bodily language, as in the Orchésographie of Thoinot Arbeau, or the works of the English Virginalists. In the following century rhetoric of the affections and bodily movement became as one in the ballet de cour and the French instrumental suite for lute, harpsichord or viol. The semantic determination of descriptive truth varied according to the degree of abstraction of the imitation, ‘icastic’ or ‘fantastic’, like or unlike its model. The basic notion goes back to the Humanists’ attempt to rebuild a theory of the affections on the ruins of Greek music, so highly esteemed for its effects on the passions of the soul. The affection is a quality of musical objects which comes into play when the form that imitates it is ‘represented’ by the interpreter to the listener’s powers of imagination. This doctrine’s point of reference was the equivalence posited by ancient writers between the soul and harmony: ‘There seems to be in us,’ writes Aristotle, ‘a certain affinity with musical modes and rhythms, and for this reason many philosophers say that the soul is harmony, or contains harmony within it.’ This relationship came to be considered as reciprocal, as moving in both directions, with the qualities of musical harmony attributed to the soul, and those of the soul attributed to harmony. Creation was, then, a metempsychosis of the spirit, which becomes embodied in the composition: just as a mother’s imagination can mould her embryo, so the composer’s fancy can imagine a form and migrate with it into the song, determining the register, the choice of intervals, the rhythm and the general character of the work. As is demonstrated by the very etymology of the term melos, which in the language of Homer can designate body parts of animals, melody was then an ethereal body, the anthropomorphic double of the ego, equipped with all the psychological and physical faculties of living beings: phalanxes, a modal skeleton, soul and body. Hence the special attention paid to problems of articulation, the respect in which the newness of this recording is most apparent. The interpretative perspective of this CD derives from an intense period of study, undertaken in collaboration with the classical scholar and violin maker Luc Breton, of the ‘parameters of timbre’ and of ‘consonantism’ in music. Until the end of the eighteenth century, before authors like Rousseau considered the sonority of consonants as a ‘barbarism’ appropriate to the northern languages, discussions of the qualities of correct declamation followed linguistic models founded on consonants (Breton). In the wake of the ancient grammarians, tradition distinguished consonants as thick or thin, heavy or delicate, combined as contrary elements in the body of the melody; all of this within the orbit of a form of ‘Pythagoreanism’ in the broad sense, in which the vowel-consonant binome goes back to the conflict between the limiting value of the numerical unit and the indeterminate interval operating in the interstices of syntax. This perspective focuses the performer’s attention on the timbral framework of the sonic discourse, leading to a more ‘philological’ reading of Baroque music, which ‘is mistakenly thought of only in terms of correct phrasing’ (Ghielmi). The result is a new coordination between the timbral and metrical elements, brought together in a complex blend – which the recording has succeeded in catching in live performance with remarkable fidelity. Confirmation of this is provided by the polymetry of La Minaudiè re, in which the play of accents diversely distributed in the interstices of the rhythmic framework generates a sculptural sonority of great ductility, which the listener’s fancy enters as if it were a second skin. Thus imitation produces images and affections. In La Diligence, the horsehair whistles on the string, conjuring up a picture of the coach setting off laboriously, its wheels caked in mud. The upper harmonics squeak in chorus in the sumptuous Plainte of Louis de Caix d’Hervelois, in which the instrument’s voice, low and hoarse, is that of a sob held back with difficulty by a lump in the throat. The counterpoint between timbre and metre is at its most extreme in Le Tact by Marais, to be struck and plucked only with the fingers of the left hand, according to the composer’s instructions: There is great need for me to provide an explanation here concerning Le Tact. This most singular piece can be played in two manners, the first being according to my intentions when I composed it, which is that each note be played with one of the fingers of the left hand, without any participation from the right hand; all four fingers can be used according to the position of the different notes. This first manner is extremely difficult and tiring, for each stroke with the finger must produce a touch [tact] which is audible to the listener. Those who have a certain acquaintance with the theorbo or the lute are more likely to succeed in this than others, unless the latter acquire the habit of such playing by long practice. The second manner in which the piece may be performed is to play it like any other ordinary piece for viol, and I have written it out in this way at the end of the volume. The foursquare rhythms of La Mandoline parody the harlequinades of the Neapolitan comedians around whom raged the Parisian querelles over the relative merits of Italian and French music. La Saillie du café evokes the animation of a talkative crowd leaving a fashionable coffee house. In Les Forgerons one’s mind casts back to the myth of Pythagoras deducing the laws of mathematics from the harmony produced by the blows of four hammers on an anvil. Other pieces – among them Marais’ gloomy La Plainte – are characteristic of that gravitas which for the Baroque era is the appropriate musical expression of exceptional states of mind, when black bile, made red-hot by the planet Saturn, intoxicates the artist’s spirit with its fantastic images. The black ink of melancholy suffuses Marais’ La Plainte, La Conversation, the Ouverture de La Grotte de Versailles, and the so-called ‘Amusements’. To the same genre belongs the aphorism entitled Le Rêveur, an enchanting rhythmic image of the fantastic style which the Baroque reserves for the expressionof the indeterminate movements of the imagination. The state of grace that directs the performer’s fingers – in the tuning known as the vieux ton, as requested by the composer[1] – is an eloquent example of how the evocative power of this music, far from mere anecdotic contingency, can act as a catalyst to the musician’s fantasy. The banal descriptive image is shattered into a multiplicity of forms, as innumerable as the possibilities of reality. ‘For banal indeed is the art that does not contemplate them all, from life to death.’ Thus art becomes a snare to capture grace: the artist is in command of his material whilst at the same time obedient to it. He does not produce beauty, he limits his role to ‘preparing ’ the conditions for capturing it. ‘The ultimate miracle of art does not depend in any sense on the interpreter, that is the error of the Romantics and the moderns: it creates itself, in the conditions prepared by the artisan.’(Ghielmi) And it is in this sense of the artist’s shrewd humility that we may grasp a final ‘truth’ (Pianca) from this interpretation. As in a certain seventeenth-century aesthetic, the ultimate miracle of art is not the consequence of ‘violence’ – in the Aristotelian sense – imposed on the material from the outside, but the result of an ars ministra naturae, which limits itself to setting nature on its way, preparing, accelerating or slowing down the processes of natural activity.
Brenno Boccadoro Translation: Charles Johnston
[1] ‘I have thought it still appropriate to use the ordinary tuning here. And if the pieces happen to use another tuning one need only put the letters that change in its place.’ Oeuvres de Charles Mouton (Paris: CNRS, 1992), Ier livre, Préface.