Le 29 juin 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance précomposée - Analyzing Models and Creativity in the Long Eighteenth Century
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Peter van Tour
In this paper I attempt to historically ground one of the formulas presented in Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style (Oxford, 2007): specifically, the daily practice of sung improvised canons is here highlighted as an assumed commonplace for the Do-Re-Mi schema. Our current understanding of the curriculum in counterpoint and composition in the Neapolitan Conservatories is centered on partimento playing and written studies in counterpoint. But Neapolitan musicians were commonly described as singers, rather than as keyboard players.
I compare the canon solfeggi of Nicola Sala (1713–1801) from a variety of sources (scholastic canons from printed sources, or solfeggio canons from manuscript sources), highlighting Sala’s instruction of improvised canon and his own solfeggio canons as models for this instruction. The Do-Re-Mi schema is contextualized through the identification of some of its historical roots. The wide range of examples from counterpoint notebooks and educational exercises of Sala show that the Do-Re-Mi was used systematically not only in the realization of partimenti, but also in the writing and improvisation of fugues and singing of solfeggio canons, particularly of the final stretto of the fugue (the stretto maestrale).
