TY - JOUR
AU - Broude, Ronald
AB - Abstract The texts self-published by such late 17th-century French performer-composers as Chambonnières, Marais and Gaultier are, by definition, ‘authoritative’. Their authority, however, is quite different from that of authoritative sources in later repertories, repertories in which musical works are stable entities defined in detail by texts serving as instructions that performers are expected to follow literally. These self-publishing composers were first and foremost performers who composed largely for themselves and their intimates, and each composition married musical conception and personal performing style in ways that do not obtain when a composer composes for a wider public. Self-publication was the means by which these performer-composers sought to control the texts in which their compositions circulated. The detailed texts found in their publications were neither prescriptive (instructions to be followed literally), nor descriptive (transcriptions of particular performances), but exemplary, representations of sample performances in the composers’ personal styles that purchasers of their publications could emulate. This is the significance of their authority. In his extravagant pursuit of la gloire, Louis XIV, as is well known, sought to assert not only the political hegemony of France but also her cultural pre-eminence. Central to the latter programme was France’s music. When Louis came to power in 1660, French music was circulating primarily in manuscript; when he died in 1715, print had become the more important medium of dissemination. The rapid expansion of print was in large part due to the house of Ballard.1 The principals of this firm, Robert III (d.1673) and his eldest son and successor, Christophe (1641–1715), held a monopoly for printing music from movable type (such music was designated imprimée). They styled themselves ‘seul Imprimeur du Roy pour la Musique’, and they guarded their monopoly jealously, aggressively employing the courts to suppress interlopers. During the 1670s and 80s, the Ballards expanded their catalogue of French public music—the operas presented at court and the vocal works performed in sacred settings—but music for solo instruments—the repertory of the virtuoso performers so important to the image of Paris as the musical capital of Europe—did not much engage their interest.2 The royal patent that authorized the Ballards’ monopoly did not, however, extend to music printed from engraved metal plates (music so printed was designated gravée), and the Crown had a tradition of granting to favoured musicians privilèges enabling them to have their compositions engraved, printed and sold by artisans and merchants other than the Ballards. For performer-composers willing to shoulder the burdens of self-publishing, this process offered several advantages. Composers could see their works in print regardless of whether or not the Ballards were prepared to risk publishing those works in the largely untried market for solo instrumental music. Engraved plates afforded performer-composers maximum control over the appearance of their music: an engraved plate could represent whatever configurations of symbols a manuscript could, whereas the Ballards’ favoured fonts were unable to represent chords effectively, were incapable of beaming notes more than a 3rd apart, and lacked sorts (i.e. pieces of type) for most of the many ornaments in use. Illustrations 1a and 1b compare a passage printed from Ballard’s type and from an engraved plate. (Note how engraving’s ability to subsume the downward leap of a 6th under a single beam could convey the grouping of the quaver and two semiquavers, and how beaming together the last four semiquavers of the first bar emphasizes the diatonic ascent, neither of which things Ballard’s font could do.) 1a View largeDownload slide La musique imprimée: Lully, Armide, Passacaille, in the Ballard edition, 1687, p.226, first system, bars 2–4, premier dessus 1b La musique gravée: Lully, Armide, Passacaille, transcription for harpsichord by D’Anglebert, Pièces de clavecin, 1689, p.64, bottom system, bars 4–6, right hand 1a View largeDownload slide La musique imprimée: Lully, Armide, Passacaille, in the Ballard edition, 1687, p.226, first system, bars 2–4, premier dessus 1b La musique gravée: Lully, Armide, Passacaille, transcription for harpsichord by D’Anglebert, Pièces de clavecin, 1689, p.64, bottom system, bars 4–6, right hand With their privilèges in hand, a number of performer-composers undertook the co-ordinative functions of modern publishers: they engaged the services of the artisans who engraved the plates and produced the printed sheets; they decided upon and authorized press runs; and they managed the distribution of their publications from their own places of residence and through the dealers beginning to establish a trade in music. Like modern publishers, they laid out the funds to pay for these processes and kept what profits accrued. The musicians who pioneered this programme included some of the most important musical figures in France: harpsichordists Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre and Jean Henry D’Anglebert; bass violists Guillaume de Machy and Marin Marais; and masters of the lute such as Denis Gaultier and Jacques Gallot.3 The institution they established would be continued by later generations of French musicians—François Couperin, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray and Jean-Marie Leclair,4 to name some of the best known—and would become a model for self-publication by composers in other lands: Johann Kuhnau, J. S. Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann in the German states, and Francesco Geminiani and George Frideric Handel at various times during their English careers.5 Among modern musicologists and performers, the texts self-published by these performer-composers have always enjoyed special status. In a repertory in which surviving holographs are few, these French prints are for most of the pieces they transmit the only extant sources with credible claims to authority, i.e. having been prepared either by the composers themselves or with their active participation. And it is clear that these publications transmit the texts—the specific arrangements of symbols—in which the composers wanted their works to circulate: collation (i.e. symbol by symbol comparison) of copies of the same publication has enabled musicologists to identify corrections and revisions made to the plates between impressions, as well as manuscript alterations inserted after sheets had been printed but before they were sold.6 It is therefore tempting to assign to these authoritative texts the same significance that we assign to the authoritative texts of Classical, Romantic and modern works. But to do so would be a mistake. The simple fact that composer-performers took so much care with their published texts makes these texts problematic, for the solo music of late 17th-century France belonged to what today would be called a ‘performerly’ tradition. Dominated by superstar instrumentalists and singers with strong and distinctive musical personalities, this tradition valued personal style, the combination of musical taste and technical mastery that enabled a performer to respond to musical situations in ways that were always fresh yet recognizably characteristic of him or her. More important from a text-critical point of view, this tradition placed a premium on spontaneity—the ability of a performer to vary successive performances of the same composition. Jean Le Gallois, royal librarian and cultural sophisticate, described admiringly how Chambonnières played his harpsichord pieces differently each time he performed them.7 Such emphasis on spontaneity in performance meant that these pieces resisted textualization. Because each performance differed from others in details that text represents, no single text could represent a piece in every detail. If such is the case, what can be represented by even an authoritative text engraved and printed under the composer’s supervision? And how can such multiform pieces be represented in modern editions? Perhaps the most thorough consideration of these questions remains David Fuller’s article on Chambonnières’s harpsichord pieces, published in this journal two decades ago.8 Chambonnières is an ideal focus for such a discussion not only because his oeuvre survives in a wealth of sources—46 of his pieces survive in three or more sources each—but because the musical sources are complemented by a substantial body of comment in public and private documents to which both the composer and his contemporaries contributed. Fuller recognizes that Chambonnières’s harpsichord pieces are multiform, that for many of them improvisation probably played an important part in both their composition and performance, and that the texts in which these pieces reach us—even those originating with the composer himself—should not be realized literally. Fuller believes that the ideal way for editors to present these multiform pieces would be to publish multiple texts of each piece for which more than one text survives (textual critics call this procedure ‘versioning’, although Fuller does not use the term). But Fuller assumes that publishers will be unwilling to print more than a single text of each work, and so he recommends that the single text that an editor prints be the composer’s text when one is extant. In the past two decades, several developments have increased our understanding of this repertory. Versioned editions have been published: Bruce Gustafson’s editions of the works of Hardel and Richard have multiple texts of several pieces, and C. David Harris’s edition of D’Anglebert’s collected works has a total of 133 texts for the 107 pieces that Harris believes make up D’Anglebert’s extant oeuvre.9 The collected edition of Chambonnières’s works prepared by Gustafson and Denis Herlin contains a total of more than 300 texts of 157 works.10 Such editions together with the convenient accessibility of sources (not only in facsimile but now on the internet) has made evident how many different ways many of these pieces were interpreted. Our understanding of multiform works has also broadened: dealing with such works has long preoccupied textual critics working in literature—especially since the 1980s, when scholars demonstrated that several of Shakespeare’s plays survived in multiple authoritative versions and editors of Shakespeare were obliged to discuss in depth the problems inherent in presenting multiform works in useful editions;11 many of their ideas can be usefully applied to music. Nevertheless, important questions that might enable us to apply such new insights to the texts transmitting French Baroque solo works have yet to be engaged. If the authoritative texts of a performer-composer such as Chambonnières were not to be realized literally, what was Chambonnières’s purpose in publishing them? If (as Fuller recognizes) the transmission of these pieces does not lend itself to the normal assumptions of stemmatics, which usually attributes textual variance either to inadvertent error or deliberate tampering, how are the often numerous differences among extant early texts of the same piece to be traced and explained? And what do surviving texts—authoritative and otherwise—suggest about the pieces’ ontology? In the following paragraphs, I shall argue that the texts in these self-published prints were intended as models to be emulated in respect of performing style. I shall suggest that variance among texts is a product of the emphasis on spontaneity in performance, and is a result of copyists often omitting details that performers would vary. And I will propose that the principal motive for publishing such texts was the composers’ desire to convey, insofar as text could, the personal performing styles for which their compositions had been conceived. By adopting such a strategy these performer-composers offered an early form of the concept that we today call the ‘authoritative text’. Let us turn first to the motives for publishing. We must begin by understanding that, unlike composers of a later day, the performer-composers with whom we are concerned were first and foremost performers known for their mastery of specific instruments. These performers composed not so much so that they could sell copies of their music to a general public or leave a body of works for posterity, as because they (and, secondarily, their students) needed new music to play. Several motives induced these performer-composers to obtain privilèges and to go through the process of publishing their music themselves. The most obvious, mentioned above, is that by self-publishing, composers could get into print music that the Ballards might not have been prepared to publish. Reputation was also a motivation: having his or her works in print enhanced a performer’s image, and might thereby attract wealthy students, yield profitable engagements to perform, and lead to appointments to lucrative posts in the royal household or in the musical establishments of the higher nobility. But, as the composers themselves declared, their principal motive was concern with the texts in which their works circulated. The avertissement that prefaces Michel de La Barre’s Premier livre de pièces pour la flûte traversière avec la basse continue, published in 1710, brings together in a single statement the sentiments that self-publishing performer-composers had been expressing, though usually in less concise form, for the previous four decades: Ces pieces sont, pour la plus grande partie, d’un caractere si singulier et si differentes de l’idée qu’on a euë jusques icy, de celles qui conviennent a la Flûte Traversiere; que j’avois resolu de ne leur faire voir le jour qu’en les excutant moy-même; Mais les solicitations de ceux qui me les ont entendu joüer, et les fautes qui se sont glissées dans les copies de celles que l’on m’a surprises, m’ont enfin determiné a les faire imprimer; Et comme ces Pieces sont les premieres qui ayent paru pour cette sorte de Flûte, je croy estre obligé pour en donner l’intelligence, de dire a ceux qui les voudront joüer.12 These pieces are for the most part of so singular a character and so different from what until now has been thought appropriate for the transverse flute, that I had resolved not to let them see the light of day but to play them myself. But the solicitations of those who have heard me play them and the faults that have found their way into the copies of them that I have encountered have at last convinced me to have them printed. And as these pieces are the first that have appeared for this sort of flute, I believed myself obliged to give some instructions [intelligence] to those who want to play them. Careful reading of La Barre’s avertissement will clarify both his concerns and the circumstances from which those concerns arose. First, these are pieces that La Barre wrote for himself, and they are so special, so personal, that he had expected that only he himself would play them. He had never intended that they circulate among the general public. However, there are already abroad copies of his works that are full of faults. Distressed by this situation, La Barre has decided to offer his pieces in print so that performers may understand just how they should be played. To this end, he has furnished his texts with instructions to indicate how the pieces should be performed. These instructions take two forms: there are symbols embedded in the texts, and there are verbal explanations of what the symbols mean. The symbols and their explanations address matters both interpretative (for example where to insert ornaments) and technical (how to negotiate particular sorts of passages). One of the verbal explanations reads: Lorsqu’on trouvera deux noirs par degré conjoint en descendant, auxquelles il y aura une liaison, on donnera un coup de langue sur la premiere, et l’on tremblera sur la seconde sans coup de langue. On fera la même chose aux croches en pareille occasion, si le mouvement le permet.13 [When one encounters] two conjoint black notes [i.e. crotchets] descending, joined by a slur, one will tongue, and one will play a tremblement on the second, without tonguing. One will do the same thing with quavers in similar situations, if the tempo permits. This recommendation—and others that La Barre provides—is not so much a general rule applicable to all performance on the transverse flute, as it is an indication of a personal preference. Taken together, the markings in the music and the verbal instructions in the avertissement encourage performers to play the pieces the way La Barre himself does—and the way that he intended they be played when he composed them. La Barre does not specify the faults that mar the copies that have offended him, but other composers do. We might suppose that scribal sloppiness is the deficiency to which these composers would most object, but in fact most of the manuscripts prepared by competent copyists (as opposed to clueless amateurs) are relatively free of mechanical errors, such as having five beats in a bar of common time. Rather, the faults that make bad copies objectionable are their tendency to reflect, to the extent that texts can, performing styles that are not the composers’. When in 1670 Denis Gaultier published a collection of pieces for lute composed by himself and his cousin Ennemond, he made this point in forceful if disjointed prose, listing some of the elements that he regarded as affecting style in lute playing: Comme iay a pris qu’on se plaint que les copies des pieces de Luth que Jay composeés, et que les copies de celes que Mr. Gaultier Sr. de Nève mon cousin a faites, se trouvent fort altereés et mesme qu’elles sont remplies de beaucoup de fautes, Jay crû estre obligé de les faire Graver pour les representer au Naturel En cet ouvrage afin qu’on les pût voir de la maniere qu’elles doivent estre. Et qu’elles ne parusent pas davantage Ainsi qu’elles ont este changeés et defigureés, et ausy afin qu’elles ne fusent plus envoyeés de cette maniere imparfaite dans les provinces, ny chez les estrangers, ou l’on ne les trouve a present qu’avec beaucoup de confusion, tant au regard de la Mesure, des Tenues, des Etoufements, et des Silences, que de la Transposition et du changement des lettres, que mesme au regard de la maniere de les toucher; ce qui empéche d’en pouvoir trouver le vray mouvement et de tirer du luth ce beau son dont l’un et l’autre forment le charme et l’harmonie. Pour eviter touts ces defauts ou l’on tombe souvant, et pour empecher qu’on ne soit plus abusé ie me suis persuadé qu’on seroit bien aise de voir ce qu’il faut observer avec iustéce tant au regard de la mesure que des Tenues, et mesme au regard de la maniere de bien toucher les cordes, dont ie donne des reigles avec l’inteligence d’iceles par des marques sensibles ainsy qu’on le peut voir cy après; et cela estant observé ie sui sûr qu’on en recevera bien de la satisfaction puis que ce moyen il sera facile d’y bien reusir.14 As I have learned that people complain that copies of the lute pieces that I have composed and that copies of those that Mr. Gaultier, Sieur de Neve, my cousin, has made, are to be found much altered and also that they are filled with many faults, I have believed [myself] obliged to have them engraved in order to represent them in their natural state [i.e. as they were originally], in this publication, to the end that one can see the style [manière] in which they should be [played], and so that they will not appear at a disadvantage, in the way that they have been altered and disfigured, and also so that they will no longer be sent into the provinces and into foreign lands in this imperfect style [manière], where at present one encounters them only much confused, with regard to mesure, tenues, etoufements and silences, and with regard to the misplacement and alteration of symbols, in short with regard to the style [manière] of playing them. It is this [i.e. these bad copies] that prevents people from being able to find the gestures appropriate to draw from the lute its lovely sound, which one way and another forms [its] charm and harmoniousness. To avoid all of these mistakes into which people often fall, and in order to prevent people’s being mistaken in future, I am convinced that people will more easily see what is to be observed with precision as well as with regard to the duration of the tenues as also with regard to the proper way [manière] of plucking the strings, for which [things] I give rules with instructions [intelligence] by means of visible marks so that one can see them; and these things being observed, I am certain that people will receive much satisfaction since by these means it will be easy to succeed. Prominent in this passage is the word ‘manière’, which Gaultier uses in several ways; common to all, however, is the sense of style as a distinctive way of doing something.15 Style was a matter of intense concern to the musical community for which this repertory was created—for listeners, for critics and for the performers themselves. But allusions to style tend to be elliptical, employing such phrases as Marais’s ‘as I play them [i.e. the pieces]’ (‘comme je les joue’) or, in Gaultier’s case, ‘the way in which they should be played’ (‘la manière qu’elles doivent ester’). For all that has been written about it, style remains an elusive concept, perhaps because the elements that we might expect to constitute a style are so protean. A performer’s style may be understood to be formed from two components: taste (goût) and technique. Taste may be usefully defined as a set of musical values shared by a particular musical community at a particular time; taste varied, therefore, from community to community—from Paris to a provincial city or from one Parisian composer’s circle to another’s—and from time to time—from generation to generation, from decade to decade, and even from year to year.16 But taste could also be highly individualized: as Rousseau would later write, ‘Every man has a particular taste, by which he gives to things that he calls beautiful and good, an order that belongs to him alone’.17 The concern with taste is reflected in the ways in which musical notation was refined during the reign of Louis XIV in order to convey more and more of the musical details by which taste manifested itself. Ornamentation was an especially important element of taste. Taste determined the density of the ornamentation (too much was vulgar, too little naïve); the kinds of ornaments used; and the appropriateness of particular ornaments in particular situations. Because composers frequently invented new ornaments that required new symbols, because the symbols used for a particular ornament might vary from copyist to copyist, and because the same symbol might represent two ornaments, depending upon the instrument, a publication brought out by a performer-composer would often include a table of ornaments showing the symbols used by the composer and his or her intended realizations. When a composer devised new ornaments (as Marais, for example, did), he or she often found it useful to introduce such inventions by describing them (as Marais does in the prefaces to his collections). The table of ornaments in Chambonnières’s collection of harpsichord pieces, which appeared in 1670, explains seven agréments and takes up two staves, the upper for the symbols and the lower for their realizations (although Le Gallois’s account indicates that the composer used a greater variety of ornaments in his performances).18 Published scarcely 20 years later, the table in D’Anglebert’s collection lists 29 (illus. 2). The table in François Couperin’s first collection of harpsichord pieces, printed in 1713, takes up two pages in folio format. 2 View largeDownload slide D’Anglebert, Pièces de clavecin, 1689, Marques des Agréments et leur Signification, p.[e] 2 View largeDownload slide D’Anglebert, Pièces de clavecin, 1689, Marques des Agréments et leur Signification, p.[e] Taste might also manifest itself in a preference for one sound rather than another: Marais seems to have preferred stopped to open strings when a pitch might be sounded in either way. We know this because among the changes Marais made when he authorized alterations to the plates of his first collection of pieces for bass viol were the addition of several fingerings that precluded the use of open strings.19 Style, then, may be regarded as the application in practice of the values that made up a performer’s taste, as a set of consistent responses to recurrent musical situations that leaves listeners with an overall impression of a distinctive and engaging musical personality. But style was also the product of technical preferences specific to an instrument: there were preferred fingerings, bowings and breathings for negotiating particular sorts of passages, and often these preferences produced specific sounds. Bass viol virtuoso Antoine Forqueray was a master of the difficult technique of playing in le petit manche (above the frets) and his music is filled with passages that take advantage of this skill; the distinctive timbre produced by this technique is one of the qualities that marks Forqueray’s music.20 Some elements of style, such as touch and phrasing, eluded representation in musical texts. But other aspects of style could be notated. Texts could represent interpretative elements such as the management of interior ‘voices’ for keyboard and lute music, details of rhythm or melodic shape in flute and viol pieces, and embellishment for music for instruments of all sorts. Texts could also convey information regarding technical elements that formed a personal style, elements such as fingering and bowing. The compositions that made up this repertory were ideally suited for the display of distinctive personal performing styles. For the most part, the pieces are relatively simple musical conceptions, largely standard dance types—allemandes, sarabandes, courantes, gigues and a variety of other dances—and they are brief. The elements that define a piece—melody, bass and a sequence of sonorities—form a sort of Platonic essence that has being only when realized in performance. It was the ability to make them come alive in performance, largely by means of spontaneous elaboration, that set the best performers apart from the mediocre. Because these pieces were so simple and subject to spontaneous elaboration, the manuscripts in which they were recorded and disseminated varied in the precision with which they represented details that might differ from one performance to the next. Most manuscripts in the solo repertory were customized for specific users, and there was therefore often no need for a copyist to reproduce his exemplar symbol for symbol. Students preparing copies of pieces from manuscripts furnished by teachers would probably have made as precise copies as they could. On the other hand, a professional copyist, paid by the page, might find it expedient to omit detail that would be varied in performance. Proficient performers, adding to their repertory a piece that had been composed by a colleague, might inscribe the piece not as found in the exemplar but as they themselves might play it, omitting much of the exemplar’s detail (if it had much) and adding as memoranda ornaments, rhythmic detail and indications of texture reflecting their personal style. Composers contributed to the confusion by suiting copies they made to the needs of recipients. Marais explains in the avertissement to his first collection of viol pieces that ‘in order to accommodate viol players of differing abilities, I have until now given out my pieces furnished [sometimes] with more or [sometimes with] fewer chords’.21 The copies of his pieces that Chambonnières entered in the Oldham Manuscript, a manuscript intended for use by an accomplished performer, are on the whole considerably less detailed than those that he printed in 1670. Such scribal practices meant that texts of the same piece might differ from each other substantially. Keyboard pieces provide the fullest examples of such variance, as in Chambonnières’s popular Courante in G, GusC 56.22Ex. 1 shows this piece in the relatively barebones form that Chambonnières entered c.1660 in the Oldham Manuscript; in the more detailed text that the composer printed in his 1670 Pieces de claveßin; and in the personalized version inscribed in detail by D’Anglebert in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. Rés 89ter. 23 Ex.1 View large Download slide View large Download slide Chambonnières’s Courante in G, g56, in three texts, bars 1–8 Ex.1 View large Download slide View large Download slide Chambonnières’s Courante in G, g56, in three texts, bars 1–8 Notwithstanding the diversity of their readings, all three texts preserve the essential elements of Chambonnières’s conception. The Oldham text specifies few ornaments, and makes frequent use of notational shorthand: cadences are presented in simplified form, ornaments are relatively few, rhythmic subtleties are smoothed out, and the management of interior ‘voices’ is suggested rather than being written out in detail. Although Chambonnières provides considerably more detail in the 1670 print than in the 1660 Oldham Manuscript, it is important to understand that the later text does not represent a revision of the piece.24 Around 1660 Chambonnières did not play the piece without the embellishment present in the 1670 text; the text of the print simply provides the sort of detail that in 1660 would have been added in performance. Whereas the Oldham text, if realized literally, would not produce an acceptable performance, the texts of Chambonnières’s 1670 print and of D’Anglebert’s holograph may best be regarded as transcriptions of performances, real or imagined, by two masters; the differences between the two texts represent the differences in their respective performing styles. D’Anglebert prefers denser ornamentation, and has refined details of melody and rhythm.25 The diversity of the texts transmitting Chambonnières’s Courante in G implies a set of conventions for inscribing and construing musical texts to enable the notation and dissemination of pieces that would be spontaneously elaborated in performance. Texts preserved the defining features of a piece but might or might not transmit details that would be varied in performance. Such conventions had consequences when texts were replicated. Barebones texts such as the Oldham rendering of the Courante in G left much to the discretion of performers—indeed, obliged performers to supply ornaments, fill in interior voices and produce properly articulated cadences. In the absence of the guidance that more detailed texts would have provided, the material that a performer supplied when performing, when entering a piece in a repertory book, or when adding memoranda to a piece already entered could easily represent a performing style altogether different from the composer’s. There were also performers who, regardless of whether or not they were working from a detailed copy, would have modified whatever texts they copied to reflect their own performing styles. The result was that detailed texts might disagree with each other in what we might call ‘performance variants’, readings that would differ in performance. Such variance makes it difficult to use conjunctive and separative variants to establish relationships among surviving texts of the same piece, since there are so many disagreements, and so few of them (mostly those involving musical substance) are significant in the textual critics’ sense of pointing to lines of descent. It is clear, however, that such variance could produce texts that composers might regard as faulty. Because French performer-composers intended their compositions primarily for their own use (recall La Barre’s remark that he had originally intended that only he himself would perform his flute pieces), or for their students or a few trusted colleagues, there was a marriage of musical conception and personal performing style that does not obtain when a composer writes for a wider public. Performer-composers were therefore likely to be fairly sensitive about what they perceived as the misuse of their compositions, which they regarded not only as their stock-in-trade but also as extensions of their musical personalities. Chambonnierès’s preface to his Livre premier of harpsichord pieces expresses this feeling with vehemence: Cependant les avis que je reçois de differens lieux quil s’en fait un espece de commerce presque dans toutes les villes du monde, ou l’on a la connoissance du Claueßin, par les copies que l’on en distribue quoy qu’avec beaucoup de deffauts et ainsi fort a mon prejudice; m’ont fait croire, que je devois donner volontairement ce que l’on m’otoit avec violence & que je devois mettre au jour moy même ce que d’autres y avoient desja mis a demy pour moy; puis qu’aussi bien les donnant avec tous leurs agreemens comme je fais en ce recueil; elles seront sans doute, et plus utiles au public, & plus honorables pour moy, que toutes ces copies Infideles, qui paroissent sous mon nom.26 The information that I have received from various places, that there is a sort of trade in virtually all of the cities of the world in which the harpsichord is known, in the form of circulating copies that are full of faults and therefore prejudicial to me, has made me conclude that I should give of my own free will what has been taken by violence, and that I should publish myself what others have already half done for me; and since moreover it would be good to give them with all their agréments as I do in this collection, they will be without doubt more useful to the public and more honourable to me than all the unfaithful copies that have appeared under my name. So strongly did Chambonnières believe that his compositions were a form of personal property, that he regarded their appearance in ‘unfaithful’ copies as theft: his pieces had been ‘taken by violence’. He was concerned with the adverse effect that these bad copies may have had on his image: they were ‘prejudicial’ to him. Like La Barre and Gaultier, he proposed to remedy the situation by publishing texts with sufficient detail (‘with all their agréments’) to show how he himself performed his pieces. Publishing detailed texts was the means by which these performer-composers sought to reassert control over the texts in which their compositions circulated, over their compositions and, in a sense, over their musical personalities. The published texts were, after all, the medium in which they and their music would be known to people who would never hear them play in person. But sometimes it was not sufficient to provide texts with the notes and all their agréments; it was also necessary to provide detailed guidance about how the notes are to be sounded, guidance which, if followed, would oblige performers to negotiate passages the way the performer-composers themselves did. When Couperin published his first collection of harpsichord pieces, he had wanted to include fingerings in his texts, but his texts were already so dense with other sorts of information that fingerings would have compromised their legibility; accordingly, he published an entire keyboard method, L’Art de toucher le clavecin (Paris, 1716), partly to explain how his pieces should be played and to provide fingerings for passages that he feared performers might perform otherwise than he intended. The bass viol was a particularly difficult instrument, and the self-publications of virtuosos of this instrument—De Machy, Marais and the Forquerays—are dense with information about fingering, bowing and ornamentation. Marais decided on the appropriate level of detail by trial and error.27 When the first copies of the viol partbook of his first collection appeared in 1686, the texts were filled with bowings, fingerings and indications of articulation, but Marais evidently decided that these were insufficient for his purposes, and he authorized more than 400 changes to the plates. The effect of most of the new readings, which included additions and alterations, was not (as some have supposed) to provide new interpretations of his pieces but rather to clarify or amplify the instructions that he had given in the earlier states of the plates. A substantial portion of the changes involved bowings, fingerings and articulation, and their purpose was usually to eliminate choices available to performers in the earlier, less precise states. Antoine Forqueray’s viol works were for many years after their rediscovery in the mid 20th century thought to be unplayable, but as John Hsu, the first to record all five suites, explains, ‘everything you need is right there on the page: all you have to do is follow the markings’.28 Yet the wealth of detail in such texts did not mean that the texts were to be followed literally. Today, we tend to think of texts as either prescriptive—a set of instructions that performers are expected to follow—or descriptive—a record in notation of a particular performance.29 But the texts of these self-publications are of a third kind, a kind that may be called ‘exemplary’: each is intended as a representation of the way the composer of a piece might perform it, and sufficient detail, both interpretative and technical, is provided to enable knowledgeable and sympathetic performers using the text to work up their own realizations in the exemplified style. The density of the instructions in texts such as those of Marais and Forqueray is provided (only) to ensure that the models will be executed satisfactorily. No doubt there were students and amateurs who went no further than realizing the models literally. But proficient performers would, hopefully, work up their own performances in the styles represented by the models. Performers of more independent inclination would have been able to penetrate the detail, to identify the elements in which resided the identity of a piece, and then to produce realizations in their own styles. That licence was taken by performers in realizing texts is demonstrated by the instructional manuals of the day,30 by composers’ objections to the ‘misinterpretation’ of their pieces, and by the often high degree of variance in readings of the same piece transmitted by multiple sources (as with Chambonnières’s Courante in G). Circa 1670, when Gaultier and Chambonnières were bringing out their collections, publishing one’s compositions in texts specifying as many details of performance as the notation of the day permitted was a novel strategy. Implicit in the publication of these texts is the idea that there is a special value in these self-published prints because they offer texts established by the composers themselves. Thus was introduced into French music an idea that in certain respects anticipated the modern concept of the ‘authoritative text’. Prior to this, printer/publishers might promote a publication as newly reviewed and corrected, with errors removed, but we must understand that ‘errors’ in this context referred not to failures to reproduce the composer’s manuscript accurately—in many cases, composers had had no connection with prints that contained their music—but rather to their being free from the sorts of musical errors that created problems in performance: a wrong pitch that produced an intolerable dissonance or a missing bar in a partbook that put one performer a bar ahead of the rest of his ensemble. This is all that Pierre Attaingnant had meant when in 1549 he had touted a second edition of one of his publications as being ‘beaucop plus correctes que les precedents’.31 When he advertised another collection as having been ‘Veu et corrige par Claude Gervaise scavant Musicien’, he had meant only that Gervaise had looked over the texts, in a sort of house-editorial capacity; Gervaise himself had not composed any of the pieces in the collection.32 The idea that an edition of a work should reflect the intentions of the work’s creator was certainly not a new one in late 17th-century Europe. Producing responsible texts of Classical authors had been a common goal of European textual scholars ever since the Renaissance, and even important editions of ‘modern’ authors’ works might advertise the authority of their texts: the title-page of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays asserts that the texts are ‘Published according to the True Originall Copies’.33 In German-speaking lands, many partbook editions from the 1570s until 1620s claimed on their title-pages that the music had been corrected by the composer.34 In France, however, the application of this idea to editions of music appears to have been a new development in the engraved prints of performer-composers of the mid 17th century. The notion of authoritative texts conveying aspects of the composer’s performance style was recognized as a selling point by commercial printer/publishers of music at the start of the 18th century. Thus c.1710, when Etienne Roger, the Amsterdam printer/publisher whose forte was repackaging French and Italian music for distribution to northern European markets, issued an edition of Arcangelo Corelli’s op.5, violin sonatas created in a performerly tradition much like the one in France, he advertised his texts as containing ‘les agréemens des Adagio de cet ouvrage, composez par Mr. A. Corelli comme il les joue’.35 There is some question as to whether or not Roger had in fact obtained the agréments he printed from Corelli, but for our purposes what is important is that Roger thought the claim worth making at all.36 When the first edition of Corelli’s op.5 appeared in Rome in 1700, it did not include elaborate ornamentation. Roger’s print employs a layout that reminds us of the difference between an undetailed text and the way in which a fine performer might realize it. The slow movements—those likely to be most elaborately embellished—are printed on three staves: the lower two contain the same material as had previous editions; the lowest staff presents the basso continuo, while the middle gives the unadorned solo line. The top staff provides the written-out ornamentation that Corelli (according to Roger) applied to these movements (illus. 3). 3 View largeDownload slide Corelli, Violin Sonata op.5 no.3, opening Adagio in Etienne Roger’s c.1710 edition, p.22, with ornamentation written out in the top staff of each system 3 View largeDownload slide Corelli, Violin Sonata op.5 no.3, opening Adagio in Etienne Roger’s c.1710 edition, p.22, with ornamentation written out in the top staff of each system But the authoritative texts found in self-publications offer only a partial picture of the life of a piece in this repertory. Because many performers of the day claimed licence to interpret pieces in any way they saw fit, and because audiences evidently enjoyed the variety of interpretations, it is fortunate that for many pieces (such as Chambonnières’s Courante in G) there survive alongside authoritative texts unauthoritative texts that show how performers other than the composers interpreted these pieces. These unauthoritative texts suggest the often broad range of possible interpretations by composers’ contemporaries or near contemporaries. Taken as a whole, both sorts of texts document the lives of individual pieces and provide insight into the fluid nature of the repertory. The texts—both musical and verbal—that French performer-composers self-published are early explorations of the concept that we today call ‘authoritative text’. But the concept denoted by this term is an invention of modern textual criticism, and the performer-composers whose texts are discussed above would not have thought in terms of the concepts in the same way we do. Today, most scholars and editors value authoritative texts because their frame of reference is one in which works are defined in great detail, because Western notation is capable of specifying such detail, and because they believe (as New Criticism has taught) that every notational element, whether it concerns content or execution, conveys information. Scholars value manuscripts or editions in the production of which the composer has actively participated because such sources are likely to reflect most accurately the composer’s intentions with respect to such details. But performer-composers in the France of Louis XIV were not concerned with works defined in great detail. Quite the reverse: their status as virtuosos depended in large part on their ability to take a musical entity defined in relatively little detail and to add different detail each time they performed it. For them, the authority resided not in the symbols that made up their texts but in the styles of the performances that those texts represented. The self-published texts discussed above marked a change in the way solo pieces were presented. Previously, performers had usually worked from texts to which they were expected to add embellishment; with the new dispensation, performers were given texts with details that they were expected to read through in order to arrive at the essential musical conception, which they were then expected to realize in the style represented by the detail. Both composers and performers accepted the convention that the texts that transmitted this repertory—whether barebones or detailed—were not to be realized literally, and it was this principle that enabled a repertory that valued spontaneity in performance to represent a multiform piece by a single text—or, indeed, by any text at all. If, as is most often the case, a modern edition can accommodate only one text of a work, then (as Fuller argues) the composer’s published text is usually the one that should be printed; the reason for so doing is that the composer’s text is the specific arrangement of symbols by which the composer wanted his work represented, even if not all of the symbols represent the notes that must be played to produce a valid performance. But had Chambonnières’s Courante in G survived only in the Oldham text inscribed by the composer and in D’Anglebert’s entry in Rés 89ter, a strong case might be made for printing D’Anglebert’s text, since it provides more performance information, even though some of D’Anglebert’s refinements are uncharacteristic of Chambonnières. The musical texts that preserve the solo music of late 17th- and early 18th-century France are the principal means of access to this repertory. It is essential, therefore, to understand what is meant by the notation that comprises these texts, the conventions according to which that notation was inscribed and realized, and the significance of the various sorts of authority that some of these texts claimed. Footnotes 1 On the house of Ballard, see the monumental study and catalogue by L. Guillo, Pierre I Ballard et Robert III Ballard, Imprimeurs du roy pour la musique (1599–1673), 2 vols. (Sprimont, Belgium, 2003). 2 For the years between 1660 and 1670, Guillo’s catalogue of Ballard publications shows only one title for a solo instrument—Guillaume Gabriel Nivers’s Pièces d’orgue, published in 1665 (Guillo 1665-h) and reissued in 1667 (Guillo 1667-f). Guillo numbers refer to the catalogue in Guillo, Pierre I Ballard, vol.ii. 3 Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Les Pièces de claveßin, … Livre premier [& second] (Paris: Jollain [= the engraver of this publication], 1670); Jacquet de la Guerre, Pièces de clavecin, Livre premier (Paris: Autheur, 1687); Jean Henry D’Anglebert, Pièces de clavecin, Livre premier (Paris: Autheur, 1689); Guillaume de Machy, Pièces de violle (Paris: Autheur 1685); Marin Marais, Pièces à une et à deux violes [Livre premier] (Paris: Autheur, 1686–9); Gaultier and Gaultier, Pièces de luth (Paris: Autheur, 1670); and Jacques Gallot, Pièces de luth composées sur differens modes (Paris: H. Bonneuil [= Gallot’s engraver], c.1679). 4 François Couperin, Pièces de clavecin, premier livre (Paris, 1713); Jean-Marie Leclair, Second livre de sonates pour le violon et pour la flute traversière avec la basse continue (Paris, c.1728); Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, Pièces de violes avec la basse continue composés par Mr. Forqueray le père [i.e. Antoine Forqueray] (Paris, [1747]). 5 Johann Kuhnau, Neuer Clavier Ubung Erster Theil (Leipzig: ‘verleget von Johann Kuhnauen’, 1695), J. S. Bach, Clavir Ubung, … Opus 1 (Leipzig: ‘In Verlegung des Autoris’, 1731); Georg Philipp Telemann, Essercizii musicae (Hamburg: ‘a presso dell’Autore’, c.1740); George Frideric Handel, Suites de pièces pour le Clavecin (London: ‘Printed for the Author’, [1720]); and Francesco Geminiani, Pièces de clavecin tirées des differens Ouvrages, [Book 1] (London: ‘Printed for the Author by J. Johnston’, 1743). The two London publications were printed at the composers’ expense but distributed by music dealers. 6 The first—and still most extensive—investigation of plate variants is to be found in John Hsu’s edition of Marin Marais, Pièces à une et à deux violes (1686–1689), The Instrumental Works 1 (New York, 1980), pp.165–9, 174–84. Hsu identified more than 400 plate variants in this publication. 7 ‘… toutes les fois qu’il [Chambonnières] joüoit une piece y il méloit de nouvelles beautés par des ports des voix, des passages, & des agrémens differens, avec des doubles cadences. Enfin il les diversisoit tellement par toutes cez beauttez differentes qu’ils faisoit toûjours trouver des nouvelle graces.’ Lettre de Mr Le Gallois â Madamoiselle Regnault de Solier touchant la musique (Paris, 1680), p.70. 8 D. Fuller, ‘Sous les doits de Chambonniere’, Early Music, xxi/2 (1993), pp.191–202. See also D. Moroney, ‘Chambonnières and his “Belle manière”’, in J.-B. Lully, Actes de colloque 1987, ed. J. de La Gorce and H. Schneider (Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg, 1990), pp.201–8; R. Broude, ‘Establishing texts in quasi-improvisatory traditions’, Text, vii (1994), pp.127–44; and D. Ledbetter, ‘On the manner of playing the adagio: neglected features of a genre’, Early Music, xxix/1 (2001), pp.15–26. 9 [Jacques] Hardel, The collected works, Art of the Keyboard 1 (New York, 1991); Etienne Richard, The collected works, Art of the Keyboard 3 (New York, 1994); and Jean Henry D’Anglebert, The collected works, Art of the Keyboard 7 (New York, 2009). 10 Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, The collected works, Art of the Keyboard 12 (New York, 2017). I am grateful to the editors for permitting access to proofs while their edition was in process. 11 King Lear was the first of Shakespeare’s plays shown to survive in two authorial states; see S. Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s revision of King Lear (Princeton, 1980) and G. Taylor and M. Warren (eds.), The division of the kingdoms: Shakespeare’s two texts of King Lear (Oxford, 1983). 12 Michel de La Barre, Premier livre de pièces pour la flûte traversière avec la basse continue (Paris, 1710), Avertissement. 13 La Barre, Premier livre, Avertissement. 14 Livre de tablature des pièces de Luth de Mr. Gaultier S. de Neüe et de Mr. Gaultier son cousin (Paris, [1672]), pp.2–3. 15 For an incisive discussion of the Italian origins of manière used in this sense, see J. Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp.15–22. 16 Le Gallois suggests the subjective and variable aspects of taste in his discussion of French harpsichordists; Lettre de Mr Le Gallois, pp.60–83. 17 ‘Chaque homme a un Goût particulier, par lequel il donne aux choses qu’il appelle belles & bonnes, un ordre qui n’appartient qu’à lui.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), p.231. 18 Lettre de Mr Le Gallois, pp.69–70. 19 On the ways in which Marais enforced his style through markings, see M. Cyr and R. Broude, ‘Thoughts on Marais’s second thoughts’, Early Music, xliv/3 (2016), pp.417–26. 20 On Forqueray’s use of this technique, see M. Cyr, Introduction to her edition of The Forquerays: The Works (New York, 2012), i, p.lxiii. 21 ‘Pour m’accommoder a la differente porteë des personnes qui joüent de la Viole, J’ay jusques icy donnë mes pieces plus ou moins chargées d’accords. Mais ayant reconnu que cette diversité faisoit un mauvais effet, et que l’on ne les joüoit pas telles que ie les ay composées; Je me suis enfin determine a les donner de la maniere dont ie les joüe, auec tous les agréments qui les doivent accompagner.’ Marin Marais, Pièces à une et à deux violes, [Livre premier], viol partbook, Avertissement, p.4. 22 GusC numbers are taken from B. Gustafson, Chambonnières, a thematic catalogue: the complete works of Jacques Champion de Chambonnières (1601/02–1672), Journal of 17th-century music: JSCM Instrumenta, i, 2007 www.sscm-jscm.org/instrumenta01.html. 23 Oldham: Private collection of Guy Oldham, London; on Chambonnières’s holograph entries in the Oldham Manuscript, see G. Oldham, ‘Louis Couperin: a new source of French keyboard music from the mid 17th century’, ‘Recherches’ sur la musique française classique 1960, [1], pp.52, 56. Chambonnières, Les Pièces de claveßin. The composer sold the rights granted by his privilege to the engraver Gérard Jollain, who c.1670 was one of the few artisans in Paris capable of engraving and printing the collection; on Jollain and his arrangement with Chambonnières, see R. Cypess, ‘Chambonnières, Jollain and the first engraving of harpsichord music in France’, Early Music, xxxv/4 (2007), pp.539–53. D’Anglebert: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. Rés. 89ter; on this manuscript, see D. Maple, ‘D’Anglebert’s autograph manuscript, Paris, B. N. Rés. Vm7 674–675: an examination of compositional, editorial and notational practices in 17th-century French harpsichord music’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1988). 24 Fuller, addressing differences between Oldham and the 1670 prints, speaks of ‘real author’s revisions’ (‘Sous les doits de Chambonniere’, p.193), but these are not revisions—refinements aiming at an improved musical conception—but merely alternative texts, the print’s more detailed than the manuscript’s. 25 For an extended discussion of the changes introduced by D’Anglebert in his redactions of Chambonnières’s pieces, see Maple, ‘D’Anglebert’s autograph manuscript’, pp 340–48. 26 Chambonnières, Les Pièces de claveßin, Preface. 27 On the stylistic concerns behind the changes Marais made to plates of his earliest collections, see Cyr and Broude, ‘Thoughts on Marais’s second thoughts’. 28 Presentation at the Fiftieth Conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society, Newark, DE, 2 August 2012. 29 The often misunderstood prescriptive-descriptive dichotomy was introduced by C. Seeger in ‘Prescriptive and descriptive music-writing’, The Musical Quarterly, xliv/2 (1958), pp.184–95, and refined in other papers over the years, appearing in its latest form as a chapter in Studies in musicology 1935–1975 (Berkeley, 1977), pp.168–81. For Seeger, who was thinking as an ethnomusicologist, a descriptive text was meant not as a basis for performance but rather as a notation for transcribing performances, a notation more accessible than wave-like lines traced on paper or projected onto an electronic display but able to capture more detail than conventional Western staff notation. 30 See, for example, Saint Lambert: ‘Après avoir appris à les [i.e. les agrémens] connoître icy, on pourra les pratiquer en toutes les occasions, où l’on trouvera qu’ils seront à propos: car, comme je l’ay dit tant des fois, on est extrémement libre sur le choix des Agrémens; & dans les Pièces qu’on étudie, on peut en faire aux endroits même où ils ne sont pas marquez; retrancher ceux qui y font, si l’on trouve qu’ils ne sients pas bien à la Pièce, & y en ajouter d’autres à son gré.’ Les Principes du clavecin (Paris, 1702), p.57. 31 Premier livre des chansons esleves en nombre XXX (Paris, 1549), no.161 in D. Heartz’s study and catalogue, Pierre Attaingnant, royal printer of music (Berkeley, 1969). 32 Quart livre de danceries, à quatre parties (Paris, 1550), Heartz no.164. Only one of the 30 pieces has any connection—and that a tangential one—with Gervaise. 33 Mr. William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories & tragedies (London, 1623). 34 See examples by such composers as Scandello, Ammerbach, Lassus and Hieronymus Praetorius listed in H. Pohlmann, Die Frühgeschichte des musikalischen Urheberrechts (ca.1400–1800). Neue Materialien zur Entwicklung des Urheberrechtsbewußtseins der Komponisten (Kassel, 1962), pp.102–05. I am grateful to Stephen Rose for this reference. 35 Sonate a violino e violone o cembalo, opera quinta, troisieme edition (Amsterdam, c.1710). 36 On the validity of Roger’s claim, see N. Zaslaw, ‘Ornaments for Corelli’s violin sonatas, op.5’, Early Music, xxiv/1 (1996), pp.102–4; Zaslaw believes that the embellishments in Roger’s publication may well be Corelli’s. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
TI - Paris chez l’autheur: self-publication and authoritative texts in the France of Louis XIV
JF - Early Music
DO - 10.1093/em/cax020
DA - 2017-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/paris-chez-l-autheur-self-publication-and-authoritative-texts-in-the-fQDoMH0JKP
SP - 283
EP - 296
VL - 45
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -